New Delhi, October 29 (PTI) Jawaharlal Nehru University canceled a webinar on Kashmir because the topic was deemed “reprehensible and provocative”, and organizers had not requested permission for the event, said Vice Chancellor Mr. Jagadesh Kumar on Friday.
The University’s Center for Women’s Studies was scheduled to host a conference titled “Gender Resistance and New Challenges in Post-2019 Kashmir”. Ather Zia, political anthropologist, author, poet and activist was the webinar speaker.
The webinar’s opinion says, “This conference will build on the ethnography of… gendered resistance to Indian occupation in Kashmir.” This is a highly reprehensible and provocative topic, which calls sovereignty into question. and the territorial integrity of our country.
“JNU cannot be a platform for this kind of highly questionable webinar. The matter is under investigation,” Kumar said in a statement.
An immediate response was not available from faculty members at the Center for Women’s Studies.
Kumar said, “As soon as we learned that an online webinar titled ‘Gender Resistance and New Challenges in Post-2019 Kashmir’ was going to be hosted at 8:30 p.m. today by the Center for Women Studies, the administration JNU immediately asked the faculty member organizing the event to cancel it, ”Kumar said.
Kumar said that “the program was canceled immediately and the faculty member did not seek permission from the administration before planning such an event.”
Meanwhile, the JNU unit of Akhi Bharatiya Vidyarthi Paris, affiliated with RSS, demanded action against the president of the Center for organizing such an event.
Rohit Kumar, secretary of ABVP-JNU, said: “We demand immediate action against the president of the Center for Women’s Studies, the relevant faculties and the JNU registrar who authorized the program and who all thoughtlessly organized a such webinar by distorting the facts about the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir with the intention of creating a distorted narrative about Jammu and Kashmir. “PTI SLB TDS
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