Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Sunday once again spoke up about the uproar that had been caused after police arrested students of New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. After saying a few days earlier that those who raise anti-national slogans will "not be spared," Singh went even further. He told the media that Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed supported the incident at JNU, adding that this was unfortunate.
Singh also made the expected noises about asking political parties to come together and condemn those raising antinational slogans, while asking police to take strict action against the guilty without harassing the innocent.
The home minister would do well to realise that even the JNU students accused of shouting about the destruction of India were not technically doing anything illegal and moreover that the Delhi Police appears to now be detaining people simply because they "look like JNU students".
But that aside, Singh's statement about Saeed's alleged support to the protests was most intriguing. It might seem to make sense – the people at the protest on Tuesday are accused of calling for Kashmir to be freed and for India to be broken apart, causes that Saeed and the LeT espouse. But Saeed is also the head of a terror outfit whose modus operandi involves sending attackers across the Pakistani border, not sending students to a Leftist university.
It was unclear where the home minister got his information from, although it wasn't entirely new information for those who have been paying attention online. That's because Delhi Police had a few days earlier tweeted something similar.
That tweet got thousands of retweets, but there seemed to be a bit of a problem. First of all, no one could confirm that the account in question, HafeezSaeedJUD was in fact run by the LeT chief. Earlier reports for example had suggested that Saeed's Twitter account was HafizSaeedJUD, which, after being suspended returned to Twitter as HafizSaeedJUD1, an account that was also suspended since. The one quoted by the Delhi Police has not been suspended, but was deactivated and is no longer available.
In fact, the Delhi Police tweet also doesn't claim that the LeT is supporting the JNU protests. Instead, the police simply cautioned people against getting carried away by "seditious anti-national rhetoric". Nevertheless, some journalists seem to have concluded that this is equivalent to the LeT supporting not just the incident at JNU, but also the protests against the heavy-handed police response to it since.
Reports came out suggesting that Saeed backs the "JNU students" and wanted a particular hashtag to trend on Twitter. Twitter users of course quickly pointed out that the first person to have used that trend, was in fact, the journalist in question.
Indeed, ever since, almost everyone using that hashtag happened to actually be people in India condeming its use or pointing out the absurdity of the situation.
From that initial spurt of information, Rajnath Singh now seems to have added his voice to those who claim that Saeed somehow supports the JNU incident and even the protests in the aftermath of police action.
Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Sitaram Yechury however was unconvinced. He tweeted, after Singh's revelation, of having met the home minister the day before with no reference to any Pakistani involvement during that interaction.
Other leaders have also chimed in, regarding Singh's suggestion that the real cause behind the JNU incident had something to do with Pakistan.
And, as might be expected, the rest of twitter was also happy to chime in.
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