A group of intellectuals from across the world has written to the Indian Supreme Court expressing displeasure at the role played by the court in enabling the arrest of journalist, educationist and human rights defender Teesta Setalvad.

The group includes well-known names such as critically acclaimed linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock, and a whole host of academics from America’s top universities.

In their letter to the court, they say that they are “deeply disturbed by some of the recent judgements of the Indian Supreme Court, which have a direct bearing on the future of civil liberties and human rights in India.”

The say that “since the petitioners had challenged the findings of the SIT report that gave a clean chit to the Gujarat government for the riots following the Godhra incident, and asked the Supreme Court to order an independent investigation, for the Court to dismiss their appeal on the basis of the very same impugned SIT report seems to us to be unjust.”

Moreover, they feel that “while dismissing their appeal, the Court has quite gratuitously and wholly unfairly attributed ulterior motives to the petitioners,” which in turn enabled the arrest of co-petitioner Teesta Setalvad, along with witness R.B. Sreekumar. They note, “If any patient, prolonged, peaceful, and entirely legitimate pursuit of justice through the due process, is called “keeping the pot boiling”, then this remark, quite apart from being offensive, discourages people from approaching the Court on any matter relating to excesses or dereliction on the part of the executive.”

They also note that “the Court has passed these uncalled-for obiter dicta without even giving a hearing to those against whom these remarks are directed; this sets an unfortunate precedent in jurisprudence.”

The complete list of signatories is as follows:

• Bhiku Parekh, House of Lords, London, U.K.

• Noam Chomsky, Professor emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Professor, University of Arizona, U.S.A.

• Arjun Appadurai, Professor, Max Planck Institute, Germany.

• Wendy Brown, Professor, Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, U.S.A.

• Sheldon Pollock, Professor Emeritus, Columbia University, U.S.A.

• Carol Rovane, Professor, Columbia University, U.S.A.

• Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus, McGill University, Canada.

• Martha Nussbaum, Professor, University of Chicago, U.S.A.

• Robert Pollin, Professor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, U.S.A.

• Akeel Bilgrami, Professor, Columbia University, U.S.A.

• Gerald Epstein, Professor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, U.S.A.

Back home in India, many legal luminaries and civil society members have questioned how the Indian justice system has treated Setalvad. In an Interview to LiveLaw, Senior Advocate Dushyant Dave said, “I think the Supreme Court has sent a terribly wrong message. I think what the Supreme Court has done effectively is to shoot the messenger, which is not good news for democracy and rule of law.” He added, “The Supreme court has crossed all lines, all limitations and all sense of propriety in ordering prosecution.” The entire interview may be read here.

At a recently held People’s Tribunal in New Delhi, Tanvir Jafri, who is the son of Zakia Jafri and slain former Congress Member of Parliament Ehsan Jafri (who was killed during the communal violence in Gujarat in 2002), voiced his concerns about the judgment and its consequences. Jafri is pained by the outcome of the Zakia Jafri case where his mother was the main petitioner, backed by Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) via its secretary Teesta Setalvad. “It is unfortunate that the petition was dismissed. What’s more shocking is how the court made remarks about police officials who were just doing their duty and the NGO that supported us. They are now in jail,” he said referring to Setalvad, who was named co-conspirator along with two whistle-blower cops – former Gujarat Director General of Police (DGP) RB Sreekumar and Sanjiv Bhatt.

At the same People’s Tribunal, Rajya Sabha Member and Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal highlighted how the Special Investigation Team (SIT), which was constituted to investigate the cases of Gujarat Riots, went on to take the statements of accused on face value to close the investigation and how the Supreme Court has agreed to this kind of investigation. Sibal had represented Zakia Jafri in the Special Leave Petition (SLP) moved before the Supreme Court, which was dismissed by the court in June this year.

Meanwhile, Mumbai-based senior advocate Mihir Desai referred to the recent rejection of bail to Setalvad by the Ahmedabad Sessions Court, and told The Wire, “The order doesn’t mention what Teesta is responsible for, or what she has done. It goes into generalities and doesn’t throw any light on what crime she has actually committed.” The entire article may be read here.

Last week, the Sarva Seva Sangh released a statement in Hindi in support of Setalvad. It said, “The arrest of Teesta Setalvad and others has dealt a body blow to the human rights movement in India.” They also condemned the persecution of other human rights defenders such as Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) activist Medha Patkar, fact-checker Mohammed Zuber and Gandhian Himanshu Kumar.

Working women and members of the All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA) also came together to hold a signature campaign in support of Setalvad in Dalit Basti in Seer in Varanasi this week. The women grassroots activists demanded Setalvad’s immediate release. Some images from the day may be viewed here: 

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is all set to hear a matter pertaining to Setalvad’s bail on August 22. After the Gujarat High Court adjourned her bail hearing to September 19, Setalvad moved SC citing the inordinate delay.

