HATE SPEECH OR INTOLERANCE AT IIT MADRAS?

Students of the present generation have always been under constant fire for being too indifferent to their contemporary society, buried as they are in their mounds of books, thus conveniently ignoring the goings-on in their immediate surroundings. Here's one exception that has raised his voice against a guest speaker delivering a very special lecture, which indicates that he was in fact intently listening to the lecture.

I am referring to Abhinav Surya, an M.Tech. student of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, who chose to protest against the tone, tenor and content in the lecture delivered by retired army officer Major General G.D. Bakshi, as part of the Extra Mural Lectures (EML) on the eve of Independence Day. He not only criticised the speech by dubbing it ‘hate mongering’, but also went to the extent of lodging a complaint with the IIT Director Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi.

          Mr. Bakshi is one such person who never hesitates to call a spade a spade, as known to his followers. As any other ex-serviceman, he’s always brimming with patriotism and a sense of pride about the nation. Going by the high position he has held, his knowledge about the way the (armed) forces work and his constant watch of Indo-Pak activities from close quarters, one can easily assume that he’s talking plain matter-of-fact and that his views are not at all hawkish.

          It is common knowledge that a speaker often laces his speech with heavy dose of knowledge pertaining to his domain. If a Veena player is invited for the EML, it will be a different ‘gyan’ for the students about Raga, Tala and Pallavi. An environmental scientist is known to talk a lot on global warming and the ever-growing hole to the ozone layer. Similarly, an ex-serviceman who had served in the highest echelons is only expected to echo views on his arena. The views thus aired are generally several rungs above that a common urban dweller’s mind can reach.

Going back to the intro paragraph, the Gen-X students are not only very different, but very indifferent too. Especially the students of premier national institutes are often accused of being bothered more about the torque of their four-wheelers, higher RAM for their smart phones and comfortable dollar conversion rates, than about the issues plaguing the society, right from poverty to national security. Agreed, there are two ends to the spectrum of any topic, the acceptance and tolerance levels move from left to right (or bottom to top, if “Left” and “Right” could be mistaken as ideologies). We can assume that an unassuming Abhinav Surya was comfortable at the left end and Mr. Bakshi’s virulent part of the speech bordered on the extreme right, causing a wide gap to appear between the two. The perspective of other students can be plotted somewhere between the two extreme ends, going by their levels of tolerance. If Mr. Bakshi’s speech was extremely hate-mongering, could the other way be Mr.Abhinav Surya was extremely intolerant to a perspective that is different from his?

He has quoted in his letter about Mr. Bakshi as saying “In our generation we split Pakistan into 2. Your generation should split it into 4. Only then we can live in peace”. From a common man’s view point, this statement is quite objectionable and indeed contains ‘hate stuff’. From the macro level, he was only referring to what could have been a strategy adopted in the past for better national security, an affirmation of scattered occurrences, a series of events worth chronicling or at least, an honest confession by an officer. The army will not mince words when it comes to plain speaking, as it is in the know of the atrocities committed for decades from across the border and the extent to which the country has been made to bleed, literally and financially as well. ‘Love thy neighbour’ had failed to cut ice as far as India’s sixty-year-old neighbour is concerned.

“Cut-throat” was once a harsh word, but it has slowly sneaked into the management boardrooms while referring to the competition and the need to “kill” it, though not in the actual sense. Similar is the phrase ‘eye for an eye’ that does not mean literally gouging the eye out. When the contemporary world is full of such seemingly-negative words for describing tougher situations, why do the goody-goody students prefer themselves to be seen as extremely good, positive-thinking, violence-hating and good-to-all?

On one hand, there is much hullabaloo over the muzzling of freedom of speech on campuses and on the other, the very student community wants the freedom of a speaker to be curtailed. Where does the need for curbing Mr. Bakshi’s freedom to speak arise, as long as it is not against the nation’s interests? If only one student had protested and all others listened to him without any objection, can we tag the rest as ‘tolerant’ and Mr. Abhinav Surya as being ‘intolerant’?

The truth will see light if the footages of the speech are released for the public. I don’t think the IIT or the organisers of the EML will censor it…!