Children displaced by floods eat their meals at a relief camp in Srinagar yesterday.
Agencies/Bhopal
Hardline Hindu activists went on the rampage at a university in central India over an aid appeal for victims of devastating floods in Jammu and Kashmir, the vice chancellor said yesterday.
The mob of young men stormed the Vikram University campus in Ujjain city on Monday, breaking windows, throwing furniture and trying to smash ceiling fans with wooden sticks, footage aired on national television showed.
Jawaharlal Kaul said the attack occurred after the university issued an appeal to help any Kashmiri students affected by the floods that have claimed several hundred lives and devastated the state’s main city of Srinagar.
“There was an appeal issued by us for helping Kashmiri boys who are studying here...there was an appeal by the state government as well,” the vice-chancellor told the NDTV network.
“They (the attackers) said they were from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal,” said Kaul, referring to rightwing militant outfits linked to the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi stormed to power in May over his centre-left rivals, sparking fears among religious minorities of a rise of hardline Hindu grassroots groups in officially secular but Hindu-majority India.
Jammu and Kashmir is India’s only Muslim-majority state where many residents oppose Indian rule and want independence or a merger with Pakistan.
Kaul said he had appealed through a local newspaper in Madhya Pradesh for help to aid students whose families were thought caught in Kashmir’s worst floods in a century.
“Particularly the landlords (of the students) were requested by me not to ask for rent for a couple of months until the situation is over,” Kaul said.
The mob stormed Kaul’s office, demanding an explanation for wanting to help Kashmiri students, before the violence broke out, he said.
“In about 10-15 minutes they broke all the office furniture,” said Kaul who was taken to hospital after being shaken by the ordeal.
The Hindu hardliners were apparently angry that such appeals had not been issued for victims of past deadly floods elsewhere in India, including in Uttarakhand last year, the Press Trust of India news agency said.
Victims send message written in chili sauce
A family of 16 Malaysians used a message written in chili sauce to attract rescuers during floods in Kashmir, a report said yesterday. Farisha Elaina Abdul Hanif and her husband Mamoon Ashraf were stranded on the roof of a four-storey building during the floods that claimed hundreds of lives, the New Straits Times reported. “We used chili sauce to mark a towel with the word ‘Malaysia’ to let them know we were foreigners,” Farisha said after arriving at Kuala Lumpur International airport on Monday. “We even used a shirt that carried a large Jalur Gemilang design to indicate to the rescuers that we were Malaysians,” she added, using the Malay term for “stripes of glory,” the national flag.
