BENGALURU: Under-graduate students of Azim Premji University (APU) on Thursday staged a day-long protest to register their opposition to CAA and NRC and also express solidarity with their peers in Jawaharlal Nehru University,
Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Milia University. The students returned to campus on Tuesday after a semester break. The protest inside the campus was out of bounds for media and outsiders.
“The violence unleashed on students of JMI, AMU and JNU show the paranoia, intolerance and the subsequent feeling of insecurity of oppressors as regards their vested interest in retaining the status quo,” a statement released by the students said. “The state’s explicit war against critical dissent does not stop with this and also gets expressed unsubtly in its continual efforts to penalise public universities such as the recent fee hike in JNU.”
Students demanded that the Delhi police drop all charges against students who protested peacefully and the unconditional release of Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan and Akhil Gogoi.
Students and faculty members shared experiences of their times in JNU, “which is contradictory to what is being portrayed by people who want to defame it”. “There were students who were in Delhi when the internet was cut off, some from
Assam who have seen the chaos of NRC and detention centres for themselves. All of them narrated their experiences at the protest,” said a student who participated in the protest.
Students also "condemned" IT major Wipro, for assisting the government in implementing NRC in Assam.
"We appeal to the private sector not to partner with the state in its fascist projects by assisting its discriminatory schemes," said a statement signed by 120 students of APU. Wipro did not respond to TOI's request for a comment.
The APU is an arm of Azim Premji Foundation, established by Wipro’s founder-chairman Azim Premji.
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