Call for JNU’s VC to be removed after campus attacks

Angry students and teachers at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) are demanding the resignation of the university’s vice-chancellor (VC) over campus attacks by groups of armed men and women wearing face masks earlier this month.

Students claimed the police – who arrived only hours after the attack began – and the JNU administration “looked the other way” while the armed mob ran amok within the campus. Around 35 students and teachers were injured in the 5 January campus violence.

JNU Vice-Chancellor Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar did not meet students for three days after the incident, they said. Students even accused the university administration of being “hand in glove” with the attackers.

The JNU Students’ Union (JNUSU) blamed the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for the attack. ABVP denied being behind the violence.

But the vice-chancellor has suggested left-leaning students and the JNUSU may have been to blame, without actually naming them directly. On 11 January in his first meeting with students since the incident almost a week before, he said: “We also want the [police] investigation report to come and if the culprits are identified, I hope they will be punished.”

Jagadesh Kumar has also claimed that “many outsiders” were staying on campus illegally and could also have been involved in the violence.

Three days after the incident the central government finally asked the university administration to increase interaction with students. The Human Resource Development Ministry, which until then had remained unusually silent, asked the JNU administration to “make every possible attempt to ensure the university returns to normalcy”.

The five-member JNU committee is conducting an inquiry into security lapses on 5 January, the vice-chancellor said.

But dissatisfaction around his handling of such a major incident has been rife, with many students fearing that they cannot be safe on campus and holding the vice-chancellor accountable for events.

On 9 January, students, teachers and civil society organisations staged a protest march to the offices of the Human Resource Development Ministry, demanding the vice-chancellor’s removal and the withdrawal of student accommodation fee hikes that had sparked campus unrest at JNU for weeks from October.

The JNU Teachers’ Association President DK Lobiyal said: “Our main objective was to make the ministry aware that there couldn’t be peace in the university so long as Jagadesh Kumar remained in office. We demand his resignation.”

However, protesters did not reach the ministry offices as they were stopped en route by police.

No meeting with students in aftermath of attack

Sachidanand Sinha, professor at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development at JNU, said JNU’s head had played a negative role throughout. “He has not met students or discussed matters with them. The Human Resource Development Ministry also sent an advisory to the vice-chancellor to meet the agitating students, but he did not meet them or the student leaders at all.”

The vice-chancellor’s first meeting with students on 11 January was almost a week after the attack. However, no member of the JNUSU attended the meeting, according to the students’ union.

JNUSU has been firm in demanding the vice-chancellor’s removal for failing to protect the campus and students. The filing of a police complaint against students injured on 5 January, including JNUSU President Aishe Ghosh who suffered head injuries, proved the university administration’s “complicity” in the attack, it maintains. JNUSU says ABVP activists responsible for the violence are “being shielded” by the university.

Students are particularly upset at police cases against injured students after the university administration lodged a complaint against Ghosh and 19 other injured students for vandalising the server room in the JNU campus.

In a television interview with India Today TV news channel on 8 January, Jagadesh Kumar said JNU students who wanted to disrupt the university’s winter registration process over university accommodation fee hikes had damaged the university’s data centre, including its communication servers.

With the people who carried out the masked attack still unidentified, and – strikingly – no arrests by police so far, the vice-chancellor said campus closed circuit television (CCTV) footage would be provided to police, “but CCTV data is connected to the data centre and perhaps students deliberately damaged the data centre,” Jagadesh Kumar told India Today TV.

For confidence-building on campus “all such cases lodged by the vice-chancellor and police against one or the other…they all should be withdrawn”, Sinha said, stressing the 5 January attacks should be “properly investigated”.

“There cannot be fair and impartial investigation in the presence of the present vice-chancellor. So he should resign from his post,” Sinha said.

Sinha said he had “never seen such a disruption, never violence of this kind”.

“I was there when this episode took place on 5 January. I narrowly missed being hit by a stone that was thrown by one of the goons who had entered the campus. And if you go around, every student has an account of how people may have entered and they have the photographs.

“There are many other concerns. The students are angry over several issues like fee hikes, attacks on campus, police brutality and registration of cases against students who faced violence and all these issues are interrelated.”

Need to return to normal

During his 11 January meeting with students, Jagadesh Kumar focused on security and returning the campus to normalcy. He said CCTV cameras would be installed outside student accommodation for the safety and security of the hostels and he called for the return of the students who had fled the campus hostels in terror.

The vice-chancellor called for “a fresh beginning”, exhorting students to return to campus and “put the past behind” them, while asserting academic activities could not remain suspended “because of one isolated incident”.

Jagadesh Kumar said thousands of students are registering for the winter semester exams. “The JNU administration is very flexible and we are doing everything to facilitate the students. There is a conducive environment and I appeal to students to be back,” he said.

He has also tweeted: “Our heart goes out to all injured students. The incidence [violence] is unfortunate. I would like to tell students that JNU campus is a secure place.”

But he has failed to win the confidence of many JNU students and teachers, many on campus say.

JNU teachers said the call to return to normalcy was “adding insult to injury”. They could not teach nor could students study when they didn’t feel safe inside the campus, they said.

JNU Professor Sinha said: “The problem can’t be solved just by issuing circulars and notices.”.

“We have seen [other] vice-chancellors who readily met their students and sorted out the problems. Here we have a vice-chancellor who has never met the students’ union members during his four-year tenure so far. He would not meet them on one pretext or the other. But he will say his doors are always open.”

Jamia example

Many people, including students and academics, feel that the Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) Vice-Chancellor Najma Akhtar handled violence on the JMI campus on 15 December far better than has the JNU administration.

JMI students were attacked in mid-December when baton-wielding police entered the campus uninvited by the university authorities, beating students who were reportedly protesting against the country’s amended citizenship law.

Akhtar did a “marvellous job” protecting the JMI campus, Sinha said. “She openly asked why the police entered the campus without the permission of the university authorities. On the other hand, when goons entered the JNU campus, we started calling for police, but nothing happened and they [the police] waited for the university administration’s permission until such a time that the damage had already been done.”

India’s Human Resource Development Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal, curiously silent immediately after the 5 January incident, finally spoke out in a 14 January media interview, dismissing JNUSU’s allegation that the vice-chancellor had allowed the violence to take place.

“The violence in the university is between two student groups, one that wants to study and the other which doesn’t,” he said, referencing JNU administration’s own statement on 5 January, which described the violence as being between two opposing student factions.

So far there are no indications that Jagadesh Kumar will be removed from the helm of JNU. Pokhriyal this week backed him and denied there was a communication gap between the university administration and students, allowing grievances to fester.

JNU classes were set to resume from 13 January, but the JNU Teachers’ Association has so far refused to resume classes. The teachers said that there had been no clarification or conversation with the vice-chancellor and that they will be on an academic boycott until he is removed.

University World News Asia Editor Yojana Sharma contributed to this article.