Mohammad Raafi
Unnecessary hue and cry by rightwing BJP backed Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) over a peaceful event on Afzal Guru and Maqbool Bhat in New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University is uncalled for.
It is not the first time that Kashmiri students have organized such an event in any educational institution of India but wherever they are studying, they raise their peaceful voices against the “excesses” in Kashmir.
After ABVP forced JNU administration to choke the space of Kashmiri students by taking action against their peaceful activities, the charges of sedition have been imposed on the organizers for shaping up a “Pro-Kashmir” event.
Indian judiciary, by means of sedition, has time and again muzzled the genuine voices from Kashmir. Besides 67 students in March 2014 for supporting Pakistan cricket team’s win over India, Indian thinker and author , Arundhati Roy, was charged under sedition in 2010 for speaking in favour of Kashmir.
Indian political diaspora and civil society has to understand it unequivocally that such events will crop up time and again for obvious reasons. History tells us that such charges fail to gag “expression” of Kashmiris.
The sedition charges primarily reflects the Indian State’s refusal to engage with, recognize or tolerate the fundamental political question of Kashmiris and their renunciation of the Indian identity. Therefore, assertion of rights – political and legal – is proximately criminalized.
The charge of sedition against students speaks of vendetta and reflects colonial mindset, besides, New Delhi’s hatred, antipathy and antagonism against the people of Kashmir.
India cannot dictate through its buoyed “puppets” who are even one step ahead of New Delhi in belittling the people of Kashmir, conveniently overlooking that it is on the dint of these very people that their now acquired arrogance flows. It is also the weakness of these “sold souls” that Kashmir has no channel to voice its rights in India. New Delhi needs to introspect!
