A battle between two Indias breaks out on campus

But this idea of nation is modelled on calendar-art depictions of Hindu goddesses. A crowned figure dressed in a sari, Bharat Mata sits astride a lion and holds a trident or a flag in her hands, sometimes both, and is invariably framed against a map of India. This abstraction of the state and its reduction to sacred nationalism is one reason why the different ideas of India are coming into violent conflict, especially on its prestigious campuses.

At a more insidious level, the student wing of the RSS, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), which revels in the political patronage of Narendra Modi’s government, is using this nationalism as a smokescreen to target its prime ideological enemies – left-wing student organisations and lower-caste students who challenge the brutal realities of caste-based Hindu society.

This explains why the traditionally liberal University of Hyderabad and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi have been labelled “anti-national” by the ABVP in a campaign that has been taken up enthusiastically by the government. In Hyderabad the systematic targeting of the Ambedkar Students Association, which represents low-caste Dalit students, by the ABVP and several government ministers hit the headlines after a Dalit student named Rohith Vemula committed suicide in the wake of this political hounding.

The greatest irony is that the Hindu nationalists, who use the war cry of “Victory for Mother India” (Bharat Mata ki jai) against all those they deem seditious or anti-Hindu – they are interchangeable offences – set little store by the Indian constitution. The most influential ideologue of the RSS, MS Golwalkar, didn’t bother to hide his disdain for the constitution even as late as 1966, when he called it “just a cumbersome and heterogeneous piecing together of various articles from various constitutions of Western countries. It has absolutely nothing which can be called our own. Is there a single word of reference in its guiding principles as to what our national mission is and what our keynote in life is? No!”

To many it would seem that Golwalkar’s views reflected in his book “Bunch of Thoughts” – a bible for the RSS – are more anti-national and seditious than the banners for freedom (azadi) that were raised by JNU students in recent weeks. Azadi from poverty, azadi from caste discrimination, and azadi from the machinations of the saffron brigade, was the demand from defiant JNU students union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who cited the fake tweets and doctored videos used to smear the students.

Kumar’s riveting speech after release from weeks of police custody was a direct challenge to Golwalker’s views. “I want to tell you that Babasaheb [Ambedkar] said that political freedom will not be enough, will not do – we will establish social freedom, which is why we keep talking about the constitution. Lenin said democracy is indispensable for socialism. That’s why we talk about democracy, that is why we talk about freedom of expression, that is why we talk about equality, that is why we talk about socialism – so that the son of a peon and the son of a president can both go to the same school.”

This is the crux of the conflict that is now sweeping across universities in India. For the ABVP, problematic issues such as caste exploitation and discrimination are not to be raised in universities, where they would resonate widely, because these upset the Hindu nationalist idea of what is sacred. Thus eating beef becomes a flashpoint resulting in violence wherever Dalit students have organised such festivals to highlight their alternative discourse to the Brahmanical idea of Hinduism. To defile the purity of Mother India with such concerns is akin to sedition.

And the sacredness of nationalism makes any questioning of the nation-state taboo. Debates on capital punishment in the context of the secret hanging of Afzal Guru, the Kashmiri terrorist convicted of attacking parliament in 2001, have become dangerous grounds for inviting the tag of anti-national, as have the screenings of films on recent communal violence. It is on this slippery slope that the ABVP is staking its nationalism.

The ABVP project to capture campuses is by no means new. As the oldest outfit of the RSS, set up in 1948, its primary aim has been to foil the left. In the heady years after independence, left-wing ideology was the dominant discourse among the youth, and the RSS was determined to establish its ideas of sacred nationalism in colleges and universities that were just being set up.

As an undergrad in Hyderabad’s Osmania University in the late 1960s, I saw how ruthlessly the ABVP fought left-wing student idealism. That was the time of the Paris students’ revolution, of the anti-Vietnam war protests in the US, and of Che Guevara, all of which inspired a left-wing movement under the leadership of George Reddy, a brilliant young Hyderabad student who believed in a more equitable social and political order.

He was murdered, and among the prime suspects for the killing were RSS members. Yet his death did not stop a new students’ movement from sweeping the campuses. Now that the BJP is in power, and with a clutch of former ABVP members in the cabinet plus dozens more who work as personal staff for ministers, it is clearly hoping for better success in its campus onslaught.