A group of Harvard students have started a petition calling on the University to sever ties with Subramanian Swamy. Swamy a right wing Hindutva extremist, and a Harvard Summer School economics instructor wrote an op-ed against the so-called ‘Islamic terrorism’; as a response to the July Mumbai attacks (which he believes was carried out by Muslims, though there is no evidence to support his beliefs) that called on the Hindus of India to unitedly stand against the Muslim ‘fanatics’. The article was outright offensive and inflammatory.
“These are statements you’d expect a demagogue on the extreme right to say,” Umang Kumar, a student at Harvard Divinity School, said, “but a professor who comes here, who got his Ph.D. from Harvard?”
Kumar and Sanjay J. Pinto, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology and social policy, organized the petition with a small group of peers and then emailed it out to an initial group of 80 students.
“Both of us decided we really needed to take action,” Pinto said. “His comments are wrong on many levels. They put forth a vision of Indian society in which not all religious groups are welcome, which is very different from the India that both of us know.”
You can sign the Petition here.
Also read:
‘Framed, Damned and Acquitted: Dossiers of a Very Special Cell’, a report on how Muslims are implicated on false charges of terrorism in India.
