JNU Violence - Students Won't Back Down

Violence cannot muffle dissent which is the DNA of JNU

- Sneha Bhura

From her wheelchair, she saw a hail of bricks, legs being pounded by rods, glass panes being smashed into smithereens. Ruby Singh, a ground-floor resident of the Sabarmati hostel in the Jawaharlal Nehru University, was a witness to the violence a group of masked persons unleashed on the night of January 5. “On all three floors of the boys’ wing, the goons went from room to room, threatening students with blows if they couldn’t prove their political affiliation,’ said Ruby, a final-year Ph.D student at the Centre for Russian and Central Asian Studies. “My classmate was let off only after he grabbed a book on nationalism and swore his allegiance to ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad).”

That night, the girls in the hostel shielded Ruby from the rampaging mob armed with sledgehammers and metal rods. Her neighbours have since told her to lock her doors at night. Her parents in Lucknow are also anxious. “I have heard that some unidentified men are still roaming the campus,’ said Ruby. “Let them come again, we will also beat them up. We girls here have bricks and stones for self-defence.”

Just then, a passing guard asked her to come eat dal chawal. Ruby was hungry. Her last meal was her lunch the previous day, on January 5. “The mess was ransacked and the goons took away the provisions. Even the security guard was hospitalised,” said the guard. The back of his blue jacket was emblazoned with the word Cyclops—a new security force the JNU administration hired four months ago, consisting mostly of former Army personnel. The guard’s colleague added with agrin, “I thought I heard the guard wasn’t even on duty yesterday, and now he is in hospital?”