The Governor General’s Files

The recent Jawaharlal Nehru University campus happenings were followed by lawlessness and violence in Patiala House courts.

Winston Churchill, a dyed-in-the-wool imperialist, was totally opposed to India becoming independent. On the eve of India’s Independence, he wrote, “Power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues and freebooters… They (the Indians) will fight among themselves for power and India will be lost in political squabbles.” Jawaharlal Nehru and the generation of freedom fighters proved Churchill wrong, but today there appears a ring of truth in what he said. We do still have political leaders who uphold high values, but they are very few.

JNU has been our premier educational institution of intellectual excellence befitting its great name. It has pronounced Leftist leanings, and so to an extent did Nehru. He was a great intellectual and a patriot who made a huge personal sacrifice for the nation. He was the architect of our liberal democracy. The chameleon-like Communists changed colours during the Second World War, and after it they were painting “Long Live Mao” on walls in Kolkata when our soldiers were sacrificing their lives fighting the Chinese on the Himalayas’ forbidding heights.

Progressive and liberal views are welcome in a democracy. Should this also apply to subversive thinking and blatantly antinational acts? Maqbool Bhat, responsible for killing Kashmiri Pandits and their ethnic cleansing; Yakub Memon, responsible for 257 fatalities in Bombay in 1993; Afzal Guru, responsible for the attack on the Indian Parliament; or Ajmal Kasab, the Pakistani terrorist who killed innocent citizens in the 26/11 Mumbai attacks have been hailed as heroes in JNU. The legitimacy of hanging can be questioned and different views expressed, but making these criminals seem like heroes is another matter.

In the UK, John Amery, the son of Leopold S. Amery, secretary of state for India and Burma in Churchill’s War Cabinet, broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin. He was declared a traitor and hanged after the war. In the US, Julius Rosenberg, who spied for Soviet Russia, was sentenced to death by the Supreme Court. No protests were raised in either case. Perhaps our intellectuals will maintain that the UK and the US are imperfect democracies, while ours is a perfect democracy in which such criminal acts can be