Prasar Bharati, India’s Public Service Broadcasters, had on Monday tweeted out a video of violence in the Jawaharlal Nehru University, saying the video proved the Vice Chancellor’s comments that those behind the violence on Sunday night were those “opposing” registration in the college.
The broadcaster was called out by AltNews on Tuesday for spreading false information, because it turned out to be quite the opposite.
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The JNUSU and Left parties in the university have been protesting the fee hike in the college and had called for a boycott of the registration process this semester. However, it was a masked mob of alleged ABVP workers — an ABVP member has now admitted this on national television — who opposed the boycott who are said to have attacked students at the Sabarmati hostel.
Prasar Bharat’s video was followed by a series of quotes by the JNU registrar that insinuated that the Sunday night attack on JNU students was triggered by those who “opposed” the registration.
However, an AltNews fact check bored holes in this theory.
They proved by juxtaposing several photos of the person beating up another student, that in fact, it was a member of the ABVP — Sharvender, a third-year PhD student at Centre for West Asian Studies, School of International Studies. Sharvender has also been photographed with the JNU VC.
Meanwhile the person getting beaten up was a member for the All India Students Association Vivek Pandey.
AltNews editor Prateek Sinha tweeted sharing the report and called out how the “usual suspects” of the BJP IT Cell and even the JNU VC Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar retweeted the video.
This comes even as the JNU VC said on Tuesday that the attack should be “put in the past”.
While the masked and armed people who carried out the attack still roam free, the JNUSU president Aishe Ghosh and 19 others have been named in an FIR by the Delhi police for “vandalism”.
Ghosh suffered severe head injuries and received 16 stitches. She was admitted in AIIMS for a day and was released on Monday.
Read the full AltNews fact check here.