A couple of days after the Jawaharlal Nehru University administration renamed one of the campus roads on Savarkar’s name, a poster has been pasted on the signage board that reads ‘Muhammad Ali Jinnah Road.’
The board that read ‘VD Savarkar Marg’ was blackened before the poster of the Muslim League leader was pasted onto it. Akhila Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishat (ABVP), the student wing of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, wasted no time to accuse the Left-wing student union of JNU for putting up the ‘anti-national’ poster.
The ABVP has blamed this to be an act of the left’s continuing intolerant activism in the JNU campus. While none of the organization has claimed responsibility of the poster, the student wing of the Indian National Congress, the National Students Union of India, has come forth as they took the responsibility of blackening the Savarkar marg sign and wrote ‘B.R. Ambedkar road’ on top of it.
BJP accuses the intolerant left
Top BJP leaders have reacted to the controversy. Sambit Patra, the first one to react, pointed out that while ‘Jinnah wali azaadi’ slogans were raised in JNU earlier, now we have seen the name of Jinnah overriding the names of our freedom fighters.
BJP’s IT Cell chief, Amit Malviya while speaking to a media house went after the left-union students referring to them as ‘brainwashed communists’ and ‘Urban Naxals.’ He also alleged that the same people who are responsible for the act is behind the funding of Shaheen Bagh protests.
Reacting to the incident, the Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers Union (JNUTF) strongly condemned the act of vandalism and urged that the ‘anti-social elements’ must be punished.
While there was no response from the left, Aishe Ghosh, the JNUSU President, tweeted a picture of ‘B.R. Ambedkar Road’ written on the board and said that ‘one cannot accept British stooges’ and called for a celebration of a man who engineered the Constitution of India. She also followed it up with a hashtag #NoToSavarkar.
Jawaharlal Nehru University, off late, has come into controversies of violence from vandalizing the statue of Vivekananda to miscreants invading the university and beating up students and now to this. While both the right and the left continue to master the game of blaming, accountability for such acts is demanded by both.
