JNU Vice-Chancellor M Jagadesh Kumar has revealed that a data centre in the Jawaharlal Nehru University may have been deliberately attacked by students in order to block the CCTV coverage of the violence that gripped the Central Varsity on Sunday night. It is relevant to mention here that amidst the registration boycott initiated by the left ruled JNUSU, a group of students in masks forcibly entered the office of the Center for Information System on January 3. They had switched off the power supply, forcibly evicted all technical staff & made servers dysfunctional with the intent to not allow online registrations to take place.
Kumar has now described the data centre as the “nerve centre” of JNU. He said, “All our CCTV data is connected to our data centre.” Interestingly, he also drew a link between the violence on January 3 and January 5. He said, “There seems to be some link between what happened on the 5th and what happened on the 3rd.” Elaborating further, Kumar suggested that the students involved in the attack on the data centre might have deliberately damaged it.
The Vice-Chancellor added, “And that is what happened on the 5th. Our data centre was down, and many of our CCTV [cameras]…they were unable to capture the data.” Kumar, however, refused to comment upon the political allegiance of the attackers. He said, “All my students are the same. I don’t distribute them into these camps.”
What Kumar has said is very plausible and fits perfectly in line with the circumstances preceding the JNU violence on Sunday. What happened on January 3 is undeniable and even the left media has not denied the events of January 3. It does not seem plausible that the January 3 attack on data centre and the damaged CCTV sever on January 5 could be a mere coincidence. The two events certainly bear a correlation.
Earlier, an official press note from the JNU administration has set the record straight. According to this note, “Around 4.30 PM, a group of students who are against the registration process moved aggressively from the front of the admin block and reached the hostels.” The note adds that students who came for the registration were beaten up by a group of students opposed to registration. Post the fee-hike protests, this registration boycott had been initiated by the left ruled JNUSU and had been going on for over a week.
In fact, it has been clear from the very starting that the left had orchestrated the violence that gripped the JNU on Sunday. There are clear markings of leftist violence on the campus of the Central University, followed by an attempt to shift the blame on the ABVP. With what the JNU Vice-Chancellor has now revealed, there is damning evidence to suggest that it was indeed the influential leftist lobby within the JNU which unleashed the intense violence on Sunday, during which a group of masked miscreants ran riot in the Central University.