Questions raised over Ramjas quiz

NEW DELHI: Barely a month after being in the eye of the storm, Ramjas College on Wednesday kicked off its annual festival season. However, what caught many by surprise was a

quiz

programme, “Akhand Bharat”, which is believed to be an attempt by a certain section to showcase Ramjas as a “nationalist” institution.

Though the contest was open to all, the college society had allegedly wrote on its Facebook page that “Umar Khalid and his gang not allowed”.

The group of students, which bore the brunt of the violence on the campus on February 22 and 23, claims that the title was chosen to mock them. “They want to show that they are true nationalists. Therefore, they chose a title, which has a different connotation,” said one of the students who had organised the ‘Cultures of Protest’ seminar in the college, which eventually sparked off a bigger debate over nationalism versus anti-nationalism.

However, Tushar Anand, president of the

Ramjas quiz

society, Qnights, played down the issue. “It was a name given merely to show that the quiz will be on ‘a unified India’. We have conducted similar quiz shows in the past,” he said.

Saumya Sagar (25), a junior resident at AIIMS Trauma Centre, has been participating at this annual event for the past three years. He too feels that there is no need to read too much into the title.

Kartik Puri, another quizzer, said that students of Ramjas look at India not as a geographical boundary but as an entity of shared culture and ethnicity.

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