Readers would recall that Setalvad had been arrested on trumped up charges just a day after the Supreme Court had delivered its judgment in the Zakia Jafri case. Though the Ahmedabad Crime Branch had told a local court that her custody was not required for further questioning in a matter pertaining to alleged forgery and conspiracy, the court of Ahmedabad Sessions Judge DD Thakkar denied her bail on July 30.

Setalvad had then moved Gujarat High Court which issued notice to the Special Investigation Team (SIT) asking them to respond to Setalvad’s bail application, but adjourned the matter to September 19. Now, Setalvad has moved SC citing how this delay is denying her the right to an expedient bail.

Related:

It is unfortunate how Zakia Jafri case was dismissed: Tanvir Jafri

Free Teesta Setalvad: Dozens of letters pour in every week

Free Teesta Setalvad: Time to defend the Foot-soldier of the Constitution

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A B52 bomber during the US war in Indochina. Wikicommons/USAF. Some rights reserved.

If we want to understand the human potential for radical change – change that genuinely transcends the out-of-control capitalism now threatening the environment and even the future of our species – we need to understand language and its origins. This is because language could not have evolved without extraordinary levels of cooperation, while cooperation is, of course, the key thing we need if we’re ever to overcome the class conflicts, social fragmentation and environmental degradation now afflicting us all.

Language may not always appear to be especially cooperative, particularly when we are involved in a heated argument. But as long as we remain on speaking terms, we are still demonstrating our commitment to cooperate in this most challenging and distinctively human of tasks – striving to make sure that, despite all difficulties, language continues to work.

Successful linguistic communication depends on previous shared understandings, trust in communicative intentions and an ongoing willingness to consider our words from the other person’s perspective instead of just our own. Monkeys and apes are highly intelligent creatures, but in the wild, their social dynamics are just too despotic and competitive for language-like communication to evolve.

It is facts like this which have led to a burgeoning scientific interest in the kinds of politics which best foster linguistic communication. The world’s earliest words and grammatical rules were invented not by hierarchically organised city-dwellers or farmers but by hunter-gatherers. And it is no accident that even to this day, indigenous people who practice that ancient lifestyle continue to live by the most cooperative, communistic and egalitarian political ideals ever known.

Based for sixty years at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky is not only the world’s most famous linguist; he is also, probably, the world’s best-known critic of contemporary capitalism. So you might expect him to be at the forefront of current debates concerning the social origins of language. Unfortunately, not only is Chomsky not involved in this area of research: his whole theoretical approach is widely considered to be a hindrance. He claims, for example, that language is not social at all. He says it was not designed to facilitate social communication. Setting aside social cooperation, Chomsky argues that language was suddenly installed in the head of one human ancestor by a chance mutation. Equipped with its new ability, that individual then proceeded to talk silently, just to itself.

A non-issue?

These ideas are so far removed from what modern evolutionary scientists have discovered about language, the brain and human evolution that it is hard to know how to respond. My book, Decoding Chomsky: science and revolutionary politics, along with my recent Open Democracy article, ‘Chomsky’s Choice’, are attempts to understand this whole situation – a situation which, for those of us who love Chomsky’s politics, is both frustrating and tragic.

Frederick Newmeyer is well-known and respected as the intellectual historian who has done most to present Chomsky in a positive light throughout the many disputes and controversies which have afflicted linguistics since the 1950s. Responding to my article in Open Democracy, Professor Newmeyer denies that the military funding of MIT’s linguistics programme played any role in shaping Chomsky’s foundational contribution to that programme. In fact, he denies that military funding was ever an issue for Chomsky at all.

Robert Barsky, who is an even more sympathetic biographer of the renowned linguist, adopts a similar position, claiming that the whole topic of military funding was always a non-issue. I have long been familiar with this line of argument, which accurately mirrors Chomsky’s own stated position.

Chomsky rejects outright just about everything I say, as does Barsky. According to Chomsky, I am mistaken for a fundamental reason: with the exception of certain departments, ‘MIT itself doesn’t have war work’. Or again, for Chomsky, the questions I am intrigued by are a non-issue because, in fact, ‘There was zero military work on campus’. By contrast, Newmeyer disputes only the second half of my two-pronged argument, regarding it as interesting and significant that during the early years, a number of Air Force colonels and other prominent figures in the US military hoped to derive ‘command-and-control’ applications from Chomsky’s research in a Pentagon-funded electronics laboratory in MIT.

If I understand him correctly, Newmeyer agrees with me on the following four points:
1)   Chomsky was operating within a heavily militarised institutional environment.
2)   He was officially employed to help develop computerised language processing including machine translation.
3)   The military implications would have been unmistakable had things worked out as the Air Force colonels hoped.
4)   No workable applications actually materialised.

