Violent Attack on University Students Increases India Tensions

(Bloomberg) — Masked assailants stormed India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi Sunday night in a violent attack on students that risked escalating protests against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.

Members of students groups allegedly affiliated with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party attacked hostels in the university with rods and batons, injuring dozens of students and some professors, said N. Sai Balaji, national president of the All India Students Association. As video clips and photographs of the attacks spread on social media, groups of students in Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad and Uttar Pradesh gathered to protest the violence, NDTV reported.

Nidhi Tripathi, national general secretary for BJP’s student union Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, in a tweet blamed leftist students’ unions for the attack.

The attack at India’s second-highest ranked university may worsen weeks of tensions between the Modi government and students, who have taken to streets to protest India’s plans to implement a religion-based citizenship law and a citizens’ registry, which protesters say violates the country’s secular constitution and discriminates against Muslims.

Yogendra Yadav, national president of the Swaraj India party, who was injured in the violence tweeted that police took no action to stop the attacks.

India’s minister for home affairs Amit Shah, who earlier said protesters should be punished for spreading misinformation on the new laws, ordered a probe into the JNU attacks.

The violence was condemned by India’s foreign and finance ministers Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Nirmala Sitharaman, both alumni of the university. Anand Mahindra, chairman of Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, founder and chairman of Biocon Ltd. also tweeted against the attacks.

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