New Delhi: The JNU campus has divided, after Umar Khalid compared Burhan Wani with Che Guevara. While some teachers claimed that Khalid’s views in his Facebook post were ‘extreme and wrong’, others chose to ignore it.
Khalid, who was one of the organisers of the Afzal Guru event, wrote in a Facebook post: “ ‘I don’t care if I fall as long as someone else picks up my gun and keeps on shooting’. These were the words of Che Guevara, but could have been #BurhanWani’s too. Burhan wasn’t scared of death, he was scared of life lived in subjugation. He detested it. He lived a free man, died a free man.”
Saurabh Sharma (ABVP), who is the joint secretary of JNUSU, demanded action against Khalid from the Delhi police. Calling him a ‘terrorist’, Sharma wrote to the JNU administration as he wanted to know the status of action taken in the February 9 Afzal Guru event case. However, JNUSU vice-president Shehla Rashid Shora called this controvery a ‘non-issue’.
Khalid, who was charged with sedition and arrested for his role in the controversial February 9 event, is currently out on bail. He was rusticated from the university on April 26.