Tiananmen Square and Jawaharlal Nehru University

The press brought out the reminiscences of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 4 June 1989; the incident was ‘a conspiracy of the western powers to derail socialist china’, according to the Chinese government. ‘A well planned attempt to crush a democratic protest, the western counterparts cried out. It is a fact that the Tiananmen - Gate of Heavenly Peace -Square has been the central point for several major historical protests. And in 1989, demonstrators, mainly students, had occupied the square for seven weeks, refusing to move until their demands for democratic reforms were met. The social chaos had to be arrested. However, there were many other ways to clamp down on a protest when China had such a massive ‘people’s army’, the protestors could have been physically removed or caught, arrested and penalized.

However, the incident, which happened 20 years back, stirred the hornets nest in Jawaharlal Nehru University. The SFI (in its prime days) lost the elections to the srtudents union that year: thanks to the Tiananmen Square massacre. The comrades were treated like the carnivorous and they were confronted in the mess, library and canteen and everywhere; except when they took there after dinner stroll with their girl friends. Some sensitive comrades (who still adhered with the bourgeois human rights values), unabashedly supported the action of the Chinese government in public while denouncing it in private conversation. The real vanguards endorsed the views of the central committee, located some 15 or 20 KM away from the campus. Comrade Yechury came to the campus to dish out the conspiracy theory and faced insult from the “anti Chinese” .

Though I was a comrade (not in arms) then and even now, I was moulded in a “reactionary framework” as I opposed any kind of violence. Keyvan Sultani Felokori (Our Iranian refugee comrade) described me as confused and tried to instill sense in me on the inevitability of a bloody revolution. Let Ahura Mazda save his soul!

The saddest part of this story lies elsewhere. We used to have an elderly (not very old but compared to us, she was old) Chinese lady who was admitted to the Hindi language centre. A quiet and warm lady! We used to tease her with the way she said Namaste with folded hands and with her “shudh hindi”, in her absence. I distinctly remember that after the massacre at the Tiananmen Square, this lady ran through the corridor, from the bathroom, almost naked. And nobody seemed to understand what had happened to her. As days passed by the story came out. She had a son who was studying in Beijing University at that time and she was not getting any news about him. She feared that something happened to him and hence broke down. We all felt sorry for her.

Soon she went back to China….. till today I do not know what happened to her or her son. But I felt that pain (even though I had not even thought of becoming a mother, those days) and it stained my otherwise jolly university days.

Since then any mention of Tiananmen Square incident, brings the picture of that helpless mother. To me, it became face of the bloody incident.

Of course, everyone forgot the incident and the very next year, the SFI alliance captured the students Union.