The response of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government to slogans shouted by a group of leftist Jawaharlal Nehru University students celebrating Afzal Guru and Pakistan and India's imminent disintegration was led by Rajnath Singh. Acting on complaints by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and a BJP member of parliament, Maheish Girri, the home minister warned that "[i]f anyone raises anti-India slogans and tries to raise question on nation's unity and integrity, they will not be spared. Stringent action must be taken against those who raised anti-India slogans in JNU".


He ordered Delhi's police commissioner, B.S. Bassi, to intervene. Bassi's men entered the campus, searched hostel rooms, instructed the university authorities to install video cameras on campus and arrested the president of the JNU students union, Kanhaiya Kumar. He was charged with sedition, a crime punishable by life imprisonment.


This near-lunatic overreaction to student recklessness is rooted in a paranoid style of nationalism that needs to be understood.


Mukul Kesavan on the JNU vs Rajnath Singh. Read