Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) students are not anti-national and they do not harbour any pro-Pakistan feelings, university's former vice chancellor Lt Gen (retired) Zameer Uddin Shah today said, amid a controversy over a portrait of Muhammad Ali Jinnah on its campus.
His remarks come days after protests and violence rocked the AMU campus over the portrait of Pakistan founder Jinnah in the students union office of the university. An indefinite sit-in and boycott of academic activities by students over the issue entered the fourth day today.
Shah said the matter could have been amicably settled had Aligarh MP Satish Gautam, who is also a member of the AMU Court, raised the issue with the university authorities.
But, Gautam wrote to AMU authorities about the portrait and sent the letter by ordinary post which took five days to reach them. In the meantime, Shah said, the MP released the letter to the press and right-wingers, who resorted to arm-twisting.
"Arm-twisting methods have only hardened the positions of both sides," said the former VC, advocating dialogue to resolve the conflict over display of the portrait.
Shah also said the University, which has since its inception nurtured the "Ganga-Jamni Tahzeeb" (culture of social harmony), "not be given a bad name for no fault of its own".
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"The students of AMU are not anti-national, they do not harbour any pro-Pakistan feelings as projected by the media. Some incidents of yelling and slogan-shouting were slogans for freedom from oppression," he said.
He had said the same thing in a video he put out on social media yesterday.
When asked what prompted him to put the video out yesterday, Shah told PTI that he believed in what Martin Luther King had once remarked in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.
After watching the videos of AMU students being chased by the police and being "mercilessly beaten up", he felt it was time to speak out against this "injustice".
"The police should act to disperse unlawful assembly, but the way I saw it in some videos five to six policemen hitting one student who was down on the ground. I felt that was very unfair and I shared my thought to express my anguish," he said.
Today, a video purportedly of protesting students shouting slogans of "aazadi" went viral on social media. Though the audio content of the video was not very clear, yet the students were purportedly seen raising slogan of "Aazadi".
"Demands for 'Aazadi' do not mean freedom from our great country. What the students were yelling but was not shown by the media was 'aazadi' from opression, arm-twisting by ultra-nationalists, and unfair treatment," said Shah, who served as AMU V-C from 2012 to 2017.
"I'm sure, cool heads can reolve this problem and people making the demand meet the authorities of AMU and settle the matter amicably," he said.
The retired Lt General stressed that the projection of the AMU in the media runs counter to the Ganga-Jamni culture, which the university has always stood for. "The AMU is one of the leading universities of the country and it should not be given a bad name for no fault of theirs," he said.
Asked what, according to him, could be the "amicable soultion", the former Deputy Chief of Army Staff said dialogue between the parties concerned was the answer.
He also clarified that admissions to the AMU are done through examinations open for all and not by any other means, as is being falsely claimed by some sections of society.
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