Typing Test

10:00

There is a scene in the movie The Dark Knight. The Joker conducts a social experiment. Two boats full of people, one which has Gotham city's most eminent persons and the other which has the city's criminals are sent out at sea. The Joker gives both these boats a detonator each and says there's a bomb in the other boat and they have to make a choice to blow the other boat up, if they want to live. The boat full of good people takes a vote in which a majority chooses to blow up the boat full of bad guys. On the other hand, the leader of the boat with the scumbags takes the detonator and throws it out to the sea. Truth is, the Joker had given the people of Gotham a false choice. And it took the bad guys of Gotham city to call his bluff. Make no mistake. A similar false choice is being offered to us, We, the people of India. We have to make this binary, reductionist choice between patriots and traitors, anti-nationals and nationalists. It is happening on the back of what happened in JNU. It is happening in our courts. It is certainly happening in some of our television studios. The other day while trying to convince a bunch of apolitical JNU students to come on my show, I was told that some of them while attending another TV debate the previous night were forced by a BJP spokesperson to say, "Bharat Mata ki Jai." And if they didn't, they would all be branded as traitors and anti-nationals. The students naturally were scared. The answer to such a ludicrous demand from BJP spokespersons or other right-wing apologists is to reject their false choice. Merely saying "Bharat Mata ki jai" doesn't make anyone more Indian than saying "Jai Shri Ram" would make anyone Hindu. Your Indian citizenship, and mine, is not a certificate from the BJP or Congress or RSS. It's not a document given by this government or the previous. It is a sacred, legal covenant guaranteed to each of us by the Indian constitution. The mere utterance or the reluctance to utter a slogan does not make any of us less Indian than the other. The JNU story is no longer about Kanhaiya Kumar. It is apparent to most non-partisan observers that he never said anything even half way close to seditious. Most right-minded people also agree that some people did say reprehensible things, but even that cannot be construed as seditious because no less than the Supreme Court of India has said it, first in the Kedarnath vs State of Bihar case and subsequently in Balwant Singh vs State of Punjab case. Balwant Singh and others were picked up on the night of Indira Gandhi's assassination because they were heard shouting slogans like "Khalistan Zindabad" and "Raj Karega Khalsa". The Supreme Court clearly said that mere sloganeering doesn't amount to sedition. Sedition can be applied only if there is an incitement to imminent violence. In JNU, there was no incitement to imminent violence, otherwise the campus would have been up in flames by now. I am also not prepared to buy the argument that this is the government's way of getting back at JNU, an institution they have no love lost for. This story has now moved way beyond JNU in a way that it concerns each one of us. Each one of us citizens is being given a choice – to choose between patriots and traitors, anti-nationals and nationalists, between deshbhakts and deshdrohis. You can choose one or the other or you can always choose to call this bluff. This false choice. Like the bad guys of Gotham did. There is a scene in the movie The Dark Knight. The Joker conducts a social experiment. Two boats full of people, one which has Gotham city's most eminent persons and the other which has the city's criminals are sent out at sea. The Joker gives both these boats a detonator each and says there's a bomb in the other boat and they have to make a choice to blow the other boat up, if they want to live. The boat full of good people takes a vote in which a majority chooses to blow up the boat full of bad guys. On the other hand, the leader of the boat wit