“All logical thinking, progressive, democratic and rational people, irrespective of political affiliation, need to come together on one platform to fight the anti-democratic and anti-constitutional force that is in power at the Centre to save the nation,” said former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar on Monday.
Speaking at the launch of his book “From Bihar to Tihar”, Mr. Kumar said that through this platform steps should be taken to create awareness and build institutions so that the correct message reaches the people. His book, he said, was an effort in that direction. According to him, there was a need for “politics not for power, but to change society.”
Borrowing an idea from Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Kumar said the RSS and BJP were strong today not because they had become good, but because the good people have become silent. He said that what no other party had done, but the RSS had, was successfully start their own institutions, schools, colleges, clubs and media houses through which they impact a large section of society. The other parties, he said, relied on public institutions run by the government through democratic means.
Talking about how the idea of writing a book came about, the former JNUSU president said that when he came out of jail, many people asked him if he had written a jail diary. “I told them that I am an ordinary person. A jail diary is written by people who do politics as a hobby and go to jail as a hobby, but I do politics out of compulsion and went to jail out of compulsion.”
Mr. Kumar said that when the discussion to write a book on his time spent at jail arose, he wondered what he would write as the size of his prison cell was the same as his house back home. His cell, he said, had a western-style toilet whereas back home they used to go to the toilet in the open. So, he decided to write about the reason he went to jail, which has its foundation in Bihar.
Chiki Sarkar, the founder of Juggernaut Books that has published the book, said it was the story of every young, poor student in India. She said that since Kanhaiya was more of an orator than a writer, she told the story to the team that worked on it for many months.
Speaking about the police crackdown on protests by JNU students, Mr. Kumar said that before the Modi government came to power, the Delhi Police would wait for the students to push barricades before detaining them. But now, students are detained even before they reach the venue. He said that the attacks to defame JNU have been going on for a while, but it was on February 9 that they could create a visual impact through a doctored video and capture the imagination of a large section of people.
According to him, there is a need for ‘politics not for power, but to change society’
