New Delhi braces for more student protests after mob attacks

JNU authorities should have been left alone to deal with what amounts, at worst, to a case of student indiscipline.

Today its sprawling, tree-lined campus is tense.

The next development has been that Kanhaiya Kumar has been charged with sedition as per the Indian Penal Code’s section 124-A.

“The government and police can’t just shut down voices that don’t agree with them”. India needs less regulation of university education, not more.

Critics have called the government’s reaction to the protests at a university known for politically active students as extreme, and blame a rising climate of intolerance for dissenting views under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party, which came to power in 2014.

Reacting to the arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar – president of Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (JNUSU), along with other students, Bhaskar says, “In his capacity as a leader, Kanhaiya tried to calm things down.

A lawmaker with the BJP, Sakshi Maharaj, said that traitors should be shot dead or executed because life imprisonment is not enough for them. “They pushed us and beat us up including women students”, AISF President Waliullah Qadri told reporters.

A joint statement signed by 455 academicians from global universities, said, “JNU stands for a vital imagination of the space of the university an imagination that embraces critical thinking, democratic dissent, student activism, and the plurality of political beliefs”. Human rights activists have argued that Guru was not given a fair trial. The arrest has also been termed as excessive by many commentators. The lawyers pulled him down on the floor of the courtroom and beat him up blue and black.

“JNU has always been a university priding itself on its democratic culture of debate, dialogue and discussion”.

But the issue has divided India sharply with some coming out in support of the government’s action.

Carrying placards, protesters raised slogans and later sent a memorandum to President Pranab Mukherjee demanding an inquiry. Shah wondered if the Congress leader had “lent his voice to the separatists”.

BJP-backed students wing ABVP has released a new video in which a group of students are raising anti-India slogans and hailing Afzal Guru. “We want these students to be thrown out of the university”.

Journalists also saw O.P. Sharma, one of the three BJP legislators in the Delhi assembly, allegedly chasing and hitting a JNU student outside the court.

The ruling party has remained firm, saying it was a question of national security.

“It is absurd to charge them with sedition”, he told the BBC. This institution is regarded as very prestigious the world over and it is “most unfortunate” that the charge of it being anti-national has been made by people at the top most level, she added.