TCN News
The current lockdown enforced due to COVID-19 pandemic is conveniently being used by the government to crush dissent, said the student leaders and activists during an online press conference over Zoom.
The online presser was organized by student leaders to condemn the witch-hunt of student activists involved in anti-CAA protests
Due to the COVID-19 lockdown, the virtual conference was initiated as a discussion forum to create awareness against youth leaders being falsely charged by the Delhi police for inciting violence in northeast Delhi riots. It saw prominent youth voices like Kanhaiya Kumar, Jignesh Mevani and Umar Khalid, address the arbitrary arrests of Khalid Saifi, Ishrat Jahan Safoora Zarghar, Meeran Haidar, Gulifsha Fatima, Asif Iqbal, Shifa-Ur-Rehman and most recently the arrests of Pinjra Tod members Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita.
“The government is killing two birds with one stone,” said Kanhaiya Kumar from CPI. He said that the government always tries to “create an internal enemy to distract people from their problems” and as of now, it has been painting Muslim activists as enemies of state so they can push their two-sided agenda of “political vendetta against activists who were in the forefront of anti-CAA struggle and by doing so they would be sending out a larger message of intimidation to everyone else with the threat of incarceration.”
Kanhaiya said the motive of arresting them is that these are not ordinary students but responsible citizens who were raising important questions on government’s failure regarding education, employment and livelihood but the government, to hide its inefficiency, started demonizing them to cover its own non-performance since it came to power.
N Sai Balaji, National President of AISA, reiterated Kumar’s view and said that the government was trying to show Muslims in a bad light, and the action of Delhi Police through these arrests only reflected that police had been “following a script that was drafted by the likes of Monika Arora who contested DUSU elections from ABVP .” He added that similar patterns of vilification have happened before by leaders having an RSS affiliation.
“This is not an investigation of a conspiracy, but this investigation itself is a conspiracy,” stated Jignesh Mevani, independent MLA from Gujarat. He highlighted that the BJP is engrossed in its campaign of “worst kind of vendetta politics” and the master plan originally got insinuated by “political masters from BJP” while the lockdown is actually being used conveniently to crush dissent as can be seen in the cases of Akhil Gogoi, Anand Teltumbde and Gautam Navlakha.
Many student leaders from AMU, MANUU and Jamia, namely Salman Imtiyaz (President, AMUSU), Umar Farooq (President MANUU), Ayesha Renna (student leader from Jamia), Fawaz Shaheen (National Secretary, SIO) were seen engaging in the conference along with the key speakers.
Salman Imtiyaz from AMU, speaking on the current round of arrests of AMU and Jamia students, said that this is in reality “an attack on the minority character and reservation in Jamia,” and no different than the constant attack and demonization of JNU because of its secular character. He said the same was being extended elsewhere, by stopping the funding of MANUU, and in fact, the whole agenda has been in operation since “the attacks on students coming from marginalized sections like Rohith Vemula and Najeeb Ahmed.”
Fawaz Shaheen from SIO outlined that “if the charges made by Delhi Police against all students are tested on the basis of the evidence they will prove to be completely false.” Extending solidarity from the student leaders and activists community to the young student community being hounded by the police, he said that the government has been “unable to digest the fact that their unconstitutional citizenship law was met by spontaneous protests from citizens all over the country, collectively led by women and students.”
“It was this that has bothered the government from the beginning and therefore the authorities are trying to create discredit to protests targeting students, particularly Muslims,” he said.
Highlighting the ongoing intimidation through threats and calls to students during the lockdown, Ayesha Renna said that all of these “activities of the police are on expected lines.” She challenged that the police must stop the vilification of students of Jamia and assured that “once the lockdown ends we will come out in protest against such blatant abuse of power.”