‘JNU attack was a fascist surgical strike’: Mamata Banerjee

Banerjee also appealed to the student community to fight together against the government. “We are all with the student community,” she said.

Condemning the attack on students and teachers of the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi on Sunday, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee said it was a ‘fascist surgical strike’.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has called the attack at JNU a ‘fascist surgical strike’. (PTI PHOTO.)

“I started my career as a student leader. I know student politics very well. It is very disturbing and is an attack on democracy. Nowadays, I have seen how they are torturing the students and even professors are not being spared. It is a fascist surgical strike,” Banerjee said on Monday.

Banerjee also appealed to the student community to fight together against the government. “We are all with the student community,” she said.

At a time when the attack in JNU by masked men is being criticized across the country and allegations have surfaced that it was orchestrated by members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), Dilip Ghosh president of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s West Bengal unit blamed the ‘communists’ for initiating such attacks in educational institutions and said that “accounts are being set straight”.

ABVP, however, alleged that it was the “cadres of the Students Federation of India who used to chase and beat college students. The youth wing supporters of both the Trinamool Congress and the Congress were beaten up. Now accounts are being settled,” said Ghosh.

Blaming the SFI – the students’ wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – Ghosh said that it was the SFI and the communists who introduced such fights in educational institutions and now they are being beaten up.

“It is a fact that now communists are being beaten up across the country. They deserve it because of the treatment they had meted out earlier. Educational institutions are not places where you fight. But who started it? The communists and the SFI started it. Except for colleges in Tripura, West Bengal and Kerala, we never heard of any incidents,” he said.

Lashing out at Ghosh, CPI(M) politburo member Md Salim, condemned Ghosh’s statements and said: “The less the likes of Dilip Ghosh speak on university campuses be it Jadavpur University or JNU, the better. He has never spoken of anything except violence. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and Ghosh all follow the pattern of Hitler and Mussolini. But we have all learnt from history how fascists are defeated.”