Salman Khurshid as bull-fighter

In December of 1973, a student agitation in Gujarat morphed into a People's rebellion against the dictatorial Indira Gandhi, her corrupt dynasty and equally corrupt and incompetent sycophants-  of whom Salman Khurshid's father was one.

What followed was a reign of terror supposedly to combat an 'internal' Emergency. Some of the bravest fighters in the battle against Indira's atrocities were members of the R.S.S- like the young Narendra Modi. Sadly, afternIndira- believing she would win- held elections and lost comprehensively, the People's 'Janata' Government was split on the bogus issue of RSS membership by Indira and her son Sanjay who cynically depicted that organization as 'Right Wing', 'Pro American', 'CIA stooges', etc. However, everybody could see for themselves that it was only people like Atal Behari Vajpayee who had shown competence and patriotism as Ministers of the 'Janata' Morcha. Thus it was the RSS backed Bharatiya Janata Party which eventually become the true successor to the Janata coalition and, as such, the final extinguisher of the Dynasty's hereditary claim to the spoils of office.

Nobody can be fooled that the RSS or the BJP are American stooges or that they are anti-poor. But Congress has become openly anti-National and Khurshid, for one, could not be more delighted. Writing for the Indian Express, he speaks of events in Nixon's America- not Indira's India- and seeks to draw a lesson from it relevant for young people in India today.

Fifty years ago, on May 4, 1970, the students of Kent State University in Ohio gathered to protest the Vietnam War. The oldest democracy of the world faltered as the Ohio State National Guard fired at the crowd and felled four students. Observers concluded that the US was rapidly spinning out of control. The report President Richard Nixon commissioned on campus unrest said that “a nation driven to use the weapons of war upon its youth is a nation on the edge of chaos” — and Americans were feeling the “chaos”.
Days after the Kent shooting, on May 15, there was a shooting at the Jackson State College in Mississippi during a protest against racism that the students on campus were facing. Two students were shot and killed, and 12 others were injured at the hands of the police.
After the shootings, there was a nationwide student strike that saw four million turn out in response to the tragedy. As many as 1,00,000 students marched on Washington. David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young released their protest song “Ohio”, a month later, with the chorus, “Four dead in Ohio,” after seeing the photographs of the shooting.

President Nixon, who initially spoke of the protesting students as “bums”, then made an effort to reach out to them. His intelligence officials could not find evidence that the protest was stirred by outside agitators. Nixon accepted that the anger was coming from the students themselves — and it was only growing. The end of the Vietnam War, it is said, began in Ohio. It changed America forever. A year after the shootings, the voting age was reduced to 18, giving the students the right to vote when they were old enough to be drafted. That generation of voters forced the war to end although it took another five years till April 1975.
I do not believe that the worst critics of the students, even those who called them “bums”, questioned their patriotism for opposing a war that they believed to be immoral and unwise.

Khurshid is wrong. Critics of the Pentagon were persecuted and accused of being agents for the Kremlin. Nixon's genius was to see that Liberal support for the anti-war protesters was solidifying his 'silent majority'. The man who orchestrated the 'hard hat rebellion'- construction workers running riot to show their hatred of the radical students- was appointed Labour Secretary two years later just when 'Hanoi Jane' was pictured with a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun poised to shoot down American plances.
Still, the fact remains America lost the Vietnam War because they were militarily out-classed. Once the shame of a shambolic defeat had registered, Ford and Carter were prepared to offer an amnesty to Draft Dodgers. The pretence was that America only lost because the War was immoral, not because the Americans were shit at fighting.

Meanwhile, the Students' Movement weakened the Left. Liberals, like Rockfeller and Kennedy- but also Nixon who was a Keynesian who believed in detente- were sidelined. Carter and Brzenski were Cold War hawks. But the future lay with Reagan.

Khurshid, deracinated fool that he is, thinks Nixon's America has lessons for young people in Modi's India. The reverse is the case. Modi was a young man in the Seventies. His side prevailed. He, not Rahul Gandhi, is Prime Minister. Meanwhile, in America, you have two Establishment boomers- Biden and Trump- going head to head. The support of Radical Youth movements have proved fatal to the causes and candidates they support. Left Liberal elites have been disintermediated in America just as they were in India.

At home in India too, there have been casualties in January and February and the students who participated in the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh, particularly those from Jamia Millia Islamia, have been booked for sedition and unlawful activities, a euphemism for terrorism.

More importantly, Shaheen Bagh led to Congress and the Left being wiped out in the Delhi Assembly elections. The BJP gained a little and would have gained more if the riots had happened before the elections.

They had all quietly folded up their protest when the COVID storm hit the country. There is no evidence to arrest them, and some others who have been arrested since the onset of COVID-19. So, sequentially charges are added to the investigation by inter alia adding Section 302 of IPC (murder) and Section 13 of the UAPA. Suddenly it seems that the glorious jurisprudence of Articles 14, 19, 21 of the Constitution too has been locked down. India has chosen to fight its own children and their mentors and guardians have chosen discretion before valour. How did you sustain the protest financially for 60 days, is the refrain that they must answer. How will they manage to defend their honour in court and afford lawyers, one might ask. Suddenly, a long line of cases culminating in Anuradha Bhasin remains high on the stated principle of rights and sparse on practical impact. Rights in ordinary times are not much to boast about. It is in extraordinary times that rights should matter as the great legal philosopher, Ronald Dworkin, argues in Taking Rights Seriously.

Why did Khurshid become the lackey of the Dynasty which had imposed Emergency, locked up opposition leaders, suspended the Constitution and forcibly sterilized hundreds of thousands? Was it because Ronald Dworkin appeared to him in a dream and told him to do so?

To be fair, Khurshid may be unaware of what happened in India in the Seventies because he only reads American books.

Earnest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms comes to mind. Hemingway sought advice on the ending after Catherine’s death in childbirth, from F Scott Fitzgerald, his friend and fellow author. Fitzgerald suggested Hemingway end the novel with the observation that the world “breaks everyone”, and those “it does not break it kills”. In the end, Hemingway chose not to take Fitzgerald’s advice. Instead, he concluded the novel with these lines: “But after I had got (the nurses) out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-bye to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”

Will Khurshid give up writing this sort of shite in order to become a bull-fighter? That would be cool.

However broken and defeated by destiny the protagonist of the novel might have been, in real life for us there is no walking away from a lifeless statue.

No. We must become bull-fighters or big-game hunters in East Africa or something real macho of that sort.

Post COVID-19 we have to make a fresh beginning, hopefully united and trusting each other as we must have been through a life-death experience together. We will have to crush the infection of hate that seems to have found some spreaders.

But Khurshid has been in the business of spreading hate of the RSS for forty years! That's all he knows how to do.

Meaningless and misdirected hate must not last.

But Khurshid, like his Party, has no other stock in trade.

We will have to learn to put India ahead of anything else — in fact, humanity first. This is something we have successfully done in our fight against the coronavirus. Fifty years from now, people will applaud and light candles to say that when India seemed to be spinning out of control our generation joined hands, hearts, and minds to hold it firm and sound. We would be remembered for having saved India.

No. Khurshid and his ilk will be remembered as useless sycophants of a worthless Dynasty. But not for long- unless Khurshid turns into a bull fighter or gets a boat and hooks this like real big fish and struggles to land it like in the Old Man and the Sea.