Kashmir simmers in hearts of JNU, Jadavpur protests
SRINAGAR: Kashmir and its political history play a crucial role in the controversy surrounding the shouting of “anti-national” slogans at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Kolkata’s Jadavpur University (JU).
Att he heart of it was an event on the hanged Kashmiri militant Afzal Guru and secondly, the slogans shouted at both universities were centred on Kashmiri separatism.
“If what’s reported on TV is true, it seems the JNU event and the sloganeering was a replica of the protests that occur in Kashmir every other day,” Sheikh Mushtaq, a senior Srinagar-based journalist, told HT.
“Any Kashmiri can say that the slogans of ‘Hum kya chahte/ Azaadi’ – that are reported to have been shouted at JNU and JU – are heard every other day in the Valley. It is a fact that many Kashmiris bear a real sense of anger against the Indian state.”
The Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) — an umbrella organisation of various rights groups and NGOs — in a press statement issued on Thursday expressed solidarity with the striking students at JNU but criticised how “the public narrative” has condemned the “irresponsible slogans”.
“We believe that the right to self-determination is inseparable from the right to political association, dissent and free expression, and these rights cannot be selectively asserted or upheld,” it said.
Guru, a convict in the 2001 Parliament attack case, was executed in Delhi’s Tihar jail on February 9, 2013. So was the founder of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front( J KL F) Mohammad Maqbool Bhat – convicted of murdering a CID officer – in the same jail on February 11, 1984.
Both executions continue to resonate among a large section of Kashmiris.