During the early 1960s, Chomsky was in receipt of significant Air Force funding for a project being conducted by a team of his students in the MITRE Corporation, an institution that specialised in developing practical military applications out of the latest theoretical scientific work.
The aim of this particular project was to connect Chomsky’s ideas about grammar in the abstract to something more specific, namely the grammatical structure of just one particular language, English. The reasoning here was that since most US military commanders were fluent only in English, it would be best if their computerized command and control systems could be designed to accept input in that particular language.

One of Chomsky’s most promising MIT/MITRE students, Barbara Partee, entitled her thesis ‘Subject and Object in Modern English’. She recalls her high ambitions during that time: ‘Actually, my dissertation proposal, which Chomsky agreed to with enthusiasm, was to write a grammar of English, synthesizing all that had been done in transformational grammar up until then’. In the end though, Partee only had time to explore a limited fragment of English.

Grammatical structure in the abstract

Left to his own devices, I suspect that Chomsky would have encouraged his students to turn their minds in the exact opposite direction. Instead of focusing on the grammatical peculiarities of English, he would surely have preferred a steady focus on the complexities of grammatical structure in general, perhaps using English sentences as examples but, in the process, driving the investigation to ever deeper levels of universality and abstraction.

Chomsky’s overriding focus, then as now, was grammatical structure in the abstract. Although in his early years he was happy to explore variations in pronunciation in spoken English or Hebrew, neither Chomsky nor any of his followers ever got round to publishing a transformational grammar of any particular language.

Apart from the intrinsic difficulties, there was always a deep philosophical reason for this. When speaking as a scientist, Chomsky refuses to acknowledge that there is even such a thing as ‘English’, regarding this and other so-called ‘externalizations’ of language (broad cultural categories such as ‘French’, ‘Swahili’ or ‘Mohawk’) as far too arbitrarily defined and messy to be studied using the methods of natural science.

At all times, Chomsky has felt most comfortable when free to pursue his fascination with purely abstract, eternally fixed and universal underlying linguistic forms, almost as if linguistics could be reduced to mathematics. By contrast, the military, naturally enough, wanted concrete results which they could use – developments in computerised command and control which would assist them in efficiently killing people in distant countries such as Vietnam.

I don’t see how anyone can seriously deny that the US military needed workable applications and were prepared to finance Chomsky’s research in the hope of finding them. Naturally, I am delighted that a colleague with Newmeyer’s reputation as an intellectual historian agrees with me, stating that I am ‘right on the mark’ in this respect.

Chomsky’s fears

Now let me turn to the second prong of my argument, which Newmeyer disputes. I can think of three possible ways to interpret Chomsky’s decision to accept military funding of his linguistic research:
1)  He took the money and happily colluded with those who were providing it.
2)  He took the money but refused to collude.
3)  It was not an issue. He didn’t care either way.
Needless to say, these are not cut-and-dried alternatives – we might envisage all kinds of uncertainties and in-between positions. But I would be surprised if any serious historian or biographer selected the first option or anything like it. The idea that Chomsky, of all people, would happily collude with the US military is just not likely – and I don’t believe it for a moment.

Yet I also find the third option – the possibility that Chomsky had no worries on this score – equally inconceivable. If he had no worries, it seems odd that he seriously considered resigning from MIT in the mid-1960s. He explained his misgivings in these words:
 

I have given a good bit of thought to … resigning from MIT, which is, more than any other university, associated with activities of the department of ‘defense’. … I think that its involvement in the war effort [in Vietnam] is tragic and indefensible. One should, I feel, resist this subversion of the university in every possible way.

Some eight years previously, Chomsky was already worried about the danger that he might unwittingly collude with military aims. We know this because when Carol Chomsky, Noam’s wife, began working on air defence research at MIT’s Lincoln Labs in 1959, the project’s leader, Bert Green, soon realised that the university’s ‘linguists were not at all happy’.

The project in question was called ‘Baseball’. According to an article authored by Professor Green and Carol Chomsky, the project was intended to lead to a situation in which people could communicate with their computers in ‘natural language’, the wider aim being to enhance both ‘military command and control systems’ and civilian computer systems. Green elaborates:
 

The linguistic side of our Baseball program was prepared by Carol Chomsky, Noam Chomsky’s wife. Noam was very nervous about our work, and met with me to voice his concerns. Since the work was being done at an Air Force lab, he believed that the Baseball thing was just a mask, and that we were really working on voice activated command and control systems. I tried to convince him that we were not, and that there was nothing sinister about interrogating a database.

However impractical such voice-activated systems were during these early years, it was not unreasonable for Noam to feel ‘very nervous’. After all, he was initially employed at MIT to work on machine translation, a project whose prime purpose was the large-scale translation of Soviet bloc documents for the Pentagon and CIA. The person who recruited Chomsky to work on this project in 1955 was Jerome Wiesner, who later co-founded MIT’s linguistics programme. It was Wiesner who, in the 1950s, made sure that MIT and its associated labs both played a leading role in setting up the US’s air defence system and in continuing to develop computerised systems for nuclear weapons command and control. I cannot believe that Chomsky would have happily colluded with any of this.

