Police are on the lookout for five JNU students who have been charged with sedition along with Kanhaiya Kumar who has been arrested.

Delhi police have described the five as absconders and said they were closely involved with the February 9 event commemorating hanged terror convicts Afzal Guru and Maqbool Bhat in which “anti-national” slogans were shouted.

So far, the five — aged between 25 and 30 — have been charged with sedition merely on the basis of the “aazaadi” slogans they allegedly raised. 

However, against the backdrop of the Union home minister suggesting that suspected 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed supported the JNU event, sinister theories have been swirling around the five students.

The five have been identified as Umar Khalid, Anirban Bhattacharya, Rama Naga, Ashutosh Kumar and Anant Prakash Narayan. The following pen sketches were put together on the basis of conversations with several JNU students and teachers.

 

Umar Khalid

• Former member of the now-defunct, pro-Maoist Democratic Students Union (DSU)

• Listed as one of the organisers of the February 9 event

Khalid traces his roots to Aurangabad in Maharashtra but was brought up in Delhi. His father, S.Q.R. Ilyas, is the president of the Welfare Party of India, a moderate political group active mainly among Muslims.

Khalid graduated from Delhi's Kirori Mal College before joining JNU in 2008. He is currently pursuing a PhD on the Adivasi history of Jharkhand at the Centre for Historical Studies (CHS).

Khalid was part of a hunger strike in JNU for eight days after Hyderabad varsity scholar Rohith Vemula committed suicide.

Khalid is known for taking radical Left positions on almost every issue. On the JNU campus, Khalid is popular among Kashmiri Muslims, across political affiliations, despite his views against headscarves and religion. The popularity can probably be attributed to his penchant for interacting with Kashmiris who are reclusive or nervous when they first come to Delhi.

Khalid never applied for a passport because of his ideological positions, despite an offer from a professor in Yale to study there for a semester. He is an atheist and is fond of convincing the religious to shed their faith.

 

Anirban Bhattacharya

•  Former member of the now-defunct, pro-Maoist Democratic Students Union

•  Listed as one of the organisers of the February 9 event

Known as Ban, Bhattacharya studied at St. Stephen's School in Dum Dum, Calcutta. He is said to be the first student of his school to make it to St. Stephen's College in New Delhi in 2004, for which a special assembly was held in his school.

Ban was considered the most soft-spoken of the DSU lot when the organisation was functional. Friends used adjectives such as "sweetheart", "loving", "empathetic" and "naive" to describe him.

In Delhi University, he is not known to have participated in any political activity. He was cultural secretary at St. Stephen's for a year.

"He wasn't passionate about social justice and had clear positions on reservations and the nuclear deal. In JNU, he started political work and took part in protests everyone else went to. I've known him for more than a decade and he has never spoken to me about Kashmir," a former roommate said.

Bhattacharya is fond of comics and John Grisham's novels. He also likes horror films. Like Khalid, he also is a PhD candidate in CHS.

He is academically inclined and considered one of the best students at CHS. Supporters of other political groups said they went to Bhattacharya for clarity on ideological debates on Marxism and Mao Zedong's thoughts.

 

Rama Naga

•  Current general secretary of the JNU Students' Union (JNUSU)

•  A member of the All India Students Association (AISA), backed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)-Liberation - a registered political party with MLAs in Bihar and Jharkhand

Naga is a Dalit from Boipariguda in Odisha's Koraput district. His father sells bangles on his bicycle and his mother is a day labourer. Odia TV channels ran news reports on him when he was elected general secretary last year.

A graduate from Vikram Dev College in Odisha's Jeypore, Naga is shy except when he is on the dance floor. In Jeypore, he gave tuitions to fund his studies.

His filmy dances during hostel and varsity cultural events drew crowds on the JNU campus. He's fondly called "Remo" after actor Vikram's character in the 2005 Tamil film Anniyan, which was dubbed in Hindi as Aparichit.

Now an MPhil scholar at the Centre for Political Studies, Naga joined JNU for his MA in 2012. He has earned scholarships ever since he joined JNU. His dissertation is on the movement against mining in the Niyamgiri Hills.

"He's shy yet articulate when he speaks. Students see him as a humble and hardworking guy who's always there for them when someone's scholarship is delayed or needs to be taken to see a doctor," said a PhD scholar who convinced Naga to join the AISA in 2013.

At the February 9 protest, he was heard requesting security guards to form a human chain to separate the ABVP and the Kashmir protesters.

 

Ashutosh Kumar

•  JNUSU president during the previous academic year

•  A member of the AISA

The son of a rail worker in Barh, near Patna, Kumar graduated from the Banaras Hindu University (BHU). He joined JNU in 2010 and was elected JNUSU president in 2013.

He is currently pursuing a PhD from the School of International Studies.

"In BHU, he wasn't in politics but was associated with a group that spoke out against discrimination in hostels by upper-caste students. He belongs to a backward class. Although his grandfather was a BJP worker, he joined the AISA during the campaign against the Lyngdoh committee recommendations during which JNUSU polls weren't held for four years, from 2008 to 2012," a former JNUSU president said.

Kumar is the go-to man of the campus on European and Russian cinema. He is believed to have stored every critically acclaimed film on an external hard drive. He is also a voracious reader of Hindi writers Uday Prakash, Phaneeshwar Nath Renu, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Munshi Premchand and Gorakh Pandey.

He is said to be deeply influenced by Dalit writer Om Prakash Valmiki's autobiography, Jhootan.

Kumar and fellow-Bihari Kanhaiya are some of JNU's best public speakers.

At the February 9 event, several witnesses saw Kumar raising popular JNU slogans: " Khap se aazaadi, mahilaon ko aazaadi, Kashmir se Kerala tab sabko aazaadi." (Freedom from khap panchayats, freedom for women, freedom from Kashmir to Kerala.)

Sources said this was a common tactic used by political groups to draw a distinction between themselves and those who advocate separatism.

"The Kashmir activists were raising slogans of aazaadi. The AISA, which is opposed to separatism, was trying to hijack the slogan but raising their own aazaadi slogans. This is a common practice that is not frowned upon. However, TV news channels showed edited footage of Ashutosh to give the impression that he was asking for Kashmir's independence. He was there with JNUSU members to thwart a fight between the ABVP and the ex-DSU lot."

 

Anant Prakash Narayan

•  JNUSU vice-president during the previous academic year

•  A member of the AISA

A Dalit from Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh, Narayan joined the AISA in BHU. In 2008, he organised a seminar on Bhagat Singh in BHU where he invited author and former JNU professor Chaman Lal.

Permission for the event was cancelled at the last moment, allegedly under pressure from the ABVP which has made attempts to own the legacy of Bhagat Singh by changing his honorific from Shaheed-e-Azam (the greatestmartyr) to Shaheed Shiromani (sacred martyr).

Narayan went ahead and held the seminar at a classroom in the Hindi department instead of the auditorium that was initially allotted.

Lal, who had participated in the seminar, told this paper: "It is ironical that the British called Bhagat Singh a terrorist and charged him with sedition. Today, youths like those from JNU who read my works on him published by the government are being charged with the same section and branded as terrorists."

Currently pursuing his MPhil at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Narayan joined JNU in 2012 and became JNUSU vice-president in 2014.

His dissertation is on the legal debates on gender following the 2012 Delhi gang rape.

On the campus, Narayan is credited with leading an agitation that led to the sanctioning of three temporary hostels.

Hacked: The Facebook account of Kanhaiya, who is in Tihar jail, was allegedly hacked on Saturday. The profile picture and cover picture have been replaced, sources said.