‘NEVER THOUGHT PROFESSORS WILL BE ATTACKED'

IN the wake of the incident of assault on students and faculty at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, professor Sucharita Sen held the university administration primarily responsible for what happened on the campus on Sunday night.

- Rajdeep Sardesai

Sen was among the 34 faculty members and students injured in the violence unleashed by a gang of masked assailants on the JNU campus. In an exclusive interview with India Today TV, Sen — who has spent 35 years as a student and a faculty member in the JNU — said, “Personally if I am being hit, that’s something I can deal with. What I am unable to deal with is the kind of environment which I saw in my university where even students hitting each other by hand was unheard of. Violence was just not there.”

“The reason that a few of the professors came to the front was with this thought that they will not attack us. But we were proved wrong,” Sen added.

Did nobody call up the administration and ask for police? “I think many of my colleagues did call up 100 but the police were not there. We heard of some incidents of violence just before our peace assembly was about to start. Till that time, everything was peaceful. Then we heard about armed goons who were assembled in front of the Periyar hostel. By the time we were debating as to how to respond to that, we saw them coming towards us. Their faces were half covered. They started raining stones. I was hit by two of them.”