The Aligarh Muslim University Students' Union will confer its honourary life membership on Congress president Sonia Gandhi.Making the announcement on Wednesday, president of the AMUSU Shahzad Alam said they would extend a ceremonial welcome to the Congress president during her visit to the university on February 16 to deliver the convocation address at the 60th Annual Convocation of the institution.
Controversial seer Yati Narsinghanand, an Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha functionary and her husband have been booked by the police for allegedly making inflammatory statements against a particular community, a police official said on Monday.
There are about 1,300 Kashmiri students studying at the AMU currently.
The offensive post has been removed from Pandit's Facebook wall.
Using the Jinnah portrait as an issue, and by demonising AMU and consequently Indian Muslims, the politics of communal polarisation is sought to be played out ahead of the Kairana Lok Sabha by-poll and to sustain it till the next Lok Sabha election, says Mohammad Sajjad.
The AMU defended the portrait, saying that Jinnah was a founder of the university and granted life membership of the student union.
RAF personnel had been deployed around the university campus on Wednesday as a precautionary measure amid fears that the sensitive issue might snowball.
Parents of several students -- particularly girls -- had to rush to Aligarh to take their wards back home.
The protesters including girls and schoolchildren, belonging to the schools within the campus, began their march from the Purani Chungi and culminated it at the Babey Sir Syed gate of the university. They also raised slogans in support of Delhi's Shaheen Bagh protesters and the Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Some important simple truths about the issue may be more helpful than high sounding debates, asserts Mohammad Sajjad.
One of the men held earlier for the crime is an alleged sex offender who targeted children in recent years.
'This time, even the professedly secular parties have maintained a conscious distance from being identified with Muslims.' 'This could be interpreted as a success of the BJP campaign of what it has been calling 'minority appeasement', says Mohammad Sajjad.
The students were booked under sedition charges after a complaint was filed by BJYM member Mukesh Lodhi.
Leaders of the newly-elected Aligarh Muslim University Students' Union have taken umbrage at Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani's recent comments on the varsity and its Vice-Chancellor on the issue of women's rights.
Why was Samajwadi Party Chief Mulayam Singh Yadav forced to cancel his trip to the Aligarh Muslim University on Monday? Rediff.com's Sharat Pradhan reports
'Nobody in AMU supports Jinnah's two-nation theory.' 'It is shameful we are debating Jinnah and not education or employment.'
True, Azam Khan is being targeted rather disproportionately and also because of his Muslim identity. That must be protested and resisted. But to say that he is a big messiah, and his profit-making educational enterprise is an issue concerning all Muslims of India, is absolutely unjustified, assert Mohammad Sajjad and Md Mohammad Zeeshan Ahmad.
Rahul Gandhi has not erred by not engaging with Muslim conservatives. After all, they had misled his father in 1986 to legislate a misogynistic law after the Supreme Court verdict in the Shah Bano case, which helped the BJP rise at the cost of the Congress, says Mohammad Sajjad.
'A fierce crusader against communalism, George joined hands with majoritarian forces, never to revisit or re-assess his saffron association.' 'He was a Union minister in 1998-2004, a time when people like Graham Staines were lynched in Orissa.' 'On the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, George went on to kind of justify the slashing of pregnant women, by saying in the Lok Sabha that this was nothing new for India.' 'Thus, he was in sharp contrast to what he had himself stood for in the heyday of his political career in the 1970s and 1980s, says Mohammad Sajjad.
'The BJP politics of appropriating icons from its ideological adversaries could only be a desperate attempt to extend the Jat-Muslim divide in Uttar Pradesh. Why this desperation when it can comfortably get votes on the plank of economic development?'
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