Both Wiesner and MIT were also involved in the Vietnam War. To give openDemocracy readers some idea of this involvement, here is an MIT student activist describing his university’s role in that unprecedented hi-tech massacre:
 

MIT’s Lincoln Labs have taken the lead in developing systems of sensors to detect anything on the ground, computer systems to direct bombs and shells to these targets, and radar/electronic countermeasures and ultrasophisticated bomb guidance to make sure the bombs get to the targets. … In each phase of the war, MIT’s contributions have become progressively more important, until now MIT-based technology dominates the air war, and in some cases makes it possible. Failure to put a stop to MIT’s work in the past has made possible the air war and social redesigning (i.e. genocide) in Indochina today.

And here is another anti-war activist, Fred Branfman, describing Noam’s attitude and reactions when, during his 1970 tour of Indochina, he met refugees who had directly experienced this bombing:
 

[Noam] downplayed his linguistic work, saying it was unimportant compared to opposing the mass murder going on in Indochina. … He was clearly driven, a man on a mission. … [I was] stunned when, as I was translating Noam’s questions and the refugees’ answers, I suddenly saw him break down and begin weeping.

Some time later, Branfman asked Chomsky if he had any regrets about his life as an activist: ‘His answer shocked me. Muttering more to himself than to me he said, “I didn’t do nearly enough.” ’

In recent years, Chomsky seems to have convinced himself that, at places like MIT, military sponsorship was mainly ‘a funnel by which tax-payer money was being used to create the hi-tech economy of the future.’ But I doubt whether he favoured that theory while speaking to those refugees who had fled from bombing raids that relied so much on technology developed at MIT. It was certainly not uncommon for those of us who protested against the Vietnam War to feel pangs of guilt that we still hadn’t done enough. But it was surely his university’s direct involvement in this war that made Chomsky feel ‘guilty most of the time’, to use his words quoted in the New York Times in 1968.

Chomsky’s choice

In the light of all this, I feel confident that throughout his later years at MIT, Chomsky would have moved mountains to avoid returning to the situation in which he found himself in the mid-1960s. He may not have been directly colluding with the US military at this time, but he came dangerously close. These, for example, are the words of former Air Force Colonel Anthony Debons:
 

Much of the research conducted at MIT by Chomsky and his colleagues [has] direct application to the efforts undertaken by military scientists to develop . . . languages for computer operations in military command and control systems.[i] 

I cannot believe that Chomsky would have been happy about any of this.

Interior of SAGE Combat Center CC-01 at Hancock Field, NY, 1950’s. Wikicommons/ United States Air Force. Some rights reserved.

So, to go back to my list of options, if we exclude options one and three, this leaves only the second option. Chomsky was willing to accept military funding but only on condition he could do so with a clean conscience, knowing that he could explore the abstract nature of language in his own chosen way. In effect, this meant that he was at all times refusing to collude.

Having claimed that Chomsky’s research had ‘direct application’ to the efforts of military scientists to develop new systems of command and control, Colonel Debons (in the passage quoted above) qualified this by observing that Chomsky’s theories ‘have not as yet led to any appreciable success’ in terms of military applications. In other words, nothing worked. And, I suspect, Chomsky was quite content to keep things that way.

Chomsky addresses an Occupy protest in 2011. wikicommons/Andrew Rusk. Some rights reserved.

Did such projects fail because the linguistics was defective? Or were the endless failures somehow deliberate on Chomsky’s part? I can appreciate why Chomsky himself needs to avoid the whole question: either answer might pose difficulties for him. Not wishing to discuss these dilemmas, he chooses instead to keep things simple. He does this by denying that military applications were ever on the horizon.
 

Viewed from another angle

These days, the approach to grammar developed by Adele Goldberg – her particular version of what is termed ‘construction grammar’ – is considerably more influential and widely admired within the discipline of linguistics than Chomsky’s so-called ‘generative’ approach. Goldberg criticises what she terms the ‘ever-increasing layers of abstractness’ characteristic of Chomsky’s formal representations of grammatical structure. All scientific concepts are abstract, and necessarily so. But, she argues, when abstraction is carried too far, theory no longer connects up with anything practical or real.

When Chomsky came up with his startlingly new ‘Minimalist’ programme in the 1990s, displacing much that had gone before, he commented with pride that Descartes and Plato – those most abstract of philosophers – might have been pleased. The switch to Minimalism represented yet another intensification of abstractness – taken to such extremes that in 2003, Frederick Newmeyer, who for decades had been a committed supporter, published a review in the journal Language expressing his exasperation with this latest turn.

