Police plan Big-Brother cameras for JNU, we have learnt. A senior police official told The Telegraph that this measure would help in identifying

students who often raise anti-national slogans and stage protests. It will also help us in preventing clashes among students belonging to different ideologies – the Left, the far-Left and the ABVP.

Remember, dear citizens, the police were actually present at the event at JNU on February 9th. We will return to this point, but they don’t really need CCTV surveillance, they are physically present on JNU campus in civilian clothes, and with JNU ID.

This,  also recollect, is the very same police force that stood by while a mob attacked JNU students and faculty and assaulted Kanhaiya at Patiala House; the same police who cannot arrest the man who publicly, with name and phone number, offered a reward for killing Kanhaiya – they “booked him for defacing property”, and will “analyse the poster carefully” before deciding whether other provisions of the IPC apply.

When all the evidence is available – the name, picture and phone number of a man who issues a death threat, he cannot be booked for anything more serious than the actual pasting of the poster on walls, because “the posters have to be analysed”.

Violence unfolds before their very eyes, and the Delhi Police cannot act.

These guys need CCTV surveillance?

This entirely compliant police force, now acting as the private army of the BJP, is concerned about preventing clashes in JNU, which has never ever had violent clashes, when it cannot carry out the normal functions of a police force anywhere else in the city.

So what will a CCTV system establish that the Delhi Police don’t already know?

Consider the following facts, and do come to your own conclusions. We have.

a) Pramod Ranjan’s article in Forward Press, also posted on Kafila, shows uncanny similarities between a Panchjanya editorial of 2015 and the Delhi Police report of 2016.

In its issue dated 8 November 2015, Panchjanya, the Hindi organ of the Sangh, carried a sensational and provocative cover story titled “JNU: Darar ka gadh” (JNU: Den of Divisiveness). That is not all. The weekly took pains to inform media organizations about the cover story and requested them to take notice. In the first week of November 2015, this cover story of Panchjanya grabbed the headlines on TV channels….

The charges levelled by Panchjanya in November 2015, surprisingly, became part of an intelligence report filed in February 2016. The Panchjanya article and the report of the intelligence department have uncanny similarities. Their tone is the same, basic content is the same, charges are the same and both smack of a conspiracy to associate students’ organizations of Bahujan ideology with extremist leftist organizations. The only difference is that of language. While the language of Panchjanya has a literary touch, that of the intelligence report is dry government-speak.

On 9 February 2016, after the so-called seditious sloganeering in JNU, the Delhi Police, on the basis of the report of its intelligence wing, submitted a report to the Government of India. This report was leaked to the media by “sources in the Home Ministry”…

The list of charges in the police report is a rough translation of the ‘JNU Leela” published in Panchjanya.

So the Delhi Police cooked up its report on the basis of the Panchjanya Action Plan outlined a few months ago.

b) Leaks from media rooms now suggest that on the morning of the 9th of February (the event was that evening)  there was a buzz that “JNU mein bawaal hone wala hai” (There is going to be a ruckus at JNU today)

These rumours are confirmed by the entry of Zee into JNU one hour before the programme at the invitation of ABVP, as revealed on India Resists.

c) The police were actually present at the event. During one of Kanhaiya’s bail hearings, Justice Pratibha Rani pointedly asked why the police present at the event did not record it, and why did they have to rely on Zee TV videos, (which turned out, as we know, to have been doctored):

“Three policemen were there in civil dress. Don’t they know what it means? Why did they not record the incident? Were they not supposed to take cognizance of the issue?” asked the bench. The bench also asked why the SHO had not asked for the video footage to be recorded. “What were your men doing?”

d) We know what a couple of them were doing. One of the former members of DSU, who joined the programme on February 9th, Srirupa Bhattacharya, wrote in Sanhati about being followed home after the event, in a clear bid to threaten and intimidate:

I returned home around midnight. My friends dropped me at my door in a rented car. I was alone as usual. It began exactly 15 minutes after I had entered. Heavy intermittent steps climbing up and down the stairs. Dry leaves on the terrace crumbling under soft footsteps. My doormat heaving rhythmically with the breath of person/persons peeping underneath the door. No knock, eerie silence for 20 minutes, and then again the entire round. You might say this could have happened on any night, but I would ask you why then was it this night? The same night photos are doing rounds thanks to a group of zealots in the media. Why this attempt to mark, to intimidate, repeatedly from 12:30 am until 2:30am? To speak the truth it was a blood-curdling night.

Whatever the anti-national slogans that were shouted (Pakistan Zindabad isn’t one of them, we now know), the question is – Why did the policemen present not follow the men with their faces covered who did shout the slogans? One of the repeated attempts during interrogation of Kanhaiya, Umar and Anirban was to have them identify those men, which they were unable to do:

When asked to identify other accused in the video, the two did name few persons but the ones raising slogans were not identified. There are some masked persons in the group and some people who apparently are not from JNU,” the officer told dna.

The Delhi Government-ordered Magisterial Report said:

Many students who protested on the JNU campus on February 9 were ‘outsiders’, the DM inferred. He stated “It may be difficult to arrive conclusively whether other four students (Kanhaiya, Khalid, Anirban and Ashutosh) have shouted anti-national slogans or not but it was visible and heard beyond doubt that ‘these outsiders and possibly Kashmiri students’ were heard raising anti-national slogans. They should be identified for further investigation.”

The question, let me reiterate, is this – why did the police personnel present at the event not follow these men to find out who they were?

Did they perhaps know who they were, as they knew “bawal hone wala hai” on  the morning of the 9th? Were they perhaps, not “Kashmiri students” but people the IB and Delhi Police know well?

e) Was it the same men shouting the same slogans at Press Club, who also mysteriously cannot be identified? Why were they permitted to shout slogans and leave, in full view of police present?

Who were these outsiders, why were they not immediately grabbed and questioned? Why were the names of eight other students most of whom had nothing to do with the event produced out of a hat?

The slogans purportedly shouted, about destroying India and so on, have never been heard before at any event organized around Afzal’s execution in Delhi, and there have been several in different parts of India since the execution in 2013.

Where did these slogans suddenly come from? Who were these men?

What is going on?