Politics

JNU Ruckus: A False Flag Operation To Revive The Anti-CAA Agitation That Is Losing Steam

Rajeev Srinivasan

Jan 07, 2020, 10:38 AM | Updated 10:38 AM IST


Protesting JNU students.
Protesting JNU students.
  • The Congress-Communist-Islamist combine has seen the anti-CAA protests fizzling out, and this is how they have decided to ratchet the violence up.
  • It’s the little things that give the game away. In the brilliant Costa-Gavras film Z, arguably the best political film of all time, it is the consistent use of the phrase “as lithe and fierce as a tiger” by every one of the rioters that clues the investigating judge into the possibility of a conspiracy.

    The same thing is true of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). There is no question that university students have a diversity of opinion, which is tolerated within the limits of freedom of speech. However, when it is apparent from circumstantial data that there were agents provocateurs and vested interests involved, things take on a different hue.

    In fact, the drama at JNU on 5 January appears to be a false flag operation, wherein violence was unleashed by leftists, and blamed on the innocent, in this case the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) student wing, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).

    Quite a bit like the 26/11 Pakistani invasion was meant to be a false flag operation to blame mythical ‘Hindu terrorists’; it was foiled only by martyr Tukaram Omble capturing a terrorist alive. Then, as now, certain political parties and their media friends were over-eager to jump to conclusions.

    Who knew what was going to happen at JNU on the 5th night? Why was Yogendra Yadav there, especially after he had written, “we need newer forms of protest in 2020”? How did FTII, Pune, students know ahead of time to create a huge banner blaming ABVP so that they were ready to march instantly after the incidents at JNU? How did people in Mumbai and at Aligarh Muslim University know so they could rapidly organise demonstrations?

    Shashi Tharoor was tweeting virtually non-stop, and dispatching his All-India Professional Congress people to JNU to ‘help’. Swara Bhasker, an actress who is available to screech on cue for any leftist cause, was there on the ground.

    Barkha Dutt, whose campaign to turn two Jamia Millia women into ‘sheroes’ ran into serious snags, was nevertheless fully on board the JNU fracas. She tweeted screenshots from a WhatsApp group which had a name implying it was anti-Left. On investigation, it turned out to be a group that is virulently anti-BJP, and had changed its name in a hurry! False flag.

    Furthermore, quite ironically, a person actively chivvying on people in that newsgroup turned out to be the Congress party’s crowd-funding honcho!

    You put all these together, and what you get is, by Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation: the Congress-Communist-Islamist combine has seen the anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) protests flagging, and have decided to ratchet the violence up a little.

    How better than to do it at JNU, which gets a lot of media attention because it is in Delhi. The fact is that there are a lot of students at JNU in the science streams who have nothing to do with the destructive anarchism of the humanities students, and they want to carry on with their studies.

    I have seen the same thing at IIT Madras, where a handful of nihilist humanities students have hijacked the discourse, while the vast majority of engineers and science students are apolitical and apathetic and just want to get on with their work.

    At JNU, the sequence of events is as follows: after they were able to bully the Human Resource and Development Ministry into partially withdrawing a fee hike, leftists have decided to force a boycott of registrations for the next term. When a number of students objected to this disruption and went ahead and registered anyway, masked agitators (not computer savvy enough to hack the systems or do a ‘denial of service’ attack) invaded the computer centre and shut down the servers physically.

    Did I say ‘masked’?

    Ah yes, why on earth would ‘masked’ ABVP supporters (assuming they were) shut down the computer systems? Ergo, the ‘masked’ agitators were leftist agent provocateurs.

    And furthermore, why on earth would the government of India want to rekindle a failing agitation by doing mayhem on campus? And exactly why would the leftist president of the JNU Students Union be caught on video with masked people? Yes, Occam’s razor, again.

    The anti-CAA agitation has been losing steam rapidly for several reasons:

    • Agitation fatigue: people are moving on to other things
    • The blood-curdling attack on Nankana Sahib (one of Sikhism’s holiest places) and the shooting to death of a young Sikh man in Pakistan showed exactly why non-Muslim minorities need to be treated with compassion as in the CAA
    • The massive, peaceful protest by Shias in Kargil over the killing of Iran’s Qassem Soleimani showed that there is basically no oppression in Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, despite the motivated lies of the media
    • The anti-CAA propaganda is not getting traction as people can see through it

    Therefore a certain political party, one may conclude, had a hand in reigniting mayhem, destroying public property, and keeping the country on the boil. Politics trumps the national interest.

    The best solution would be to track these people down, both the instigators and the actual rioters, and bring down the full weight of the law upon them. They forget that even if they mask themselves to foil the CCTV cameras, they can be tracked by their cell phones and their social media interactions.

    The second best solution would be to temporarily shut JNU down, cleanse it of all the agitators, and then reopen it. Then the university should be privatised by inviting bids. The science bits will get some interest, and the humanities bits that nobody wants could be permanently closed.

    Rajeev Srinivasan focuses on strategy and innovation, which he worked on at Bell Labs and in Silicon Valley. He has taught innovation at several IIMs. An IIT Madras and Stanford Business School grad, he has also been a conservative columnist for twenty years.


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