On Wednesday the former ABVP student leader Pradeep Narwal, who resigned from the BJP's student wing following the JNU fracas, addressed a gathering of protesters at Delhi's Mandi House area.
"Saathiyo kal tak main ABVP mein tha, aaj main yaha khada hoon." (I was in the ABVP till yesterday, today I am here.)
"Some days ago", he says, "there was a stall in JNU inviting questions for Smriti Irani. I had asked 'What's your educational qualification, please clarify'. Maybe I was asking questions from the wrong platform then, and am at the right one now."
Referring to news reports of four MPs from the Bharatiya Janata Party calling for death to India's Muslims he says, "If your nationalism doesn't include India's twenty crore Muslims then I don't believe in your nationalism."
Narwal continues: "Gyan Dev Ahuja, BJP's MLA from Rajasthan says 3000 condoms are found in JNU. What sort of a comment is this? If your nationalism doesn't include respect for women, for our comrades, then I don't accept that nationalism."
"It happened in Gujarat in 2002, now it's happened in Haryana. I am from Haryana. Call it political polarisation, call it whatever. I am very sad at what happened in Haryana, people have died and they are in fear now, so I want to ask the government what it did in Haryana. For their own political advantage they polarised people, which makes them the most anti-national."
"Friends, these days people kill people in the name of the flag so the most anti-national are these people."
"We are all standing up for the nation, against this mob, against this Talibani culture."
"One last thing I'd like to say, JNU doesn't stand for fascist nationalism, we stand for pluralism."
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