Students of Jyoti Nivas College in Bengaluru on Wednesday alleged that a group of men claiming to be Bharatiya Janata Party workers threatened a JNU-style attack on them if they refused to sign a poster supporting the Citizenship Amendment Act, Deccan Herald reported.
The suspected BJP activists heckled the students. This was followed by heated arguments, according to videos on social media. “A team of BJP activists had put up a poster outside our college and were forcing us to sign on the poster and help them gain support for CAA,” said a student.
Some videos also showed the suspected BJP workers shouting slogans in support of the citizenship law. The students claimed they were told that they were not Indians and should go back to Pakistan if they did not support the law. “You are not concerned about citizenship, you are concerned about yourself… you are not Indians,” a man was heard telling them.
The matter was resolved after some police personnel intervened. “It was later sorted out with the intervention of security personnel and police,” a faculty member told Deccan Herald. “Later on, police were also posted outside the campus and the college has nothing to do with that.”
A professor at Jyoti Nivas told The News Minute: “Thankfully, there was no major physical confrontation as a lot of people in the street had gathered by then. But as seen in the video, there were a lot of personal comments made by the BJP workers against our students.”
The suspected BJP workers called the students uneducated and anti-national, the professor said. “Noting some students were Muslims, they asked them to go to Pakistan and other forms of personal attack,” she added. “Thinking of the safety issues, we had to ask the students to leave.”
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. Of these, 19 died in Uttar Pradesh, five in Assam and two in Karnataka. The Bijnor Police in Uttar Pradesh were also accused of detaining and torturing minors.
JNU attack
A mob – allegedly comprising Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad members armed with sticks and hammers – attacked students and teachers of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi on Sunday evening, injuring at least 34 people. The outfit is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s student wing.
Later, a group of right-wing activists sloganeering outside the university’s main gate heckled, abused and threatened several journalists who were reporting on the violence. Several eye-witness accounts and videos indicated that in most places, police personnel present at JNU did almost nothing to stop the violence, and, in fact, allowed the attackers to exit the university without apprehending them.
Members of the ABVP have blamed the violence on “Naxals” and leftist students. However, Scroll.in traced Whatsapp messages planning the attack – as well as celebrating it – to the Hindutva organisation’s activists.
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