The Rohit storm that gripped the nation was slowly subsiding
only to be struck again by Hurricane Kanhaiya. Free speech has been taken for a
ride, the extreme right tried stifling it in the name of their bigoted
patriotism, anti-social fringe groups joined the band wagon like fare-evaders
and the extreme left opportunely embarked on this gravy train with their usual
insouciant leftist-jingoism.
Within a transient period of few
weeks, heroes and villains have emerged from the dust-bowl of government’s
high-handedness, pervasive yellow-journalism and slapdash social media. The
aftermath left a wreckage of impaired vanity and introspection, leaving behind
a litany of unanswered questions. From this debris popped out Mr.Chauhan, a
sombre villain, a lawyer turned judge, jury and executioner. His nausea-inducing
antics on the day Kanhaiya Kumar was presented before the magistrates should
sound as a death knell and chilling reminder of dogmatic nationalism that is
engulfing this secular nation. Draconian use of sedition charges on a student
instigated a debate in both the houses; cornered and confronted rose another
protagonist, Smriti Irani with her fiery and emotional counter-attack dismantling
her unwary rivals with an incendiary commotion, if not, reason. The dust barely
settled and from the rubble, exploded rejuvenated Kanhaiya, freshly bailed yet
bizarrely admonished as diseased by the Judge. And oh! My gracious me, this boy
can talk.
My first impression of him when
he took stage was that of a meek and gentle pupil caught up in a skirmish that might
have puffed up into a serious agitation, possibly fanned by opposition student
wing into a political fist-fight and ultimately framed into an act of sedition
by administrative muscle of HRD ministry. That may well have been the case, but
ten minutes into his tirade the sheer eloquence and uncompromising diction of
his speech has laid bare my naïve misjudgment of his personality. This
youngster is a seasoned raconteur, influenced by left-wing idealism and hardened
by torment meted out to him by the establishment, reinvigorated by the support
he received from the liberal academia, he turned his resentment towards Modi
and his cohorts, understandably and rightly so. His speech was impressive and
free indeed, free-flowing, freely publicized by the free press, “Freedom in
India and not from India” was his expedient swan song.
Unrelenting and unabated, he
enthralled, captivated and fascinated his university peers by his unrestrained
flow of ideas. Amidst the euphoria, I was still struggling to unravel any
pieces of wisdom from his passionate discourse that I could muster. Invoking many
of Modi’s tag lines, his harangue was evoking and mildly provoking, bordering
marginally on light-hearted demagoguery and cheerful rabble-rousery but devoid
of any tangible intellectual content. I was waiting for him to illuminate his
countrymen on why he chose Afzal Guru’s anniversary as his day of emancipation
to drumroll his version of “Azadi from hunger, corruption, discrimination and
backwardness”. He vividly talked about Jumlas(Gimmicks), the parables and
metaphors were exemplary, but his speech was
appealing to emotion and not to intellect. His seamless change of tack
from soldiers to farmers’ suicides and from caste system to equal right to
prosperity, reminding the nation of his family’s modest income and humble beginnings
bore all the hallmarks of Modi’s pre-election campaigns: replete with empty
rhetoric and infectious orotundity, mishmash of passionate idealism and euphonous
obscurantism, alluring to the concomitant dissents of the lower and middle
class India; Modi has finally met his match.
An hour of
random reflections, cliché musings and Modi bashing constructed with magniloquence makes a great performance, not a consciousness-raising speech. This is
unrivaled entertainment and its over and if you happen to be a purveyor of
more intellectual stuff, start looking elsewhere; listening to the likes of
Dr.Jayaprakash Narayan would be a good start.
