Society

Indrajit Gupta, India’s Longest-Serving MP and First Communist Home Minister

Gupta earned the moniker ‘father of the house’, both for the length of his tenure and for his ability to broker resolutions.

This article is part of a series by The Wire titled ‘The Early Parliamentarians’, exploring the lives and work of post-independence MPs who have largely been forgotten. The series looks at the institutions they helped create, the enduring ideas they left behind and the contributions they made to nation building.

A long 37 years in parliament earned Indrajit Gupta the moniker “father of the house”. February 20 marks the 24th death anniversary of communist leader and veteran parliamentarian. He was elected to the Lok Sabha 11 times, making him independent India’s longest serving parliamentarian.

Gupta received the Outstanding Parliamentarian Award in 1992 and was the first communist home minister of India. But in many ways he was surprisingly shy – as a young man, he was in love with a woman named Suraiya but could not quite get himself to propose. He finally married Suraiya when he was 62; he had to wait 40 years until her first marriage with photographer Ahmed Ali (father of socialite Nafisa Ali) was legally dissolved.

As an opposition stalwart and the leader of the Communist Party of India, Gupta’s speeches in the Lok Sabha were marked by force, with moderation and criticism within reason, which earned him the admiration of even his political opponents.

As home minister during the United Front Government (1996-98), he was blunt about the government’s failures and raised many eyebrows among the treasury benches with his frank observations. When he was home minister and the BJP was the main opposition party, his favourite sentence when meeting the more vocal opposition members after a stormy day was, “If I were in the opposition I wouldn’t have done what you did.” His stature as the oldest member raised him to the position of pro-tem speaker in 1991, 1996, 1998 and 1999.

It is noteworthy that Gupta became the first communist to hold the powerful post of Union home minister in 1996. This was a dramatic reversal of roles, as the home ministry had banned the Communist Party thrice since independence, leading to many of its members, including Gupta, being jailed or forced underground for long periods.

According to CPI(M) veteran parliamentarian late Rupchand Pal:

“Whenever the House was in disorder of some sort, whatever the dimension of the disorder, every section of the House looked to “the Father” sitting in the corner of the front bench facing the Chair… Ultimately, the baritone voice in quality English “the Father” spoke out. And the House found a solution. The House was again in order, following a brief discussion in the Hon’ble Speaker’s Chamber and, of course, in the presence of the ‘Father’. It was a long innings spanning decades for “the Father” in Parliament, starting from 1960 and continuing till his death.”

Born on March 18, 1919 to a family of distinguished civil servants, Gupta chose to serve the nation rather than opt for the civil services as a career. After his schooling in Shimla, he graduated from St Stephen’s College, Delhi, in 1937 and then left for a higher education in England where he joined the King’s College and Cambridge University. Attracted to the communist movement during his student days in Britain, he returned to India in October 1940 after obtaining a degree in economics.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Gupta was a member of the enlightened Brahmo Samaj and related to B.C. Roy, one of West Bengal’s most charismatic chief ministers. So, on returning to India and becoming a trade union leader in Bengal’s jute mills, he had to undergo a “declassification”.

As a committed activist of the Communist Party of India (CPI), Gupta went underground for one and a half years in 1948-50 and suffered imprisonment in 1953 and 1959 and then again in 1969. But these hardships did not deter him in any way; on the contrary, he remained devoted to the party, involving himself with the grassroots workers and the trade union movement. In the years that followed, he represented and articulated the voice of the Communist Party in the parliament.

According to his old buddy and former chief minister of West Bengal Jyoti Basu:

“Indrajit Gupta was a few years younger than me. I met him in England after 1936 when he was a student in Cambridge. Those were stirring times with reaction and fascism on the march. The political ferment attracted particularly the student community, including the Indians in a big way. We organised the Indian Student’s Federation and Majlis’s in London, Cambridge and Oxford and participated in political debates and propagated the cause of freedom for India and helped Shri Krishna Menon’s India League in its propaganda work. Some of us, including Indrajit Gupta and myself, joined the Communist Party as whole-timers in 1940. I remember how to avoid arrest we stayed together in the underground dens for quite some time. After the split in the party Indrajit remained in the CPI and I joined the CPI(M). Both of us were working in the Trade Union Movement. Like a true communist he engaged himself in parliamentary and extra parliamentary activities. Even when the party split, we did not put up a candidate against him and helped him to win.”

In 1964, when the party split over the China issue, Gupta was among the 35 members of the National Council who swore allegiance to the parent organisation led by S.A. Dange. In fact, he drafted the main resolution of the Dange loyalists. He hated Dange’s pro-Congress policy, especially after the Emergency, but never challenged it outside the party forum.

Gupta was elected to the Lok Sabha in a by-election from West Bengal in 1960 and remained a member until his death except for the period 1977-1979. The CPI was defeated in the 1977 general election for supporting Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule.

In 1968, Gupta was elected the secretary of the National Council of the CPI. He was then elected deputy general secretary of the party in 1988. Finally, he was made general secretary of the CPI in 1990. He held the office for six years until 1996.

An active trade unionist, he had earlier been general secretary of the All India Trade Union Congress. He was vice-president of the World Federation of Trade Unions and was elected its president in 1998. Though born in a well-to-do family, with a number of family members having served as civil servants both before and after freedom, Gupta found himself drawn towards fighting for the downtrodden and exploited masses. He chose to identify himself with the working class.

The issues that affected the lives of ordinary citizens always found an echo in Gupta’s speeches, both in parliament and outside. He spoke passionately for workers’ rights, minimum wages, trade union rights, etc. He repeatedly brought up the plight of jute mill workers, tobacco plantation workers and agricultural labourers in the Lok Sabha. The rise in prices of essential commodities too was a recurring theme for him. The drought situation, food scarcity, ineffectiveness of the public distribution system, the crisis in the educational system, infrastructural inadequacy in the health sector, the difficulties faced by paramilitary forces, etc. were subjects close to his heart.

Gupta was a vocal champion of the cause of gender equality and was at the forefront to demand action to have specific and concrete schemes and legislative and administrative measures for the empowerment of women. He spoke with passion and sensitivity when issues concerning women came up before parliament. When the Lok Sabha was considering a resolution on measures to put an end to economic and social injustice to women, he advocated the reservation of 15% seats for women in Parliament, as far back as in 1975. At the same time, he had also consistently called for a struggle against the centuries’ old irrational prejudices which belonged to an obsolete, feudal society and stressed on a campaign for removing adult illiteracy among women, mainly in the rural areas. In his 37 years as a Lok Sabha member, he stood for principles and deep commitment to values.

Gupta had to his credit two publications, ‘Capital and Labour in the Jute Industry’ and ‘For self-reliance in national defence’. His grassroots experience, incisive intellect and brilliant oratory skills helped him reach out to all sections of people, who found him accessible despite his high standing in public life. In fact, even as the Union home minister, he preferred to live in his two-room flat in the Western Court in New Delhi rather than shift to a spacious bungalow that was his legitimate due.

Gupta died of cancer in Kolkata on February 20, 2001 at the age of 82. Even after his death, leaders from across party lines paid tribute and remembered him fondly.

On his death, then President K.R. Narayanan paid homage to this outstanding parliamentarian by saying:

“A brilliant and veteran parliamentarian and a true leader of the people, Shri Indrajit Gupta remained at the vanguard of the Communist movement in our country and fought for the rights and freedoms of the people, especially the underprivileged, till the very end of his life. He enriched parliamentary proceedings and debates with his passionate espousal of public cause, his eloquent oratory and subtle and penetrating wit. In his long and eventful public life, marked by disarming Gandhian simplicity, democratic outlook and deep commitment to values, uncompromising integrity and honesty, Shri Gupta earned the affection and respect of all people who came into contact with him, cutting across the political parties and ideologies.”

According to then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Gupta was a “towering personality” whose “life was like an open book”.

On December 5, 2006, a statue of Gupta was unveiled in the Parliament House by then Vice-President of India Bhairon Singh Shekhawat.

Qurban Ali is a trilingual journalist who has covered some of modern India’s major political, social and economic developments. He has a keen interest in India’s freedom struggle and is now documenting the history of the socialist movement in the country.

Ukraine Not Invited to Its Own Peace Talks, History Full of Such Events

This is not the first time large powers have colluded to negotiate new borders without the input of the people who live there.

Ukraine has not been invited to a key meeting between American and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia this week to decide what peace in the country might look like.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine will “never accept” any decisions in talks without its participation to end Russia’s three-year war in the country.

A decision to negotiate the sovereignty of Ukrainians without them – as well as US President Donald Trump’s blatantly extortionate attempt to claim half of Ukraine’s rare mineral wealth as the price for ongoing US support – reveals a lot about how Trump sees Ukraine and Europe.

But this is not the first time large powers have colluded to negotiate new borders or spheres of influence without the input of the people who live there.

Such high-handed power politics rarely ends well for those affected, as these seven historical examples show.

