JNU row, Rohith Vemula incidents not isolated: Yechury

The police action against JNU students and the conditions leading to Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula's suicide are not isolated incidents, but part of a larger project to change India into a "Hindu Rashtra", CPI-M general secretary Sitaram Yechury said on Thursday.

"What happened in JNU is not matter restricted to only one university. You have seen what happened in Pune, Allahabad, Jadavpur, various places," Yechury said, participating in the ongoing debate in the Rajya Sabha on unrest in universities.

He said there was interference in the order which was not sanctioned by law, demanding a house committee be set up to go into "all these issues."

"You will see an effort in the field of education and higher education in general of what I would describe as an effort to replace Indian history with mythology, to replace the rich philosophy by Hindu theology. This is the larger project at work." said Yechury.

"This is the project the government is patronising. The project of metamorphosing India's secular democratic republic into what they call a Hindu Rashtra. This is an attack on Indian constitution," said the leader of the Communist Party of India-Marxist.