After IIT Kanpur formed a panel to inquire into a complaint against the recitation of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s noted poem ‘Hum Dekhenge’ on its campus, noted lyricist Javed Akhtar termed the controversy "absurd and funny" and difficult to be taken seriously. Reacting to the controversy, Akhtar told news agency ANI: "Calling Faiz Ahmad Faiz 'anti-Hindu' is so absurd and funny that it's difficult to seriously talk about it." Calling Faiz Ahmad Faiz anti-Hindu is absurd: Javed Akhtar More at pic.twitter.com/3iuz7qDJy8 — The Indian Express (@IndianExpress) January 2, 2020 "He lived half his life outside Pakistan, he was called anti-Pakistan there. Hum Dekhenge he wrote against Zia ul Haq's government which was a communal regressive and fundamentalist government," he said. Earlier, IIT Kanpur Deputy Director Manindra Agarwal said a committee has been formed to probe whether Faiz's poem Hum Dekhenge, recited by students to express solidarity with their peers at Jamia Millia Islamia on December 17, is offensive to Hindu sentiments. Last month, a professor at IIT-Kanpur alleged that students protesting on campus against the police action in Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia were “spreading hate against India”. The complaint was provoked by the use of a couple of lines from the late Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poem Hum Dekhenge. The written complaint filed with the IIT director states that the poem had some wordings that could hurt the sentiments of Hindu. A week after the incident, the premier engineering institute’s student media body said they had to take down a recent editorial against the institute’s decision on the direction of the authorities. Faiz was a communist who employed traditional religious imagery to attack political structures in his quest for revolution. In Hum Dekhenge, the description of Qayamat, the Day of Reckoning, is transformed sharply into the communist day of revolution.