1. The Scramble for Africa

In the winter of 1884–85, German leader Otto von Bismarck invited the powers of Europe to Berlin for a conference to formalise the division of the entire African continent among them. Not a single African was present at the conference that would come to be known as “The Scramble for Africa”.

Among other things, the conference led to the creation of the Congo Free State under Belgian control, the site of colonial atrocities that killed millions.

Germany also established the colony of German South West Africa (present-day Namibia), where the first genocide of the 20th century was later perpetrated against its colonised peoples.

How the boundaries of Africa changed after the Berlin conference.Wikimedia Commons/Somebody500

2. The Tripartite Convention

It wasn’t just Africa that was divided up this way. In 1899, Germany and the United States held a conference and forced an agreement on the Samoans to split their islands between the two powers.

This was despite the Samoans expressing a desire for either self-rule or a confederation of Pacific states with Hawai’i.

As “compensation” for missing out in Samoa, Britain received uncontested primacy over Tonga.

German Samoa came under the rule of New Zealand after the first world war and remained a territory until 1962. American Samoa (in addition to several other Pacific islands) remain US territories to this day.

3. The Sykes-Picot Agreement

As the first world war was well under way, British and French representatives sat down to agree how they’d divide up the Ottoman Empire after it was over. As an enemy power, the Ottomans were not invited to the talks.

Together, England’s Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot redrew the Middle East’s borders in line with their nations’ interests.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement ran counter to commitments made in a series of letters known as the Hussein-McMahon correspondence. In these letters, Britain promised to support Arab independence from Turkish rule.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement also ran counter to promises Britain made in the Balfour Declaration to back Zionists who wanted to build a new Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine.

The agreement became the wellspring of decades of conflict and colonial misrule in the Middle East, the consequences of which continue to be felt today.

4. The Munich Agreement

In September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier met with Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, and Germany’s Adolf Hitler to sign what became known as the Munich Agreement.

The leaders sought to prevent the spread of war throughout Europe after Hitler’s Nazis had fomented an uprising and began attacking the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland. They did this under the pretext of protecting German minorities. No Czechoslovakians were invited to the meeting.

The meeting is still seen by many as the “Munich Betrayal” – a classic example of a failed appeasement of a belligerent power in the false hope of staving off war.

5. The Évian Conference

In 1938, 32 countries met in Évian-les-Bains, France, to decide how to deal with Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany.

Before the conference started, Britain and the US had agreed not to put pressure on one another to lift the quota of Jews they would accept in either the US or British Palestine.

While Golda Meir (the future Israeli leader) attended the conference as an observer, neither she nor any other representatives of the Jewish people were permitted to take part in the negotiations.

The attendees largely failed to come to an agreement on accepting Jewish refugees, with the exception of the Dominican Republic. And most Jews in Germany were unable to leave before Nazism reached its genocidal nadir in the Holocaust.

6. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

As Hitler planned his invasion of Eastern Europe, it became clear his major stumbling block was the Soviet Union. His answer was to sign a disingenuous non-aggression treaty with the USSR.

The treaty, named after Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop (the Soviet and German foreign ministers), ensured the Soviet Union would not respond when Hitler invaded Poland. It also carved up Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres. This allowed the Soviets to expand into Romania and the Baltic states, attack Finland and take its own share of Polish territory.

Unsurprisingly, some in Eastern Europe view the current US-Russia talks over Ukraine’s future as a revival of this kind of secret diplomacy that divided the smaller nations of Europe between large powers in the second world war.

7. The Yalta Conference

With the defeat of Nazi Germany imminent, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and US President Franklin D Roosevelt met in 1945 to decide the fate of postwar Europe. This meeting came to be known as the Yalta Conference.

Alongside the Potsdam Conference several months later, Yalta created the political architecture that would lead to the Cold War division of Europe.

At Yalta, the “big three” decided on the division of Germany, while Stalin was also offered a sphere of interest in Eastern Europe.

This took the form of a series of politically controlled buffer states in Eastern Europe, a model some believe Putin is aiming to emulate today in eastern and southeastern Europe.

Matt Fitzpatrick, Professor in International History, Flinders University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Protector of Kochi’s Synagogue of Black Jews

Kadavumbhagam Synagogue in Kochi was abandoned about half a century ago after local Jews left for Israel.

Ernakulam’s Broadway Market Road never sleeps. A ceaseless river of life, vendors calling, rickshaws honking, footsteps weaving into an urban symphony — the pulse of Kochi beats loud and unbroken.

But then, you notice a gate, wide open. Step through, and the city dissolves. A forest unfurls, dense with orchids and anthuriums. Sunlight filters through emerald canopies, while cuckoos and macaws screech as if warning each other of the stranger who has just walked in. A heady mix of petrichor and the fragrance of blooming petals create a dream-like ambience.

Entrance to the Kadavumbagam Synagogue.

Wander deeper, take another turn, and the forest melts into liquid blue. A shimmering marine world emerges, goldfish, black mollies, and oceanic creatures gliding past. Before you can wonder, the tide pulls you in, weightless, endless.

Then, just as suddenly, the water vanishes. A corridor appears, its walls breathing stories from another time, centuries ago. The year is 1549.

Words in an unfamiliar language buzz like a spell. And then, there it is: The Star of David. It watches over you, and you stop to think: Are you still in Kochi? Have you stepped into Israel?

No need to doubt, you stand within the walls of Kadavumbhagam Synagogue, the ‘Black Jew’s’ synagogue in Kochi.

A Boy’s dream, a synagogue reborn

“Why are Athangudi tiles inside a Jewish synagogue?”

“Doesn’t it look beautiful?”

“Yes, but this might be the only synagogue in the world where Boaz and Jachin, the two pillars from the porch of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, stand on Tamil Nadu’s Chettinad Athangudi tiles.”

The aquarium and nursery located in front of the Kadavumbagam Synagogue.

Elias Josephai, the caretaker of this historical treasure, chuckled. “It was the dream of a 12-year-old boy back in 1968. Inspired by the Paradesi Synagogue in Mattancherry, he asked his father to lay these tiles inside the Kadavumbhagam Synagogue.”

Who was that boy?”

Elias smiled. “You’re looking at him.”

Now 69, the tall and steadfast Elias Josephai, with a beautiful kippah adorning his head, stands as the guardian of this historical treasure, restoring and preserving it against the passage of time.

After years of renovation, the Kadavumbhagam Jewish Synagogue in Kochi reopened in early February.

One of the city’s seven synagogues, it is the oldest restored place of worship for the Malabar Jews/Black Jews. Unlike most synagogues now under government control, Kadavumbhagam and Paradesi remain privately owned.

Elias Josephai.

The synagogue, abandoned since the 1970s due to dwindling Jewish presence, was revived by Elias Josephai, whose father once served as its Hazzan (synagogue leader). With support from global Jewish communities, Josephai led restoration efforts that began in 2003.

Today, it stands as the oldest active synagogue in the Commonwealth.

When asked why the Malabar Jews were referred to as Black Jews and whether this was common among the Jews of Cochin, Josephai explained: “Yes, the Sephardi Jews who arrived from Spain and Portugal brought both wealth and enslaved individuals. These enslaved people came to be known as Black Jews and were barred from entering their place of worship, the Paradesi Synagogue.Even the earlier Jewish settlers, the Malabari Jews, my ancestors, who are believed to have migrated from Iraq and Yemen, were labeled as Black Jews due to their darker skin tone.

Despite not being enslaved, they faced discrimination from the Sephardi community, who excluded them from social and religious spaces, reinforcing a rigid hierarchy within the Jewish community of Cochin.”

The Jewish legacy in Kerala

Before leaving, Josephaí received a call from his employee, informing him of an order for angelfish.

Promising to return soon, he departed.

It was then that Sanjay Johnson, a tourist guide and history enthusiast, arrived at the synagogue with two Israeli tourists, Ameen and Michel.

As they stepped inside, Sanjay began narrating the rich history of the Jewish presence in Kerala.

“The Jews arrived here in 72 BC,” he explained, “establishing settlements across the region. Their presence is even mentioned in the Periplus (A Historical Book). By the 12th century AD, they had become key players in regional conflicts.

One of their leaders, Joseph Raban, allied with the Cranganore Maharaja in a war against the Chola Raja. After a yearlong battle, the Maharaja emerged victorious and rewarded Raban with 72 square miles of land, known as Anjuvannam, the Jerusalem of the East.”

However, in 1165, disaster struck. A brutal attack nearly wiped out the Jewish population, forcing the survivors to seek refuge in Chendamangalam, then Paravur, and later in Mala and Ernakulam.

Sanjay explaining the history to his Israeli guests, Ameen and Michel.

Sanjay continued, “Mattancherry, derives its name from the Hebrew word mattana, meaning ‘gift.’ It was founded when Raban’s younger son sought land from the Cochin Maharaja.”

