Just hours after JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar blasted the Centre for curbing of any sort of dissent against the ruling class, Delhi Police arrested him on charges of sedition, remanding him to three days of police custody.
This is just a continuation of the fall-out of the Feb 9 cultural programme where students had condemned Afzal Guru’s execution and had defended Kashmir’s right to self-determination.
A video of Kumar furiously slamming the Union government for saffronisation of the country and the ‘alarming rise of the RSS’ just before the arrest is now doing the rounds online.
While unabashedly displaying his patriotic credentials, Kumar asks the RSS not to play the sole custodian of nationalism and that the students did not need a certificate of patriotism from them.
The sanctity of the Constitution is what the students believe in, Kumar says, and none including the Sanghis would be tolerated if seen challenging their constitutional rights.
Calling for all students to unite under Ambedkar’s cry for abolishment of castesim, Kumar castigated all those ABVVP leaders who had abused his mother –of which he claimed he had visual proof- asking whether his mother too did not figure among the innumerable Bharat Matas of the oppressed and the Dalits of this country.