Leftist or Rightist: Will Delhi Police arrest the hooligans who unleashed mayhem in JNU? 

Hours before the mayhem was unleashed in JNU on Sunday, a handful of people in New Delhi’s posh Defence Colony assembled in the afternoon in one of the parks to discuss the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), NPR and NRC. There were less than fifty residents present there, according to eyewitness accounts.

But the Residents’ Welfare Association (RWA) office bearers objected to the discussion, which was critical of the Government, and when the residents refused to disperse, called the police. Even after a posse of policemen arrived, the residents, among them women and senior citizens, refused to budge, and insisted on carrying on with their meeting. “ Why can’t residents meet in the colony’s park and discuss whatever they want,” they asked and wondered under what law the police were asking them to disperse.

The policemen, possibly because the residents belonged to the middle class, desisted from dispersing them but went on to video record the meeting. One of them took down notes and identity of the people participating in the meeting.

But hours later when a masked and armed mob moved into the JNU campus, a large posse of Delhi policemen and women in riot gear watched silently and made no effort to photograph the goons. On Monday Delhi Police claimed that they had been able to identify some of the hoodlums by checking CCTV footage of the locality and the video footage circulating on social media.

But no arrest had been reported 24 hours after the mob violence in JNU begun on Sunday. But various people present in the campus, students, teachers and journalists, identified some of the people, who were allegedly a part of the mob. A few websites tracked the WhatsApp numbers and screenshots shared and tried to get in touch with them, all of whom seemed to be associated with RSS affiliated front organisations. But they had either switched off their phones or did not take the calls.

Some of the tweets claimed they were leftist ‘thugs’ while others claimed they belonged to the ‘Right’. But whether they belong to the ‘Left’ or ‘Right’, it remains to be seen if Delhi Police end up arresting the miscreants. A selection of some of the tweets sharing WhatsApp numbers and identifying some of the people in the mob are as follows: