India’s pseudo-secular political parties, sections of the mainstream media, the intelligentsia and five star activists are a cartel of frauds. They attempted to make of Hyderabad University student Rohit Vemula a Dalit icon. Evidence suggests that Vemula was no Dalit, and might have misrepresented his caste for backward privileges. They advocated how unsecure Modi’s India was for Dalit students. Numbers suggest that Manmohan’s India was more unsecure. They attempted to present Vemula as a scholar. His records suggest that he was a rabid anti-Brahmin pro-terrorist hooligan who beat up his ideological opponent, sending him to hospital. They attempted to implicate a union minister for his suicide. Letters suggest that the minster in question simply sought a restoration of peace, a peace broken by Vemula’s ilk. They used his suicide for their political advancement. The note Vemula left behind suggests that this is exactly what he feared and hoped to avoid.
The Hyderabad University saga was a key operation for this cartel of frauds. It was the perfect opportunity to kill several birds with one stone. All they lacked was facts. Indeed, the cartel’s every move has been weak on that front. Whether it was Dadri and intolerance, the church attacks, the JNU controversy or Rahul Gandhi’s claims of not being allowed into a temple, the cartel has simply become a machine of misrepresentation. This doesn’t mean that they were paragons of virtue when in government, but their proximity to the coffers ensured that their desperation never reached these ridiculous heights. But today, they are unloved, far from their erstwhile royal status and under prosecution. Their survival is in direct correlation to the tea-seller’s failure.
Being a student myself, it is painful to watch others from the fraternity becoming pawns in their game. Yes, words like freedom, equality and liberality do appeal to us. Words such as oppression, regression and discrimination make our blood boil. The problem is that some of us undermine ourselves too much. Forget judging for oneself or separating fact from fiction, if an eminent personality or a prominent media house says so it must be right. It is quite fascinating to see certain educated people with no affiliation to the cartel, like some students at the Hyderabad University, behaving with such confident ignorance. What makes their movement completely moronic is that they’re fighting the battle of those who brought about inequality and oppression in India! The cartel never got rid of poverty and casteism in all these years in order to display fake empathy and reap political rewards.
I would hate to think that these Hyderabad University students have any direct affiliation with the cartel. But where on earth were they when eight other students of backward origin committed suicide in the same university? Had they lost their voice when Rohit Vemula physically assaulted and grievously injured an ABVP student over a Facebook post? Were they not ashamed when protests took place on their campus in support of a convicted terrorist? Maybe they simply enjoyed the limelight when India’s opportunist politicians began airdropping one after the other for photo-ops. What an honor it must have been to be formally inducted into Pappu’s Kalavati-brigade of one-day stands.
What disturbed me particularly was one section of Smriti Irani’s brilliant speech in the Lok Sabha. The minster boldly exposed several disturbing facts and trends, but one of them stood out. Apparently, after Rohit Vemula hung himself, no doctor was called in till almost half a day. The Telangana Police’s report that she was quoting also states that the students didn’t allow the police to take the body out and investigate the case. The police faced resistance from an unruly mob of students. Just what were the students trying to pull off there? Stupidity is one thing, but perversity and psychopathic tendencies are quite another.
This week, the Hyderabad University was in the news again. Twice. The first was when the vice-chancellor who had gone on leave when the protests broke out, returned to assume his office again.
The students vandalized his office with a mainstream media contingent egging them on and reporting live. The second was when Kanhaiya Kumar came to Hyderabad with the intention of addressing other students such as himself, only slightly younger. This is the same inspirational middle-aged man who peed on public property and assaulted a woman who objected to his peeing. This is the same poor man, icon of India’s entire impoverished class, who flew down from Delhi and was driven around. Any halfwit would understand by now that Kanhaiya has some wealthy spin-doctors as his patrons. But not some students of Hyderabad University, for whatever reason.
Through school textbooks and the mainstream media, certain mentalities have manifested among a section of the youth. They haven’t lived through the socialist Congress years, the emergency, or the Left rule in Bengal. Whether it’s because of a short memory or a carefully curated mindset, they keep forgiving people like Kejriwal despite hypocrisy after hypocrisy coming to light. They are too radical to even think openly about somebody like Modi. But these are political differences. What is alarming, is that this cartel has created a Frankenstein monster. Ideologies such as these, when taken to their extreme form, are detrimental to India as we have seen lately. Not going after such people defeats the entire purpose of being a sovereign republic. The cartel doesn’t want to see India destroyed for they would be themselves be finished with it, if it ever came to that. The problem is that once you have created your pawns, they begin to act independently and you have no control over them anymore.
The emergence of the mainstream mujahiddeen is a consequence of the seeds sown by the cartel. At the Hyderabad University, the vice-chancellor returned. Kanhaiya was denied entrance and the accused union ministers stood their ground. Similarly, in other places where the breaking out of this epidemic was engineered, apt counter-measures based on respective circumstances were taken. Parallel to that, the indoctrination of junk at the lower levels of education is gradually being curbed. The Modi government should be applauded since it has made the right moves in dealing with the country’s most major menace. I can’t help but wonder how much better off we would have all been if some people, especially at the Hyderabad University, were better informed and thought for themselves.