The Jawaharlal Nehru University has sent a notice to two of its students, one of whom is JNU Students' Union President Aishe Ghosh, to clarify their stand regarding a protest that took place three years ago. The students complained that this is probably the worst time to spend on sending notices from three-year-old protests when there's so much to be done — from disbursal of scholarships to maintaining COVID care facilities on campus.
Kriti Roy, an MPhil student at JNU, was in her first year when she participated in a protest on campus with Aishe. A Proctoral Enquiry was started and that committee has finally come out with a result and found her guilty of "indiscipline and misconduct". The question is why it took them three years to come up with a verdict? "Such an enquiry normally takes a few months," said Kriti. "It does not make sense as to why they would spend time coming up with age-old enquiry results in the middle of a pandemic when students are suffering and many of them have not received their scholarships," said Kriti.
The same allegation of diverting attention from the issues on campus was directed at the administration only last week when some students went to the reading room of the Central Library to study. The administration claimed that they broke in and threatened the staff. In a statement, the varsity said, "This (incident) has caused health risk for the library staff and even other students residing in the hostels, since these unruly students return to the hostels for lunch/dinner or other purposes." That's quite an allegation. Even though the university has not commented further on the issue, the JNUSU said that the administration has "misplaced priorities" and that they should "focus on actual issues that are faced by the JNU Community" — online education issues, COVID-19 vaccination, safe reopening of campus among others.
