Jawaharlal Nehru University student leader Kanhaiya Kumar, who was booked for sedition over a campus protest march earlier this year, skipped the Bangalore Literature Festival, opting not to board the flight from New Delhi on Sunday morning. He was scheduled to be one of the panellists on the session on ‘Contrarian Views’ on the second and final day of the fest.
While the organisers announced that he was ill and had to cancel the trip at the last moment, sources in the organising committee said Mr. Kumar had recently shared his concerns with them after getting threats from trolls on Twitter and being shouted down at a literature fest in Mumbai recently.
Aakar Patel, executive director of Amnesty International India, who was also a panellist on ‘Contrarian Views’, said the very fact that Mr. Kumar had opted out reflected very badly on “us, the society”. “I will be upset if he thought of Bengaluru in those terms. This is a more civil city,” he said.
In fact, there was increased police presence at the venue in anticipation of the Mr. Kumar’s participation. “There was a session with Rajiv Malhotra, the right wing intellectual, for which many right wing supporters thronged the venue. The Kanhaiya Kumar session was immediately after that, making the situation a delicate one,” a senior police officer said.
Mr. Kanhaiya Kumar was not available for comment.
