President Pranab Mukherjee stepped into the fray to remind India of the importance of its values of tolerance and respect for diversity of views in the national discourse. He spoke out in the context of the disgraceful scenes at a well known Delhi college where a seminar was disrupted by violent demonstration by a students union affiliated to the Sangh Parivar. The demonstrators took offence at the speech of a young woman, Gurmekhar Kaur, whose father had died in action fighting in the ranks of the Indian Army. She preferred to make the futility of war the subject of her talk rather than pin blame for her family’s bereavement on any country. As a nation which pays homage to Mahatma Gandhi there was nothing offensive or unusual in her words.
The demonstrators, irrationally, perceived her words to be pro-Pakistan, hence they accused her of treason and compared her to the jihadi terrorist Dawood Ibrahim, currently holed up in Karachi. Knowing of the loss of a muchloved parent and circumstances in which he laid down his life in the performance of duty, the charge was surely grotesque. This man is wanted in India for terrorist funding in India.. To compare Ms Kaur to this criminal was both offensive and uniquely absurd. The hooliganism accompanying this insult was obscene. The scene on a college campus was sheer collective insanity, meriting surely a Mad Booker prize, responded a noted Delhi University teacher in utter despair. The ‘patriotism’ on show was once described as ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ It was a prescient description uttered in 18 th century London by the wisest and most humane of men, Dr Samuel Johnson.
