2-year-old pic used to malign JNU after Maoist ambush 

The Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU) is threatening to lodge a police complaint against two “right-wing” news websites for claiming that students of the University celebrated the ambush on Central Reserve Police Force jawans by Naxal insurgents earlier this week.

We are going to file an FIR against both the websites for defamatory articles,” the President of JNUSU, Mohit Pandey, told National Herald.

The two Hindi news websites – Shrishta News and Dainik Bharat – carried an old photograph of JNU students from 2015 in which they are seen celebrating a student election victory.

Shrishta News, however, passed the image as being a recent one. The picture was part of a misleading article titled, “While nation mourns death of the jawans, JNU celebrates their killing by Maoists.” The fake story was repackaged and carried by another Hindi language website, Dainik Bharat.

The websites claimed that the picture was taken in the wake of the recent Naxal attack in Sukma in Chhattisgarh. Twenty-five CRPF troopers were killed in the deadly ambush, which has been condemned across the political spectrum.

Both the news portals had also published photos of posters on the JNU campus walls in a bid to reinforce their dubious claims. The Dainik Bharat story is now understood to have been taken off the internet. The websites are otherwise notorious for running stories scapegoating minorities and containing sleazy subject matter. Renowned TV anchors such as Zee News’ Sudhir Chaudhary and Rohit Sardana, and India TV’s Rajat Sharma are often glorified in their articles.

The fake news about JNU students was taken at face value by some social media users, several of who appeared to be supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Ramhari Dwivedi, who works as IT convener with Bhartiya Janta Yuva Morcha (BJYM), remarked in a Facebook post that “that mad dogs needed to be killed”, understood to be veiled reference to JNU students in the picture.

On the other hand, senior journalist Rajdeep Sardesai was one of the first observers to call out the fake story in a tweet on Tuesday,

The picture in Sardesai’s tweet is from 2015 and shows former JNUSU General Secretary Rama Naga, Vice-President Shehla Rashid and President Kanhaiya Kumar after student election results were announced.

Anger and helplessness among JNU students

While the JNUSU has taken a tough line against the defamatory posts, several students on the campus expressed doubts if their complaints would be taken seriously, at all, by the police.

Om Prakash, who is seen in a picture carried on the fake news article, reckoned that such things would happen “again and again”.

“These things will happen again and again. How many times will we go to the police,” he said while voicing his doubts about the willingness of the police to take any action,” he said.

A fellow student, who didn’t want to be identified, mocked the news packaging, saying that the news websites “should have used recent pictures to make their stories look more credible.”

Another high-profile JNU student, Umar Khalid, who is facing sedition charges blasted the articles as another example of “how fascism operates”.

“For all their crocodile tears about jawans who were killed in Sukma, for the Sangh, this is just another opportunity to target voices of dissent, JNU being one of the most prominent ones. This is just another example of how fascism operates – through lies and propaganda.”