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| Milan Kundera |
The slapping
and withdrawal of sedition charges on the Kashmiri students for allegedly
cheering Pakistan in a cricket match against India are to be seen as
internalisation of a despotic state by individuals and institutions even when
there is an absence of such a regime in India. For, only a totalitarian state
and a regime of incalculable anxiety could perceive and project an imaginary of
a threat to the sovereignty of a nation in jocular, trivial, and playful
gestures of university students. Cricket, like love and war, may be
historically suffused with experiential structures and emotions of political
power and rivalry in South Asia but the uniqueness of the Meerut incident can
only find a parallel absurdity in fiction, in Milan Kundera’s 1969 novel ‘The
Joke’. Ludvik Jahn, the protagonist of Kundera’s novel, although a student, is
of course different from the hapless Kashmiri students when he unwittingly
sends a postcard to a girl in his class saying, “Optimism is the opium of
people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!”. Ludvik
Jahn’s jesting line’s political satire and its evocation of anarchy often
associated with the name of Trotsky were unmistakable in the post-World War II
Czechoslovakia where a fresh Communist regime thrived in the novel’s historical
setting. However, the purging of Ludvik Jahn from the Party and its nightmarish
consequences were brought upon him not by the state but by his
friends and other common people who populated his world of everyday life. Milan
Kundera’s genius lies in capturing and mapping the internalisation of a State
in the hearts and minds of common people and it is in that charting of the
assimilation one sees the parallel in the bitter irony of the novel and the
unfortunate reality of the Meerut incident. As folk wisdom often informs,
reality is harsher than the fiction.
From
constables at the small town of Meerut police station to a university
Vice-Chancellor thought fit that legal action would be required to contain the
threat to public peace allegedly posed by the celebrations of the Kashmiri
students at the occasion of Pakistan team’s victory over India in a cricket
match is in itself revelatory of the punitive arms of a State reaching out through
individuals and institutions to define the boundaries of a nation’s subject.
Characteristically in a statement reported in the Hindu, the Vice Chancellor of the Swami Vivekananda Subhrati
Univeristy in Meerut, Mr Manzoor Ahmed said that the students would have to
produce affidavits mentioning that they would not indulge in ‘such acts’ in
future. The Vice-Chancellor’s statement is issued after the charge of sedition
has been dropped against the 67 Kashmiri students, but they still face the
charges of promoting enmity among different groups under Section 153 A of the
IPC, and mischief under Section 427 of the IPC. Even as the Meerut
administration is conducting a magisterial probe, the university has
additionally constituted a committee, led by a Kashmiri origin professor to
investigate the case. Indelible and irreversible are the celebratory acts of
the Kashmiri students; it appears that endless woes will follow them until
their inner selves are beaten into shape to fit the remoulded cricket response
mechanism, appropriate for the responsible citizenry. The ‘punish and
discipline’ machinery of the University has never been more visible before and
it is remorseless about the ordeal it has already caused to the students.
Sitting in the artificially silhouetted and darkened ambience of a recently
televised debate, three of the Kashmiri students were at pains to elaborate
their innocence in cheering and celebrating Shahid Afridi who smashed two
consecutive sixes off Ravichandran Ashwin’s balls in the final over of the Asia
cup match. Indeed, for those who watched the Asia cup match between India and
Pakistan Shahid Afridi’s feat of those two sequential sixes was stupendous and
one of the finest moments in cricket. Let us assume all the charges on the
Kashmiri students have either been dropped or proved wrong in the court of law,
what would be the affidavit the Kashmiri students will swear on to meet the
demands of the university? For the fear of expulsion from the hostel, for the
fear of being police escorted and dropped off forcibly in the streets of Delhi,
for the fear of their future being completely marred by the police and court
cases would they have to sign an affidavit that their jaws would not drop,
their veins would not carry the blood of dizzying pleasure of watching two
consecutive sixes, and they would shut their eyes and turn away if the
cricketer’s nationality happens to be Pakistan?
For the
literary text of ‘The Joke’ its author Milan Kundera can always rescue it from
the clutches of its political and historical setting and reposition the text in
a new milieu and recommend a fresh reading.
That is what Kundera did in the 1982 preface of the English translation
of the novel. He writes “ When in 1980, during a television panel discussion
devoted to my works, someone called ‘The Joke’, “a major indictment of
Stalinism,” I was quick to interject, “Spare me your Stalinism, please. ‘The
Joke’ is a love story!” After the interruption in his life caused by the
fateful postcard Ludvik Jhan somehow becomes a successful scientist and decides
to take on his former friends and to seduce Helena, the recipient of his
postcard. The novel moves in the direction of unpredictable repercussions only
for Ludwik Jhan to realise that, to
quote Kundera again, “….. if a character is condemned to triviality in
his private life, can he escape to the stage of history? No. I have always been
convinced that the paradoxes of history and private life have the same basic
properties: Helena ends up in the hoax of the trap Ludvik has set for her;
Ludvik and all the others end up in the trap of the joke history has played on
them: lured on by the voice of utopia, they have squeezed their way through the
gates of paradise only to find, when the doors slam shut behind them, that they
are in hell. Those are the times that give me the feeling history enjoys a good
laugh.”
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