New Delhi: The Congress on Sunday demanded the immediate dismissal and starting a criminal investigation against the Jawahar Lal Nehru University Vice-Chancellor M. Jagadesh Kumar.
The party also alleged that the Vice-Chancellor was the ‘mastermind’ behind the violence in the university campus.
The demand comes after a fact-finding team of the Congress had visited the university to assess the situation.
The Congress had appointed the four-member fact-finding committee to carry out a detailed inquiry into the violence at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
The members of the committee included Mahila Congress chief Sushmita Dev, Hibi Eden, MP and former NSUI president; Syed Naseer Hussain, MP and former president of JNU NSUI; and Amrita Dhawan, a former NSUI president and ex-DUSU president.
Ms Dev said, “A criminal investigation must be initiated against the VC, the company that provides security service and members of the faculty who conspired with the attackers to unleash the violence at Sabarmati hostel, Periyar hostel and other places. The security company’s contract must be immediately terminated.”
The fact-finding committee also charged a certain member of the JNU faculty ‘who was operating in consonance with the VC’.
She added that since his appointment in 2016, he meticulously “infiltrated” the university with people in the faculty who did not merit their positions and promoted only those who would be compliant to him and had their inclination to right-wing ideology.
He operates through these members of faculty to orchestrate chaos on campus.
She further added, “The crisis on the campus is a culmination of his misgovernance and autocracy. He deliberately imposed his decision on the university students and teachers without due process and then refused to engage with the duly elected student and teacher representatives which led to the deadlock.”
The fact-finding team termed the violence in the campus as ‘state-sponsored’ and demanded a judicial enquiry.
It also said that faculty members like ‘Tapan Bihari Warden of the Periyar Hostel were actively involved in facilitating mob violence’. “It is clear that the attack on the JNU campus was state-sponsored. There is absolutely no doubt about it. The important question is what did the administration and Delhi police do to stop the attack,” Ms Dev said. The other recommendations of the committee included an independent judicial inquiry into the events of January 5 that led to violence on the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University. She said there is every reason to believe that the mob that attacked the students and teachers on campus were from the right-wing factions.
“There is sufficient evidence to show that the people who were attacked on 5th January at Sabarmati hostel and the Sabarmati-T junction just outside the hostel were people who did not belong to the right-wing politics on campus. The attackers did not touch the students and faculty who were right-wingers at the Sabarmati hostel area,” she added.
