TNUEF Conducts Successful Struggle against Caste Discrimination

Public Meeting on "Muzaffarnagar and Beyond"

SFI CEC Statement on Sexual Harassment and Ragging in Pondicherry University

Ensure Punishment to the Criminal Elements 
Who Indulged in Sexual Harassment, 
Ragging and Intimidation of Girl Students 
in Pondicherry University!

Set Up GSCASH in All Universities in India!!

03.10.2013

The Central Executive Committee of the Students’ Federation of India strongly condemns the instances of sexual harassment, ragging and intimidation of girl students in Pondicherry University (PU) and the violence let loose against students who supported the girls.

The students of the University conducted a massive protest on Tuesday (1 October) night against the aforesaid criminal acts in the campus. Some girl students had filed a complaint against ragging and threat of rape by a group of senior students. The Kallapett police has filed an FIR against the aggressor under IPC sections 506 and 509. The students who supported the girl students in filing the complaint were under threat for the past few days, and on Tuesday morning, a gang of hooligans manhandled them. They threatened that they would cut off the legs of those students who stood with the girl students if the assailants are suspended from the University because of the complaint filed by the girl students. The gang also brutally beat up one of the students; his tooth was broken and he had to be admitted in JIPMER, Pondicherry. The security personnel of the University remained mute spectators throughout even as the gang unleashed violence.

When the girl complainant approached the Vice-Chancellor with her grievance, she was discouraged from filing the complaint – the VC’s prime “concern” was that the “reputation” of the institution would be spoiled. Such insensitivity of the University authorities has been one of the prime causes for the continuance of instances of sexual harassment in the campus. Following recent incidents, the students are under constant fear of being attacked at any moment. Ever since she filed the complaint, the girl student who was harassed has been continuously subjected to intimidation and threatened that she wouldn’t be allowed to complete her course of study in the University. Even more shockingly, the attempts to intimidate her are being led by a faculty member of the Department of Physical Education. There are also attempts to divert attention from the matter by fabricating false cases against the students who helped the girls in filing the complaint against the attacker.

The protest on Tuesday night saw massive participation of girl students and others. The students demanded that the University must take steps on an urgent basis to stop ragging, sexual harassment and goonda raj in the campus, and that the University must set up a Gender Sensitisation Committee Against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH) to address complaints of sexual harassment in the University.

The CEC of SFI demands that Pondicherry University must promptly take steps to ensure the safety and security of girl students in the campus and that the culprits in the case must be given exemplary punishment. We demand that a GSCASH be set up in the University immediately as the students have been demanding. It is appalling that sixteen years after the Supreme Court (in its Vishaka judgement of 1997) laid down binding directives regarding the formation of committees to deal with cases of sexual harassment, and in spite of the recently passed law against sexual harassment in workplaces, GSCASH has not been formed even in most central Universities. SFI demands that GSCASH should be constituted in all Universities and colleges in the country in order to effectively address cases of sexual harassment in campuses and to sensitise students on gender issues. The incidents in PU should serve to underscore the need for intensifying our struggle against ragging in campuses across the country and to establish GSCASH in all campuses.

Sd/-                                                                                  Sd/-

Dr. V Sivadasan, President                                                 Ritabrata Banerjee, General Secretary

Murders Cannot Extinguish the Fire of Our Struggle against Communal-Fascism!

Condemn the Murder of SFI Activist by RSS-ABVP Goons in Kerala! Red Salute to Comrade Sajin Shahul !!

A Failed Union, and the Organisations Leading it Blaming Each other for Their Failure to Advance Students’ Rights — Do We Need This Again?

Just ahead of the JNUSU elections 2013-14, we see the AISA and DSF trading charges at each other for the failures of the Union led by them. The student community is faced with serious challenges ranging from the hostel crisis and inadequate MCM to the restoration of the JNUSU constitution and the fight for a more just and inclusive admission policy which includes the struggles to end discrimination in viva voce and to ensure adequate representation to backward minorities in the light of the Sachar Committee and Ranganath Mishra commission reports. At the same time, AISA and DSF have been engaging in an ugly post-mortem of each other’s actions throughout the past one year. They have been claiming that the divided mandate delivered by the student community last year was the reason for the non-performance of the Union. This amounts to nothing but eyewash.

