Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi accused the Narendra Modi government of trying to crush students’ voices in university campuses by ordering police crackdowns.
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Mr Gandhi was shown black flags by a group of ABVP members. The ideology that says “till the downfall of India, we will fight” is anti-national.
Drawing parallel between the actions against students in the JNU and events leading to the suicide of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula in Hyderabad University, he said the question is why a student is “not allowed to say what he believes in”.
On Thursday, a lawmaker from ruling Bharatiya Janata Party Mahensh Giri and rightwing Hindu nationalist students union Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) filed a report with police against the university students.
The fresh protest sparked outrage in the capital with an angry government on Friday saying it “will not tolerate any anti-national activities in the country”. Take action according to law against them.
Police have detained several students and are searching for more in connection with the case.
On the killing of BJP Bihar vice president Visheshwar Ojha yesterday, he said since Nitish Kumar came back to power in alliance with Lalu Prasads RJD, “jungle raj” has returned to the state with a spurt in incidents of murders and kidnapping.
Left leaders Sitaram Yechury and D Raja, JD(U) leader K C Tyagi and others also addressed the students who were gathered to protest against the arrests into the controversy. “All sections of the JNU community, including representatives of the students, teachers and karmacharis have assured that they uphold the values and ethos of this University.lt is an appeal to all sections to go beyond this incident and return the campus to normalcy”.
“There was a person in Germany named Hitler who had destroyed millions and millions of people”.
Raja said nobody knows if the protesters were from JNU or outside. It said its members “hold no brief for those who raised objectionable slogans”.
Addressing those students, Gandhi said: “People who showed black flag on my face, I feel proud that in my country they have the right to show black flag”.
A meeting was organised on Tuesday on the JNU campus where a group of students mourned the hanging of parliament attack convict Afzal Guru and Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) co-founder Maqbool Bhat and shouted anti-India slogans. “I am hopeful that about the investigation”, said Girri.
Kanhaiya Kumar’s parents who live in Bihar also asserted that their son was being victimised for his opposition to Hindutva politics and was not an anti-national.
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JNU students’ union president Kanhaiya Kumar, arrested in a case of sedition and criminal conspiracy for holding an anti-national event inside the university premises, was today remanded to three-day police custody by a Delhi court.
