New Delhi : Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, who had rushed to Hyderabad twice to join protests against Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula”s suicide, on Saturday seized the opportunity nearer home by jumping into the JNU row to mobilise the young generation against the Modi government.
The row escalated with the Left and the Right almost coming to clash as Rahul reached the JNU campus on Saturday evening to join a meeting of students and faculty to protest the arrest of JNU students union president Kanhaiya Kumar who has been charged with sedition.
Cong, Left join protest, seek release of the student leader | Rahul Gandhi accuses govt of suppressing students’ voice
JNU has been dominated by the leftist faculty and students for decades but the right groups have not only made inroads lately but also captured some posts in the students” union, a root cause of friction on the campus. Union president Kumar in a 3-day police custody belongs to the student wing of CPI.
In a related development, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced that he has ordered a magisterial inquiry into the incidents in the JNU, asking the (South Delhi) District Magistrate to probe. He acted on the plea by a Left delegation that they have no faith in the Modi government as the whole trouble has been created by it.
Accompanied by Delhi Congress president Ajay Maken, senior Congress leader Anand Sharma, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechuri and CPI leader D Raja, Rahul not only joined the protest but made a fiery speech as did other leaders too.
The students having allegiance to ABVP, a RSS student wing, showed him black flags and shouted at him to go back and not provide political protection to anti-nationals. He asserted that “the most anti-national people are the people who are suppressing the voice of this great institution.”
Rahul was booed from one side and cheered from the other side as he asserted that “those muzzling the voices are anti-national.”
He also told those who had organised the protest meeting to ignore those showing black flags and continuously disrupting the meeting. “They have right to show black flags. But don”t let them bully you,” he declared.
“People who showed black flags on my face, I feel proud that in my country they have the right to show black flag,” he said.
He also referred to his Hyderabad visits and pointed out that even attempts were made to dub late Rohith as anti-national. He asked the students not to allow the BJP government and the RSS lackeys to muzzle the voice of dissent. “I was in Hyderabad a few days back and these same people or their leaders said that Rohith Vemula was an anti-national.”
Rahul had tweeted on Friday night that “Modi Govt & ABVP bullying an institution like JNU simply because it won”t toe their line is completely condemnable.”
To those booing him, he shouted that “anti-India sentiments are unquestionably unacceptable, but the right to dissent & debate is an essential ingredient of democracy and you can”t suppress it.”
Meanwhile, on the sidelines of a function here, Home Minister Rajnath Singh said the Left leaders had met him to protest against the arrest of JNU students union president and he told them that “no question of harassment of students, but the guilty will not be spared.”
Left leaders Yechuri and Raja and JD(U) general secretary K C Tyagi accused IIT professor M Jagdeesh Kumar who has just taken over as the JNU vice-chancellor of acting on the instructions of the government to give a go-ahead to police for a “crackdown.” “This is happening not only here but across all universities that VCs are being removed and the government is appointing persons who are then acting on their instructions,” Yechury said.