My own view is that we need to explain why Chomsky kept retreating into ever deeper layers of formalism and abstraction. I fully acknowledge Newmeyer’s point that a fondness for this kind of thing was always there, even before Chomsky got his first job at MIT. But other linguists might have been prepared to compromise, permitting their abstractions to be tweaked or amended to make them fit more closely with reality.

Had Chomsky in his early years gone down that road, allowing his models to become more concrete and useable, it would have been the US military who benefited most. To his credit, Chomsky was never willing to do this. My argument is simple. As soon as an approach of his looked as if it might work, he began to feel anxious. His conscience was too strong and before long he would recoil back – always toward some further extreme of other-worldliness and abstraction.

Chris Knight is a research professor at University College London and a co-founder of the international evolution of language conference series, EVOLANG. His latest book is Decoding Chomsky: Science and revolutionary politics, Yale 2018. His website is www.scienceandrevolution.org

C

[i]. http://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2018/1/28/the-mitre-corporations-project-to-use-chomskys-linguistics-for-their-weapons-systems
 

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Signing the petition started by former IIM Kolkata professor and environmentalist Jayanta Bandopadhyay, Chomsky joins 100s of other people from different walks of life demanding justice from Prime Minister Modi for the project affected people. So far, the petition has gathered signatures from 29 countries.

The support from Chomsky comes on the third day of the indefinite fast of Medha Patkar and 12 other project affected people in the submergence village Chikkalda, on the banks of river Narmada, in Madhya Pradesh. People are on fast against the forced displacement and demanding just rehabilitation, and intimidation with 100s of armed police camping in the submergence zone. The claimed rehabilitation sites are far from habitable, with even basic amenities like drinking water missing.

The petition said, “The Supreme Court order clearly states that Resettlement and Rehabilitation of the Project Affected Families to be complete in all respects before any forcible displacement of these villages is directed. Closing of the gates is de facto a method of forcible eviction and thus, not only a barbaric act but also a disrespect of the court order.”

The petition demands a comprehensive re-survey of project affected people giving priority to rehabilitation first by following orders of the Supreme Court so that no family is evicted without rehabilitation. It also demands directions to Madhya Pradesh Govt. and authorities to provide the benefits to farmers as per the Supreme Court orders to ensure alternative livelihoods and to constitute a committee to assess the impact on environment, river and forests by submergence and also the impact in downstream flow of the river.

Chomsky said in the petition that meeting the rightful demands of the people is “essential to ensure the faith of people in non-violent, democratic and constitutional governance and struggle for their rights. I, on behalf of the people of Narmada valley, now appeal to you for immediate attention and intervention to save the people threatened by submergence.”

Link to the petition is HERE.

Courtesy: India Resists
 

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Maintains there is no credible evidence of seditious activities in the academic institution

Renowned thinker and academician Noam Chomsky has questioned the way administration at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) handled the recent controversy on campus

In an e-mail to Vice-Chancellor M. Jagadesh Kumar, Mr. Chomsky has questioned the decision to allow police on the campus. “Many of us remain very concerned about the crisis in JNU, which was apparently created and precipitated by the government and university administration with no credible evidence of any seditious activities on campus. Why did you allow the police on campus when it is clear that this was not legally required?” the e-mail sent on Sunday read.

Students and teachers at JNU have also been protesting the alleged mishandling of the issue by the university administration and questioned the decision to allow the police on campus.

The administration, in its defence, has maintained that “the university was bound to do so”, even as protesting students and teachers contended that the matter was one of indiscipline and not sedition.

“I never invited the police to enter the campus and pick up our students. We only provided whatever cooperation was needed as per the law of the land. We only asked police to do whatever deemed fit,” the V-C had earlier said.

The university has also set-up a high-level committee to probe the issue. On the basis of the committee’s preliminary report, Kanhaiya Kumar and seven other students have been suspended. A final report is expected to be ready by February 25.

Mr. Chomsky, along with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and 86 other academicians, has condemned “the culture of authoritarian menace that the present government in India has generated” and said that those in power are replicating the dark times of the oppressive colonial period and the Emergency.

The JNU Students’ Union president was arrested on February 12 after being charged with sedition and criminal conspiracy.

Courtesy: The Hindu

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We strongly believe that the charge of sedition against Kanhaiya Kumar follows spurious claims. This arrest is an excuse for the state to root out dissenting voices on JNU campus, a move towards converting educational institutions like JNU into an arm of the authoritarian state. Attempts of a similar nature have been witnessed recently at other Indian educational institutions such as Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) and Hyderabad University. The growing threat to academic freedom posed by the current political climate is transnational, and extends beyond India to other parts of the world – it is a threat we face here in the United States, too.

