Students, teachers and activists drawn from academic centres in and outside London came together to express their solidarity with the students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and to demand the immediate and unconditional release of the three JNU students -- Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya who are currently under arrest. Holding placards and shouting slogans in front of India House in the busy Aldwych area, the group of about 60 protestors were drawn from institutions like the London School of Economics, King’s College, SOAS, Birkbeck, Cambridge University, Portsmouth and Southampton.
“ Growing intolerance”
A signed statement condemned the “growing intolerance towards voices of dissent against the capitalist, casteist and Hindu fundamentalist government ... (and) state-sponsored violence and intimidation to suppress the democratic ideals within a university space.”
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“We are India’s youth, we are not anti-national,” said Priyanka Basu, one of the organisers of the demonstration. “We demand the release of the three students, scrapping the sedition law, getting justice for Soni Sori in Chhattisgarh, and reversing the privatisation of education in India.”
Debanjali Biswas, a Ph.d student in performing arts at King's College working on Manipur performance traditions, and an ex-JNU student said "It is deplorable that our right to critique the state and the process of nationalism is being taken away. If we go by their narrow definition of nationalism, the whole North East can be called anti-national," a region so long neglected by successive governments that a strong sense of alienation amongst its people exists.