Former Kerala DGP and BJP sympathiser T.P. Senkumar has reignited an old controversy as he said Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was littered with condoms. “I have seen girls coming out of toilets in men’s hostel in the JNU. That was 40 years ago,” he said. The campus was littered with condoms, said Senkumar, raking up an old myth about JNU, The New Indian Express reported.
“Now women tie their hair with condom,” he said, adding, “We don’t want such a university”. The former DGP was speaking as part of a two-day conference on 'Constitution and Democracy: 70 years of Indian experience' organised by Central University of Kerala. Earlier, the same event made headlines as students walked out of a programme that had Kerala BJP intellectual cell convener T.G. Mohandas as the speaker.
Apparently, Senkumar fell for fake images circulated by JNU critics on social media targeting the students who are protesting against a fee hike in the university. Ever since JNU students took to the streets to protest against the fee hike, various misleading images have appeared on social media targeting them. One of the images that were doing the rounds had the image of a girl with her hair tied using a condom. Another image had a woman, captioned as a JNU student, holding a liquor bottle. Both the images were proved fake by fake news busting websites.
This is not the first time that fake news and images were used by influential individuals to target and tarnish JNU. In 2016, Gyandev Ahuja, a BJP MLA from Ramgarh in Rajasthan’s Alwar district, had said something similar. “In JNU daily you find 3,000 beer cans and bottles, 2,000 Indian liquor bottles, 10,000 cigarette butts, 4,000 beedis, 50,000 bone pieces, 2,000 wrappers of chips, 3,000 used condoms and 500 abortion injections," he had said. His comments had invited criticism from various quarters.