Condole the death of Prof. Md. Islamuddin
- MSAD (Manipur Students' Association Delhi) -

New Delhi: 28 May 2009

Office of the Manipur Students' Association Delhi
New Delhi
Ref. No.: PR/01/28-05-2009

The killing of Prof. Md. Islamuddin on 25 May 2009 at the very campus of Manipur University represents a severe lack of the spirit of engagement when it comes to the question of disagreement and contestation. The condition of free speech and fair dialogue on any issue involved in contestation are shattered. The killing should not have occurred if this condition were protected and promoted. However, unfortunately nobody seems to care for this sector of such a public political importance in anyway possible in order to settle things in a democratic fashion. This lacking is symptomatic of our society in many ways.

The government is busy in profiling all the citizens as potential suspects of anti government activities and thereby marking them with pervasive characteristics of illegality and criminality. Any body can be forced to disappear all of a sudden by killing, catching and scratching. Any body is possibly liable to get killed at any point of time at any place. The innocent is as much fake as the convict or the criminal.

Non state forces are busy dictating all that goes beyond what is acceptable or not. There is no dispute and disagreement in the gaze of those who have power to dictate. Only thing that remains is that the gaze should be obliged and followed. Consequently, there is no option to engage with such dictates but to succumb to the outcomes of being unpalatable to the powerful dictates, either by getting killed or let the powerful decide to be either merciful or cruel to their 'convict', the choice being left absolutely to the conscience of the powerful.

What we see as outcome of this sinful, baneful, fearful world of ours is that any body or even the public in the collective sense who rises to speak up barely ends up being targeted. Terror is a profitable value for the powerful now.

The brutal killing of Prof. Islamuddin is condemnable for two reasons. One, University is considered as the symbol and site of serious engagement with every ideas, thought and imagination no matter the intensity of disagreement and contestation among them. The outcome should always be of something that renders an effort to learn the spirit to listen to and opine.

Democracy exists, then in the absence of oppression of ideas to the least. This value is messily devastated by such killings. The killing of the professor has now suggested that nobody dares to oppose the reasons of the other, if it happens to be a big, powerful and fearful 'other'. It kills rather the sustaining capacity to win rationally over the reason of the opponent and thus favouring the complicity of being self defeated in the face of the 'unspeakability' of the opponent whose audible reason is thus reduced to total silence, unheard and uncritiqued, than the professor of his corporeal presence.

Two, what accounts for the 'fatal' mistakes of the Professor, whatever may it be, cannot be undone or permanently rigged out of the messy and intricate system of the University and its working through his being physically eliminated. The killing might have pleased the corrective sentiments of his killers. However it was seriously flawed and ill conceived. What went seriously wrong in the making of the whole drama of cruelty was the specific targeting of the person, his ideas, his stubbornness or whatever.

What about those ruling mentalities within the University, the networks of ideas and values, the whole backup of forces and pressures, the play of chances and maneuvers, conditions of corruptible and frailties, group of strong men and puppets, ideas of resistance and confrontation, in a word, all those forces, the points of 'authority' and the capillaries of 'power' that make the animation of the person seemingly active and involved, detached and reliable?

Should not this be considered for better and fair campus or the imagined world of promises in the hinterland of the University and its system and the larger society outside of it? The drama of cruelty that led to the Professor's pitiful death could hardly sense these ruptures. The target was wrongly conceived and the conscience was fatally flawed in its execution and therefore the killing remains only to be blamed for many such reasons like a few that have been outlaid here.

MSAD regrets and deeply shares with the distress of the Professor's family. MSAD appeals to all our powerfuls that no such acts of cruelty be committed anymore in future. MSAD hopes we may have the 'dawn' if we listen to one another. Lets respect the battle of ideas where lies the winning hopes of our 'dawn'.

Apunabana yaifare!

Sd/-
O. Sandhyarani Chanu,
President, MSAD
Dated 28-05-09