Apr 26 (FP): Rusticate actually means being sent to the country, a kind of temporary exile. The poet Shelley, it is said, was rusticated for writing an atheistic poem. You sort of stayed in frozen exile till others made decisions about your life.
The JNU committee made these decisions and now dispatches the ‘guilty’ to the wilderness.
The flaw in this dispensation of academic justice is that the highest profile individual has got the least penalty... not even the cost of a Mumbai-Pune business class ticket. In contrast, much lesser known and unknown students seem to have absorbed much of the JNU committee’s wrath. Even unheard of (or unheralded) union secretaries and the like have been given harsher financial penalties.
One understands that the committee goes by the evidence it either is given to work with or what it obtains from its own investigations and if this is the way the biscuit breaks so be it.
In other words, the committee has freaked out in fear and placed this token penalty of Rs 10,000 on Kanhaiya and hopes now that by being feather light in its retribution, all will be forgiven and the students and faculty will merrily dance into the sunset with a song on their lips. Either that or it failed to get enough evidence to indict KK. Ergo, that evidence does not exist or was swiftly swept under the carpet. Of equal interest is the yardstick used to measure the penalties given to the others. They are so disparate and odd in texture that even if the committee released its findings and made them public it would be well nigh impossible to figure out how it computed these wide ranging punishments.
What they have actually done is give a mountain of ammunition for the agitators, left the leader of the wolf pack alone to whip up the howling and martyred a handful of vague individuals, all of this setting the scene for more demonstrations and protests and an overdose of the KK protocols of self indulgence.
As a ham handed, clumsy and oafish exercise this chocolate box of assorted disciplinary actions is hard to beat.
Students have been expelled for much less. If you can penalise a person Rs 1 through a special committee then you are pronouncing that person guilty of an infraction. So, if they are all guilty just dismiss them as unwanted elements and weather the storm. Companies retrench staff without reason. This is bagatelle in comparison.
For Kanhaiya Kumar fresh out his latest game of being ‘strangled’ on a jet plane (proven to be a stunt, no FIR, nothing, yet he is still lionized) this scenario is a gift.
He couldn’t have set the stage better if he had been Chairman of the disciplinary board. He now has a dozen students to choose from as he bounds around the nation spilling vitriol and igniting it.
He can use the caste card, the minority card, the religious card, the guy is now going to be a triple nuisance and far more dangerous. Using his hostility as an armour he is almost untouchable.
Just as he was fading away, the JNU committee has resurrected a man who has done nothing to contribute to the commonweal or make life better for those whose cause he supposedly espouses.
He has spread dissension with no agenda except to literally upgrade himself. His speeches are nasty and hostile and insult the office of the Prime Minister of India regardless of who occupies it.
He wants 3D azaadi. He has got it in spades... the freedom to run riot.