Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (All India Students Federation), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, today sought to distance itself from the violent incidents on Jawaharlal Nehru Campus on Sunday evening.
In their first official reaction, officebearers of the JNU unit of ABVP said the violence was carried out by students organizations affiliated to Left parties.
In an impromptu press conference today morning, they said several ABVP members have been injured in various incidents of violence last night. They also presented a student who had his hand in a sling.
Asked why hostel rooms with ABVP stickers were left alone by the attackers while other rooms were ransacked, ABVP representatives said they were yet to conduct an examination of the various hostels that were subjected to the attacks.
The office-bearers also said ABVP has video footage of certain members of Left-oriented students groups, including Students Union President Aishe Ghosh, were behind Sunday’s attacks.
Ghosh was one of the people grievously injured in the incident.
ABVP also released a video in which a group of students were running within the campus. One of the students, according to ABVP, was Aishe Ghosh.
It was not clear from the video whether the students shown in the video were running away from attackers or whether they were themselves the attackers. However, the students in the video were not armed, unlike those in other videos from the night of violence.
Several videos have emerged from the campus yesterday evening, including one showing masked assailants threatening and attacking female students inside a hostel, as well as an armed mob exiting the campus victoriously — presumably after the violence.
Several WhatsApp group screenshots have also been circulating on social media, and allegedly show ABVP students discussing the attacks.
However, in their press conference today, ABVP office-bearers said they were forcibly added to a WhatsApp group and were made administrators there.
The latest incidents of violence come in the backdrop of a weeks-long agitation by students in the central university against a steep increase in hostel and tuition charges.
SOME PICTURES FROM JNU VIOLENCE
