Delhi police identify JNU students’ union president Aishe Ghosh, 8 other suspects in campus violence case

Aishe Ghosh, the student leader who was allegedly thrashed by masked hooligans on Sunday evening, was part of one of the groups that attacked students at Periyar hostel at about 3.45 pm, the police said.

Aishe Ghosh, the JNU students’ union president was named by Delhi Police as one of the nine suspects identified by them in connection with three criminal cases registered by the police.

Ghosh, the student leader who was allegedly thrashed by masked hooligans on Sunday evening, was part of one of the groups that attacked students at Periyar hostel at about 3.45 pm, the police said.

Joy Trikey, the deputy commissioner of police who heads the special team investigating the violence at JNU, said they would serve notices to the people identified so far on the basis of photographs and videos being circulated and explain what they were going there.

Watch | JNU violence: Delhi police identify injured JNUSU president, 8 other suspects

 

Ghosh promptly hit back at Delhi Police, describing the police attempt to pin the blame on them as an effort to build “a false narrative” for the ruling party.

“We are not afraid and we will not budge. False narrative being created,” she told reporters.

In a tweet minutes after the news briefing by the police, Union Minister Smriti Irani accused Left parties of involvement in the JNU violence. “Left design in JNU unmasked. They led mobs of mayhem, destroyed public property paid for by taxpayers, disallowed new students from being enrolled, used the campus as a political battleground,” she tweeted.

Trikey did not go into the political affiliation of the nine suspects but spelt out the Left groups that were part of the JNU students’ union. There was no answer to a question around links of any suspect to the ruling BJP-linked Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad.

A police officer said two of the nine suspects were from the ABVP. One of them has been identified as a PhD scholar in Sanskrit Yogendra Bharadwaj who was administrator for “Unity against Left”, one of the four-five WhatsApp groups created that day.

Trikey, who gave a broad sequence of events on Sunday evening, said after the 3.45 pm attack on students at Periyar, a peace meeting was held at Sabarmati T-point attended by teachers and students at about 7 pm.

While this meeting was still on, a group of people came and first got into an altercation with people at this meeting and later entered Sabarmati hostel and attacked students.

Like the attack that had taken place earlier in the day at Periyar hostel, this group at Sabarmati hostel also targeted specific rooms, said Trikey. This implied that JNU students were part of this group of masked attackers.

“They knew which rooms to go to,” Trikey said that he had been to the campus a couple of times and would still forget the way around the sprawling campus.