Is the government decided that all dissent is anti-national

While the harassment of Dalit students in universities has been widespread over the past several decades and cannot be blamed on the Bharatiya Janata Party or



the current regime alone, it is clear that the targeting of the Ambedkar Students’ Association had a thinly veiled ideological agenda. It is linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s plan to impose a Hindutva code through the Centre, as well as frontal organisations across various public institutions in the country, including university campuses. There is a direct link between the circumstances leading to the tragic suicide of Ambedkarite Dalit student Rohith Vemula in Hyderabad University and the increasingly bullying tactics used by the Modi government to snuff out dissenting and anti-establishment views. There has also been a disturbing tendency by the ABVP – perhaps egged on by seniors in the Sangh Parivar and emboldened by its clout in New Delhi – to impose some kind of ultra-nationalist code in universities. This was underlined this week when a mob of ABVP students did not allow well-known journalist and commentator Siddharth Varadarajan to speak at Banaras Hindu University and even held him hostage for some time before the police freed him. The mob apparently accused Varadarajan of being “pro-Naxalite” and “anti-national Similarly, there is little substance to the lament by BJP spokespersons that the Dalit student group had been influenced by left-wing politics or that the human tragedy of a student’s death was being needlessly politicised. Ambedkar himself emphasised how politics was the “master key” to Dalit liberation and those who espouse his ideology cannot but be political First Chennai, now Hyderabad