Thursday, March 28, 2024

Casteism at its worst to malign one of the oppressed leaders of the JNU. Hate campaign against BAPSA candidate

Opini Diary – Waseem R.S

 

 

There is a personal slandering and malicious online hate campaign against BAPSA Presidential candidate Rahul Sonpimple . This hate campaign not only originated from Brahminic right forces of ABVP but from both progressive parliamentary and non-parliamentary leftist (!) camps. One of the arguments is that Rahul is against Muslims! First of all , this a denial of the agency of Muslims who support Rahul for the president of the JNUSU. These leftist vanguards think that Muslims are not capable of taking political decisions on their own and they still believe that Muslims are the victims of false consciousness . This is precisely the reason why many independent Muslims students – that cut across region/caste/gender/class – and like-minded Muslim organizations with different shades rejected the disgusting paternalism of the Leftist student groups on this campus. Leftists don’t know how to respect the autonomy and the political choice of Muslims in this campus and they only see Muslim politics as a form of lack or gap. Instead, Rahul and his organization BAPSA – especially in the last few years – understood the problem of Muslim otherization in all its comprehensive manner and responded to it both as an existential and intellectual question. As a Dalit-Bahujan thinker , Rahul, during many conversations with me, clarified his position on Muslim identity – from an intersectional point of view and by acknowledging multiple axes of power – without rejecting the validity of an Islamic/ Muslim politics in the JNU campus. This is indeed a critical revolutionary praxis of one of the unique subaltern student leaders in Indian campuses and of course he is not a darling of hegemonic Savarna media that gives a monopoly to elite high caste student of JNU to represent what they name ‘Indian campus’ . The history of the left is one of the old nationalist Marxist positions which only sees Muslim for their voting strength and treat them as mere statistical numbers to count in the electoral period. There is no other existence for Muslims in the left political horizon. This is the context where BAPSA gained a lot of support from Muslim students and organizations in JNU. The personal attack against Rahul by misquoting and cutting one old speech is not going to work on the campus and this is casteism at its worst to malign one of the oppressed leaders of the JNU campus . Insha Allah, his commitment to the unity of oppressed and his tireless efforts to build an alternative democratic platform on this campus will change the history and politics of JNU.

 

Waseem R.S – Research Scholar , JNU

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