KARACHI: A portrait of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah at India’s Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) is in the eye of a controversy following protests on campus after a lawmaker from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) objected to its presence there.

In a letter addressed to the university’s vice-chancellor, Tariq Mansoor, BJP legislator Satish Gautam claimed that there was no justification for the presence of Mr Jinnah’s portrait on the campus.

“It is fine if Jinnah has been revered in Pakistan after partition. But his portrait should not be put up here in India,” he was quoted as saying in his letter by the Indian media.

Mr Jinnah, he said, was responsible for the creation of Pakistan, a country that had always caused problems for India. Instead of putting up Mr Jinnah’s portrait, the varsity administration should celebrate the contributions of Raja Mahendra Pratap and Sir Syed Ahmed Khan who played a crucial role in establishing the university.

The university administration, however, said the portrait had been up for several decades as Mr Jinnah was a donor and had been granted life membership of the university’s student union.

“Mr Jinnah was also accorded life membership of the AMUSU in 1938. He was the founder member of the University Court in 1920 and also a donor,” said AMU spokesperson Shafey Kidwai, adding the renowned jurist and politician had been granted membership before the demand for Pakistan had been raised by the Muslim League.

He added that no national leader had raised any objection to the photo even after independence, the media reported. These included Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Azad, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Rajendra Prasad and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Following the BJP leader’s demand to remove the portrait, members of several groups broke into the varsity campus, mounting protests in which students were injured.

According to BBC Urdu, dozens of people were injured when clashes erupted on Wednesday during an event organised to confer life membership of the student union on India’s former vice president Hamid Ansari. The president of the AMU Students Union, Mashkoor Ahmad Usmani, was among those injured. The function had to be cancelled.

Before Mr Ansari arrived on the campus, a large number of Hindutva activists gathered outside the Baab-i-Syed gate and started chanting slogans against Mr Jinnah. Police had to lob teargas shells and resort to baton-charge to disperse the crowd, leaving several of them injured.

In the meanwhile, #JinnahFreeAMU started trending on social media websites and the controversy gained momentum.

In a statement, AMU’s public relations officer Omar Peerzada condemned the provocative slogans and expressed his sympathy with the injured students. The AMU Teachers Association also condemned the protests and appealed to the government to take action against those inciting violence on campus.

Published in Dawn, May 4th, 2018