Attack on Ujjain Univ VC revives memories of Sabharwal case

Call it sheer luck or timely intervention of the fellow professors and staff that a repeat of professor Sabharwal case didn't happen in Ujjain University when VC Jawahar Kaul was attacked.

Call it sheer luck or timely intervention of the fellow professors and staff that a repeat of professor Sabharwal case didn't happen in Ujjain University when the vice-chancellor Jawahar Kaul was attacked by Saffron groups on Monday.

Now, as police struggles to arrest the culprits who attacked Prof Jawahar Kaul, it is a matter of probe whether the culprits had come with an intention to kill him.

The attack has once again revived memories of the brutal attack on Prof HS Sabharwal, who was professor at Madhav College in Ujjain (an affiliated college of Vikram University) and who was murdered on August 26, 2006.

Six ABVP workers were booked in case and were later acquitted after all the 94 witnesses in the case turned hostile. Sabharwal was the head of political science department at Ujjain’s Madhav College and was entrusted with supervising elections to the students’ council.

Unlike Kaul case where varsity staff locked him in a bathroom, Sabharwal could not be saved from the attackers even though some fellow professors and peons had tried to protect him.

In both the cases attackers were more than 30 in numbers. Sabharwal was attacked as he was opposed to holding students’ election. As per the report prepared by the police on October 10 2006, when this news reached students, a strong mob attacked Sabharwal.

He was later rushed to the hospital where he was declared brought dead. All the accused of Sabharwal murder were acquitted by a Nagpur court in July 2009.

The case was transferred from a court in Ujjain court to Nagpur after Sabharwal’s son, Himanshu urged the Supreme Court that he was not sure of a fair trial in Madhya Pradesh, where the BJP was in power at the time of the incident.