He pointed towards the Paravur Synagogue, explaining, “Originally built in Muziris, it was destroyed in a Portuguese attack in 1635. It was only in the 1700s that it was reconstructed.”

“By 1972, most of the Jewish community had migrated to Israel, leaving their synagogues abandoned. The Kadavumbhagam Synagogue in Ernakulam suffered years of neglect and was vandalism before being restored in 1978.

“The Kadavumbhagam Synagogue reflects the architectural style of the historic Muziris Synagogue, which was lost to rising sea levels in 1165 CE. Initially constructed in 1200 CE, it underwent renovations in 1700 CE.” he said.

Muslim’s effort helps restore Jewish Synagogue?

Following the migration of Jews back to Israel in 1972, the synagogue remained largely ignored until Elias Josephai took charge.

After completing his business order, Josephai returned to the scene once again, just as he had promised.

Sanjay confided in a whisper, “He is super happy when he gets a chance to explain the synagogue details to Israeli visitors because they can connect more than anyone else.”

As soon as Josephai stepped inside, Michel made a humble request, “Can we see the Sefer Torah?”

Without hesitation, Josephai walked to the podium. The Sefer Torah, a handwritten Jewish holy book, was one he had brought from Israel in 2018.

After opening the Holy Torah, he began asking Ameen and Michel about Jewish traditions. However, Ameen explained that she was raised in a secular family in Israel, where religion played a lesser role.

Josephai then invited her attention to the architectural marvel of the synagogue. “The flooring is adorned with Chettinad Athangudi tiles, fulfilling a dream I’ve had since childhood. The warm glow of the yellow lamps adds to the charm, they were donated by a Muslim.”

Joseph enters the podium at the center of the synagogue, known as the Bimah, where the Torah is read.

Ameen’s eyes widened in surprise. “What? A Muslim helped restore a synagogue? If people everywhere could think and act with such harmony, how beautiful and peaceful the world would be.”

Josephai smiled and continued, “A Christian contributed a plaque of the Ten Commandments, and the chandeliers were a gift from Swami Hariprasad of the Vishnu Mohan Foundation in Chennai. This is the true essence of India, where faiths come together, not just in spirit but in action.”

Every part of the synagogue, including the windows, chandeliers, and floor tiles, has been meticulously restored with the dedicated efforts of volunteers.

‘Courage to Remember’

Last but not least, your eyes will be drawn to the haunting photographs currently displayed inside the synagogue. The Holocaust memorial exhibition, ‘Courage to Remember’, organised by the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), was initially set to run for just five days after reopening to the public on 3 February. Yet, it remains.

Most visitors glance through the images and move on, but Michel stood still, gazing at one particular photograph. It was only later that Sanjay revealed why.

“Michel lost her grandfather in the Holocaust. Though her connection is through stories passed down by her father, like every Jew, she feels the loss deeply, an inherited wound.”

Before leaving, Ameen and Michel thanked Josephai for his dedication to preserving the synagogue and commended his efforts.

Most blessed, most cursed

As Sanjay, Ameen and Michel stepped out, Josephai kept talking.

“All my cousins and relatives are in Israel. My wife, too, will return and settle there with our daughter after my last breath. My daughter is already settled there,” he said, quite certain his wife would live on after him.

When asked about the Jewish belief that one attains heaven if they die on Israeli soil, he simply shrugged.

“Then what about my ancestors here? They lived and died in this land. I will not go back.”

Holocaust History Exhibition.

On the Israel-Palestine conflict, Josephai reflected with a quiet solemnity: “Jews have never lived in peace. And perhaps that is by design. If we ever did, we might forget the Almighty. We are the most blessed and the most cursed people.”

With that, he stepped outside, locked the heavy doors of the synagogue, and walked away.

It was 7 pm. Josephai took a seat in his shop, surrounded by the glow of aquariums. The hum of water filters filled the silence.

When I walked out of the synagogue, a teenager was walking in the opposite direction.

“It’s closed already. You’re late,” I said.

“No, no,” the boy replied confidently. “This shop stays open until 9 pm I’m a regular customer.”

For him, it was just an aquarium shop, a place of fish tanks and water bubbles. He had no idea about the stories, the history, the lives behind that locked door.

This article was originally published on South First.

Acharya Narendra Deva Fought to Make Socialism Integral to the Freedom Struggle

On his 69th death anniversary, remembering Acharya Narendra Deva’s contribution to India’s socialist movement and freedom struggle, his literary work on Buddhism, and more.

February 19 marks the 69th death anniversary of great socialist leader, Acharya Narendra Deva. The day after his death in 1956, then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said in the Rajya Sabha:

“The death of Acharya Narendra Deva is something much bigger for many of us and, I think, for the country than just the passing away of an important person. He was a man of rare distinction – distinction in many fields, rare in spirit, rare in mind and intellect, rare in integrity of mind and otherwise. Only his body failed him. I do not know if there is any person present here in this House who was associated with him for a longer period than I was. Over 40 years ago we came together and we shared innumerable experiences together in the dust and heat of the struggle for independence and in the long silence of prison life where we spent. …There is the public sense of loss and there is the private sense of loss and a feeling that somebody of rare distinction has gone and it will be very difficult to find his likes again.”

Early life

A doyen of the Indian socialist movement, a scholar and teacher, an educationist and an ardent nationalist, Marxist and freedom fighter, Deva was born on October 31, 1889, at Sitapur in Uttar Pradesh. He belonged to a middle-class Hindu Khatri family from Sialkot in Punjab (now in Pakistan) but living in Faizabad.

After an early education in Sanskrit, Deva joined Muir Central College, Allahabad, in 1906. While there, he read Prince Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary and Mutual Aid, A.K. Coomaraswamy’s Essays in National Idealism, stories by the Russian author Ivan Turgenev, Johann Kaspar Bluntschli’s The Theory of the State, and Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini in six volumes. He also read a lot of nihilist literature from Russia.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

After graduating, he went on to Queens College Banaras for a masters in Sanskrit under Dr Arthur Venis and Professor Harry Norman, both of whom left a deep impression on his mind.

He also studied Pali, Prakrit, German and French. He had an MA degree by 1913 and an LLB by 1915.

Deva was being slowly drawn into the politics of Lal-Bal-Pal. As a result, he took a vow of swadeshi. During the non-cooperation movement in 1920-21, he quit he practice of law and joined the Kashi Vidyapeeth. In 1926 he was appointed the principal, and it was from this time that ‘Acharya’ became a permanent prefix to his name.

Deva had followed the Russian Revolution and subsequent events with great interest, but it was only after he came to the Kashi Vidyapeeth that he took up the study of scientific socialism or Marxism, as it was called, in all seriousness. Another subject in which he was deeply interested was Buddhist Philosophy and he continued to study and teach it whenever he got the opportunity. From 1921 onwards until he left the Congress party in 1948, he was a member of the UPCC and also the AICC.

Imagining a socialist future

A group within the Congress comprising Nehru, S. Srinivasa Iyengar, Subhas Chandra Bose, Zakir Husain and others was unhappy with the traditional Congress line. They formed the Independence for India League to press the Congress to adopt independence as its goal. The League established its branches in various provinces. Deva did not seem hopeful about the League’s future. In spite of the shortcomings he pointed out, the League was effective. Its opposition to Dominion Status made some dent in the Congress policy.

The Congress in Calcutta in December 1928 passed a resolution that if within a year the British government did not grant Dominion Status, it would pass a resolution demanding complete independence at its next session. This it did in Lahore in 1929. It also passed a resolution launching a struggle to achieve complete independence. India was in revolt. Deva played a leading role in organising the people for the coming struggle. He moved from place to place, explaining the meaning of ‘complete independence’ and propagating the use of the spinning wheel as a symbol of swadeshi.

After the Second Session of the Indian Round Table Conference held in September 1931 failed to find a solution and M.K. Gandhi returned empty-handed, no-rent campaigns had begun in the UP. Deva joined the campaign. He was arrested on October 16, 1932 and sent to Banaras District Jail, from where he was released in June 1933.

In 1926, Deva drew up a socialist agrarian programme with Sampurnanada under the aegis of the UP Congress Committee (UPCC) and sent it to the All India Congress Committee (AICC). Nehru got the AICC to accept this programme in 1929. At the1931, the Karachi session of the Indian National Congress set ‘socialist pattern of development’ as the goal for India. Nehru, who drafted the Karachi resolution, writes in his autobiography that its origins were in the UPCC resolution of 1929.

Deva was one of the leading theorists and founder of the Congress Socialist Party in India in 1934, the party of which Jayaprakash Narayan was the first general secretary. Deva remained one of the party’s top leaders for as long as he lived. His democratic socialism renounced violent means as a matter of principle and embraced satyagraha as a revolutionary tactic.

