Assistant professor Dr Pravesh Kumar, who is a faculty member in the Centre for Comparative Politics & Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), has slammed the “anti-India forces” operating from the JNU campus and has alleged that these groups were feeling threatened because their foreign funding has been stopped by the current Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led NDA government. Dr Kumar is a Dalit scholar belonging to Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh.
Giving the example of Rona Wilson, a former student of JNU, who has been recently arrested by the Maharashtra police for his alleged involvement with Maoist organisations, Kumar said that for decades the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus has served as a fertile ground for anti-India activities and such forces carry out their activities under the garb of bringing social justice.
“These people talk about bringing social justice while living a lavish life, wearing branded clothes and holidaying in foreign countries. Someone needs to ask them that with the kind of salary that they get as professors in JNU, how they manage to go so frequently on foreign holidays. All this comes from foreign funding and since the present Narendra Modi government has clamped down on NGOs and organisations through which they are funded, they are attacking the government,” Dr Kumar said.
According to him, though these “tukde-tukde” gang claims to work for Dalits and accuse the government of being anti-Dalit, it is the present government which had done the maximum work for Dalits. “The present government has brought Dalits into the mainstream. So many heroes whose names were forgotten in history have been resurrected by this government. So many roads of JNU have been named in the names of Indian heroes. This did not happen before,” he said.
He alleged that certain professors of the Jawaharlal Nehru University were conducting researches in their private capacities, earning huge sums of money, but were using the facilities provided by the government. “They do not give back anything to the government. They are misusing the facilities provided to them. Now, this government is taking steps to stop this, which has angered the Left-leaning professors who used to have a monopoly here,” he said.
“Earlier, only those students who subscribed to the Leftist ideology were able to live on this campus. All others were harassed. Now this is changing and more and more students who support the right, national thinking are becoming vocal,” Kumar said.