25 students held for protesting
25 students held for protesting
TV actor and BJP member and not-so-newly appointed chairman of the Film and Television Institute of India Gajendra Chauhan’s first day at the institute was expectedly not a very peaceful one. His entry into the campus was stalled when students from the premier filmmaking institute in Pune, started protesting at the entrance gate.
When the quiet protest turned louder and the demonstration turned violent, the police intervened and arrested about 25 students, enraging the crowd even further. Pune’s deputy commissioner of Police Tushar Joshi said that the students wanted to block the way to the institute and thus had to be restrained — adding that they used “minimum force”.
However, one of the detainees, Harishankar Nachimutu, president of the FTII Students Association (FSA), told the reporters, that they weren’t doing anything unconstitutional and in fact, the violence was created by the police. He also added that the ministry had deceived the students and had made them look like “jokers” in front of the nation.
Amid loud demonstrations, where the students shouted slogans like “Chauhan, go back” calling him a “political appointee”, Chauhan entered the campus where he held his first meeting with the rest of the Governing Council. At the meeting producer-director B.P. Singh was elected as the vice-chairman of the Governing Council. An alumnus of FTII, Singh is most well-known for the popular for Indian television serial, CID. The FTII Students Association (FSA) members protested against Chauhan’s “politically motivated” appointment and the students had gone on a 139-day strike. Eventually, after several rounds of talks with the ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the students called off their strike and classes resumed.
Speaking to the staff members, Chauhan said that he would do his best to solve the problems of the institution, including the longstanding demand of pension for the staff.
The arrested students were released by evening. Ritwick Goswami, a second year student studying direction at the institute, said, “For so long we have said, ‘we shall fight, we shall win’. Today, I’m not so sure any more. We might have just lost.”