Delivering the first presidential address at the foundation conference of the CSP on May 17, 1934 in Patna, Deva said:

“Socialism has come to stay in this country and is daily gaining strength and prestige inside the Congress as well as in the country. The social foundation of this new school of thought which has appeared within the Congress is the democratic intelligentsia. Outside the Congress among its adherents are representatives of workers and to a much smaller extent peasants who constitute the real revolutionary elements of an anti-imperialist struggle. As a matter of fact the working class is the vanguard while the peasants and the intelligentsia are only its auxiliaries.”

Deva fondly remembered Nehru, who was in jail at the time, and said Nehru had inspired them to found the CSP within the Congress party:

“Friends, we are founding today the first cells of the socialist movement within the Congress in the absence of our great leader, Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, our task has become extremely difficult. We do not know how long we shall remain deprived of his valuable advice, guidance and leadership. I am sure he will hail with delight the birth of this new party within the Congress and that he will be watching our progress with keen interest from behind the prison bars. Let his great example stimulate and inspire us during the period of his incarceration and let us march forward with the assurance that the cause we represent will triumph in the end.”

From the beginning of his public life, Deva had taken a keen interest in the problems of the kisans (peasants). On April 11, 1936, representatives of kisan organisations met in Lucknow. Thus was founded the All India Kisan Sabha.

Deva was a Marxist, but he did not believe that only the workers could be the vanguard of a revolution. In a country like India, he believed that the peasants could also play a revolutionary role. Mao Tse-tung also held similar views.

In 1936, Nehru invited Deva to be member of the Congress Working Committee and he continued there up to 1938. Deva was also elected the president of the UPCC the same year, a position he continued to hold till January 1938. In 1937, he was elected to the UP Legislative Assembly but, despite great pressure, refused to join the cabinet as the CSP was not in favour of such participation.

Deva was an eloquent speaker and spoke against communalism which had plagued Indian politics and finally led to the partition of the country. He favoured not only the protection of minorities but also wanted the majority community to make them feel justly – and generously – treated.

Also read: How the Princely State of Aundh and its Raja Took Surya Namaskar to the World

During the AICC meeting in Bombay on August 7-8, 1942, when Gandhi moved the ‘Quit India’ resolution and gave the slogan of “Do or Die”, Deva also spoke. Gandhi and the members of the CWC were arrested in the wee hours of August 9, 1942. Gandhi and his entourage were kept in the Aga Khan Palace in Poona, and CWC members in the Ahmednagar Fort. Deva was in detention at Ahmednagar till 1945, along with Nehru, Maulana Azad and others.

During his detention, Deva devoted himself to literary work. He translated Abhidharmakosa, an important work on Sarvastivada, which he had begun in the Banaras District Jail in 1932-33, from Poussin’s French version into Hindi. This was his magnum opus, published after his death is his monumental work on Buddhist religion and philosophy in Hindi entitled Bauddha Dharma-Darshan, running into 616 pages. He also helped Nehru with his book The Discovery of India.

Breaking from the Congress

In 1948, after independence, the Socialist Party decided to secede from the Congress. Deva and 11 other members of his party resigned from their seats in the UP assembly, to which they had been elected on Congress tickets, arguing that they no longer had a moral right over these seats.

While resigning on March 30, 1948, Deva made a memorable speech in the UP assembly. He said:

“Separation is always painful and sad. Our separation from the Congress has been no less painful to us. But in the lives of institutions and individuals there are moments when they have to give up their dearest possessions for the sake of those ideals and objectives which they cherish. We are leaving today our ancestral house with a sad and a heavy heart, but we are not relinquishing our claim to our inheritance. It is not material goods to which we advance our claim. This treasure consists of ideals and noble objectives…. We have no false pride in us; we know our limitations and we are conscious of our shortcomings. All that we want to say is that we shall try to prove ourselves worthy of our heritage…. We shall always try to avoid personal attacks and will not enter into any such controversy. We shall always be guided by Mahatma Ji’s teachings.”

Thus ended his more than three-decade relationship with the Congress. Deva and 11 others who had resigned from the assembly contested the by-elections caused by their resignations. The elections were held in June-July 1948. The Congress was determined, from the beginning of the election campaign, to somehow to defeat the socialists.

Much against his will, the Congress had put up Baba Raghavdas, a prominent Congressman from Gorakhpur, to oppose Deva. It was believed at the time that Raghavdas’s religious affiliations, no his political standing, led to his nomination from Ayodhya. Deva was depicted as an atheist and anti-religion. It was alleged that leaflets entitled ‘Rama-Ravana Samvad’ were distributed among the voters and there were also posters to the effect that to defeat ‘Ravana-roopee’ Deva, the people should vote for ‘Rama-Roopee’ Raghavdas.

Deva kept his cool at the time, but years later reacted to the Congress’s actions:

“Was it not said against me in the 1948 by-election that I was an atheist and that on this ground the elector should not vote for me? Was it not highly improper to do so, especially when it was claimed that ours was a secular state? I derive malicious pleasure from the fact that the gentleman who said this has the misfortune to adorn in his old age the durbar of a non-believer, of one who is neither pious in the religious sense of the word nor God-fearing. Was it not said that both Sanskrit language and Indian culture stood in grave peril if I was returned by the electorate? Was it not said, again, that I had betrayed the Congress by leaving it at a critical juncture in its life’s history? Was this the speech of a democrat or of a demagogue of the worst type? Was not Gandhijis spirit invoked and Ramchandra’s help solicited to secure my defeat? Did not a prominent Congress worker make women voters take oath in a temple to vote against me? Did not a prominent Congress leader take the cards from many of my women voters and send them away by falsely telling them that they would be placed in the ballot box?”

Deva lost the election by a margin of 1,312 votes. Raghavdas got 5,392 votes and Deva polled 4,080.

In April 1952, Deva was elected to the Rajya Sabha from Uttar Pradesh. He was re-elected in April 1954 for a six-year term. His desire to shape centres of higher learning, and pressure from friends and authorities, finally made him accept the vice-chancellorship of Lucknow University in October 1947.

A nationalist Marxist

Deva was a staunch Marxist, but his Marxism was not a set of rigid formulations. It was to him a method of analysing and studying social phenomena which can yield widely differing conclusions depending on the environment.

To him Marx was a great democrat and a great humanist, and the way his teachings were being distorted and misapplied by his communist followers was a matter of great sorrow and disappointment.

Also read: Upholding the Idea of India: Remembering M.A. Ayyangar

Deva’s specific contributions to the socialist movement in India can be summed as follows. In the first place, he helped to make it an integral part of the national struggle for freedom. Second, he realised from the very beginning that no socialist movement could succeed in India without the active participation of the peasantry, and in all policy statements and programmes formulated by him land reforms were given their due importance. Third, he never tired of emphasising that socialism was not merely an economic issue but a great cultural movement.

Deva advocated the abolition of poverty and exploitation not just through his belief in the Marxist materialist dialectic, but especially on moral and humanistic grounds. Furthermore, he insisted that “without political democracy social democracy was a sham”.

He represented a rare synthesis of certain qualities which would ordinarily appear to be incompatible. He was an ardent believer in a national identity and integration despite being a Marxist. He was deeply interested in ancient Indian history and culture. On the question of language, he said “those who desired to speak in Hindustani should be permitted to do so”. In fact, he himself spoke in elegant Hindustani in the UP assembly.

Deva passed away at Perundurai, Erode in Tamil Nadu on February 19, 1956.

Suspended, Detained and Insulted: Here’s How Jamia Students are Fighting for Their Right to Protest

“I was carried by a male and a female guard, my body exposed. I was screaming and asking them to at least let me fix my clothes,” said a protesting student who was suspended from the university and detained by the police.

New Delhi: On the wee hours of February 13, 14 students who were protesting inside gate seven of Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) in Delhi were woken up while they were sleeping in front of the central canteen and forcibly carried by security guards of the institute under the guidance of the chief security officer of the university Syed Abdul Rasheed.

They were then handed over to the Delhi Police who were inside the campus near another gate. Later, the students were detained at different stations in Delhi for almost 12 hours without being informed of any grounds for detention and access to lawyers.

These 14 students were part of a sit-in protest which commenced on February 10 in front of the central canteen in the university. They were demanding the revoking of the disciplinary action against four students – Saurabh, Jyoti, Fuzail Shabbar and Niranjan – who were targeted for organising an event, remembrance day, on December 16 to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the police crackdown on the university campus during the protests against Citizenship (Amendment) Act-National Register of Citizens (CAA-NRC) on December 15, 2019.

“The guards came from three sides. While I was sleeping, I was picked up by my hair. I woke up to the male guards pulling my leg, they did not allow us to even wear our slippers. I was carried by a male and a female guard, my body exposed. I was screaming and asking them to at least let me fix my clothes. The more I was resisting, the more aggressive they became,” said U.R. Uthara, first year MA Sociology student who was among the 14 students who were detained by the police and later suspended from the university.

The events that led to the protest

The students sought permission from the proctor’s office to organise an event to mark the remembrance day on December 15. However, they were denied permission.

