Attacks – Others

Chaotic scenes unfolded at Azim Premji University on Tuesday, February 24, after members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) – the student wing of the RSS, barged into the campus and vandalised property over an event on state violence in Kashmir. Later in the evening, the police removed the ABVP members from the campus and stayed on to prevent any further incidents.

Mamata (name changed), a masters student at APU, told TNM that a group of over 20 ABVP members, who are not part of the campus, barged into the APU campus in Sarjapura around 6.30 pm.

The trigger for the ABVP barging into the APU campus was an event organised by a student club. Spark APU Reading Circle had organised an event at 6pm to discuss the alleged mass rape of Kashmiri women in Kunan Poshpora village in Kupwara district by Indian armed forces on February 23, 1991. The day of the alleged rapes is observed as Kashmiri Women’s Resistance Day.

The Indian army has denied that any such incident ever took place, but a 2013 petition in the Supreme Court resulted in a reinvestigation of the case.

Mamata said that the reading circle organises events once a month and invites students to participate by distributing pamphlets and spreading the word on WhatsApp.

“We don’t know how ABVP found out about it. They’re definitely not APU students. Security staff tried to stop them but they pushed past them and came inside. They raised slogans such as ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’, ‘Vande Mataram’ and called us anti-national. This is the first time something like this has happened,” Mamata said.