For any word or action to qualify as being “seditious” under Indian law, it has to directly issue a call to violence. This was not the nature of the protest held by a group of JNU students against the judiciary’s decision regarding Afzal Guru, who was convicted of an attack on the Indian parliament. The peaceful protest held on February 9 on campus was not unlike other protests convened at the university over the last several decades. Dissent is an essential part of a healthy democracy. We therefore strongly condemn the Indian government’s response to the students’ protests and demand that the state refrain from authoritarian behaviour. In this spirit, we urge the vice chancellor of JNU to protect members of the university community and safeguard their democratic rights.
 

1. Natasha S.K., Social Science, Syracuse University
2. Taveeshi Singh, Social Science, Syracuse University
3. Mitul Baruah, Geography, Syracuse University
4. Sean Wang, Geography, Syracuse University
5. Miguel Contreras, Geography, Syracuse University
6. Manuela Ruiz Reyes, Geography, Syracuse University
7. Carolina Arango-Vargas, Anthropology, Syracuse University
8. Tina Catania, Geography, Syracuse University
9. Linh Khanh Nguyen, Anthropology, Syracuse University
10. Jon Erickson, Geography, Syracuse University
11. Tom Perreault, Geography, Syracuse University
12. Jessie Speer, Geography, Syracuse University
13. Sravani Biswas, History, Syracuse University
14. Don Mitchell, Geography, Syracuse University
15. Tod Rutherford, Geography, Syracuse University
16. Jacquelyn MicieliVoutsinas, Geography, Syracuse University
17. Sturdy Knight, Information Studies, Syracuse University
18. Jenna Sikka, Sociology, Syracuse University
19. Jaisang Sun, Social Science, Syracuse University
20. Madhura Lohokare, Anthropology, Syracuse University
21. Brian Dobreski, Information Studies, Syracuse University
22. Sujata Bajracharya, Religion, Syracuse University
23. Chandra TalpadeMohanty, Women’s and Gender Studies, Syracuse University
24. Alisa Weinstein, Anthropology, Syracuse University
25. Li Chen, Mass Communications, Syracuse University
26. Taapsi Ramchandani, Anthropology, Syracuse University
27. Laura Jaffee, Cultural Foundations of Education, Syracuse University
28. Tula Goenka, Television-Radio-Film, Syracuse University
29. Romita Ray, Art and Music Histories, Syracuse University
30. Dorothy Kou, Sociology, Syracuse University
31. Kriangsak Terrakowitkajom, Geography, Syracuse University
32. Susan S. Wadley, Anthropology, Syracuse University
33. Emily Mitchell-Eaton, Geography, Syracuse University
34. Scarlett Rebman, History, Syracuse University
35. Matt Huber, Geography, Syracuse University
36. Brian Hennigan, Geography, Syracuse University
37. Parvathy Binoy, Geography, Syracuse University
38. Liz Mount, Sociology, Syracuse University
39. Himika Bhattacharya, Women’s & Gender Studies, Syracuse University
40. John Western, Geography, Syracuse University
41. Vani Kannan, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, Syracuse University
42. Ani Maitra, Film and Media Studies, Colgate University
43. Diane Swords, Cultural Foundations of Education, Syracuse University
44. Alejandro Camargo, Geography, Syracuse University
45. Cecilia Van Hollen, Anthropology, Syracuse University
46. Alexandra Jebbia, Documentary Film & History, Syracuse University
47. David Gustavsen, English, Syracuse University
48. Michael Gill, Cultural Foundations of Education, Syracuse University
49. Tiago Teixeira, Geography, Syracuse University
50. Nimanthi Rajasingham, English, Colgate University
51. Kimberly E. Powell, Women’s & Gender Studies, Syracuse University
52. Sharon Moran, Environmental Studies, SUNY-ESF
53. Adam Fix, Environmental Studies, SUNY-ESF
54. Alvaro A. Salas, Public Administration, Syracuse University
55. Diane R. Wiener, Division of Student Affairs – Disability Cultural Center, Syracuse University
56. Brett Keegan, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, Syracuse University
57. Jyoti G. Balachandran, History, Colgate University
58. Barbara L. Regenspan, Educational Studies, Colgate University
59. Deborah J. Knuth Klenck, English, Colgate University
60. Suzanne B. Spring, Writing & Rhetoric, Colgate University
61. Cristina Serna, Women’s Studies, Colgate University
62. Joel Bordeaux, Religion, Colgate University
63. Mark Stern, Educational Studies, Colgate University
64. Susan Thomson, Peace and Conflict Studies, Colgate University
65. Kapil Mandrekar, Environmental and Forest Biology, SUNY-ESF.
66. Jackie Orr, Sociology, Syracuse University.