They organised the event the next day (December 16) after the classes at 5.30 pm, it started with a march, which commenced and ended at the central canteen. Next, students gave speeches highlighting the police brutality that happened in 2019 and threw light on the ongoing fascist attack on educational institutions. The event lasted for about an hour.

On December 17, one of the organisers of the event, Saurabh, a PhD scholar in the Department of Hindi and a member of All India Students Association (AISA) received a show cause notice from the proctor’s office, in which it was stated that the event had a “malafide political agenda” and it “paralyses academic spaces”.

However, Saurabh refuted the claims of the university administration.

“There is no malafide political agenda. The police crackdown on December 15, 2019 was a brutal attack on the entire university, we did not have any individual political agenda,” Saurabh told The Wire. Subsequently, he sent a 16-page letter to the administration on December 20 which they deemed “unsatisfactory”.

Following this, he received a notice on February 3, informing that a disciplinary committee would be formed to take action against him with no mention of a date for the same.

Also read: Odisha: KIIT Accused of Racism and Intimidation After Nepal Student’s Death Sparks Outrage

“By then, we understood that we were being rusticated. They had completely butchered our rights as students,” said Jyoti, also a PhD scholar in the Department of Hindi and a member of Dayar-I-Shauq Students’ Charter (DISSC).

On February 10, a sit-in protest was organised in response to the action taken by the administration against Saurabh. A day prior to this (February 9), three other students – Jyoti, Fuzail, a first year B.Tech in computer engineering and member of DISSC and Niranjan, a fourth year law student and member of All India Revolutionary Students Organisation (AIRSO) — also received notices for disciplinary action.

“By this time, it was necessary to start the protest because there are many students being affected by these futile show-cause notices for gatherings. They demand that we take permission for every event and later reject every single one of them. That’s the situation of the campus now,” says Jyoti.

According to a memorandum released by the university registrar on August 29, 2022 “no meeting/gathering of students shall be allowed in any part of the campus without prior permission of the proctor, failing which disciplinary action shall be taken against the erring students.”

Another memorandum released on November 29 last year states that “no protests, dharnas, raising slogans against any constitutional dignitaries shall be allowed in any part of the university campus.” Along with this, there is a fine ranging up to Rs 50,000 for graffiti and postering in the campus premises.

Memorandum released by Jamia Millia Islamia authorities on November 29, 2024.

“When we sought permission to hold a study circle during the International Day for Solidarity for the Palestine People, the administration denied it. We had to resort to distributing pamphlets. Still we received calls asking us not to engage in such activities. There is no freedom to organise anything in the campus,” said Mishkat Tehrim, a first year student of MA Sociology, who was detained and later suspended.

The right to organise and gather is part of the six freedoms in Article 19. However, the brutal state repression and militarisation has curtailed the rights of the students in the university.

Along with this, the presence of police inside the campus raises serious questions about the safety of the students. “This is not the first time the police entered the campus. It happened in 2019 during the anti-CAA NRC protests. At this point, it is not very surprising the police were already inside the campus,” said Uthara.

‘Want our democratic space back’

“The students were taken from the central canteen area, harassed by the guards and were handed over to 50-60 police officers who were waiting inside gate four. They deliberately took us out through gate four because there are no cameras there,” Jyoti said, recalling the ordeal that they had to face on February 13.

The students were then shoved into three buses, and taken to three different stations – Kalkaji, Badarpur and Bawana.

“We had asked them to take us together. When they denied, we requested to at least put the female students together according to the protocol. This was also denied,” said Uthara, who was taken along with Mishkat, Sajahan Ali, both first year MA Sociology students and members of AISA, and another male student to the Kalkaji police station.

When other students and media reached Kalkaji station, they were not allowed to meet the detained individuals and their whereabouts were also not revealed.

At around 10 am, when more people gathered outside Kalkaji station, these students were taken to Fatehpur Beri station, in the pretext of taking them back to the campus. They were kept there till 4 pm in the evening, denied access to their lawyers even after multiple requests.

Along with this, the students were forced to sign documents – contents of which they couldn’t read – as they were threatened that they would not be released unless they signed it. “Our parents were also called to coerce us to sign those documents,” Mishkat said.

The students underlined that they were “treated like criminals, physically and verbally harassed by the police officers.” For instance, Habeeba, who was detained in the Badarpur police station, was allegedly slapped by a police officer for resisting to give her phone.

Another detainee, who did not wish to be named, has said that Islamophic slurs were directed at him, such as “yeh musalmaan log sirf dange fasaad karte hain (These Muslims create riots and fights everywhere).”

This wasn’t all. The administration has been using various measures to dismantle and disrupt the sit-in protests.

On the first night of the protest on February 10, authorities cut off the electricity in the campus, closed the washrooms and shut off the canteen area. Along with this, the vice chancellor, Mazhar Asif has allegedly denied holding any dialogue with the students.

On February 11, the parents of these protesting students were called by police officers and they instructed them to ask their children to withdraw from the protests. “This means the administration has shared our numbers with the police,” says Mishkat.

“The day before detaining [us], the Jamia Nagar police called my father asking him to coerce me to back out from the protests. He runs an auto-rickshaw in Kolkata, receiving multiple calls from the police threatening that an FIR would be booked against his son and he will be expelled from college was to frighten him and to intimidate me,” says Sajahan.

On February 12, the night before the detention, seven students including Sajahan received suspension letters for a clash which happened 800 metres away from the protest site.

Posters by AISA in Jamia Millia Islamia university campus during the recent protests.

Posters in Jamia Millia Islamia university campus. Photo: U.R. Uthara

Now, all the 17 students involved in the sit-in protests have been suspended. The reasons cited in one of the suspension letters include “leading an unruly and rowdy group of individuals to vandalise and deface the university’s property, disrupting the normal functioning of the campus, creating ruckus inside the campus, creating gross inconvenience to other students and defacing university property.”

“Suspension cannot happen in isolation,” says Uthara adding, “there is a due process for it. You should receive a show-cause notice. With the reply being unsatisfactory, a disciplinary committee will be looking into the issue and they will decide whether a suspension is necessary and if yes, the details of it.”

However, in this case none of that has happened. “Normally suspension lasts for two weeks. In the letters we received, no time is mentioned. They can suspend me again if I attempt to enter the campus after two weeks” she adds.

After the detained students were released on February 14, posters displaying their name, phone numbers, email IDs and political affiliations with the seal of the university were pasted inside gate seven, eight and 13 of the institute.

In an official statement, the university refuted this allegation saying that “some individuals and anti-social elements have been attempting to defame the image of the university and its students by spreading misleading, defamatory and malicious messages.”

The statement has put the blame on the protesting students for spreading the personal information and said it “condemns such brazen and irresponsible acts.”

Sonakshi Gupta, another student who got suspended has been receiving calls and messages from unknown numbers since her name and number were displayed on the posters.

“If the university is not responsible for this, how did their seal come in those posters?” asked Sajahan, in a press conference jointly organised by different student political parties of JMI on February 16 at the Press Club of India.

A student shouts slogans in support of protesting students in Jamia Millia Islamia.

All the 17 students involved in the sit-in protests have been suspended in Jamia Millia Islamia. Photo: U.R. Uthara

Apart from revoking of the suspension, the students have put forward five other demands in the press conference, which includes “an immediate end to the issuance of show cause notices to students exercising their fundamental rights, revocation of all show-cause notices issued to students for raising their voices, repealing of the official memorandum dated August 29, 2022 and November 29, 2024, an end to the witch-hunt against students for expressing dissent and withdrawal of the notice penalising postering and graffiti on Jamia walls.”

The press conference organised by the suspended students saw large scale participation by students from various educational institutions and political organisations.

Underlining how “democratic spaces” are shrinking in university campuses, Jyoti pointed out, “We want our democratic spaces back. If the administration has a problem with the political culture of the university, they can resign. Or else they need to ensure the freedom and safety of the students.”

As students from various departments of the university have released solidarity statements in support of the suspended students, the classes in JMI were also boycotted on February 17. However, the administration has been actively working to suppress any kind of resistance and voices in support of the suspended students.

“The registrar, Mehtab Alam Rizvi has said that if somebody boycotts classes on the [February] 17th, the entire class would be suspended. What kind of authoritarianism is this,” asks Jyothi.

The boycott, however, saw huge participation from students with classrooms remaining empty. On the same day, the students submitted a memorandum to the dean of student welfare demanding the immediate revoking of all suspension letters with an ultimatum of 48 hours.

Hajara Najeeb is a researcher based in Delhi.

Odisha: KIIT Accused of Racism and Intimidation After Nepal Student’s Death Sparks Outrage

KIIT registrar issued a letter describing the incident as “unfortunate” and appealed to all the students from Nepal to return to the campus to resume classes. Earlier, the authorities had declared the institute closed sine die for international students from Nepal.

Bhubaneswar: The alleged death by suicide of a Nepalese student at a private university in Odisha’s capital city and the indifferent attitude of the university staff towards the students from the Himalayan kingdom, who were asked to vacate their hostels immediately, have triggered an international outcry.

