Jawaharlal Nehru University has invited yoga practitioner Jaggi Vasudev to deliver the 14th Nehru Memorial Lecture, a prestigious event previously addressed by eminent statesmen and intellectuals.
The invite to Vasudev comes days after his scheduled lecture at Pune’s Film and Television Institute of India was cancelled because of indifference from students, many of them involved in an agitation for better infrastructure.
The Tamil Nadu-based preacher is on a month-long tour of Indian campuses as part of a “Youth and Truth” lecture series.
Vasudev has faced criticism for his remarks in recent speeches. “In this country, nobody should be talking about unemployment as there is so much to be done in India,” he said at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, earlier this week.
“The problem is, people look for a certain kind of job when there are many other kinds of jobs around.”
A recent analysis by JNU economist Santosh Mehrotra has found that the national average of completely unemployed people aged above 15 rose from 2.2 per cent in 2011-12 to 3.4 per cent in 2015-16.
On Sunday, Vasudev told reporters in Hyderabad: “We must know and acknowledge and appreciate and enjoy one thing — that in the last four years there have been no bomb blasts in the country. Whatever is happening is only in the border areas and, unfortunately, in Kashmir.”
The government had told Parliament last year that 406 explosions had killed 118 people in India in 2016 alone.
Vasudev had added: “If they (the students) want to engage in politics they must be given opportunities outside the university. They can participate in political activities outside. But the university space should be left free of politics.”
JNU is known for its strident Left politics, practised by groups linked to the communist parties. The CPM-backed SFI, a constituent of the Left Unity alliance that controls the students’ union, has ties with the All India Democratic Women’s Association, which has led a campaign against alleged encroachment of tribal land by Vasudev’s Isha Foundation in Coimbatore.
The students’ union had not opposed last year’s lecture being delivered by another Hindu preacher, Ravi Shankar, although the Left controlled the student body then too. But it is likely to speak out against Vasudev, especially after his recent tweet attacking feminists.
“Today, in the name of #feminism, unfortunately, a whole lot of women are desperately trying to be like men,” Vasudev had tweeted. “Making subtler aspects of life significant is vital for the rise of feminine (sic).”
JNU students’ union joint secretary Amutha Jayadeep, from the CPI-backed All India Students Federation, told The Telegraph: “What are sanyasis doing in a university? Why are they being called for the last two years? In previous years, even if personalities like the Dalai Lama were invited, they were people with some academic stature and there were no communal undertones in their discourse.”
Speakers in past years included former Presidents Pranab Mukherjee and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, former Nepalese Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and former Supreme Court judge Markandey Katju.
