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This story is from February 28, 2016

Hounding students is pest control? Big ‘mishtake’

Lekin Twitter pe jaane se lagta hai jaise ki hum kushti lad rahe hain. Haanfne ki awaaz mere paas bhi…
Hounding students is pest control? Big ‘mishtake’
Lekin Twitter pe jaane se lagta hai jaise ki hum kushti lad rahe hain. Haanfne ki awaaz mere paas bhi…
Lekin Twitter pe jaane se lagta hai jaise ki hum kushti lad rahe hain. Haanfne ki awaaz mere paas bhi…
This was the message I sent to a friend in Delhi; his village is close to mine in Champaran, but he is now an anchor on a Hindi channel. In my message, I was telling him that whenever I logged on to Twitter, I felt that I was in a battle, or, more accurately, fighting a wrestling match.
Close to me, the sound of panting…
There was poetic evasion in that comment. The panting was coming from me. If my friend heard me, he would find that my voice was hoarse. This is because after the recent troubles at JNU I had become a Twitter warrior.
I teach at a college in upstate New York. Every night before going to sleep I scan the websites of Delhi newspapers and then, on waking up, try to find out what fresh horror has been unleashed. That’s how I see it — young, idealistic students being hounded by an inept police and loudly hypernationalist politicians. And the murderous mob.
On Sunday I woke up and saw the by-now-infamous tweet from the actor-turned-acting-PM, Anupam Kher. Kher’s tweet, taken from a piece of dialogue in the Hindi film, A Wednesday, could be translated thus: “When you do pest control in your homes, cockroaches, insects, spiders come out. The house gets cleaned. These days pest control is taking place in this country.”
This tweet was extraordinarily insensitive, even dangerous, its use of extermination rhetoric carrying a echo of the Nazis calling their Jewish victims cockroaches and vermin. In India, too, we have seen the devastating consequences of ethnic cleansing. How else does one describe Gujarat in 2002?

Immediately after preparing breakfast for my children that morning, I sat down at my computer and googled images of riots and of neighbours turned into refugees. I posted seven photographs as a “public announcement” for Anupam Kher: each picture came with the caption, “This is what pest control looks like.”
I was making an argument and presenting evidence. But the truth is that photographs lie. Not simply because they can be photoshopped or, as we have seen in the case of the Kanhaiya Kumar video, they can be maliciously doctored. No, I’m making a larger point, namely that images lie because we only take them as evidence of what we want to believe.
The pictures I put on Twitter that morning were retweeted by hundreds of people but they were also roundly condemned by the people who were denouncing the JNU students as anti-national. This latter group had noticed that there were Muslims in the first few pictures; they hadn’t paused to consider that at least two of the images I had put up were also of Hindus, specifically, of Kashmiri Pandits in refugee camps.
So, here is now another image from the TOI archives. It was taken in 2010, decades after the Pandits first lost their homes in the Valley. Once again, my caption is the same and is addressed to everyone in our divided democracy: “This is what pest control looks like.”
We are living in the republic of the aggrieved. Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid are aggrieved — they see rampant inequality in the country. Those baying for their blood are also aggrieved. They call these youth traitors. What are we to do? I know I do not want to do kushti. I also know that I want for myself and for others the right to free speech.
For our democracy to survive we will have to allow for the possibility that different interpretations are bound to exist for any picture of social reality that we hold dear. To deny even the chance of others holding contrary readings of this reality is to strangle democracy.
Gyandev Ahuja, the BJP MLA from Rajasthan, has said that every day on the JNU campus, you can collect 2,000 empty bottles of imported whiskey, 10,000 packets of cigarettes, and 3,000 used condoms. It is a nutty notion, and has nothing to do with anything really, but I believe Ahuja has the right to sound ridiculous.
I support his right to free speech. And I want to reserve the right to mock him or his leaders, without fear of being dragged into court on the charge of sedition.
Without tolerance we will remain caught in a sickening drama of quick violence. Till it’s too late. We will be like that character in Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story who plunges his knife into a stranger’s stomach. The blade severs the cord of the stranger’s pyjama, exposing his genitalia. The attacker notices something now. He says, “Oh, I’ve made a mishtake.”
The writer is a professor of literature at Vassar College.
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