JNU Students' Union president Kanhaiya Kumar narrowly escaped a shoe hurled at him while he was addressing a seminar in Hyderabad on Thursday.
JNU Students' Union president Kanhaiya Kumar narrowly escaped a shoe hurled at him while he was addressing a seminar in Hyderabad on Thursday.
The JNU student leader, who is on bail after being sent to jail, claims to be in town to express solidarity with the mother of the deceased University Of Hyderabad Ph. D. scholar Rohith Vemula, and was addressing at a seminar on "Constitutional Rights Protection" at Sundarayya Vignana Kendram, a complex owned by the Left parties.
Hundreds of students had come to hear the firebrand student leader, who has suddenly emerged a student icon after the Delhi police, under the jurisdiction of the Union Home Ministry, arrested him for alleged sedition in February.
Kumar began addressing the gathering in Hindi and expressed regrets for not being able to speak in Telugu. Even as he was speaking, there was commotion in the hall as anti-Kanhaiya slogans were raised from among the audience.
Suddenly a shoe flung from the audience landed on the dais from where Kumar was speaking, narrowly missing him.
Recovering from the development, students belonging to the All-India Students Federation, of which Kumar is a leader, tried to catch the miscreants, resulting in a scuffle between the AISF students and anti-Kanhaiya sloganeers.
The two persons who allegedly disrupted the meeting were later identified as Nareesh Kumar and Pawan Kumar Reddy of the Goraksha Dal. As they were being beaten up by the agitated students, chaos and confusion prevailed, and the camera stands of some of the TV crew got damaged in the melee. The police soon arrived and nabbed the two Goraksha Dal members and whisked them away.
Even as the students were manhandling the duo behind the shoe-flinging, Kumar appealed for them to be left alone, claiming that they must have been merely "stooges of forces that were hell-bent to crushing the students' voices".
"I will not be afraid if someone tries to scare me," he said, and added that his way was "Gandhian".
He reiterated that any attempt to crush the students' movement, being waged to protect democratic rights in the universities and educational institutions, would only boomerang.
The student leader said that the movement launched by the students to uphold their constitutional rights and to wage a war against casteist and divisive politics being played by the powers-that-be could not be crushed. He said that the students' struggle for the enactment of a Rohith Act would continue till such an act was enacted. While thanking the students of UoH, OU and other universities in Telangana and AP for extending their whole-hearted support, he called upon the student community to fight till the last to bring justice to students belonging to the Dalit and weaker sections, minorities and other suppressed classes.