A token resistance against the ‘stifling’ diktats of Students Federation of India (SFI) leaders had caused the near-fatal stabbing of a fellow activist and undergraduate Akhil Chandran at University College here on Friday, according to State police officers.
In an FIR registered at the Cantonment police station here on Saturday, the police said a unit committee member of the SFI had stabbed Akhil on the chest, while his party compatriots kept their quarry pinned down. The motive for the attack was ‘disobedience to orders’ of SFI leaders, the FIR said.
The case has spotlighted SFI's stranglehold on the campus. It has brought to the public eye what a police investigator described as a delinquent campus subculture that demanded total deference to SFI leaders.
SFI dominance
The campus dominance of the SFI has manifested in University College as aggressive patrols by unit committee members, which other students often fearfully referred to as ‘rounds.’
Held almost daily during the lunch recess, the ‘rounds’ invariably ended up in victimisation of students for apolitical acts such as singing, sitting in pairs or flocking at the canteen in the case of freshers.
Officers said enforced attendance at political demonstrations and roughing up of ‘rebellious’ students inside the union room were the norm. The police said politically partisan teachers and lack of a robust Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) often deterred students from reporting campus crimes.
Investigators said the SFI had, of late, increasingly relied on militant methods to deter Campus Front and Solidarity activists. The outfits had attempted to make a political inroad onto the campus by enlisting the support of students of Islamic History initially.
The confrontational and violent approach of the SFI to rival student organisations had led to stockpiling of swords, knives, clubs and home-made bombs in the college.
The Kerala Students Union and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad have zero political presence in the college, which the SFI touts as a flagship of the Left student movement in Kerala. The police intelligence had repeatedly forecast that the arbitrary actions on the part of the SFI would lead to internecine violence as witnessed on Friday.
