Kanhaiya Kumar Won’t Be Arrested In Hyderabad, Say Cops

Mangalore Today News Network

Hyderabad, Mar 23, 2016:  Kanhaiya Kumar, the Delhi student who was arrested on sedition charges, will not be arrested in Hyderabad where he landed this morning, the city’s top police officer told NDTV today. Mr Kumar plans to visit the university where Dalit student Rohith Vemula killed himself in January this year.

   
Hyderabad Central University is tense ahead of Mr Kumar’s visit. Officials have said no outsider will be allowed to enter the campus.
   
After violence on campus yesterday, 25 students have been arrested. Property was damaged and some professors complained that they were injured in clashes.  
   
The arrested students allegedly vandalized the office of Vice Chancellor Appa Rao who returned to work yesterday after a long absence that began amid the furious protests that followed Mr Vemula’s suicide.
   
A section of students say that the Vice Chancellor should be fired because he did not intervene when Mr Vemula complained of caste discrimination a month before he hung himself in his hostel.
   
They also insist that they cannot be stopped from meeting as scheduled with Mr Kumar in a section of the campus where they have built a makeshift memorial for Mr Vemula.
   
Kanhaiya Kumar is also meant to meet Mr Vemula’s mother in Hyderabad today. Like the opposition and some students, she blames ministers Smrithi Irani and Bandaru Dattatreya for instigating university officials to suspend her son - he killed himself weeks after that.
   
The university has sought police protection today; it has closed all entrances except the main gate and declared the campus off limits to  "media personnel, political groups, external students, organisations and politicians."
   
All classes at the university have been suspended till Monday next.
   
After being released from jail earlier this month, Mr Kumar, upon return to Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University or JNU, described Mr Vemula as his "icon".
   
In his suicide note, Rohith Vemula did not blame anybody. But a month before that, he wrote a despairing letter to the Vice Chancellor complaining of discrimination against Dalit students like himself.