Com. Sudhansu, AISA’s State President of UP Expelled by Lucknow University Administration for Organising Talk on Women’s Right to Choose!

Who is Afraid of Love?

On 15 November 2015, the AISA unit of Lucknow University (LU), held a convention on the campus premises on ‘Prem Se Darr Kisko?”(Who is afraid of love? Love Azaad vs. the lie of Love Jihad) The convention was organized in the light of the increasing communalisation of love in Uttar Pradesh by the RSS/BJP machinery. The urgent need to dispel the myth of love- jihad was further necessitated by the spate of provocative statements and threats being issued by BJP leaders like Yogi Adityanath on a daily basis and the falling apart of the mythical love-jihad propoganada by the sangh machinery after it came to light that in the much hyped love-jihad case of Merut, it was actually the local BJP leaders who had threatened and subsequently bribed the family members of the girl to falsely accuse their daughter’s Muslim partner. The AISA unit of LU obtained formal permission from the university authorities for organising the convention (permission letter attached). However, on the day of the convention, when CPI (ML) Liberation’s Politburo member and AIPWA national secretary Com. Kavita Krishnan was about to deliver her talk, the ABVP goons entered and vandalised the convention venue, manhandled the speakers and other students (especially women) among the audience and disrupted the talk. While disrupting the talk they proudly raised pro-khaap and pro-moral policing slogans while also threatening those against their regressive, patriarchal, communal and parochial views with ‘goliyon se aarati‘ (salutation by showering bullets). Most disturbingly, the University authorities with whom layed the responsibility to ensure that such disruption does not happen, chose to collude with the vandalists. That all this happened in a state university of a state whose ruling party claims to be the most fervent upholder of secular values, is a serious give-away not only of their false claims of standing for secularism but also to the heightened fear and insecurity the minorities must be experiencing every passing moment.

Two months later, in a most shocking and disturbing turn of events, the University authorities who had earlier failed to rein in the vandalists and also failed to ensure that the university campus remained a space of critique, democratic dialogue and freedom of expression, instead of coming down on the disruptors of academic and secular spaces has chosen to take action against those who stand for democracy, secularism and rights of women. LU authorities have now issued orders to expel Com. Sudhanshu, state AISA president and a student of LU, for standing up for the rights of women to make their own decisions, for having challenged sangh brigade’s unabated hate mongering and for having the courage to stand for ‘love’ during the time of ‘hate’.

Punishment for Spreading Love in the Time of Hate: Resist Surrender of University Authorities to Right Wing Patriarchal Forces:

At this juncture, it becomes all the more important to ask ‘Who indeed is afraid of love’, so afraid, that they would rather let vandalists and goons run loose and unreined in the university than safeguard the democratic, egalitarian and secular ethos of institutional spaces! What kind of University feels threatened when issues of ‘women’s right over their bodies and choices’ are raised? What kind of university allows open threats and intimidation of women and then follows it up by penalising those who stood with the women resisting such threats? What kind of university shuts its eyes when a group such goons throw money at girls dancing on a stage during an college event (as reported by the female students on the day of the convention) but suddenly wakes up when the same women bravely stand up and assert ‘no more’!! And also, what is about the state government’s mindset, that university authorities feel so emboldened to punish those who stand against the sangh brigade’s hate mongering and daylight lumpenism!!

In recent times we have seen how educational institutions are becoming brazenly anti-women and instead of creating spaces for questions and critiques, are instead going all out to curb them. From beating up Jadavpur students at midnight for daring to demand justice for a fellow student, to issuing show cause notices to students for organising events in order to assert people’s rights over the spaces they daily occupy. Last month, the authorities of Calicut Universities had issued show cause notices to common students and several left activists including those from AISA for organising  a “Hug of Love” event in their college on 10 December 2014. At a time when the self-appointed guardians of morality have been busy spreading “hate” through divisive speeches and campaigns like “love-jihad” targeting different communities, the students’ of Calicut Law College had undertaken this initiative to ensure that we remember love, the most unifying of human emotions. By issuing show-cause notice to the students, the Calicut Law College administration violated a key principle on which any institute of higher education is founded, which is,  that there be presence of critical thought and freedom of expression, and the college/university administration is beholden to safeguard that freedom. Though the university later was forced to withdraw the notices under tremendous pressure from progressive sections it nonetheless showed itself to be replete with the very regressive and irrational notions that it must instead be striving to replace.

By bowing down before communal and patriarchal forces, the LU too has shown itself to , be an unthinking agent of the status-quoist and right-wing forces in the state, when it considers a convention on love, secularism and women’s agency as immoral, problematic and an unfit topic of discussion among students.

We appeal to all democratic section to unite against the expulsion of comrade Sudhanshu and build up a massive resistance against shameless surrender of LU administration to right-wing hate mongering forces.

See   NO to Homophobia! NO to Misogyny!