On Tuesday, the Delhi High Court asked the Delhi police to interrogate the members of two WhatsApp groups — Friends of RSS and Unity Against Left. Screenshots of conversations that happened in these groups suggested that its members may have instigated the violence in JNU on January 5. The police was also asked to seize the phones of the WhatsApp group members.
It may be recalled that on the evening of January 5, masked goons had vandalised the buildings in the JNU campus and beat up a lot of students. Many of them, including the JNUSU President Aishe Ghosh, were badly injured. A few hours after the attack, social media platforms were flooded with screenshots from these two WhatsApp groups.
While the screenshots suggested that the members of RSS and ABVP planned the violence, there were also allegations that members of left parties and Congress were also a part of the group.
This was when a few people came forward and confessed that they had infiltrated the group. We spoke to one of them, on condition of anonymity.
"I had infiltrated the group with good intent. However, I had anticipated that this will happen soon. I will be soon summoned by the police because I was a member of 'Unity Against Left'," he says. "The admins of the group were members of the ABVP. A JNU Registrar was also in it. I hope that they are interrogated too," he claimed.
This JNU student says that he doesn't know what has happened to the WhatsApp group now. "I exited the group an hour before the attacks began. Even though we got a lot of information initially, it seemed like the admins knew about us infiltrators after a while," he says. "Soon, they changed the group's name to 'Friends of Left' and then to 'ABVP Mordabad'," he added.