On Tuesday (February 18), the Odisha government has constituted a high-level fact finding committee to inquire into the incidents that took place at the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) university in the wake of the suicide of a girl student from Nepal on the campus.

In a press release, the government said that it would take “appropriate legal and administrative” action in the matter based on the findings of the committee that consists of additional chief secretary, home department, principal secretary, women and child development department and commissioner-cum-secretary, higher education department.

The release, which said that the institution had been placed under notice, described the incidents as “unfortunate”. It said that “government of Odisha had taken immediate cognisance of the matter and taken steps to arrest security guards and suspension of erring officials involved.”

“The government of Odisha remains committed to ensuring the safety, dignity and well-being of every student. The Odisha government will take all necessary steps to ensure that justice is served swiftly and fairly,” the press release added.

Speaking on the issue earlier, Nepalese Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli threatened that it might “impact Indo-Nepal relations”. Following the backlash, the authorities at KIIT, Odisha’s first private university founded by former Biju Janata Dal (BJD) MP Achyut Samanta, have apologised for the inconvenience caused to the students from Nepal but the incident seems to have done irreparable damage to the image of the institution.

The incident that triggered protests

Trouble erupted at the university after the dead body of a 20-year-old undergraduate student from Nepal was found in her room on Sunday (February 16).

Although no suicide note was found, the student’s cousin, who is also a student at KIIT, told the Infocity police in his complaint that his sister was forced to take the extreme step because of alleged misbehaviour and blackmail by her ex-boyfriend, who is a third-year mechanical engineering student at the university.

Sources in the university blamed the death of the student on her boyfriend’s ‘abusive behaviour’. The victim allegedly also complained against him to the university authorities but to no avail.

After seizing her laptop and mobile phone, the police have arrested the boyfriend. Bhubaneswar-Cuttack commissioner of police S. Dev Datta Singh said the accused was nabbed on the basis of prima facie evidence that suggested that he was harassing the student.

Meanwhile, the incident triggered protests by Nepalese students who blocked the road outside the university campus, forcing police intervention. Next, the university authorities in a knee-jerk reaction declared the institute closed sine die for international students from Nepal and asked them to vacate the hostels on Monday (February 17).

The students, many of whom did not even have enough money to buy tickets to travel back home, were herded onto buses and abondoned at the Cuttack railway station. Many protested vociferously but their protests fell on deaf ears.

“We were asked to vacate the hostels after we protested against the death of the girl. We don’t know what their intentions are. I am neither sure of train timings nor do I have money to travel. We have not even had food. We are helpless. We were simply asked to vacate the hostels. The staff members entered the hostel and forced us to move out. They even hit those who were slow in vacating the hostel,” said Rajan Gupta, one of the Nepalese students abondoned by the KIIT authorities at Cuttack station.

As Nepal government stands by the students, KIIT authorities are in a damage control mode

As videos of harassed students describing their ordeal went viral on social media, Sharma Oli was forced to intervene. He assured the students that two officers from the Nepalese embassy in Delhi were being dispatched to take care of them.

“Our Embassy in New Delhi has dispatched two officers to counsel Nepali students affected in Odisha. Additionally, arrangements have been made to ensure they have the option to either remain in their hostel or return home, based on their preference,” he wrote on his X handle.

Our Embassy in New Delhi has dispatched two officers to counsel Nepali students affected in Odisha.

Additionally, arrangements have been made to ensure they have the option to either remain in their hostel or return home, based on their preference. #Nepal #Odisha

— K P Sharma Oli (@kpsharmaoli) February 17, 2025

Meanwhile, Nepali parliamentarians have also urged the government to take immediate steps to ensure the safety of Nepali students studying in India. During an emergency session of the Nepal House of Representatives on Tuesday (February 18), MPs Chhabilal Bishwakarma, Madhav Sapkota, Dhruv Bahadur Pradhan, and Thakur Gaire called for a probe into the death of the student and also demanded action against those responsible, reported The Kathmandu Post.

Although officials had not yet arrived at KIIT by the time this report was filed, the fear of the issue gaining international attention has clearly put the KIIT authorities on the defensive, prompting a massive damage control effort.

On Monday (February 17) evening, KIIT registrar Jnyana Ranjan Mohanty issued a letter describing the incident as “unfortunate” and appealed to all the students from Nepal to return to the campus to resume classes.

“There was an unfortunate incident which took place late in the evening yesterday on the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) campus. Immediately after the incident police investigated the matter and apprehended the culprit. The KIIT administration has taken all out efforts to restore normalcy in the campus and hostels to resume the academic activities. An appeal is made to all our Nepali students who have or plan to leave the campus to return and resume the classes,” said the letter.

A few hours later, KIIT authorities, apparently having realised their mistake, opened a dedicated control room to facilitate the return of the Nepalese students to the campus. A 24×7 helpline was also set up to provide them support and guidance.

“We urge all Nepali students to reach out for any assistance. KIIT remains committed to their safety and well- being,” the university said in a statement.

On Tuesday (February 18), when the university saw a silent protest by foreign students studying there, additional registrar Shyam Sunder Behura told mediapersons that every possible effort was being made to bring back the Nepalese students who had left the campus.

Acknowledging that there had been a mistake, he said, “Almost 100 Nepalese students are already back. Bringing them back is our priority. Their parents are also being taken into confidence.”

He added that the Nepalese students had been asked to vacate the hostels because they had created trouble on the campus following the suicide of the student who was from their country. “They had blocked the road,” he said, adding that the university had so far received no communication from the Nepal government.

The university issued an apology in a “follow up” notice that said that two security staff had been immediately terminated and two senior hostel officials and one senior administrative officer of the International Relations Office (IRO) had been placed under suspension pending thorough inquiry.

“For our staff we recognise that certain comments were made in the heat of the moment and we apologise for any distress caused. We prioritise the safety and well being of students above all,” said the notice.

The apology came on a day when the incidents on the KIIT campus found an echo in the state Assembly with leaders cutting across parties expressing concern over the issue. Talking to reporters outside the Assembly, BJP MLA Babu Singh condemned the atrocities committed against Nepalese students and demanded action against KIIT authorities.

The insensitive behaviour of KIIT authorities against Nepalese students was also condemned by the father of the student, who died by suicide. He reached Bhubaneswar this morning.

Speaking to reporters here, he said, “This is unfortunate. Students come to study here from far off countries because of your assurance. You should not treat them in this manner.” He, however, admitted that university authorities as well as the police were cooperating with him and he expected that justice would be done to him.

The viral video clips

The insensitive behaviour of the KIIT authorities was evident from one of the video clips that went viral on social media. It captured heated exchanges between university officials and students purportedly inside the hostel where the deceased resided.

At one point during the argument, a female official is seen asking the Nepalese students to go wherever they felt safe while stating that the amount spent by the university on students’ welfare was more than the national budget of Nepal. The statement was widely criticised and even led to protests by student.

“Do not insult the founder of this university. The man is feeding 40,000 students for free. Such an amount would even be more than your country’s entire budget,” the official can be heard saying in the clip.

The alleged highhandedness of KIIT authorities has also drawn protests from various students’ organisations which demanded strict action against the guilty and an apology from the university to the Nepalese students.

“We urge the university to issue an immediate apology to Nepali students, ensure their accommodation and food arrangements, and provide adequate compensation to the deceased student’s family,” said the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), noting that such incidents could adversely impact the strong ties between India and Nepal.

If you know someone – friend or family member – at risk of suicide, please reach out to them. The Suicide Prevention India Foundation maintains a list of telephone numbers they can call to speak in confidence. The TeleManas helpline, a government helpline functions 24×7, the numbers are:1-800 891 4416/14416. You could also take them to the nearest hospital.

Rebuilding Life Like Origami: How Does One Survive the JEE Rat Race?

This is a photo essay depicting how the countless students in India who are forced into gruelling systems they never chose silently endure their struggles.

I lost myself in the relentless rat race of JEE preparation.

My dad is a scientist. So, the pressure on me to become something started early. I was enrolled in tuitions as early as Class 3 to ensure someone kept an eye and made sure I didn’t slack off on my studies.

It felt as though the rat race had already begun for my parents, long before I even started preparing for JEE, or Joint Entrance Examination, for engineering courses.

In elementary school, scoring less than 35 out of 40 marks would be met with disapproval from my mother. Although my parents never expressed their disappointment outright, their indirect reactions often felt sharper.

I started believing that my performance in school was less about me and more about not letting my mother feel hurt because somehow my marks let her have a better position in society.

Photo: Abhinav P.S.

I do not have a single memory of my childhood where I was not worried about academics – the pressure was always looming over me like a shadow.

Whether I was playing football or was engaged in other co-curricular activities, I felt guilty, thinking I should be studying instead. At the time, this constant pressure didn’t seem to affect my mental health because I never had the opportunity to reflect on it.

