Five days after the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur (IIT-K) administration formed a high-level committee to probe allegations that students made “communal statements” during a recent event against the new citizenship law and NRC, the premier engineering institute’s student media body “Vox Populi” on Thursday said they had to take down a recent editorial against the institute’s decision on the direction of the authorities. “A high-level inquiry committee had been set up by the (IIT-K) director to investigate the complaints against the students’ march of December 17. Vox Populi published an editorial on December 21 on the same. The committee has asked our publication to pull down our recent editorial — “Don’t communalize the peaceful gathering at IIT Kanpur”— to reinstate harmony on campus. The editorial was the opinion of the editorial board on the issue surrounding December 17 march. As a team, we stand by every word in our editorial, but as per the instructions, we have to take it down. This is the first time, since the launch of the online edition of Vox Populi, that we are pulling down any article following instructions from the administration,” stated a post by Vox Populi on their Facebook page Thursday. The controversy pertains to the reported recitation of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Hum Dekhenge” by students during the protest. INSPIRE faculty Vashi Mant Sharma had complained to institute director Abhay Karandikar that protesting students had made communal remarks at the event by singing the lines “when all idols will be removed, only Allah’s name will remain”. The Vox Populi had stated in its editorial that a peaceful gathering at IIT-K was being communalised. It claimed that the Faiz’s lines were taken out of context and the events of the march were grossly misrepresented.
