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IIT-B HSS Dept Prof Invites Radical Leftist Theatre Artist Sudhanva Deshpande Who Goes On To Glorify Terrorists And Gun Culture

November 8, 2023
The Commune

The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) has again courted controversy by inviting a radical leftist Sudhanva Deshpande who went on to glorify Hamas terrorists and gun culture in his lecture.

Sudhanva is an actor and director with Jana Natya Manch (Janam) which is a left-wing theatre group based in New Delhi. 

The lecture was hosted virtually by the institution’s professor Sharmishtha Saha where Sudhanva Deshpande spoke about his meeting with some of the terrorists.

During his talk, Sudhanva said “In 2015, the first time I had gone to Palestine, I’ve been there twice. On my first visit I was lucky to meet Zakaria Zubeidi.“

Zakaria is the former Jenin chief of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a coalition of armed armed Palestinian groups in West Bank, which has been designated as a terrorist organization by Israel, the European Union, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States.

He admitted his involvement in the 2002 Beit She’an attack, which killed 6 people. On February 27, 2019, Zubeidi was arrested once more and subsequently charged in an Israeli military court for his role in carrying out at least two shooting attacks on civilian buses in the West Bank.

Sudhanva then goes on to quote Palestinian Marxist–Leninist politician Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani saying “In order to have liberation, we need guns. We have to fight the occupation. You know, it has to be an armed struggle.

He also goes on to justify and glorify gun culture saying “But if we don’t have the culture to go with the guns, guns will turn on us. In other words you know, we will start killing each other, if we don’t have the culture with the guns.”

The radical leftist director further goes on to characterize the Palestine’s attack on Israel as “freedom struggle” saying “This is something I do want to emphasize that the Palestinian struggle is a freedom struggle. And there has been no freedom struggle in the history of the world, in the history of colonialism that is entirely 100% non-violent. It is never. All the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, that have thrown off the yoke of colonialism, that have only done through a combination of peaceful and armed struggle. And so that is exactly what you see in Palestine today. That’s one.” 

This is the same argument that was made by Moussa Abu Marzouk who heads Hamas’ international relations.

Basically, he equated India’s brave freedom fighters like Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad, Master Surya Sen, and Bagha Jatin to terrorists who kill infants, kidnap and rape women, and show no mercy to old people.

Deshpande then spoke with reverence about Zakaria Zubeidi who he called as one of the legendary freedom fighters in Palestine who took part in the armed struggle who also happens to be one of the main characters that will be seen in his film. Sudhanva then explains about the death of the protagonists in his documentary and how the Israeli state is discriminating against its own citizens including the Jewish. 

He further goes on to draw equivalence to India saying “In this context, all of us in India should be wary of because we are sitting in where there is rhetoric. There is lot of talk of Hindu Rashtra etc etc as if Hindu Rashtra is going to be a Rashtra of all Hindus. Now, clearly a Jewish state is not a state for all Jews even.“

Sudhanva also alleges that the Israeli state not just discriminates Israeli Jews and Palestinians but also Israeli Arabs calling it an apartheid state like that of erstwhile South Africa. 

Towards the end of the video shared by IIT B for Bharat, a student can be seen confronting Prof. Sharmishtha Saha for trying to politicize and vitiate the campus by screening controversial documentaries. She goes on to justify that Sudhanva is a famous director and called him a stalwart. 

“Under the pretext of theatre, you are showing this kind of movies. That’s it. That is the point that I am making.” to which she says that is not a banned movie anywhere. 

“It doesn’t have to be about banned films. The Kashmir Files was not banned but it was still not allowed to show here.” which Sharmishtha Saha evades from answering. 

The student then goes on to say that IIT Bombay has guidelines that prohibits political events and political narratives.

IIT B for Bharat noted that the documentary was used as a tool to invite ultra-leftist Sudhanva Deshpande on the pretext of their course (HS 835 Performance Theory & Praxis), where he unabashedly glorified the terrorist activities of Zakaria Zubeidi, and Ghassan Kanafani while conveniently forgetting the latest Hamas attack.

 

Just a few days back the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) had invited controversial professor Achin Vanaik to deliver a talk titled ‘The History and Politics of the Palestinian Present’. He once had also glorified suicide bombing as a very effective tool for Islamic Jihadi terrorists. This talk was later cancelled after social media outrage. 

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