"DU में मारा है, JNU में भी जवाब देंगे।

आपकी लाश को समंदर में फेंक आएँगे।"

“We beat you up in DU, We’ll answer you in JNU too.

Your dead body we will throw away in the sea.”

This is how the prime accused in the anti-India programme that was organised on 9 February 2015, Umar Khalid, currently out on bail, threatened Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) leader Saurabh Sharma on 22 February at the same Sabarmati Dhaba (where the anti-national programme was organised). Ideally, the crowd should have protested this open threat to a student leader who also belongs to the very same university. But they didn’t. In fact they responded with an ecstatic cheer, applause and hooting.

Welcome to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), one of the last crumbling bastions of intellectually and ideologically deranged Communists!

Khalid’s threat was in response to protests demanding cancellation of his invite as well as Shehla Rashid’s by Delhi University’s prestigious Ramjas College two days before the scheduled programme. Khalid and Shehla were to address a seminar along with other Leftist speakers at the college, which turned hundred this year.

While the students of Ramjas College had no problems with the programme per se, they were displeased with the idea of inviting Khalid, who is facing trial at Delhi High Court for raising anti-India sloganeering during a February 2016 event in JNU, organised to condemn the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru. The students feared disturbance of peace and communal harmony in the Ramjas campus as Khalid has a history of inciting crowd with anti-India rants. His calls for ‘azaadi’ and fragmenting India into pieces, evoking emotions by appealing to political fault lines, and demanding the liberation of Kashmir, and eulogising terrorists like Afzal Guru as national heroes, were the points of concern for the Ramjas students.

Hence the students of Ramjas College, led by Students Union president Yogit Rathi, who won as independent candidate (not ABVP), appealed to the college administration to cancel invitation to Khalid. The college principal yielded to the demands.

When the organisers of the programme, comprising largely of the comrades in faculty – mostly members of Left-affiliated Democratic Teachers’ Front (DTF) – were informed about the cancellation of invitation to Khalid and reasons explained, they refused to back down and insisted on having Khalid on the programme.

On 21 February, the day the programme was scheduled, activists of All India Students Association (AISA) and Students Federation of India (SFI) from JNU, along with other DTF teacher-activists, attempted to barge into the venue. When prevented by the security, they began to raise anti-India slogans.

Some of the slogans that they raised include: