Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar — whose speech at the university after being released on bail on a sedition charge electrified social media on Friday night — will campaign for the Left parties in the coming West Bengal Assembly elections.
Confirming this, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury said, “All students supporting the Left will participate in the campaign along with Kanhaiya. For the first time, the nation can see the power of the youth of Left.”
Mr. Kumar, who hails from a poor family of Bihar, belongs to the All India Students Federation, which is the students’ wing of the CPI, a part of the Left Front.
The Left has lost part of its once powerful support base in Bengal, which is now under arch-rival All-India Trinamool Congress, and would hope to pull in a slice of sympathy for the charismatic young student leader.
Mr. Kumar, however, earned the wrath of the RSS, the BJP’s ideological mentor, which he has lambasted in several speeches.
“The example of Communists is that of rats. What the High Court has said during Kanhaiya’s release is much more important than what the RSS thinks about him or the Communists,” RSS Akhil Bharatiya Prachar Pramukh Manmohan Vaidya said.
The Twitter handle rss.org spewed venom at “the Communists” on Friday, showing signs of a deepening conflict between the RSS and the Left in the backdrop of the recent incidents at the JNU.
