Aheli Moitra
Little known to us, a university far west of Nagaland was under siege by right wing forces.
Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, north western Pakistan, re-opened on February 15, almost a month after an attack by armed men left 21 students and teachers dead. The four attackers were killed later in a ‘shoot-out’ with the police.
The attack was carried out during the observation of the death anniversary, January 20, of the soul the University is named after: Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988), a Pashtun independence activist and pacifist, popularly named Bacha (Badshah or Emperor in Pashto) Khan, and ‘Frontier Gandhi’. Khan founded the ‘Khudai Khidmatgar’ (Servants of God) that opposed British colonisation of the subcontinent through non violent struggle.
The Bacha Khan University in Pakistan was founded on the principles of peace and universal brotherhood.
If Pakistan State reports are to be followed, the attack was carried out on the instructions of Pakistan’s neighbouring State, India. And if this allegation were to be taken seriously because it was said out loud in the media, some Indian leader needs to be brought to the gallows for the death sentence the four attackers gave to the 21 people.
But death sentences of neither kind should find a place in society. One expects a just society to study matters, raise issues in a democratic, not demagogic, manner and follow a course of action that informs everyone of the debate. Whoever carried out the attack on Bacha Khan University obviously did not bother with this difficult course of action, instead snuffing out the pursuit of truth at the educational institution through the barrel of the gun.
Pakistan is not very different from India. In fact, matters are worse in the latter where the State itself plays the role of the demagogue—based on Twitter feeds and poor judgment, it gate crashes an institute of higher learning and snuffs out even the mention of a debate on public matters
In a world where words like terrorists, separatists, insurgents, secessionists etc are scattered like pollen, do the youth not have the right to even ask where these terms, or the people who are termed so, come from? Does the nation not want to know why thousands of people are killed by it in justification of it?
In the lands that were set free through struggles of such people as Bacha Khan and MK Gandhi, today the kind of youth that may have joined a Khan or Gandhi in their struggle for justice and peace are being stifled by States, and their violent non-state progeny.
Bacha Khan University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Hyderabad University, and scores more have fallen to the demagogue lurking round the corner. Education that raises creativity in the mind of the human being, and dissent as a natural outcome of mainstream injustices, are fast becoming casualties. Rohith Vemula gave up his life to exemplify this point. 21 students and teachers lost their lives in Charsadda as a case in point.
Is it time to go back to our shared history of civil disobedience to bring home the point?
Suggestions may be sent to moitramail@yahoo.com
