JNU turns into political battleground

The Jawaharlal Nehru University has turned into a political battleground after its students’ union leader Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested on Friday by Delhi police personnel in plainclothes.

The university has been facing severe criticism by the right-wing groups including the RSS and the BJP, ever since the JNU students had started raising their voice against Muzaffarnagar riots and death of the dalit student in Hyderabad. The BJP had been criticising the Left-dominated university for propagating wrong information about the two incidents.

Tuesday’s event to mark the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, in which some students had allegedly raised anti-India slogans, sparked a major political row but outside the campus.

An AISF leader said that ever since the BJP has come to power at the Centre, its supporters have been trying to vitiate the secular environment of the JNU campus. “They (saffron brigade) are trying to wrest control over the campus. But we will fight till end to see we our freedom of speech is not impinged upon.”

“We protest about each and every incident that needs attention. JNU is a place for debate and if we peacefully protest, the BJP did not have an issue to counter upon so they chose to malign our university and, in turn our ideology,” another AISF leader, Aparajita, said.

“A group of people, who we believe are not from our campus, shouted anti-national slogans. We definitely condemn that, but that does not mean the police gets the permission to arrest an innocent like Kanhaiya, who was just seen in the video and also search our hostels to search and arrest other students,” university’s political science student S. Ananda Krishan Raj said.

CPI leader D. Raja, who was there at the university to talk to vice-chancellor Jagdeesh Kumar, said JNU is a temple and such sort of activities should not take place here. “We will take this matter up in Parliament. I will also meet the home minister soon. During our freedom struggle, the RSS and BJP were not in support, but the Left was. Atal Bihari Vajpayee himself was a part of the AISF for a short time. This is a total challenge against the leftist ideology by the right-wing supporters,” said Mr Raja.

Comparing police action to the Emergency, university professor Aisha Kidwai said: “The last time the police barged into JNU was in 1975, during the Emergency. This time it is clearly understandable that the BJP wants to shift its attention from the Rohith Vemula incident. Now that they are at the Centre. Whenever we protest against their wrongs, they try to shut us up. Students got beaten up by the police for protesting for Vemula’s justice.”

The right-wing group, however, is adamant. “Kanhaiya was a part of the group who were shouting anti-India slogans and it was wrong on his part. We are not against freedom of speech, but that does not mean we can say anything we like. India is our motherland and we cannot abuse her,” ABVP leader Anshul Bharadwaj said.

However, he added, ”In order to stop the protest, we definitely need to have the police out of here.”