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Signage with Savarkar’s name at JNU vandalised
New Delhi:
New Delhi:
Amid objections raised by Jawaharlal Nehru University students over naming of a road in the campus after Hindu leader Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the signage was vandalised on Tuesday—triggering a series of allegations between rival student groups.
Members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) on Tuesday alleged the Left-led students’ union defaced the signage around midnight and put up a Mohammad Ali Jinnah Marg poster.
The JNUSU denied the allegations. On Sunday, JNU students’ union (JNUSU) president Aishe Ghosh had termed the decision to rename the road outside Subansir hostel as a “shameful” move.
“We strongly condemn this act of the Left in defacing public property on the JNU campus. The campus had witnessed similar such defacing activity at the administration block during the struggle against the fee hike, which cost lakhs of rupees in cleaning and renovation,” said Shivam Chaurasia, president of ABVP’s JNU unit.
Reacting to the defacement, vice-chancellor M Jagadesh Kumar said, “In the last two years, several roads have been named after great personalities. But last night some miscreants indulged in defacing the road signage in our campus. This is highly regrettable. In an educational institution, one can disagree intellectually but stooping down to such acts is unwarranted.” He said the naming of different roads was approved by the Executive Council in November last year based on the recommendations of the campus development committee in 2016.
Blaming ABVP for the controversy, the JNUSU said, “The ABVP has crossed more levels of shamelessness and tried to malign JNU further by circulating morphed images of the road in the name of Jinnah. JNU believes in the ideals of Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar and not Savarkar as the ABVP does.”
Meanwhile, the students’ union also wrote to the vice-chancellor, asking the administration to halt the process of installing closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in hostels. “The administration is using the absence of students to install CCTVs in residential hostels, directly violating a 2017 High Court order that forbade the installation of CCTVs in residential areas on the campus,” JNUSU said.
Despite repeated requests, the VC did not comment on the CCTV issue.