Divided Mandate is Not an Excuse for Non-Performance

The history of the JNUSU gives ample proof that divided mandates need not mean that student demands cannot be addressed effectively. In fact even when the mandate was divided between left organisations and right-wing organisations (such as in 1996-97 when SFI had the Presidents’ post while ABVP had a majority in the JNUSU Council), the Left ensured that the fight for students rights was not in jeopardy. Whenever irreconcilable differences of opinion regarding a particular course of action in a struggle against the administration arose among the organisations leading the Union, such differences were settled through school-level general body meetings or University General Body Meetings, where students came to know clearly about the differences of opinion within the Union and a gave a clear mandate to the Union to fight against the administration without harming students unity.

Significantly, it was in 2006, when the SFI-AISF had three office-bearers (Vice-President, General Secretary and Joint Secretary) and a majority in the Council while the AISA had the President’s post that the last successful MCM agitation was fought. The agitation was led by the office-bearers and councilors from SFI, and the participation of the JNUSU President from AISA was minimal. But this was not allowed to harm the struggling unity of the JNUSU, as differences of opinion were settled in the JNUSU council and the agitation was fought to a successful completion, with MCM being raised from Rs. 600 to Rs. 1500.

Sectarianism within JNUSU

The record of the previous union was so dismal precisely in this regard – the AISA and DSF fought each other regarding practically every issue concerning the students, to which the failed agitations of October 2012 and August 2013 stand testimony. As their recent pamphlets show, there was no united voice against the administration from the part of these organisations on a number of important issues, ranging from viva voce weightage, BA/MA delinking, MCMs and so on. The JNUSU is an instrument of struggle for the student community – it cannot be the battleground for the kind of petty and sectarian organisational interests as the AISA and DSF have ended up turning it into.

The October 2012 agitation had brought out in the open the sectarian nature of the differences of opinion between the organisations leading the JNUSU. Instead of sincere attempts to preserve the struggling unity of the JNUSU, what came out in the open was a fight between the leading organisations regarding competing demands and priorities, with the student community remaining largely in the dark.  The office-bearers of the JNUSU quarreled among themselves in public in the midst of the agitation, thus diminishing the credibility of the Union at a crucial juncture, and thereby strengthening the hands of the administration.

The recent agitation (August 2013) led by the JNUSU saw the dropping of many major demands of the October 2012 struggle which had remained unfulfilled, without informing the student community why all those demands were dropped. The Union’s admission that the JNUSU leadership was aware of the administration’s proposal to increase MCM to Rs. 2000 from July 5^th onwards only strengthened the impression among the student community that AISA and DSF had been deceitful in calling for an agitation on just one demand (about which crucial information was deliberately hidden from the student community while not calling for an agitation earlier) at the eleventh hour, before falling down to an abject surrender to the administration.

Lessons from the Past and AISA's Record

The abject surrender of AISA to the administration has been nothing new, and it is no wonder that not a single JNUSU office-bearer from AISA has ever been rusticated while fighting for students’ rights. The record of SFI and SFI-led Unions provide a stark contrast – the SFI unit secretary was in jail throughout the Emergency; rustications before and after the sine die of 1983 were directed against JNUSU office-bearers from SFI and the organisational leadership of SFI; in 1997-98 the move to rusticate JNUSU President Battilal Bairwa was defeated by the organised resistance by the students with a historic, 10-day hunger strike by Com. Vijoo Krishnan who was then the JNUSU Vice-President; the SFI unit secretary had been rusticated for six months following the struggle for Progressive Admission Policy in 1998-99.

The deceit and surrender of the AISA-DSF-led Union is nothing but a reflection of the politics of the AISA and the DSF. It is the sectarianism of AISA which has of late been succumbing to the bourgeois parliamentarism creeping into their ranks on the one hand, and DSF’s petty bourgeois formulation of “autonomy” from the larger left and democratic forces in the country which amounts to stooping to a non-class position on the other, which has led to the weakening of the JNUSU vis-à-vis the administration (over hostels, MCM etc) as well as to its weak-kneed position vis-à-vis the State (with regard to the restoration of the JNUSU constitution, deprivation points for backward minorities etc.)

The overwhelming anger of the student community over the absolute non-performance of the Union expressed in the annual GBMs and in election GBMs have exposed the efforts of the AISA-DSF to shift the agenda of this year’s elections to a devious shadow boxing between them and to the ruling class practice of attacking the organised left by spreading ill-informed rumours on various issues like the martyrdom of Com. Sudipto Gupta as well as the brutal murder of T P Chandrasekharan.

SFI appeals to the student community to participate in today’s UGBM in large numbers and to expose the anti-student record of the AISA-DSF combine.

