Within a day, contradicting the JNU vice-chancellor’s stand that he did not call police to the campus, an internal communication to the Delhi police from the Jawaharlal Nehru University has revealed t
Within a day, contradicting the JNU vice-chancellor’s stand that he did not call police to the campus, an internal communication to the Delhi police from the Jawaharlal Nehru University has revealed that the force was granted permission to enter the campus as it may deem fit.
The letter, dated February 11, a day ahead of the arrest of JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar, reads, “The vice-chancellor has granted permission to the police force to enter JNU campus if need be and as you may deem fit.”
JNU V-C Jagadesh Kumar had on Monday denied giving permission to the Delhi police to enter the campus and arrest students. “I never invited the police to enter the campus and pick our students. We only provided whatever cooperation was needed as per the law of land. We were bound to do so,” Prof. Kumar said.
The letter, written by varsity registrar Bhupinder Zutshi to DCP South, was sent in response to two communications sent by the police to the university, asking them to rectify the faulty CCTV cameras and produce six students for the investigation of the case.
When asked about the two contradicting stands, a senior JNU official said, “The letter was an assurance of cooperation as per the law of land. Understanding the concerns of the students about the security deployment on the campus, we had raised the issue with police officials and there has been no deployment inside the campus since then”.
The university has also stated in the letter to the police, “Security has been briefed to make use of present CCTV cameras and cell phone cameras to record any such incident. The repairing of non-functional CCTV cameras and laying of optical fibre cable for better connectivity of surveillance systems is in progress.”
Four deans of JNU had also written to the V-C last week to convey their protest against the manner in which students were being compared to terrorists and picked up from campus by police personnel in plainclothes.
