Bharatiya Janata Party leaders and Union ministers Smriti Irani and Prakash Javadekar on Friday cited the Delhi Police statement naming nine students for the violence in JNU last week as proof that Left parties had organised the attacks.
The Delhi Police named Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union President Aishe Ghosh, Chunchun Kumar, Pankaj Mishra, Waskar Vijay, Sucheta Talukraj, Priya Ranjan, Dolan Sawant, Yogendra Bhardwaj and Vikas Patel as suspects in the attack on a students hostel. Seven of these people were from the Left-backed All India Students Association and two from the RSS-backed Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad.
“Left design in JNU unmasked,” Irani said in a tweet. She claimed that Left-led organisations “led mobs of mayhem, destroyed public property paid for by taxpayers, disallowed new students from being enrolled, used the campus as a political battleground”
Javadekar claimed that the ABVP and the BJP were unnecessarily blamed for the past five days. “Malafide campaign launched to defame ABVP but Delhi Police cleared picture,” he said, according to ANI.
“Today’s police press conference established that for the last 5 days, the chorus that was created deliberately to blame ABVP, BJP and others, wasn’t true,” he said. “It is the left organisations that pre-planned violence, disabled CCTV and destroyed server.”
Javadekar added that JNU students must end their protests and allow academic sessions to begin. “Parties like CPI, CPI-M, AAP have been rejected in LS polls; they are now using students for their vested interests,” he added, according to The Indian Express.
Other BJP leaders such as Amit Malviya also claimed that the Left had perpetuated the violence and used the hashtag #LeftBehindJNUViolence on Twitter.
For nearly three months, many JNU students have been protesting against the decision of the administration to increase hostel fees. The protests had gathered momentum in the days before the attacks as the registration process for the winter semester began.
Crime Branch DCP Joy Tirkey claimed that last week’s violence began because the JNU Students’ Union, Students Front of India, All India Students Federation, All India Students Association and Democratic Students Federation were against the university’s decision to begin online registration of students for winter semester from January 1 to January 5.
On Sunday, the Delhi Police had filed two FIRs against Ghosh and several others based on the events that had taken place between January 1 and 4 based on complaints lodged by the JNU administration. These were registered while a mob attack was underway at JNU on Sunday.
The administration has alleged that a group of students on January 1 had entered the Communications and Information Services Centre and switched off the power supply after evicting the staff. On January 4, the administration alleged, students agitating over the hostel fee revision ransacked the server room and intimidated technical staff to hamper the semester registration process. While the FIR related to the alleged incident on January 1 named eight students, the one filed in connection with the January 4 incident has names of 20 students.
The university has claimed that Sunday’s violence was linked to the attack on the servers. The police have filed an FIR in connection with Sunday’s violence as well. But no one has been identified in this connection yet. 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.
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