Congress leader Digvijaya Singh also hit out at Irani’s defence and said that it was an attempt to shift the blame and confuse people. “My appeal is, please do not instigate students and communities deliberately”. “Passions have been ignited through misconstrued and misrepresented facts”.
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Mr. Gandhi said that the 26-year-old student had certainly committed suicide but “the conditions for his suicide have been created by the vice-chancellor and the Minister and the institution”.
He said the vice chancellor re-opened an inquiry to not only suspend the five Dalit students but subject them to social boycott which was unheard of in any Indian university. She said, “In a time of grief like this, I express my condolences to the family who lost their son”. Mr Naqvi told reporters that the Congress should not make an issue out of it.
Rao also hit out at the Delhi Chief Minister, saying, “Arvind Kejriwal, like always, is trying to fish in troubled waters in the politicized issue of Rohit Vemula suicide!”
After its first letter, the ministry sent four reminders on – September 24, October 6, October 20 and November 19 a year ago, to the University seeking facts expeditiously so that it could respond to the Minister of State Dattatreya. “The document being circulated as Rohith Vemula’s suicide note does not name any MP, minister, political organisation or university official”, Irani said in defence of the Labour minister. She said whatever her ministry had done was done in accordance with the protocol of the Central Secretariat Manual of Office Procedure. We have sent a twomember team which will apprise us of the situation.
He demanded that Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani’s role in the matter should also be investigated.
“The Vice Chancellor and the Minister in Delhi have have not acted fairly”. I have been appointed through a due selection process. “I want to reply to Rahul Gandhi’s statement only through these reports”.
Appealing for restraint, Irani said passions are being ignited by “wrong information, misrepresentation, misconstruing and twisting” of facts to project a wrong image. How can a minister term young, bright students as anti-national, simply because they had an altercation with the ABVP?
– Rohith, a second-year research scholar of Science, Technology and Society Studies Department, and others were suspended from the hostel last year following allegations that they attacked Sushil Kumar after the screening of a controversial documentary “Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai”.
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Executive council took “lenient view” after students were found guilty of assault.
