Bhookhmari se! Azaadi!
Brahmanwaad se! Azaadi!
Manuwaad se! Azaadi!
Hum leke rahenge! Azaadi!
The slogans rang out. The same azaadi slogans that became infamous in Indian households because of their link to JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar who has been charged with sedition. The acceptance of his bail plea was met with joyous celebration in the form of a victory march organised at the last minute on Wednesday night.
But Thursday’s march was the big one: JNU’s hero was coming home.
Students, supporters, professors, teaching staff, non-teaching staff, and the omnipresent media were there in huge numbers, waiting for Kanhaiya’s much-awaited ghar wapsi.
They shouted slogans in support of the JNUSU President as frantic mediapersons made calls to sources who were feeding them addresses of professors with whom Kanhaiya may have been ‘hiding’. But this wasn’t a protest. Far from it. It was a celebration.
But every slogan came with a caveat: a reminder that the fight was not yet over. Umar Khaled and Anirban Bhattacharya were still behind bars and Kanhaiya’s release was merely a small victory in a war that has a long way to go.
By the time the march began from JNU’s Ganga Dhaba to the Administrative Block, or the Ad Block as it’s more popularly known, students were already correcting the usage of the term victory march and calling it a maha juloos. And that’s exactly what it was.
On the way, students raised slogans in support of Ravish Kumar, the NDTV India anchor who was present at the march and is being lauded for his coverage of the JNU debacle.
On the dimly lit roads of the campus on a pleasant March evening, hundreds, maybe thousands of voices mingled with each other, none contradicting the other.
Till they reached the Ad Block. There things quietened as Rama Naga, the General Secretary of the JNUSU and one of the 6 accused students drew everyone in with a riveting speech about the struggles of the student community against a government that is trying to shut down free speech.
But he wasn’t who the crowds were waiting for. The sight of Kanhaiya before he gave his speech was met with renewed vigour that escaped through slogans, cheering and the furious waving of a very large Indian flag just behind where the speakers were seated.
The audience clung to his every word as he spoke, his tone confident and shifting smoothly between tongue-in-cheek and heartfelt. The audience responded in kind: They laughed, they yelled ‘shame’, they cheered and they applauded.
He took potshots at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Rajnath Singh, HRD Minister Smriti Irani and the media.
All this, while portraying the police and media as one with the audience and himself – the common person rising from poverty, oppressed by the power of the government.
He spoke of his family and how they survive on Rs 3000 a month. Of how nowhere else would a person like him aspire to a PhD. He turned the argument of armymen dying at the borders around by pointing out that those armymen are the sons of hardworking farmers who get pushed to suicide. And he himself is the son of a farmer.
He did all this while spinning his own politics through every argument but turned everyone in the crowd tonight, regardless of their political leanings, in favour of the country’s ongoing student movements.
He raised JNU and its students and placed them on a pedestal and as they shone in the glory of the institution, he pointed out that while they call out classist elitism, they’re themselves guilty of intellectual elitism through the constant use of academic jargon that alienates the masses.
Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested and taken away as the elected president of Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union. He returned a hero to his campus. He’s already become a neta with a following.
Camera: Sanjoy Deb
Video Editing: Prashant Bhardwaj
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