By Michael Deibert
In early 2007, while reporting on the conflict in India-controlled Kashmir, I sat at a small tea shop in Srinagar discussing the political trajectory of this troubled region with two friends—a Kashmiri attorney named Malik Aijaz Ahmad and a student named Idrees Kanth.
I saw in Kashmir, as I have in other countries such as Haiti and Côte d’Ivoire, how the majority of the populace was caught in a vicious war of attrition between opposing sides with very little recourse or protection. Witnessing the situation in Kashmir led me to write my first long-form feature for World Policy Journal, the flagship publication of the New York-based World Policy Institute, where I have recently been named a senior fellow.
During my time in India, I also became aware of the country’s complicated religious and ethnic dynamic. On one hand, this saw frequent and repeated episodes of discrimination and violence against the country’s Muslim minority, including the murder of some 2,000 people—the vast majority of them Muslims—in a bout of ethnic cleansing in the state of Gujarat in early 2002. On the other hand, representatives of the Muslim community in India could also often behave in ways that reeked of intolerance, such as when members of the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) political party, including Indian lawmakers, attacked the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen as she attempted to speak at a book release event in the city of Hyderabad in 2007.
A recent email from Idrees, studying at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, demonstrates vividly to me that these tensions evident in Indian society as a whole do not shy away from rearing their heads even in a university setting. If communal violence, such as that which India witnessed in Gujarat in 2002, is also allowed to flourish in places of higher learning such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, it is a worrisome sign for a country that this month undertook another exercise in its vast experiment with democracy.
I print Idrees Kanth’s email, with his permission and in its entirety, below.
(Note: The ABVP that he refers to stands for the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, an extremist Hindu youth group. The RSS stands for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist organization, one of whose most well-known members, Nathuram Godse, assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.)
MD
Dear All,
We want to bring it to your notice the constant physical and psychological violence that many of us Muslim students have been experiencing at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, over the last two years. Recently on March 17, a Muslim student, Masihullah Khan [M.A. French], was brutally assaulted by a group of ABVP/RSS students inside Lohit hostel—in full view of the senior warden and fellow residents. Despite that, the administration did not deem it be a serious offense and let them off with very mild punishments, which were then revoked. All that was left of the punishment was hostel transfers, and even those were not carried out.
Exactly a month later, on April 17, the same group of students assaulted me badly and further threatened me of dire consequences. Even after this, the administration, claiming “humanitarian considerations,” has been protecting them, making us feel not only very vulnerable but traumatized. Such an attitude of the administration has only emboldened these hooligans who are now openly targeting us.
It is a common knowledge among students in JNU that the administration is completely right wing. In the past, if by any chance a Dalit or a Muslim student was involved even in a minor act of indiscipline, the student was severely punished and even rusticated.
We therefore, appeal to you all to build an opinion on such a stark and open communal policy of the JNU administration and the growing communal violence on the campus. We are being constantly threatened, intimidated, abused, physically beaten, etc etc. We feel completely helpless!
Thanks,
Idrees Kanth
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Michael Deibert is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com.