'Cops allowed ABVP members to go on rampage, allowed thuggery of state'

The "Cultures of Protest" event never took place because of the intervention of the BJP student wing — ABVP. However, Delhi University on Thursday displayed their culture of protest because of the incompetent handling of the Wednesday's Maurice Nagar police station incident in which scores of students and scribes were brutally thrashed by the police and ABVP cadres.

Protesters numbering in hundreds had gathered around the Police Headquarters in ITO chanting slogans against the Delhi Police and ABVP and assailed the alleged police complicity in allowing the ABVP cadre to go on a rampage, which the protestors had labelled 'Thuggery of the State'.

The students from universities across the Capital — Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Ambedkar University, Jamia Millia Islamia University and IP University had rushed in from all quarters of the Capital and reached ITO Metro Station.

The police, anticipating the move, and to avoid the embarrassing rerun of violence reminiscent of the Patiala House Court attack, had erected multiple barricades in a bid to curtail the protesters from spilling onto the streets.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (Central) Mandeep Singh Randhawa, had taken up position behind a barricade, flanked by several policemen in riot gear. The protestors came, armed with placards of a wide pallet of colours, which read "ABVP Beware!" "Delhi Police stop protecting ABVP" and "Your nationalism is not above our Democracy".

The Delhi University students, post the JNU February 9 incident, had quietly withdrawn into passive actors, however, the riot like situation created by hooligans pelting bricks had energised the cadre from various colleges, yet many of them did not claim that the protest was spearheaded by a single political party and criticised the media for drawing binaries between the Left and Right.

"Hooliganism used to be witnessed in campuses during the elections, but this kind of violence was never seen in my three years in college, and that is why I came out here. No student political party is speaking on our behalf; we don't want to turn this into AISA vs. ABVP and drift from the agenda," said Arandhna, a student from Miranda House College.

And the agenda was followed with a single-minded purpose of registering an FIR against the perpetrators of the incident, the arrest of ABVP members behind the incident, and finally a public hearing of the complaints via a public facilitation desk — the brainchild of SBK Singh, Special Commissioner (Law and Order), North Zone.

However, SBK Singh had quite an irate public at his hand whose grievances he tried to hear over a loudspeaker as he and Mandeep Singh Randhawa, negotiated with the protesters through the barricade.

The negotiations began in the afternoon after the protestors started to make their demands; Singh and Randhawa merely passed the buck to an official procedure and claimed that the demand of registering a fresh FIR was out of the question as multiple FIRs can't be registered for a single incident.

The protestors booed the duo and started to shout slogans at them. "We will hear all your grievances. We will take all your complaints into considerations and will use that in the investigation," said SBK Singh. The senior police officials later sought counsel inside the PHQ as they charted out a future course of action while the protestors waited outside making their strategy and talking to senior lawyers from the Supreme Court.

As the evening drew to a close, the protestors were promised by the senior police officials that a new FIR would be filed. The police had already transferred the case to Crime Branch and shrugged themselves of the ire of the protestors asking them to the concerned officers.

A contingent of teachers reached the Police Headquarters for deliberations while the students, tired with the day's exhaustion, kept the momentum going.

The teachers returned and told the students, that the police will not register an FIR in their case. Many of them too tired of protesting, focused on the next course of action, which was going to court.