Letters to BS: Attack on JNU students a manifest failure of Hindutva

The brutal attacks on Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students and teachers by masked goons armed with lethal weapons, in collusion with the JNU administration and the Delhi police, appalled the public. What was going on in the JNU campus was a nightmare. The image of JNU student’s union President Aishe Ghosh bleeding profusely from a gash on her head was no advertisement for Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao campaign.

When Ghosh and other students were attacked, it needed no great intelligence or exertion of the mind to know the identity of the “masked goons”. It is futile to try to shift the blame to the Left-leaning students when they were the victims of mob attack at the JNU. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parisha’s grouse was that the Left “ruined the JNU campus and turned it into a Naxal citadel. The Hindu Right hates JNU for being a bulwark against virulent nationalism and would not mind its shutdown.

The pre-planned cowardly attack on JNU students and teachers was a corollary to the manifest failure of the Hindutva forces to fight them ideologically. It was a sequel to the students’ just protest against fee hike and their campaign to save the Constitution and their solidarity with the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protesters. Fracturing the skulls of young compatriots on a university campus with iron rods, albeit to the accompaniment of chants of Bharat Mata Ki Jai and Jai Shri Ram, cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be glorified as an act of patriotism. Thrashing professors by members of a party’s students’ wing is at odds with the guru-shishya parampara (teacher-disciple tradition).

The JNU administration and the Delhi police would never be able to live down the way they allowed the thugs to go on the rampage and “vent their anger” for hours on end but for the tacit approval of the higher-ups in the university and the Modi government. 

G David Milton  Maruthancode

Letters can be mailed, faxed or e-mailed to: 

The Editor, Business Standard

Nehru House, 4 Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg 

New Delhi 110 002 

Fax: (011) 23720201  ·  

E-mail: letters@bsmail.in

All letters must have a postal address and telephone number