Sd/-

Arjun Sengupta,

Convenor, Central Campaign Committee, SFI JNU Unit 

Reject the anti-student AISA-DSF!

Students’ Unity Long Live!!

Release the Jailed SFI Comrades Immediately! Expose the Corrupt Congress and its Puppet, the Delhi Police!!

This is the fifth day of incarceration for the nine SFI activists who were arrested for participating in a protest demanding the resignation of Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy for his involvement in the multi-crore Solar Scam. Com. V Sivadasan, SFI’s all-India President, Com. Noor Mohammad (all-India Vice-President), Comrades P Laxmiah and Shatarup Ghosh (all-India Joint Secretaries), Comrades Y Ramu, Narendra Mandula and M Shobhan (Central Executive Committee members), and Comrades Rahul N and Nitheesh Narayanan (Executive Committee members of the SFI JNU Unit) have been remanded in Tihar Jail since Wednesday.

The nine activists, along with several others, were arrested on Tuesday, 9 July 2013, during a protest at the Kerala House in Delhi. The peaceful protesters, including women activists, were dragged, beaten up, punched, slapped and pushed into overcrowded police vans before being taken away to the Connaught Place police station. One of the police officers harassed a journalist and at one stage he charged at the protestors brandishing the burning stick on which the effigy of Oommen Chandy was burned. But the police have chosen to cover up their own brutality and excesses and have charged the protesters with non-bailable offences. At every instance the police indulged in dirty tricks to keep the arrested activists under confinement. On the first day they tried to delay every procedure to prevent the protesters from being taken to the court in time so that they could be kept in police custody. On the second day they argued that the medical report of some “injured” policeman has not come, following which the comrades were sent to Tihar Jail (the report, which came the next day, proved that the police was lying about the “injuries suffered” by the policeman); and on the third day the police argued that the activists must remain under custody to prevent any “obstruction” to the ongoing investigation! The court refused to grant bail to the nine comrades on the basis of such frivolous arguments, even as it was clear that the charges against them are baseless and fabricated.

The entire episode clearly smacks of political pressure from the Congress party, which is neck-deep in corruption. The Solar scam in Kerala is only the latest in the series of corruption scandals involving the Congress and its governments at the Centre and in the states. Chief Minister Oommen Chandy and his office have been found to have facilitated the deception of several people by duping them into investing in a solar energy company headed by a set of fraudsters. These criminals were able to continue their fraud even after several complaints were raised, thanks to their close relationship with the Chief Minister and his office. Witnesses have come out in the open to reveal that the CM made personal recommendations for the fraudulent company named 'Team Solar', and Oommen Chandy’s personal aide has already been arrested by the police. As the scam broke out, there were repeated demands from the Opposition led by the Left that a judicial enquiry be ordered into the issue, and as the CM himself was found to be complicit in the scandal, his resignation was demanded. Powerful popular protests in support of these demands have emerged in the recent days, with students, youth and other democratic sections actively joining the protests.  But the Congress government has chosen to respond to these protests in a draconian manner by unleashing violence on the protesters. Numerous students and youth have been brutally beaten up, booked under non-bailable charges and thrown into jails. Police repression in Kerala against the protesters is still continuing unabated – SFI CEC member Com. R S Balamurali has suffered multiple injuries in police lathicharge.

The Congress and its governments in Kerala and at the Centre have been trying to prevent an independent enquiry so as to prevent the truth from being revealed, and the brutal repression unleashed on protesters all over Kerala and the fabricated charges leveled against activists in Delhi are part of the ploy to mute the popular demand that the Chief Minister should step down. The Delhi Police meanwhile has once again proven beyond doubt that it has long foregone its duties towards the common citizens and has become a vicious tool in the hands of its political masters. Be it during the anti-gang rape protests of last December or during numerous other protests against the government’s murky involvement in various scams, the Delhi Police has always been found standing on the side of the wrong doers.

SFI condemns the continuing brutality of the Kerala police and the travesty of justice that is being done under the pressure of the ruling party in Delhi. The Congress is mistaken in assuming that such political victimization will result in the silencing of left and democratic voices in this country. The SFI, in solidarity with the struggling masses of Kerala and the rest of the country, resolves to continue its fight against corruption and political authoritarianism to its logical conclusion.


Sd/-
Manu M R, President, SFI JNU Unit
Paaritosh Nath, Vice-President, SFI JNU Unit