Things escalated in class 8 when I was enrolled for JEE coaching and they started teaching us mathematics for class 11, as if a three-year head start was essential to clear the entrance test.

Initially, I was performing well in coaching and even scored 94% in my class 10 exams, which encouraged me to keep pursuing JEE. However, grade 11 and 12 were when I realised I felt trapped in a system I never wanted to be part of but couldn’t voice my thoughts to my parents.

The coaching system is rigid and monotonous; they train students for speed not for fostering creativity or a deeper understanding. Somehow, my well-educated parents too believed it was worth investing five years of my life in it.

However, I wonder now – was I put into this race because they didn’t want to take a risk? Or was I unable to convince them that I could pursue something else that I truly loved? After so many years of tuition and academic conditioning, I wasn’t even sure anymore.

I felt like I had no personality and no awareness beyond my subjects – I was, quite frankly, worried I had turned into a boring person. Was it the environment at home that made the JEE process so difficult for me or the inherently grueling nature of the exam itself?

I would spend hours at the coaching centre, even when I didn’t have any classes. I wasn’t sure whether the weekly proficiency exams were tracking my progress or adding to my fear of getting scolded by my parents.

I existed with no reflections of my own; I just followed instructions without a question, too scared to do anything outside what I was told.

I forced myself to fit into the system and in the process I lost touch with who I was. I used to like making origami but I had given up all hobbies apart from what I needed to do for JEE.

Then, at the beginning of class 12, the pandemic hit. This unexpected pause gave me space to breathe and reflect. That’s when I realised chasing a blind and aimless race into an abyss.

I reconnected with origami, a hobby that became my outlet and a necessary distraction. Origami, with its blend of discipline and creativity, felt like a contrast to JEE preparation, which lacked any creativity.

I still don’t know if I am the son who lost or the son who survived.

Origami became a metaphor for me, a gateway to express my emotions of when I felt trapped and when, eventually, I rediscovered hope.

We students are often forced into systems we never chose, and many of us silently endure the struggles. The series of photographs below are a depiction of the same.

Photo: Abhinav P.S.

The system seems alien at first. You are the lone red butterfly in a field of white – not by design, but by circumstances.

This is the first glimpse of a world modified by the poisonous coaching culture, where difference is a cross to be borne. The burnt edges of the paper signify the pressure, consuming the hopes and dreams – the true self you lost to be shaped into an unfitting mold. The white butterflies owe their resemblance to the peers who have already found adaptation – or resignation – in this system. When you now enter this universe you realise that personalities are mass-produced here. You’re the one outlier, in a world waiting for answers that conform to its regulations.

Photo: Abhinav P.S.

The person in red depicts students who are drawn into an individualistic and creative mind – the red butterfly. They stare back with curiosity, hope, and perhaps a willingness to embrace their uniqueness. The students in black shirts, expressionless, watch the white butterflies or look lost, while the student in red, smiling, follows the red butterfly – a symbol of individuality and creativity. But as the days unfold, the pressure of JEE slowly pulls them into conformity.

In conformity, disappearing feels safer. But what about happiness?

Photo: Abhinav P.S.

Some people embrace their individuality while others adhere to society’s social contract – there is a stark divide between them. The overshadowing of the white butterfly represents the system designed to normalise homogeneity and conventional success empowering over a single individual who tries to be different.

Photo: Abhinav P.S.

Once you are knee deep into a system like that of JEE coaching, you forget who you truly are. You get so alienated from yourself that your own perception is formed on the basis of what this world desires from you, not what your true desires are.

Photo: Abhinav P.S.

Then comes a time when one thinks they can borrow some traits of the masses in the rat race in order to keep up the pace; just so that they can have a “secure” future.

Photo: Abhinav P.S.

The breaking point: This image captures a powerful moment of self-realisation while nearing a collapse of individuality under pressure.

Photo: Abhinav P.S.

The value of individuality: Another realisation hits – the student realises that everyone belongs to a different background, possessing varying sets of aptitudes and abilities. The burnt paper under the red butterfly symbolises the indelible impact on their mind of the student due to the impact of this gruelling system.

Photo: Abhinav P.S.

There are times when the student, lost in the race, succumbs to the pressure. Some end up taking their lives.

Photo: Abhinav P.S.

However, sometimes, a few students try to shake up the system; they break free and pave their own path, albeit with sacrifices. They learn to build their own road to success.

Abhinav P.S. is pursuing engineering at Shiv Nadar University. This visual project has emerged out of a course on photographic image taught by Sreedeep Bhattacharya.

The Very Important Hindus and the Ones That Are Not Counted

Would it have been possible for the Hindutva government to plead inability to either count or be accountable for those that died seemingly in droves had they been VIPs and VVIPs?

Even as much has been said about the grand event of the Maha Kumbh festival, one rather telling thing remains to be observed.

It has been the defining ideological pitch of the Hindutva players over the last many months that Hindus must learn to obliterate all forms of division among themselves in order to be safe and invulnerable.

There has also been little ambiguity as to who it is from whom danger ostensibly to Hindu supremacy emanates.

Thus, the frustrating faultlines of caste, region, dialect, gender, political turf wars etc. have come in for disparagement from both the grand icons of Hindutva, namely, the prime minister and the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh which hosts the Maha Kumbh festival.

As the fatal stampedes happened, widespread public comment came to the fore, bemoaning the bottlenecks caused by the exclusive arrangements made for the VIPs and VVIPS.

Some media outlets were bold enough to come forward with criticism to this effect.

We may recall that a similar differentiation between ordinary pilgrims and VIPs had been in evidence at the time of the inauguration of the new Ram Temple at Ayodhya.

Also read: Is 2025 Maha Kumbh Really a ‘Rare’ Event Held After 144 Years?

We do not know how many died in the Kumbh stampedes at Prayagraj.

You see, the magical new digital tool of AI seems to count only the living and not the dead.

This discovery by itself may, of course, have furnished an important research input to the whiz kids who invented AI, so that we may in future expect that the dead may also come to be counted by this god-like technology.

Had AI been equipped to count the dead, why surely the in-your-face chief executive of Uttar Pradesh would not have shied away from sharing the extent of the carnage with fellow Hindus across the realm.

At any rate, Hindutva being philosophical in the extreme, when push comes to shove, it was left to a noted seer, Shri Dhirendra Shastri to instruct the flock how those that died attending the Maha Kumb attained Moksha or salvation.

Why more of the living who after all were attending the Kumbh precisely to secure salvation did not think of this option remains a matter of deep spiritual cogitation.

But here is the point: in seeking the unity of all Hindus against the ever-menacing threat from the Saracen, cancelling all fault lines, the one faultline that remained unaddressed was that of class.

Clearly, where caste, region, dialect, gender, political interest are all to be set aside if Hindu supremacy is to be ensured, there seems no call on the great mass of Hindutva followers to also unite across classes.

That the powers-that-be don’t think this desirable or an opposite part of the call to unity was clear from the poshly discreet arrangements that were made for privileged and important Hindus to take their salvational dip pronto, without hassles from the mass of less endowed devotees.

One might also speculate whether the great seer cited above would have said what he said of those that died should the dead ones have come from among the important and very important Hindus.

Nor might it have been possible for the Hindutva government to plead inability to either count or be accountable for those that died seemingly in droves.

So you see, come to think of it, even as faith continues to be pressed into service to camouflage the cruel realities of economic divisions, the organisation of the grand festival at Prayagraj has once again proved the truth of the leftist maxim: you may obliterate as many fault lines as you wish but even the history of Hindutva consolidation remains slave to the overriding divisions between those that have and those that do not, however they may all be very devoted followers of Hindutva.

How consequential this truth may be made in the future of the republic is of course quite another matter.

Badri Raina taught at DU.

Why Ranveer Allahbadia’s Bad Joke on the Family Got Indians So Riled Up

Jokes on women or members of the LGBTQIA+ community are made regularly without any repercussions because they don’t pose a threat to India’s public morality. A perceived attack on the hetero-patriarchal family unit, though, is a whole other story.

Ranveer Allahbadia’s recent remark on Samay Raina’s show India Got Latent has caused a massive stir across India. To one of the contestants on the show, Ranveer had asked, “Would you rather watch your parents have sex, or you will join them once and finish it off?”

The backlash was so intense that it led to multiple FIRs being filed, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) stepping in, and even statements being issued by two chief ministers. The issue also made its way into parliament’s budget session. But what was it about Allahabdia’s comment that provoked such a strong reaction from all sides of the political spectrum, uniting the government and the opposition?

The main criticism of Allahbadia’s remark centres around three key phrases: obscenity, vulgarity and sexually explicit content. These words also constitute Assam chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma’s tweet announcing the FIR against Allahbadia, Raina and others involved. However, the controversy goes beyond just the specific comment – it highlights deeper issues about public morality in India.

