New Delhi : Amid hours of loud, noisy and perpetually bitter arguments, and counter-arguments there was a brief period of cool learned assertion on the subject of nationalism.
“I sometimes fear that those who are defining nationalism so narrowly will end up one day describing Rabindranath Tagore, the composer of our National Anthem, as anti-national if they read some of the sentences in his book on nationalism”, observed Dr Sugata Bose the soft spoken scholarly historian and Trinamool Congress member.
Bose made a strong point about nationalism in a democracy and asserted that Tagore who composed our National Anthem was also a powerful critic of nationalism.
“He knew that nationalism could be both a boon and a curse. He wrote beautiful patriotic songs during our Swadeshi movement. But then he also saw that nationalism could lead to the carnage of war in Europe during the First World War and that is why, when he travelled the world in 1916, he first went to Japan and then the United States of America. He gave lectures on nationalism and it was a powerful critique of nationalism that we find in those lectures. These lectures were published in a little book titled ‘Nationalism by McMillan ‘in 1917.’
Barring for a few moments when he aroused the ire of the Communist members, Bose was heard literally in pin-drop silence and with all the attention. The heckling and the running commentary having been brought to a halt.
Referring to the speech delivered by the JNUSU president, Bose said, “I heard the speech given by Kanhaiya Kumar on You Tube and agreed with many things that he said. I disagreed with some of the things that he said. I agreed with him when he extolled Ambedkar’s commitment to the Constitutional rights and Constitutional morality. I agreed with him when he expressed admiration for our great revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, Asfaquallah, Sukhdev and Rajguru. He, of course, said that the RSS took no part in our freedom struggle. There too he was right.”
But then Bose added: “… as a teacher I would have liked to have a discussion with him about history and I would have pointed out to him that even the Communists had actually taken part in the freedom struggle but also betrayed the freedom struggle at crucial moments during the 1942 movement and during the Azad Hind Movement led by Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. So, we condemn the vigilantism of self-appointed protectors of the nation who are trying to create a climate of fear.”
This was the stage at which the Communist members protested. Demanding that the law on sedition should be abolished, Bose said that a law that was deployed to persecute our freedom fighters has no place in the statute books.”
We ought to be able to have a discussion with our children, with our students, with our youth. We ought not to be subjecting them to trumped up charges of sedition based on very dubious evidence, based on morphed visual evidence. We ought not to be doing this to our students and to our youth,” he added. In the context of the JNU incidents, the Trinamool Congress MP condemned the objectionable slogans and posters.
