Organisers of the students’ rally on Saturday where Kanhaiya Kumar is scheduled to speak, said here on Friday that they had to shift the venue “due to pressure exerted by the police”.
“We had a No Objection Certificate (NOC) from the management of the Janata Shikshan Sanstha in Worli, which they revoked yesterday under pressure from the Worli police,” said Dhananjay Kangude of the Republican Youth Association (RYA). The programme will now be held at Adarsh Vidhyalaya in Tilaknagar.
The programme, called the Student-Youth Assembly Against Discrimination, is being organised by a collective of student and youth organisations of the city. The organisers had informed the police about the programme a week earlier. “During the course of their audit, the police procured letters from a few parents stating that the scheduled programme wasn’t good for their children,” said Abhilasha Srivastava of the All India Students Association (AISA). The police informed the organisers of the letters on Thursday evening.
The organisers have claimed that they are under tremendous pressure to cancel the event and are being been constantly threatened and intimidated.
“Threats have been made to all the members of the organising committee,” said Mr Kangude, “but we are not going to buckle under these threats.”
The organisers said they faced a lot of difficulty to find a venue for the programme. “Before Janata Shikshan Sanstha agreed, we had approached several halls with higher capacity, but the managements declined after looking at the speaker list,” said Ms Srivastava.
