The All India People’s Forum condemns the police crackdown on Jawaharlal Nehru University students and the arrest of the students union leader Kanhaiya Kumar
Full text of the statement:
The All India people’s forum (AIPF) condemns in the strongest possible words the trampling of all democratic norms and rights in the JNU campus. This is a targeted attack on one of the bastions of open, left , liberal spaces of hope, of dissent, of democracy.
JNU has been converted in to a war zone with police encirclement and raids inside. Students are being targeted and the president of the JNUSU has been arrested and sent to three day judicial remand. The AIPF condemns this encirclement and brutalization of the right to democratic dissent.
While the giving up of life by Rohit Vemulla brought out the deep rooted societal, institutional bias and had put the BJP on the political backfoot, it has seized this “opportunity” to hit back with its pet project of defining who is pro- national by defining and targeting the ant-national.
The latent but simmering contest between two ideas of a nation , of a country, have been brought out into the open. This is the challenge which all left, liberal and democratic forces have to respond to.
The AIPF, while calling for the immediate release of the arrested student leader, immediate, unconditional withdrawal of police forces from the JNU campus, demands unconditional apology from the Home Ministry for sending police forces to carry out the project of the RSS-BJP-Hindutva.
The Government of India is not constitutionally mandated to carry out such ideological onslaughts using government machinery.
On behalf of the Campaign Committee of the AIPF,
Swapan Mukherjee, N.D. Pancholi, , Gautam Mody, Kavita Krishnan, John Dayal, , Ambarish Rai, Kiran Shaheen, Vidya Bhushan Rawat,Avijit, Prem Singh Gehlawat,Rafiq Mulla