Opinion | In India, blood flows on Delhi’s JNU campus as Tiananmen Lite meets Democracy Lite
- Right-wing groups linked to Narendra Modi’s BJP have been blamed for a violent attack on students at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University
- Campus attack deepens fears of Modi’s creeping authoritarianism and spurs more protests nationwide against new citizenship law
Unlike the crackdown in Beijing three decades ago, however, it came without tanks or assault rifles. Instead, the state crackdown on dissenting students in the Indian capital hid itself in the anonymity of masked strangers wielding sticks, rods and sledgehammers.
The police did mass in large numbers at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, but only to allow the violence to continue for three hours as the 50-odd people with their faces covered went about attacking student activists and vandalising hostels and canteens. Videos doing the rounds on social media show the police escorting the group off the campus, helping them flee undetected.
Leftist student leaders and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a Hindu nationalist student organisation affiliated to Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), blamed each other for the attack. Thirty-four students and teachers were hospitalised. Most of the injured students were from the leftist groups that dominate the university’s student union. Videos showed Aishe Ghosh, president of the university’s student union, profusely bleeding from her head.
Teachers and students blamed right-wing groups for orchestrating the violence. Screenshots of WhatsApp messages showing ABVP leaders planning the “operation” have flooded social media. Street lights were turned off to enable them escape, deepening fears of collusion by the local administration. Some of the individual attackers have also been identified as ABVP cadre.
Ghosh later told the NDTV channel she had warned police that “unknown people were gathering at the campus” hours before the violence broke out, but they refused to act. Delhi police lawyer Rahul Mehra addressed a tweet to Delhi’s commissioner of police (CP) saying: “I, as Standing Counsel @DelhiPolice, hang my head in shame after witnessing video clips of goons merrily entering JNU campus, creating mayhem & grievously injuring innocent students, damaging public property and then exiting the campus in capital city. Where is our force @CPDelhi?”
