New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University students are gleefully reminding everyone that BJP MP Udit Raj had addressed students at the 2013 Mahishasur Shahadat Divas.On Wednesday, HRD minister Smriti Irani, with a voice laced with outrage, had announced in Parliament that JNU students have organised such events and had read from a pamphlet that the organising body, All India Backward Students' Forum (AIBSF), denied was theirs."We believe Durga defeated Mahishasura through trickery but don't think of Durga as a prostitute. Nor have we written that in any of our documents," said AIBSF member Anil Kumar , who was one of the organisers. Mahishasur Divas was last held, formally, in 2013. "She was reading from a coloured document. Our parchas (pamphlet) are never coloured. She also read from some parcha claiming the SFI disrupted our meeting. That isn't true. The Left has supported us and they're not religious," he added.All the AIBSF students want is for the "king of the Asuras"-of the Asur tribe-not to be depicted as a rakshas (demon) being murdered by Durga. "It debases the entire community. We see the battle between Durga and Mahishasura as one between two communities. The Asur is an adivasi tribe recorded in the Census. In Bengal, too, there are tribes that celebrate Mahishasur Shahadat Divas," Kumar said.The effort to bring into focus an existing counter narrative to the Durga Puja is based on the premise that "myths serve as social capital". "The Asuras will see themselves as victims, as demons, as nobodies. They have no one to speak for them," Kumar said.Raj distanced himself at least from the pamphlets. "I did attend but I didn't know what was written in the pamphlets distributed. I had gone there to talk about the caste system and Ambedkar's philosophy," he said.The Delhi MP also tweeted that he had attended in 2013 and joined BJP in 2014. He also said that "Dalits are left behind in every field where Marxists ruled be it in Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura", and "Marxists are most casteist and Dalits are least developed where they ruled and so called upper caste dominate entire leadership".The divas was first held - and resisted by the ABVP - in 2011. A framed picture on a pedestal would be garlanded, post-dinner, in the Kaveri hostel mess which was the venue that year and in 2012. But the main celebration - in this they were classic JNU - involved discussions on caste and adivasis.In 2013, they secured permission to hold it in the School of Social Sciences auditorium-a sure sign they were established. Or so they thought. In October 2014, the ABVP complained and, like the February 9 event, permission was withdrawn. Guest speakers could no longer be entertained but the students did hold a meeting. It was not organised in JNU again.