FEDCUTA Press Release on AMU Incident, 14.02.2019

The attack on students by the current government and their political activists continues unabated since the killing of Rohit Vemula and Feb 2016 incident in JNU. In Uttar Pradesh a combination of lawlessness and the Hindutva ideology is producing brutal consequences for the Youth. Numerous incidents have come to light in Western Uttar Pradesh, since the new government has come to power, where the youth from specific caste and religious backgrounds are being killed, targeted and hounded with the active partnership of the state police. Latest incident in this list is that of 14 students of Aligarh Muslim University have been booked under sedition on March 12, 2019. They have been booked after so called clashes that followed a confrontation of students with a journalist from a news channel Republic TV.

The manner and hurriedness with which the case has been registered shows that the case has been registered for political ends. Case has been registered on a complaint filed by Mukesh Singh Lodhi, district president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s youth wing who claimed he was driving past the campus just as the clash was taking place. Lodhi said he heard the students shout “Pakistan zindabad, Bharat murdabad”. The other complaint by Republic TV has also got immediate attention of the police and case has been registered without any detailed investigation.  Police have so far ignored the complaint filed by the AMU students and the AMU administration. Among the 14 students booked are the AMU students’ union president M Salman Imtiaz and his predecessor Mashkoor Ahmad Usmani. Imtiaz has denied raising any such slogans and Usmani claims he was not in Aligarh on the date of the incident.

What exactly happened on the campus is contested but when it comes to sedition, the script is painfully familiar. The sedition law was made by the British Raj to suppress voices inimical to their rule. It was retained in modern India, and used as a political tool by successive governments. In Aligarh, for one, suggesting that the students were trying to overthrow the Indian government – which is what is implied by sedition – would be absurd. It is clear that the BJP government to prepare the ground for the upcoming general election by simply using the sedition law.

FEDCUTA demands that the political misuse of higher educational institutions is immediately stopped and the state police be taken to task for registering cases without due diligence. FEDCUTA condemns the misuse of higher educational institutions and destruction of future of young India for narrow political ends of the Hindu right and demands immediate withdrawal of these cases on the students of AMU.