A cultural programme at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) to mark the death anniversary of Parliament convict Afzal Guru was on Tuesday disallowed by the university authorities.
Afzal Guru was hanged on February 9, 2013, inside Tihar jail, where he was lodged in the Parliament attack case. A group of students had organised a cultural protest to mark his death anniversary but the BJP backed Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad opposed the event. The matter was brought to the knowledge of the Vice-Chancellor, through a written communication. “We heard there was some cultural programme but later came to know it’s not a programme but a protest. We came to know about it through posters and no permission was sought by anyone. Thus, to keep calm and maintain peace in the campus, we cancelled it,” JNU Vice-Chancellor Prof Jagadesh Kumar said. The V-C, however, did not confirm who wrote to him. The programme called “A country without a post office — against the judicial killing of Afzal Guru and Maqbool Bhatt”, was supposed to showcase the protest through poetry, art and music.
