New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union president Aishe Ghosh, who was brutally assaulted by masked thugs and was left bleeding on Sunday night after the rampage inside the university campus, filed a complaint with the Delhi Police on Wednesday with respect to the incident, alleging that "a mob conspired and acted with common intention to assault, intimidate and attempt to murder me." She requested that an FIR be registered and the culprits be apprehended at the earliest.
Ghosh, in her complaint at the Vasant Kunj (North) police station, said she had received information about students affiliated to the ABVP along with unidentified men and women who had gathered at Ganga bus stop with weapons. She added that she, along with Nikhil Mathew, an MA Labour Studies student, was at the spot when 20-30 people allegedly dragged her behind a car near the 24-7 and surrounded her. "Despite my pleading, they did not let me go and attacked me with rods while I had fallen down."
"I was attacked by the above-mentioned persons collectively and was hit on the head multiple times with iron rods. I fell to the ground and my head started bleeding, and some of them kicked me and hit me with the rod on my hand and rest of the body including my head, chest and back."
Ghosh added that Mathew tried to save her but was also attacked in the process by the unidentified people.
Meanwhile, JNU V-C Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar finally found the time to meet with officials of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, where he is said to have received a dressing-down by Higher Education Secretary Amit Khare. During the meeting, when the JNU V-C was asked why had he not informed the police soon after the violence, Kumar remained mum for a while and then gave lame excuses, including something like the attack on students was the outcome of a scuffle between two different groups. The police had received 46 PCR calls between 4 pm and 5 pm, yet the administration had given written permission to enter the campus only after 7:30 pm.
Kumar was immediately interrupted by Khare, who said that any sort of violence in the university will not be accepted and maintaining normalcy is the responsibility of the head of the varsity.
Khare also directed the JNU V-C to restore normalcy on campus at earliest by reaching out to students amid reports that he had not met them even once to resolve the fee-hike issue.
With the Delhi Police being blamed for alleged inaction, the Forensic Sciences Laboratory (FSL) here divided its JNU probe team into three separate parts to collect relevant evidentiary materials for the investigation. FSL officials have been visiting the campus on an off, especially the hostels where most of the violence was reported.
With more than three days having passed since the attacks, the Delhi Police has no arrest/s to show as government sources insisted that they had identified some of the culprits and will soon crack the case. The JNU administration, which lost no time to file a case with respect to alleged vandalism on January 3 and 4, is yet to lodge a complaint about Sunday's attack.
Expressing condemnation at the turn of events in JNU, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen said: "I'm appalled by what's going on." Sen, on the sidelines of the Infosys Prize 2019 in Bengaluru, stated: "That the establishment of the university can't prevent outsiders from coming in and creating such bloody violence within the campus. I'm also appalled that communication between the administration and the police would be so delayed that ill-treatment of students could go on for quite some time without being prevented by forces of law and order."
The rage against state machinery over the assault on students and faculty inside JNU also spread to Delhi University's St Stephen's College, a rarity for the varsity according to many alumni, where hundreds of students boycotted classes to stand up and register their protest against the alleged police inaction in JNU on Sunday evening and against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens.
Students and teachers marched in the North Campus on a wet and cold afternoon holding placards of "Students against fascism", raised slogans of "Azaadi" and read the Preamble to the Constitution.
The students' union of Delhi University's Hindu College unanimously decided to postpone its literary festival, scheduled to be held on January 9-10, to express solidarity with the students who have faced violence on their university campuses.
Moreover, a day after a video posted on a micro-blogging site went viral with claims of "Left students" violently assaulting a member of RSS-affiliated ABVP, a fact check has shown that the attacker in the video was, in fact, a member of the ABVP, while the person being assaulted was a member of AISA, both students at the School of International Studies, JNU.
Government-owned Prasar Bharti News Service had retweeted the video, claiming that "Left students" had attacked ABVP members and that this confirmed V-C Kumar's version of the events. The VC himself had retweeted the video but the fact-check found that the attacker was an ABVP member and that the VC had also appeared in photos with him on one occasion.
In fact, ABVP's Delhi Joint Secretary Anima Sonkar has also admitted that an ABVP member, identified as Vikas Patel, was one of the men seen brandishing a fibreglass baton, usually used by police personnel for lathicharges, in the hours leading up to the Sunday attack. She also confirmed that she was an administrator of one of the WhatsApp chat groups — Unity Against Left, where the assault can be seen purportedly being coordinated.
Sonkar claimed that they were asked to assemble in groups and arm themselves with weapons only in "self-defence".