Skip to main content

Cruelty and the Right Wing


Professor Mukul Manglik of Ramjas College, Delhi concludes his interview to Frontline with a quote from historian Howard Zinn: “Human history is not only a history of cruelty, but also of compassion, courage and kindness... and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is inhuman and cruel around us, is itself a marvellous victory.”

Struggle against Right Wing cruelty
Source: India Today
The students’ union, ABVP, had unleashed a lot of cruelty on the campus and the Professor was speaking about that.  He mentions in the interview that he as well as many other teachers feels intimidated by ABVP which physically assaulted some teachers during the agitation. 

ABVP is a student organisation that is affiliated to RSS and nurtured by BJP both of which take pride in Hindu culture and civilisation.  The teacher is placed on a par with god in the ancient Hindu tradition.  It then becomes extremely ironical and darkly comical that teachers in a college in the capital of the country feel intimidated by ABVP.

Violence is nothing new for RSS or BJP.  But when it takes violence from the streets and electoral arenas to the campus and lets even teachers be beaten up by students, the organisations become mere caricatures of what they profess to be.  In their eagerness to saffronise the country, RSS and BJP are vitiating the campuses.  This will have serious repercussions in the future.  The country may be saffronised but it will also be reduced into a snake pit of hatred and violence, petty thinking and regression.

Our hope lies in what Howard Zinn said.  Human species has survived in spite of all the cruelty practised incessantly by organisations, parties and other agents because there have always been people who defied cruelty and inhumanity.  The greatest challenge faced by India today, arguably, is the negativity propagated by the ruling party and its multifarious agents.  The negativity is cleverly concealed beneath the facade of development mantras.  A day will come when the people will understand whose development is being taken care of actually.  Then the tables will be turned.  Nobody, however great he may appear to be, can go on befooling a whole nation for a long time.


Comments

  1. Cruelty is not limited to RSS - ABVP alone. You do not talk about left violence in Kerala and West Bengal. That does not mean any violence is better than the other. But we must condemn both equally.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Violence of any kind is contemptible, no doubt. But the leftist violence is confined to Kerala and WB and it won't spread beyond those regions because the leftist ideology is breathing its last. Hence it doesn't pose much danger. On the other hand, the right wind is on the ascent now in the country and all sorts of Senas are mushrooming. It is a dangerous trend. That's why I chose to focus on that.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...