For the first time in their existence, Left-leaning students’ groups active in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus nominated several Kashmiri students as candidates for various positions during the 2015 elections in the university, officials have said. Anti-India sentiments started becoming stronger in the campus since last year, the officials said.
Outsiders, who are not a part of the JNU, were present on the university campus on 9 February as part of the event that was planned by some students to remember Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru and JKLF leader Maqbool Bhatt.
According to intelligence agencies, these people had entered the campus on 7 February and were in constant touch with Umar Khalid, a student associated with the ultra-left Democratic Students’ Union (DSU). The Delhi police, despite its best efforts, has not been able to trace Khalid, who has gone underground.
“These outsiders have gone back to Kashmir and we are trying to trace their whereabouts. These outsiders, who have been coming to the campus regularly, played a major role in instigating the crowd to chant anti-India slogans,” an official said.
“Stoking of anti-India sentiments on campus has grown stronger in the last one-and-a-half years. In October last year, we had shared inputs with the then Vice-Chancellor of the university in which we had told him that some students, including Umar Khalid, were igniting anti-India passions on campus. Again, in November, another report was shared with the university head in which similar observations were made,” an official with an intelligence agency said.
The event to remember Afzal Guru and Maqbool Bhatt was planned by these students well in advance and according to officials, the origin of such “movements” has been traced to Kashmir. “Such movements are likely to be executed in other parts of the country in the near future. In many other places, they are already taking place, but because of less media presence, it is not getting noticed. The link of the people involved in these kinds of events has been traced to Kashmir. Students are being used by separatist forces as a soft tool to promote separatism,” the official said.