The speakers at the seminar organised by Group of Intellectuals and Academicians (GIA) were filmmaker and activist Vivek Agnihotri, Supreme Court advocate Monika Arora, educationist AK Bhagi, MyNation editor-in-chief Abhijit Majumder and ABVP national organising secretary Sunil Ambekar
New Delhi: The anti-India urban naxal ecosystem must be really nervous. Otherwise, why would one of their propaganda websites publish fake news on an August 24 event at the Hansraj College on 'Urban Naxalism'?
The speakers at the seminar organised by Group of Intellectuals and Academicians (GIA) were filmmaker and activist Vivek Agnihotri, Supreme Court advocate Monika Arora, educationist AK Bhagi, MyNation editor-in-chief Abhijit Majumder and ABVP national organising secretary Sunil Ambekar.
This website had quoted a couple of students as saying that they were not allowed at the venue. The truth is, the venue was teeming with students. An estimated 300-400 of them had packed the hall and speakers like Agnihotri and Bhagi addressed them directly.
The students, in fact, led in organising the event too. Be it registering the participants, or helping the guests, hundreds of smiling, eager students were in action.
Speaking to MyNation, Arora expressed surprise, "The seminar was held with the intent to expose the urban naxal in colleges, intelligentsia, media. I think we have hit the right button. It has hurt them where it hurts most. That's why we see the fake news being peddled about students not being allowed. You were there. You saw it yourself how packed the auditorium was with students. Registry was manned by students as well."
Agnihotri went a step further, "Mr Siddharth Varadarajan is running a personal campaign as he has his wife to defend who herself is an urban naxal. As for the students being asked to move, first rows are reserved for guests. But the entire auditorium was buzzing with them. You yourself witnessed it. Nothing more for me to add."
Earlier this month, the same website was caught in a spot of bother when it ran a story with the headline, “IIT-Bombay students question the decision to invite Modi to convocation ceremony”, only to be corrected by senior IIT-Bombay fellow Raghav Pandey, who took to Twitter to explicitly state that the students' body of the institution had taken no such action.
The website quoted anonymous students, alleging they had questioned the decision to invite the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the campus. At that time, many students took to Twitter to outrightly deny the allegation. On August 11, Modi addressed a packed house on the occasion of IIT-Bombay's 56th convocation.
This is purely a fake news item by https://t.co/EuxOY1eHhZ. There is no statement like this, which has been issued by any student body of It is shameful for a media house to individually talk to a few students and publish this as the larger view of the students. pic.twitter.com/iB5AO8N2id
— Raghav Pandey (@raghavwrong)I am IIT Bombay student... It was a honor to host our PM... is known for anti BJP and Anti-Modi news... We don't scare their views https://t.co/kCwvyANe9F
— Umesh V. Dhumal (@umeshd412)Such fake news only reconfirms what Majumder said at the seminar. "They have already set deep roots in academia and media... Leading editors, some of whom don’t even have an Indian citizenship, freely operate. They are the one-stop shops for every foreign correspondent who comes to India and they prime them with anti-India hate," he said. "Treat the seasoned foreign-funded urban naxals as enemies of the nation. As intellectual terrorists, only the youngsters, the young rebels deserve compassion. Not their handlers."
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