In the beginning to the New Year, on the very first day itself, the mainstream media engaged in a concerted campaign to discredit IIT-Kanpur. It was reported on Wednesday that a panel was constituted by the institution to decide if Faiz’s poem ‘Hum Dekhengey’ was anti-Hindu. However, it appears such a thing never happened.
Refuting the media reports, the deputy director of Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Manindra Agarwal said that the panel instituted to probe the protests in the institution will not look into whether the poem is anti-Hindu or not. “The institute is not sitting in judgement on whether Faiz’s poem is communal or not. The committee is looking into several complaints of inflammatory actions/posts and will decide if there was a deliberate attempt to disturb the harmony at the institute,” Agarwal, who heads the five-member probe panel, told media.
The institution has only constituted a high-level committee to look into the protests that were conducted against the CAA in the campus without permission. No panel has been set up to specifically determine whether Faiz’s Islamic Supremacist poem is anti-Hindu.
In fact, Manindra Agarwal had tweeted on 1st January itself that panel was constituted to look into various complaints and that is far cry from a probe to determine whether Faiz’s poem is anti-Hindu.
This talks about protest march and that a committee has been constituted to look into the complaints. A far cry from deciding whether “Faiz poem is anti-Hindu”.
— Manindra Agrawal (@agrawalmanindra) January 1, 2020
He had also said that among many complaints, only one was against the poem saying it hurt religious sentiments. He had said on 1st that the committee has been formed to look all the complaints, but today it was clarified by him in an official statement that the poem has been dropped from the ambit of the probe.
My last post in this conversation as it is fruitless convincing people whose mind is already made up. Multiple complaints have been made, including about the poem, and the committee has been formed to look at ALL of them and decide if there is value in ANY of them.
— Manindra Agrawal (@agrawalmanindra) January 1, 2020
OpIndia independently reached out to IIT-Kanpur and was informed that the committee will not be looking into the poem. The Information and Media Outreach Cell of the institute told us that even the reports of anti-CAA protests taking place in IIT-Kanpur were not correct, as some students had taken out only a march in solidarity with the students of JNU. As this march was not authorised, and multiple complaints have been received against it, the committee was formed to look into them, but the poem is not being probed.
However, the mainstream media had already spread the message far and wide that IIT-Kanpur had actually set up a panel to specifically determine whether Faiz’s poem laced with Islamic Supremacist imagery is anti-Hindu. The BBC and the Economic Times were quick off the block to report on the matter without bothering to verify the actual facts of the event.
Meanwhile, ‘intellectuals’ and ’eminent citizens’ have already condemned IIT-Kanpur have jumped in and issued words of condemnation. Javed Akhtar was at the forefront of it.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with the IIT-Kanpur setting up a panel to determine whether Faiz’s poem is laced with anti-Hindu rhetoric, the institution has not done any such thing. Only a high-level committee has been set up to determine whether any rules were broken by the individuals in the said protest and if so, whether any or what disciplinary action should be initiated against them.
