An organizational meeting was convened by Jamia Students Solidarity Forum (JSSF) today at India Coffee House, Connaught Place. It was attended by the student community hailing from different colleges and universities in Delhi. The meeting discussed in length the challenges posed by the vicious atmosphere of communalism surging in the country.

The issue of communalism, as we understand, doesn’t arise from a single entity or person rather that entity should only be seen as a mere phase in the broader historical spectrum of xenophobia. Hence, in this meet we strove to contemplate more on the indicators of communal hatred instead of converging on a mere episode in that historical progression of the institutions of hatred.

Since independence, RSS has been working to maximize its clout over the Indian people in sinister ways more than one. The three-hour long meeting highlighted the various stages of development of communal politics and it was observed that after the inhumane and bestial nature of Partition riots, our country has more or less gone through a major riot every decade since 1980s which was the decade of two horrible state-sponsored riots i.e. the Baghalpur and Anti-Sikh riots. Then came the black day of December 6, 1992 and if it was not the end of all humanity, the unforgettable Gujarat riots of 2002 proved to be more than a modified version of 1992. A decade had passed since and just when we had hardly begun to assume that riots would soon be a redundant weapon of political mobilization, reality knocked at our doors in the form of Muzaffarnagar riots.

We also discussed about the patronizing factors of communalism. Apart from RSS, various mainstream political parties have used riots as a tool for electoral incentives. Even the alleged secular fronts’ have not refrained from washing their hands in the pool of innocents’ blood and in the same breath we pondered upon the negative contributions of many pretentious Muslim leaders across various party lines from south to north India. The participants agreed that it for the same reason that many people, especially the youths, who could have struck a positive chord with the secular fronts are now so disillusioned with the utter lack of visionary leadership on one side that they are gradually percolating towards the corporate-fascist sponsored schemes on the other side which is currently spearheaded by a communal poster boy from Gandhi’s Gujarat.

In this light, the forum decided to launch an offensive against all forms of communalism through a massive people to people campaign through different academic and cultural mediums by holding conferences, seminars, grassroot discussion forums, film screenings, street plays and other connecting mediums.

The assembly of responsible students and participants felt that since for a past few months the developments within JSSF are being enthusiastically witnessed and followed by hundreds of its followers in the student community, the need for giving the forum an official organizational structure was being strongly felt by most of its members in the wake of which the forum nominated possible names of the office bearers in the organization and after a fruitful discussion the forum elected four office bearers who assumed their respective roles effective immediately. It was decided upon that to keep up with the secular, socialist and democratic spirit, internal elections of office bearers will be held at the interval of every six months.

Apart from 20 others executive members, the names of the leading office bearers along with their portfolios are as follows:

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