Azadi's new odyssey

Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” phonetics professor Henry Higgins had wistfully chanted to his pal Colonel Pickering in My Fair Lady, the musical movie version of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. That line is buzzing in my head as I try to cope with the dizzying stream of “Why can’t Kanhaiya Kumar be more like...”

The Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union president is under attack, not just from the habitual haters and lunatics who call him a traitor, wish him dead or announce a “prize” for cutting off Mr Kumar’s tongue, like the recently expelled Bharatiya Janata Party youth leader, but also from usually sane people who now want to sculpt, mould and change the 29-year-old young man from Bihar into their shape, Pygmalion-style. Over the past week, Mr Kumar has been at the receiving end of an avalanche of unsolicited advice from the Left, Right and centre.

Every adviser has his/her own fantasy about the speech Mr Kumar should have made once he got bail in the sedition case filed against him. If he was sensible, here are the freedoms Mr Kumar would be demanding, tweeted a well-known foreign policy expert, pointing to an article in the Swarajya magazine, which describes itself as a “big tent for liberal Right of centre discourse that reaches out, engages and caters to the new India.”

What would these freedoms be? Licence raj se azadi, permit raj se azadi, taxman se azadi, profit banaane ki azadi, and of course, Marxvaad se azadi, to give you a flavour of the Swarajya list. Union minister of urban development, housing and urban poverty M. Venkaiah Naidu has advised Mr Kumar to shut up, study and not get involved in politics. Mr Naidu, incidentally, was a student leader of the ABVP and was elected the president of the students’ union of Andhra University colleges.

Then there are liberals who are all admirers of Mr Kumar’s oratory but are advising him to not offer his services to a discredited ideology. Mr Kumar has also been advised to heed Lord Krishna’s advice on detachment.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong in the sum and substance of all this sage counsel. But the point they miss is actually quite simple — Mr Kumar is an adult, it is his life, his choices and above all his speech.

If someone does not like what Mr Kumar says, why doesn’t that someone give his or her own speech? Nothing stops anyone from going out and holding forth in sylvan surroundings, as in the JNU campus, or somewhere else. Nothing stops anyone from making a speech that sets the Yamuna, the Ganga, the Kaveri, the Hooghly or Twitter on fire. Instead of having their own say, why are they so keen to convert Mr Kumar?

In short, let Mr Kumar be.

As someone who neither studied in JNU nor has met Mr Kumar, my most important takeaway is simply this —Mr Kumar helped many of us reclaim the word azadi. The word which means freedom is no one’s copyright. It is a politically-charged term. It has always been, in this country and in every other country. But it has a million connotations.

Mr Kumar situated it in the context of a range of issues of social justice and political and social inclusion on which the Left has traditionally campaigned.

Azadi has often been framed in the political discourse as a symbol of separatist movements. But it doesn’t have to be viewed necessarily through the prism of volatile Kashmir or even Mr Kumar’s activism. In fact, in the recent past, the word has often been used by gender rights activists in India.

Young India wants freedom in a million ways. For some, it is freedom from hunger, unemployment, illitracy. For others it may be freedom from fear of falling ill and not finding money to pay the medical bill or simply the fear of walking down a dim-lit street in a teeming metropolis.

Mr Kumar has put on the table the issues that resonate with him. He is not the first to have raised these issues nor will he be the last. But in presenting his passion, his causes in a powerful way that resonates with people far beyond JNU or even this country, he has simply asked us to think about them.

By lending him an ear, by listening to what he has to say, we are not compelled to agree with every word he has said. We can debate, we can critique, but mythologising him either way — demonising him or making him out to be a messiah despite his protestations — is a sad waste of collective energy.

Will Mr Kumar become a full-time politician soon? That question seems to be bothering a lot of people. Mr Kumar has got lots of advice on his options — which party he could or should align himself with and which parties he can junk to be on the political fast-track. Yet others predict that since Mr Kumar — a member of All-India Students’ Federation, the student wing of Communist Party of India — lacks a movement of his own, he will soon be left high and dry by his JNU campus comrades who will go on to join the civil services or private firms. Then, goes this argument, he will have to compromise and join conventional politics.

Yet others wonder aloud on social media why someone in his late 20s is pursuing a Ph.D., that too in African studies, instead of getting a job and paying his EMIs? When reminded that universities are supposed to provide opportunities to think and debate, some want such universities to be closed down. Clearly, they find thinking and civilised debate subversive.

What did Mr Kumar say for himself? “I am not a politician, I am a student. I have no intention of joining mainstream politics or contesting any election. I want to question as a student and I will like to answer as a teacher in the future. So, the question about my political ambitions should be kept aside.” This is one part of his speech that has been largely ignored by the chatterati.

Here is a young man who made a powerful speech. Many people liked it, many did not. But why is he being demonised for making the speech? Is thinking or talking about azadi really such a subversive, treacherous, traitorous act? Or is it that many people feel threatened if anyone turns the spotlight on hunger, unemployment, casteism, exploitation and so on? Is he really saying something we did not know? Or is the fear more basic?

Mr Kumar has shown he is capable of thinking and articulating his own thoughts. Perhaps that is what our patriarchal and hierarchical society fears the most.