Kafila.org

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We believe that these actions by the Indian state and its associated groups and institutions are part of a larger campaign to stifle dissenting voices in the country, especially on university campuses which have persistently resisted the capitalist, Brahmanical hegemony of the current government. This was clearly evident in the institutional murder of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD student at Hyderabad Central University (HCU) last month. The similarity of the modus operandi in Hyderabad and Delhi is striking: Rohith and his comrades had been accused of ‘anti-national’ activities for their condemnation of the hanging of Yakub Memon, and suspended from their academic positions on these undemocratic grounds. Similar charges have been framed against the students of JNU for organizing an event in solidarity with the struggle of Kashmiri people for their right to self-determination. To make matters murkier, it is now certain that at the event, which also marked the third anniversary of the execution of Afzal Guru, the ABVP was involved in raising the controversial slogans that are being cited to justify the sedition charge. We are of the firm opinion that protesting against state violence is a fundamental right that must not become vulnerable to arbitrary violation by governments, police and university administrations.

We believe that the colonial-era laws of sedition — already diluted and read down by the Supreme Court — are an embarrassment to India’s democratic principles. The criminalization of dissent in this case reveals how India’s current political leadership has been unable to respect diversity and guarantee the full legal rights of its people. Its political program imagines the citizen as upper caste, heterosexual, male, Hindu; its economic program necessitates a blind faith in neoliberalism; and its social program continually imagines an enemy – the Muslim, the Dalit, the Left. It is not surprising that a government so debilitated and blinkered by its ideological narrowness has invoked the charge of sedition and sent police forces into the JNU campus, an action reminiscent of the worst years of Emergency.

We are also distressed by views expressed in certain sections of the Indian media regarding the legitimacy of political activism in public universities. This argument claims that since central and state governments subsidize education in public institutions, it is the responsibility of beneficiaries to refrain from critiquing state policies and to solely prioritize their studies. We firmly reject this cost-benefit understanding of education as shallow, apolitical, and deeply reactionary. As the saying goes, ‘education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire’. The current administration and sections of the media would prefer students to remain uncritical of the violence of Brahmanism, communalism, and neoliberal capitalism. But the Rohiths of the world will keep lighting a fire and keep burning down bigotry. We believe that both public education and free speech are fundamental rights enshrined in the Indian Constitution, rights that have been earned through long struggle and rights that we will keep fighting for in India and elsewhere as we face systematic neoliberal onslaughts on dissent and education.

To our friends, colleagues and comrades in JNU, HCU, FTII and elsewhere, we stand with you in your resistance against state sponsored violence, which curbs any form of dissent on the one hand, and on the other, condones hate speech by Hindu nationalists. We believe that scholarship and the concomitant development of our critical faculties should be used in dreaming of and implementing a better, pluralistic and just society.

Sayantan Saha Roy, PhD student, Anthropology
Ahona Panda, PhD student, South Asian Languages and Civilizations
Harini Kumar, PhD student, Anthropology
Tanima, PhD student, Anthropology
Sneha Annavarapu, PhD student, Sociology
Abhishek Bhattacharyya, Phd Student, South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Anthropology
Tejas Parasher, PhD student, Political Science
Jenisha Borah, PhD student, Cinema and Media Studies.
Suchismita Das, PhD student, Anthropology
Vidura Jang Bahadur, MFA student, Visual Art
Mannat Johal, PhD student, Anthropology
Shefali Jha, PhD student, Anthropology
Sanjukta Poddar, PhD student, South Asian Languages and Civilizations
Aditi Das, PhD student, Social Service Administration
Joya John, PhD student, South Asian Languages and Civilizations
Marc Kelly, PhD student, Anthropology
Eleonore Rimbault, PhD student, Anthropology
Eric Powell, PhD student, English
Patrick Lewis, PhD student, Anthropology
Romit Chakraborty, PhD student, Chemistry
Gautham Reddy, PhD student, South Asian Languages and Civilizations
Amanda Shubert, PhD student, English
Peter McDonald, PhD student, English
Hannah Chazin, PhD student, Anthropology
Jahnabi Barooah, PhD student, Divinity
Margherita Trento, PhD student, South Asian Languages and Civilizations
Peter Malonis, PhD student, Neuroscience
Zoya Sameen, PhD student, History
Sharvari Sastry, PhD student, South Asian Languages and Civilizations
Andrew Messamore, MA student, Social Sciences Division
Thomas Newbold, PhD student, South Asian Languages and Civilizations
Eduardo L. Acosta, PhD student, South Asian Languages and Civilizations
Uday Jain, PhD student, Committee on Social Thought
 

The post Statement of Solidarity with Student Protests in India, from students of the University of Chicago appeared first on SabrangIndia.

DSA Pakistan Letter of Solidarity
 

We reject the charges of sedition, subversion and treason that are used to silence, suppress and smother voices that do not resonate with state-sanctioned truths and resonate beyond state-imposed parameters of intellectual, political, cultural and social thought and action.
We, the members of the Democratic Students Alliance, know well the struggle and cost of challenging state narratives. We strive for the revival of student unions in Pakistan and admire their existence in India, for we believe students of this region are forces that can salvage the future of our countries from the archaic but potent forces of myopia, hate and coercion that have held out countries hostage.

