Day after attacks, 'WhatsApp groups' go dead

New Delhi: After the violent assault on students and teachers inside the Jawaharlal Nehru University on Sunday night, the WhatsApp chat groups, which showed an organised and planned attack on JNU students, started seeing mass migrations as members of these groups started abandoning the chat groups on Monday morning and several of them rushed to switch off their mobile phones in order to save themselves from being implicated in the case.

At least two such chat groups have been identified where the attacks inside the JNU campus were allegedly planned and organised –Friends of RSS and Unity Against Left. The second group was created by Yogender Shaurya Bhardwaj, identified as a student in JNU's Sanskrit department. After creating the group, Bhardwaj can be seen posting a link to join it on the Friends of RSS chat group.

Bhardwaj's phone has been switched off since Monday morning but several people who were operating as admin in the Unity Against Left WhatsApp group confirmed that Bhardwaj had started the group. Bhardwaj has deactivated his social media accounts but his Twitter identified him as an ABVP member.

As the Delhi Police waited for permission to enter the campus on Sunday evening and masked men continued to beat students inside the campus as per their claims, the Friends of RSS WhatsApp group saw a traffic of messages that suggested coordinated attempts to get ABVP supporters with intent to create violence inside the JNU premises.

Bhardwaj had messaged in the group that they must unite against "left terror" and added, "Ab pakadkrin logo ko mar lagni Chahiye". He then said, "Bas ek hi dawa hai." To this, a phone number identified as belonging to an ABVP member, Vikas Patel, whose phone has been switched off since Monday morning, asked people in the group to get DU students to enter from the Khajan Singh swimming side. He then added, "Hum log yaha 25-30 log hain".

Another person in the Friends of RSS group, whose name was saved as 'Sandeep Singh JNU ABVP', said that Mall Gate is also open for students to enter to which Bhardwaj replied that the ICSSR side entry is also open for them. The phone numbers of several other members of these groups were switched off since Monday morning. Sandeep Singh is a PhD student at JNU. However, Millennium Post was able to reach at least one member of the Friends of RSS chat group, who categorically denied being part of the group. When confronted with his phone number being in the group he said that he was added to the group but then immediately left it.

Another member of the Unity Against Left chat group claimed that he was part of the group as someone else had added him and made him an administrator. But he left the group soon. None of them disclosed when they left the group when asked.

Another administrator of the Unity Against Left chat group agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity and said that the group was in fact created on Sunday evening and he was made an administrator. Without getting into details, he said that the group was created to "coordinate support for our cause". This admin, who is an ABVP member said that he left the group soon. Delhi Police has said their probe in the Sunday night violence will also include the angle of probing WhatsApp groups that seemed to prop up in the hours before the clashes broke out.

Police said during such incidents various WhatsApp groups are created and members circulate the link to their contacts who then forward it to their networks, because of which screenshots from the chat groups are easily circulated to a large number of people.