Bharatiya Janata Party’s West Bengal unit chief Dilip Ghosh on Tuesday said that Sunday’s mob attack on Jawaharlal Nehru University students was a “staged incident”, IANS reported. The remarks came a day after Ghosh proclaimed that Communists in the country getting assaulted in the country perhaps “deserve it”.
“It has now come to light that the JNU incident is staged,” Ghosh alleged. “How could outsiders enter the university with faces covered, and zero in on ABVP members to beat them up. Then they seemingly disappeared. They must have removed their face cover and mingled among students.”
He further alleged that the students who had brought in the masked assailants may have hidden them. The BJP leader also wondered whether Jawaharlal Nehru Students’ Union President Aishe Ghosh’s head injury was real. “One person was allegedly hit on the head,” he said. “It is still to be tested whether it is blood or some colour on her head.”
The BJP leader alleged that Aishe Ghosh may have orchestrated the violence in the university campus with help from miscreants. Dilip Ghosh said that there was an attempt to create turmoil in the country over the violence in JNU, and that it showed that Communists and other Opposition leaders were suffering from existential crisis.
The Delhi Police registered two first information reports against Ghosh and 26 other students for allegedly vandalising the server room and attacking security guards to disrupt registration of students for the winter semester. The vandalism was allegedly carried out as part of a protest against the fee hike on January 1 and January 4 – before Sunday’s violence on campus, in which Ghosh and 33 others were injured in a mob attack.
The FIRs, based on complaints by the university administration, were filed around 8.35 pm on Sunday, when the mob attack on the campus was under way. It has been alleged that activists of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, were responsible for the attack.
‘NRC will be implemented in Bengal’
Dilip Ghosh on Tuesday also spoke about implementing the National Register of Citizens in West Bengal. “NRC will be implemented in Bengal,” he said, according to Mumbai Mirror. “I don’t know when but NRC will definitely be implemented here. We want NRC in Bengal after Assam because there are highest number of infiltrators from Bangladesh to Bengal.” The NRC is a proposed nationwide exercise to identify undocumented migrants.
The BJP state unit chief claimed there were 20,000 prisoners, arrested under the Foreigner’s Act, in West Bengal jails. He added that Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee should offer them citizenship instead of saying “amra shobai nagorik [we are citizens] during protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act.
The Citizenship Amendment Act, approved by Parliament on December 11, provides citizenship to refugees from six minority religious communities from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, provided they have lived in India for six years and entered the country by December 31, 2014. The Act has been widely criticised for excluding Muslims. At least 26 people died in last month’s protests against the citizenship law.
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