Would have intervened 'at any appropriate time': Ex-police chief

New Delhi: Former Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar said on Sunday that he would have sought relevant intelligence and intervened "at any appropriate time" to prevent the situation at Jawaharlal Nehru University last Sunday from getting worse if he had been in command of the force.

"I would have pressed my special branch into service and asked it to develop intelligence and at any appropriate time, I would have intervened and prevented the incident from happening and no one could have faulted me for that," he said.

This comes a week after a masked mob of men and women entered the varsity's campus on January 5 and ran riot, beating up students and faculty with iron rods and sticks as the Delhi Police waited for written permission from the JNU administration to intervene in the matter. Around 30 students and two faculty were injured in the attacks.

"The administration kept seeing the situation and that was wrong. Police could have acted even without VC's request," Kumar said, adding that the special branch and local police, which was aware of the events of the few days before the attacks should have foreseen this based on their own reports.

He also said the "goons who came to JNU belonged to a certain party" and perhaps whatever reservations the police had, it was on account of that. Calling the perception that police should go in only on the request of the VC "fallacious", he said if a crime has been committed within the premises of a university there is nothing to stop police.

However, he confessed that in law order situations like this, only on-ground officers know what happened. "It is easy to analyse based on incomplete information. This is a very peculiar situation –that the police intervened in a proactive way in Jamia and they were damned in JNU because they said they were not called in. So the police is [sic] damned in any case," he said, adding that the police did end up using excessive measures at Jamia which were not called for.

Kumar was Delhi Police Commissioner in 2012 when the Nirbhaya case had come to light and protests had erupted all over the Capital.