AISA along with other student organizations staged a massive protest on the first day of a ‘seminar’ organised by Arundhati Vashishtha Anusandhan Peeth (AVAP) on the issue of ‘Ramjanmbhoomi’. Around 700 students from different organizations joined together in front of the Arts Faculty which was heavily policed and was almost turned to a police cantonment with armed forces covering the way to the seminar hall. The policemen even used force to keep the students intact inside the barricades. It was shameful that barricading and deployment of the armed forces were done not to protect the defenders of secularism and the University’s autonomy but rather to protect the hate mongers sitting inside the conference hall seeking to divide the country and provoke violence in the name of ‘Ram Mandir’.
AISA condemned the manner in which DU gave permission for this communally provocative ‘seminar,’ while on many occasions it has refused permission for seminars or discussions organised by student groups. This is an instance of state power being used to impose communal ideas on academic spaces. A large number of students and teachers had demanded the cancellation of the event, pointing out that a University should not play host to communal politics, and also pointing out that the event was not a ‘seminar’ in any academic sense.
Sucheta De, National President of AISA said, “this is not only the case with DU but rather we can see a systematic pattern in which the government is destroying the academic institutions. It was couple of months back when we saw that Yogi Adityanath was invited to Allahabad University and then we saw JNU giving invitation to Baba Ramdev for a conference. One may wonder what these non academic people have to do with the academic talks”.
“Now with the assembly elections due in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal in the coming year, we can sense a clear conspiracy of polarizing the students on communal lines and this is how they have done it in the past. We will, with all our might, resist any attempt by the Sangh Parivar to saffronize educational institutions and communalise the students.”
