Activists raise banner of protest against 'fascism, rewriting of history'

Their declared aim was to “celebrate freedom and pluralism.” But protest remained the recurrent theme on the first day of two-day (December 9-10) conclave of Mumbai Collective 2017 at Y B Chavan Centre near Mantralaya. Through passionate presentations from activists, historians, scholars, student leaders, including by the “much-toasted and equally vilified” Kanhaiya Kumar, depending on which side of the debate you are, the meet collectively hammered home one point: the idea of India is under assault from “creeping fascism.”

Clad in full-sleeved shirt, jeans and chappals, Kanhaiya sounded combative from the word go. Greeting the full house with krantikari salaam (revolutionary salutation), he first slammed his fellow leftwing student leaders and members of different factions of the communist movement. “In these fights among the left I am being left out,” he joked. “Riots are not confined to big cities. Kasbas and villages have been divided into conflict zones and Muslim areas are being branded as mini-Pakistans. Violence is being normalized,” said the former student leader of JNU. Calling the Narendra Modi-led BJP government a “vigyapan ki sarkar (government of the advertisements), he claimed that an RTI application had recently found that the government spent over Rs 3500 crore on advertisements when farmers are committing suicide and unemployment is rising. Kanhaiya predictably received the cheery applause from the crowd comprising mostly of socially conscious and politically aware college students, many from

Tata Institute of Social Sciences

(TISS).

In fact TISS scholars are at the forefront of the Mumbai Collective 2017 with Professor R

Ramakumar

serving as its convener. “The Collective provides a common platform to activists, commentators, scholars and historians in the city who are otherwise fragmented geographically and ideologically,” Ramakumar told TOI.

The session titled ‘Foreign Policy in Disarray’ saw the sparks fly as speakers blamed the government for playing second fiddle to powers like the USA and China and abandoning traditional friends like Palestine. Irfan Engineer who moderated this session joked: “We don’t know who our Foreign Minister is? I think Sushma Swaraj should declare it on a sign board that she is India’s Foreign Minister.” “Except Modi’s suits nothing shines in his global visits,” remarked Prabir Purkayastha, Vice-President, Free Software Movement of India. Senior commentator Seema Mustafa alleged that a “shadow of secrecy” marked the Modi regime’s foreign policy which is not pragmatic. “After Trump announced that Jerusalem would be the new capital of Israel, India didn’t react the way it should have. Its stand on Rohingya refugees has been awful. The government is focused on how to expel out the just 40,000 Rohingyas who have been settled in India for over a decade,” said Mustafa.

After recitations of protest poems by Rasika Agashe and Milind Phatak, the session on ‘Rewriting History, RSS Style’ saw the speakers railing against the RSS, its ideological fathers like

Golwalkar

and Savarkar. Political scientist Shamsul Islam who claims to have collected enormous body of literature on the RSS painted the parivar as an organization which “didn’t participate in the freedom struggle but claims to be nationalists.’’ “They should not teach nationalism to us.”