JNU Controversy: The March Of The ABVP

The Sangh’s student organisation strides across campuses on the strength of a BJP regime at the centre.

- Kaushik Deka

On February 9, around a dozen former members of the Democratic Students’ Union (DSU), an organisation active in the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, called for a cultural meeting to protest against what they called “the judicial killing of Afzal Guru” and express solidarity with “the struggle of Kashmiri people for their democratic right to self-determination”. Around half-an-hour before the event was to start, members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) thronged the administrative building of JNU and demanded that the permission given to DSU to hold the event be withdrawn. They claimed the cultural programme was “harmful to the campus atmosphere”. Fearing clashes, the administration acquiesced, and security guards were sent to keep the badminton court, where the meeting was supposed to take place, out of bounds for the organisers. But alleged DSU members—though many students in the campus claim that they were Kashmiri outsiders and not part of the university—gathered around a nearby dhaba and raised slogans demanding Kashmir’s independence and India’s destruction.

As the video of some people—unidentifiable because of poor light— shouting these slogans went viral, all hell broke loose across the country. On February 12, based on an FIR filed by BJP MP Mahesh Giri, the Delhi Police arrested JNU students’ union president Kanhaiya Kumar on charges of sedition and claimed there was evidence that he was part of the sloganeering. “I have evidence to justify Kanhaiya Kumar’s arrest,” Delhi police commissioner B.S. Bassi told India Today.