“The lawyers were escorted by police”.
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Informing the ministry about the apprehension among faculty members about police presence on campus, JNU has said, “a letter was sent to police requesting them to take utmost precautions before entering the university campus if required under law”.
The JNUSU had earlier declared a strike on the campus for the day.
He played down Monday s violence after media accused police in court of doing little to stop it, saying that “to my knowledge nobody has received any serious injuries”. BJP MLA O P Sharma who was in the complex in connection with the hearing in the defamation case filed by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, was seen beating up Jamai. Till late evening, investigators said they were trying to identify the culprits and ascertain whether they were lawyers or troublemakers dressed in black robes.
Mohammed Afzal Guru was hanged in 2013 following his conviction over an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 that left 10 people dead.
The head of the ruling nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Amit Shah, said the government would not tolerate what he called “anti-national activities” at JNU, which has a long history of left-wing student activism.
Reacting to anti-national slogans at the programme at JNU, the former UP chief minister said, “It is a joke that the BJP has collaborated with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir to form a government”.
Waliullah Qadri, a JNUSU leader, said the attackers disrupted court proceedings and beat up students and others present there.
A television reporter was attacked while a woman journalist was spared even as the crowd threatened them that their phones and bones will be broken.
A row over the arrest of an Indian student on a controversial sedition charge escalated Monday, with students refusing to attend classes and violent scenes at the Delhi court where he was due to appear.
AAP leader Ashutosh met a senior Delhi Police official and submitted a letter alleging bias against Kanhaiya in the probe.
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“The crackdown signals an utter lack of judgment in the government, where ministers manage to manufacture a national crisis out of what were always, at best, minor affectations in student politics”, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a leading political commentator, wrote in the Indian Express newspaper.
