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JNU Protesters Worse Than Prostitutes: Haryana BJP Leader
NEW DELHI: As students, teachers, alumni and others gather peacefully to protest against the police crackdown on Jawaharlal Nehru University, Haryana BJP leader Jawahar Yadav took to micro-blogging site Twitter to compare women protesters at the university to “prostitutes.”
Yadav, who until recently was the officer on special duty to Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, tweeted: “ For the girls who are protesting in JNU, I only have one thing to say that prostitutes who sell their body are better than them because they atleast don't sell their country".
The BJP leader retracted his tweet a few hours later, issuing a foot-in-the-mouth clarification that said “ "No girl has been compared to any prostitute in my previous tweet. Instead I meant that the girls who are forced to enter prostitution are rather better than the girls who were protesting in JNU and raising anti-India slogans, Pakistan Zindabad slogans. The daughters and sisters who are forced to sell their body are better than the girls who were demanding the freedom of Kashmir and Kerala and shouting that their fight will continue till India is destroyed."
Yadav’s tweets come in response to protests at JNU campus, after the police moved in to arrest students in connection with an event on campus held to mark the death anniversary of Afzal Guru. Home Minister Rajnath Singh warned of “stringent action” against the organisers of the protest. “Anyone who raises anti-India slogans or tries to put a question mark on nation’s unity and integrity will not be spared,” he said. Education Minister Smriti Irani said: “The nation can never tolerate any insult to mother India.”
At the behest of the ABVP, police moved in and arrested JNU students, including JNU Students Union President Kanhaiya Kumar on grounds of sedition and criminal conspiracy. Students protesting at the university maintain that the slogans were shouted by “outsiders” and had been denounced by the students union.
Further, students and those supporting them at JNU, including teachers, staff, alumni, civil society and the people at large, have questioned why the government felt the need to take such stringent action; as if; the government was waiting for an act of this intensity to happen, so that its occurrence could be highly escalated to preserve the right-wing rhetoric of the country. “The current government is systematically targeting the educational institutions, be it the Rohith Vemula’s case or #ShutDownJNU slogan, creating a left ‘other’ that needs to be loathed, unheard and unseen, forcibly made invisible from the contours of political dialectics,” says JNU doctoral student Shubhda Chaudhary.
The crackdown is being equated within the larger context of the centre’s interference in government institutions, with recent examples being the controversy over the Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle at IIT Madras, objection of a film screening at IIT Delhi, and the unrest at FTII, Pune, in addition to the suicide of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad.
Thousands have come out to join the protests in JNU, all peaceful, as hashtags #SaveJNU and #StandWithJNU trend. Below are some photos from recent protests at the campus.
