Over a hundred students from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) were detained outside Kerala Bhavan, near Jantar Mantar, and other areas near the Central Secretarial Metro Station on Friday evening.
The students had given a call for protest outside the Union Home Ministry against the alleged police inaction in finding student Najeeb Ahmed, who has been missing for a week now.
There was heavy police deployment on all roads leading to Raisina Hill in anticipation of the protest.
After being detained at the Parliament House police station, a few student representatives as well as Mr. Ahmed’s uncle were allowed to go meet officials of the Home Ministry to submit a memorandum signed by students of JNU.
The memorandum, addressed to Union Home Minster Rajnath Singh, requested his intervention for ensuring safety and justice for Mr. Ahmed. It also demanded “a high-level team be constituted to search for and locate Mr. Ahmed”.
They also demand that the Home Ministry “instruct the JNU administration to use all available means to appeal to Mr. Ahmed and reassure him that his safety will be taken care of”.
In the afternoon, two chartered buses — escorted by the Delhi Police — left JNU for the protest site at Jantar Mantar. However, when they got there they were barricaded inside the protest site. Some students tried to move out of the area and were detained.
Those who did not travel in the buses were detained near Rail Bhawan when they started their protest.
To ensure that the protesters did not reach anywhere near the Home Ministry, anybody looking like a student was asked by the police to prove that they were not students from JNU.
Former JNUSU vice-president Shehla Rashid, who was seen being roughed up by the police, along with other women protesters when they resisted being detained, said that the students continued their protest inside the police station and were talking to the police along with eyewitnesses to demand concrete steps to be taken immediately.
Mr. Ahmed went missing on October 15.
With the agitated students keeping JNU vice-chancellor Jagadesh Kumar and other university officials confined to the university’s administrative block for over 20 hours, Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday directed the Delhi Police to set up a Special Investigating Team (SIT) to trace the missing student.
Death threat
Meanwhile, former JNUSU leader Saurabh Sharma filed a complaint with the SHO of Vasant Kunj (North) police station regarding the letter he received by speed post on Thursday that threatened to “cut him into pieces”.
He also wrote to the JNU vice-chancellor to beef up security on campus as the letter did not threaten harm only to him but the entire JNU community.