Incest, as a topic, is deeply troubling for public morality in India, but a crucial question arises: why are remarks about incest seen as such a major moral violation, while jokes that mock women, LGBTQIA+ people, and other minorities are often overlooked or even normalised? To answer this, we need to look beyond the public figures involved, Allahbadia and Raina, and understand how gender norms and patriarchal values influence the way society reacts to such issues.

The trajectories of the personalities

Raina gained fame for his “dark humour”, which has been widely criticised. His brand of humour has strayed far from the original intent of dark humour, which was meant to help marginalised communities cope with trauma. Instead, it has become a tool for ridiculing these very communities. Raina argues that humour should be free and that everyone should be able to joke about anything, even if it offends someone. In this view, humour doesn’t need to consider the power dynamics within society – jokes about women, transgender persons, Muslims and survivors of sexual assault are, in his view, just jokes.

Allahbadia – aka Beer Biceps – is a podcaster who has gained widespread popularity in recent years. He often invites controversial guests, including right-wing politicians, spiritual leaders with questionable reputations and people who promote pseudo-scientific views. Despite being considered pro-government, Allahbadia’s recent comment has turned some of his political allies against him. This raises the question: what was so controversial about his remark that even those aligned with him felt the need to distance themselves?

Public morality and hetero-patriarchy

To understand why Allahbadia’s comment created such a storm, we need to examine the role of public morality in Indian society. Public morality is a set of values and standards that dictate what is considered acceptable behaviour in society. In India, these values are heavily influenced by hetero-patriarchy, a system where male dominance and heterosexual/heternormative relationships, particularly imagined through a monogamous family structure, are seen as the foundations of society.

In this hetero-patriarchal system, the sanctity of the heterosexual monogamous patriarchal family becomes paramount. This idea of this family has been idealised as the backbone of Indian society. Any act of destabilisation, or even a mild transgression, can thus invoke strong responses. The institution of the family and the discourse around it have been reinforced by both social norms and legal frameworks. However, this view has not remained static and has evolved over time, especially after India’s independence.

Also read: Poor Joke or Convenient Target? Understanding the Case Against Ranveer Allahbadia

Historical imaginations of family and public morality

To understand how public morality has evolved, it’s necessary to look back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the Indian nationalist movement, the “women’s question” became a central topic. Nationalists were concerned with the portrayal of Indian women as helpless and oppressed, a view promoted by the British. Indian reformers, often upper-caste men, constructed the image of the “new woman” who had to be educated enough to become an ardhangini (half-companion) in marriage with the task of raising ‘good’, ‘moral’ children.

The “new woman” was designated the guardian of the “domestic sphere” – a sphere of life, according to the Indian nationalists, where Indians had an upper hand over the colonisers. The British, they argued, had attained superiority in the “material sphere” of science, technology and governance, but they could never conquer the “domestic sphere” of familial life and spiritual life, dotted with moral values and civilisational ethos, respectively.

The “domestic sphere” required the invention of a sacrosanct familial tradition, which was continuous and unchanging for most parts. This rested on middle class, upper caste ideas of heterosexual monogamous patriarchal family, partly informed by a reimagination of the ‘great’ Indian past of epics and ancient law-books, and partly by Victorian notions of the family. Women were seen as guardians of family values, tasked with raising children and maintaining moral order. Gandhian ideas about women, which emphasised purity and marriage for reproduction, reinforced this model. In Gandhi’s view, a woman’s role was to maintain the sanctity of the ‘home’. This ideal woman was distinguished from the “common woman”, often seen as promiscuous or coarse, representing ‘lower’ caste and lower class women, such as street vendors and sex workers.

In post-independence India, this idea of the family continued to dominate. The newly independent state emphasised the sanctity of the hetero-patriarchal family as essential for social stability. Civil codes were framed to maintain this sanctity. The family, founded upon the marriage of a heterosexual male and a heterosexual female, conferred a “bouquet of rights” (to quote the Supreme Court in the recent ‘Marriage Equality’ case) to the people. As such, in elevating these ideals of family life, alternative and heterogenous forms of copulation and marriage, and heterogenous notions of masculinity and femininity found in various castes, tribes and communities in India, were relegated to the margins.

If the family was sacrosanct, and ideals were seen as static and normative, duties had to be defined for the constituting members of the family. Just like the woman’s role was defined as being the homemaker and the man’s role defined as the breadwinner, the parent-children relationship had to be one founded upon ‘respect’ for the elder. Discussions about sexuality that unsettles the ideal family life had to be repressed. Discussions on deviant sexualities and copulation – homosexuality, incest, ‘love marriages’ – needed to be policed because they challenged the upper caste morals of the ideal family and the consequent property and caste relations that emerged out of it.

However, changes in political economy primarily in the post-liberalisation period, and challenges from the LGBTQIA+ groups and women’s rights activists meant that the sanctity was far from being unchallenged. As the economy evolved and more middle-class women began working, the traditional values of family and gender were perceived to be threatened by the cultural nationalists. We find similar responses when governments mandated sex education in India. These changes were seen as a threat to the moral fabric of Indian society.

Why the outrage on incest but not on misogyny or homophobia?

In today’s India, the cultural nationalists, represented by the Hindutva Right, have become the self-righteous preservers of the familial imagination of the late 19th and early 20th century. This is also reflected in the recent attempts by the current regime to oppose the marriage equality case in the Supreme Court, where it dubbed same-sex marriages as an “urban elite issue”. Similarly, in the context of marital rape, the BJP has vehemently opposed the criminalisation of marital rape with the argument that it destabilises the sanctity of marriage. Sections of the Congress have also opposed both marriage equality (for instance, the former Congress state government in Rajasthan) and criminalisation of marital rape.

The criticism of Allahbadia has to be located in this wider context and history of public morality, derived from the sanctity of a heterosexual monogamous patriarchal family. In addition to other supposed motives such as setting an example to bring in stringent laws against free speech, a primary motive in policing and going after Allahbadia, Raina and others, for the BJP, is to project and affirm its image as the preserver of public morality.

In India Got Latent, Raina and other panellists have often made problematic and offensive remarks towards women and LGBTQIA+ individuals. In one episode, for instance, Raina had asked a participant who identified as bisexual if she “feels something” when women security guards check her at the airport. While questions are being raised today on the “sexually explicit content” on his show from various corners, it took an Allahbadia-style comment on incest to attract public outrage. This is because neither misogyny nor homophobia destabilises the imagination of public morality founded upon the sanctity of the family.

Misogyny and homophobia are not aberrations, but the norm. Rape jokes, wife jokes and jokes about gay and trans people have been a part and parcel of our everyday life. Even before the Raina version of “dark comedy”, they have arrived in the form of the “non-veg jokes” of our fathers and uncles. They affirm patriarchy and heteronormativity, as both these systems of power rely on the vilification and marginalisation of women and sexual minorities. Incest, or the mere act of making a stupid, unfunny statement involving incest, however, unsettles our imagination of the sacred – the institution of the family which we have been fed through our culture, state and the media. It disrupts the sanctity of our national, legal, cultural and social institutions.

Tridib Mukherjee is a PhD scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati.

Over Three Years On, Modi Govt Does Not Declare its Position on Places of Worship Act

The top court, while expressing displeasure at the number of pleas filed in the case, adjourned the matter till April.

New Delhi: The Union government once again failed to file a counter-affidavit in response to a plea challenging the validity of the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991.

The matter has been pending in the Supreme Court since 2022 with the first notice seeking the Union government’s response dating back to May 2021.

Between October 2022-December 2024, the top court has passed eight orders in which the Union government was either granted more time to file a response or the court was told that it was working on a “comprehensive” one.

A bench comprising Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar adjourned the matter till April during the hearing on Monday (February 17).

The court also expressed displeasure at the number of fresh pleas being filed in the case. While dismissing all petitions in which a notice had not been issued, the court said that petitioners could file applications but only those raising new legal grounds would be entertained.

“People keep on filing fresh petitions alleging that they have raised new grounds…It will become impossible for us to deal with the petitions besides whatever has already been filed,” CJI Khanna said.

“We are constrained to pass this order after taking note of the number of fresh petitions filed. The pending writ petitions, which have no notices, stand dismissed with liberty to file an application raising additional grounds, if any. The new IA will only be allowed if there is any new point or new legal issue that has not been raised in the pending petitions,” the bench said.

Senior advocate Vikas Singh, referring to the notices issued by the court in the initial petitions in 2021, said, “Please direct the Centre to file its counter-affidavit at least in these petitions.”

The Union government’s silence on the matter comes amid an increasing number of petitions being filed to ‘reclaim’ Hindu temples at religious sites belonging to Muslims.

In December 2024, the top court barred civil courts from registering any fresh cases on such matters or passing orders in pending ones.

The Places of Worship Act preserves the character of religious places as they existed on August 15, 1947. Section 3 of the Act prohibits the conversion of places of worship and Section 4 imposes an obligation to maintain the character of religious places as they were on August 15, 1947.