India: BJP-backed student union unleashes violence at Delhi University
By
Pradeep Ramanayake
8 March 2017
At university campuses across India there has been an outpouring of anger and opposition against the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad’s use of intimidation and violence to silence students at Delhi University who are critical of the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government and its noxious Hindu supremacist ideology.
The ABVP (ABVP or All Indian Student Council) is the student organization of the fascistic Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is itself the ideological mentor of the BJP and the training ground for much of its cadre.
The ABVP’s attack on left-wing students at Delhi University’s North Campus is only the most recent episode in a concerted, government-supported campaign to stamp out political dissent and freedom of expression at India’s universities.
The ABVP prevented Delhi University’s Ramjas College Literary Society from holding a two-day “Culture of Protest” seminar, scheduled for February 21-22.
The BJP-aligned student group denounced the participation in the seminar of two Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students, Umar Khalid and Shehla Rashid, who are activists in the All India Student Federation (AISF), the student wing of the Stalinist Communist Party of India (CPI).
Bowing to ABVP pressure and in the purported name of “keeping peace and harmony” at Delhi University’s North Campus, the principal of Ramjas College cancelled Khalid’s and Rashid’s participation in the seminar. This only emboldened the ABVP. Its activists cut the power supply and locked down the venue of the seminar so as to ensure that it could not go ahead.
The ABVP had branded the JNU students Khalid and Rashid as…