Savarkar to Jinnah: Signs of fresh row at JNU

NEW DELHI: Controversy never seems to leave Jawaharlal Nehru University alone. While students and university authorities are wrangling over the closure of hostels after suspension of classes due to the threat of the novel coronavirus, there is also an anachronistic war under way over signboards.
After a lane was named after Hindutva stalwart V D Savarkar, the signboard was vandalised and the name of B R Ambedkar inscribed over it on Monday night.But early on Tuesday, even that was the target of defacers, who blacked out the name and pasted a picture of Mohammad Ali Jinnah at the side.
Sign defaced to read BR Ambedkar Marg
The signboard was cleaned on Tuesday evening by the RSS-affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, though the name of Ambedkar remained. The student organisation alleged that Jinnah’s picture was the handiwork of Left student groups, but said it didn’t know who had replaced Savarkar’s name with Ambedkar’s.

Picture of Jinnah removed, black paint erased to show the BR Ambedkar Marg inscription again
“The JNU administration took the decision last year to name the various roads on the campus. Therefore, the road near Subansir Hostel was named after Savarkar,” said ABVP JNU president Shivam Chaurasia. “However, the leftist students took midnight action to deface the road sign with the Mohammad Ali Jinnah poster.”
Ambedkar’s name blacked out from the signboard and a picture of Muhammad Ali Jinnah pasted on it
While condemning the act, Chaurasia also alluded to the left students painting graffiti on the walls of the administration block last year during the agitation against the hostel fee hike. Chaurasia, however, had no clue to who had inscribed the name of Ambedkar on the signboard.
It was JNUSU president Aishe Ghosh who, in a tweet at 1.11am on Tuesday, posted the image of the defaced signboard bearing Ambedkar’s name. Alongside she wrote, “We can never ever accept apologists and stooges of the British who undermined our secular fabric. Let’s respect those who gave us our Constitution.”
JNUSU itself denied involvement in the issue but declared, “JNU believes in the ideals of Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar, not Savarkar or Jinnah as ABVP does” and charged the saffron student organisation with “crossing all levels of shamelessness” and “maligning JNU by circulating morphed images of the road in the name of Jinnah”.
JNU Teachers’ Federation, breakaway faction of JNU Teachers’ Association, condemned the vandalism and accused the miscreants of trying to “vitiate the peaceful environment” and called for the immediate identification and punishment.
JNU vice-chancellor M Jagadesh Kumar explained that the naming of different roads on the campus had been approved by the Executive Council based on the recommendations of the campus development committee in 2016. “In the past two years, several roads have been named after great personalities,” Kumar said. “Last night some miscreants indulged in defacing the road signage. This is highly regrettable. In an educational institution, one can disagree intellectually but stooping to such acts is unwarranted.”