Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath has said that there is no question of celebrating Muhammad Ali Jinnah in India, it was reported in India Today TV.
Scores of students of the AMU were when some right wing activists stormed into the campus on Wednesday and attacked them – allegedly with police backing – in connection with a row over a decades-old photograph of freedom fighter Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
The right wing activists have been demanding the removal of Jinnah’s photograph, which students have been fighting hard to resist for sometime. Former Vice President, Hamid Ansari was to speak there, but the programme had to be cancelled due to this.
Adityanath told India Today TV, “Jinnah divided this country. How can we celebrate his achievements? I have asked for an inquiry [into the clash in AMU]. We will act as soon as the report is submitted.”
Lt.Gen. (Retd) Zameer Uddin Shah, former AMU Vice Chancellor wrote in The Bengal Story on Thursday that “the university has always been in the eye of the storm and subjected to negative publicity for all the wrong reasons. It is a modern secular university with an Islamic ethos which probably galls a lot of people who do not understand or value the “Ganga Jamuni Tahzeeb” the institution epitomises.”
He also wrote that “the university is wrongly accused of harbouring anti-national sentiments and we have taken pains to explain that criticism of the government should in no way be construed as an anti-national activity.”
Read Lt.Gen. (Retd) Zameer Uddin Shah’s piece for The Bengal Story here.