UC Berkeley protests show US is going through what India faced during JNU agitation
If you are a JNU student, or a mediaperson who had covered the months-long agitation over the arrests of JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, Anirban Bhattacharya, or just a secular Indian watching in awe the grave parallels between what happened in this country exactly a year back, and what the University of California at Berkeley, one of the top Ivy League institutions of higher education in the US, you could be experiencing déjà vu. It’s little wonder then that the satirical group Aisi Taisi Democracy dubbed the Berkeley incidents as “Trump’s JNU”.
Chalo wahaan ka JNU ho gaya. https://t.co/U1FeJzxRoF
— Aisi Taisi Democracy (@AisiTaisiDemo) February 2, 2017
And it is.
Although protests in America are coming from every corner, from women who are thronging the streets in millions wearing pink “pussy hats”, to newspapers and magazines that are opting out of the famed “White House Correspondents Dinner”, hitherto the most prestigious gathering to get to know the elected top boss – the POTUS. While activists are turning up in thousands outside US embassies in London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin and other big European cities to agitate against the now temporarily overturned "Muslim ban", the UC Berkeley moment is a tad different from all.
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| When noted internet troll and pro-Trump white nationalist Milo Yiannopoulos wanted to speak at the liberal haven of UC Berkeley, students felt it was their obligation to protest. |
When Donald Trump threatened to defund the “sanctuary cities” – municipalities that have adopted a policy of protecting illegal immigrants by not prosecuting them for violating the federal immigration laws – there was a hue and cry. However, when the noted internet troll and the pro-Trump white nationalist Milo Yiannopoulos wanted to come speak at the liberal haven of UC Berkeley, the students felt it was their obligation to protest.
While the question of freedom of speech might be at stake here, what is also true is that Milo is symptomatic of the rise of the “Alt-Right” Breitbart brand of fact-free fascism, which simply thrives on whipping up hysteria. Milo Yiannopoulos has been using his white nationalist drag persona to both claim a “minority status” within the pro-Trump movement and also hide behind it, all the while fanning the worst nativist passions, even though he’s a British-Greek himself.
While President Trump has threatened to cut off UC Berkeley’s funding for the protests, the parallels with JNU are unmissable. A large body of students in JNU had steered the nation towards seeing just how authoritarian the Modi regime could have been, locking up research scholars for merely allowing a talk on Kashmir and Afzal Guru, for raising a few slogans.
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| JNU and UC Berkeley are and will continue to be the first line of defence against the onslaught of fascism. |
Just like Trump wants to squeeze public funds for higher education – even though much of it is privatised in the US, and is practically run on immigrant money, as foreign students pay thrice the fees compared to US-born students, Ivy League universities such as UC Berkeley are really run on massive donations from major corporations as part of their CSR and cultivating the next generation of intelligentsia. But the public money, if completely cut off, would mean a vindictive government that is crushing its own youth who want to retain a liberal and fair America.
Just like there were protests in JNU when the Patanjali honcho and yoga entrepreneur, Baba Ramdev, was supposed to speak, Yiannopoulos had evoked extremely negative response from the UC Berkeley students, who are used to lectures that expand the horizons of liberty, equality and justice, not shrink them. Although stopping Milo from speaking may not have been the correct response – he should have been grilled and roasted while on stage and every claim of his torn to shreds – Trump’s response has been unbecoming of a President.
Just like social media has been used to the hilt by right-wing commentariat and the BJP’s immense troll army to spread communally charged rumours, falsehoods about journalists, non-BJP politicians, threaten women journalists and liberals in India, the likes of Milo, just like Steven Bannon’s Brietbart News, have been responsible for fascism taking deep roots into America. Unfortunately, they have used working class grievances against the Democrats for bringing in the most working class-unfriendly regime, the richest in the history of America.
The empathy-less presidency of Donald Trump has to be countered by the generations that will shape the future of America, including the protesting students of UC Berkeley. This is a historic moment when a people rise up against a regime that is trying to undo the two centuries of American ideal – at least in theory – by tearing apart the inclusive fabric of the chiefly and fundamentally immigrant nation.
Both JNU and UC Berkeley are not just havens of social democratic ideals, they are also reservoirs of intellectual and cultural memory that is crucial to counter the make-believe ideas of both the Trump presidency and the Modi regime.
Just like the Alt-Right government of Donald Trump, engineered by Steve Bannon, is busy normalising fascism, the RSS-driven Modi sarkar is routinising discrimination on the basis of religion and caste, in its bid to restore India to its imagined Vedic glory, to turn it into an Akhand Hindu Bharat.
JNU and UC Berkeley are and will continue to be the first line of defence against the onslaught of fascism. The students and the faculty are the foot soldiers of a regime change that is desperately needed in these trying times in the world’s biggest democracies.
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