It is in the spirit of these ideas that we strongly condemn the arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar (JNUSU), the attack on JNU and extend our solidarity and lend our entire support to the brave students standing against this injustice.

Across the border, we stand in unity and solidarity.

More power to you, more power to students.

17th February, 2016

Democratic Students’ Alliance, Pakistan
 

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The post All India Lawyers Union writes to Delhi HC chief justice for action against errant lawyers and police at Patiala court appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Support came in from Hyderabad University’s Joint Action Committee for Social Justice, which itself is fighting for justice for Rohith Vemula.

“Joint Action Committee for Social Justice (UoH) strongly condemns the attack on students all over the country, the planned attack on JNU students by the State, the arrest of JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar, police brutality and militarisation of campuses, the attack on university autonomy and constant state intervention in universities,” it said in a statement.

Expressing solidarity with the JNU teachers and students, Nandita Narain, president of Federation of Central University Teachers Association (FEDCUTA), asserted that the opposition raised by the students was “anti-establishment and not anti-national”.

“The event could be in bad taste but was not seditious. Whatever opposition the students have is against the present government and not against the Constitution. This kind of police action against the students on the pretext of national security is uncalled for,” she said.

Students of Pune-based Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), who were supported by JNU students in their protest against the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as the institute’s chairman, expressed solidarity with the agitators and accused the government of harassing and threatening those who dare to oppose its ideology.

In a letter to the JNU Teachers’ Association (JNUTA) Harishankar Nachimuthu, the president of the Students’ Association, FTII said, “We express our solidarity with the JNU students and condemn the random arrest of JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar on charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy and demand his immediate release. The current government has not learnt anything from the tragic death of Rohith Vemula and is continuing with the vilification, harassment and threat to those who dare to oppose its ideology.”

A faculty of Ambedkar University said, “Today it is JNU, tomorrow it could be any other university. Any voice of dissent being branded as anti-national is dangerous for any educational institution or community at large. No university should allow such indiscriminate raids on student hostels.”

(The Hindu)
 

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Registering a strong protest against the ongoing rift in Jawaharlal Nehru University, three office bearers of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) resigned from their respective posts on Wednesday, 17 February. Pradeep, Rahul Yadav and Ankit Hans posted an open letter on Facebook spelling out the main reasons for their joint resignation: crackdown at JNU, ABVP’s Manuwaad and ‘Rohith Vimula’ incident.

Here is the complete post:

Dear friends,

We, Pradeep, joint secretary, ABVP JNU unit, Rahul Yadav, president SSS ABVP Unit and Ankit Hans, secretary SSS ABVP unit [are] resigning from ABVP and disassociating ourselves from any further activity of ABVP as per our difference of opinion due to the following reasons:

1. Current JNU incident.

2. Long standing difference of opinion with party on MANUSMIRITI and Rohith Vermula incident.

Anti-national slogans on Feb. 9 in university campus were very unfortunate and heart breaking. Whosoever responsible for that act must be punished as per the law but the way NDA government tackling the whole issue, the oppression on Professors, repeated lawyer attacks on Media and Kanhaiya kumar in court premises is unjustifiable and we think there is a difference between interrogation and crushing ideology and branding entire left as Anti-national.

People are circulating #ShutDownJNU but I think they must circulate #ShutDownZeeNews which has demeaned this world class institution, this biased ZEE news media generalize and related the act done by few people to the whole student community of JNU. JNU is considered as one of the progressive and democratic institution where we can see intermingling of people from lower to upper income strata of the society, notion of equality.

We can't be mouthpiece of such a govt. which has unleashed oppression on student community, legislature like O P Sharma, govt. which has legitimized the action of right wing fascist forces either in Patiala house court or in front of JNU north gate. Every day we see people assemble at front gate with Indian Flag to beat JNU student, well this is hooliganism not nationalism, you can't do anything in the name of nation, there is a difference between nationalism and hooliganism.

Anti-India slogans can't be tolerated in campus or any part of country, JNUSU& some left organization are saying that nothing has happened in the campus but here we want to stress that veiled persons in the event organized by former DSU persons shouted slogans BHARAT TERE TUKADDE HONGE of which there is concrete evidence in videos, so we demand any person responsible for the slogans should be punished as per the law, and in this whole process we also condemn media trial which has culminated in Anti-JNU sentiments throughout the country.

Today we all must stand together to save JNU which has given us identity, we need to come across party lines to save reputation of this institution, to save future of JNUites as more than 80% of students don't belong to any political party so let's unite to save this JNU culture.

|VANDE MATRAM |

| JAI BHIM |

| JAI BHARAT |
 
 

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