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Video Editor: Mohd. Irshad Alam and Md. Ibrahim
“We are just students. We had just gone to Dehradun to study. We have no connection with any issue or politics. Then why did the people of Uttarakhand do this to us?”
Thus said a voice behind a black burkha, sitting at a house in Jammu where she has taken shelter after fleeing from Dehradun, the city which witnessed a mass exodus of Kashmiri students in the aftermath of Pulwama terror attack.
On 16 February, a peaceful procession allegedly turned into a mob in Dehradun’s Suddhowala area. A group reportedly stopped outside the Girls Nest Hostel and threatened 15 Kashmiri girls living there.
Saira (Name changed), an inmate of the hostel, recalled the incident.
She says there has been constant and heavy police deployment near her hostel and no violence has been reported, although their movements outside the hostel was immensely restricted.
Nivedita Kukretri, Senior Superintendent of Police, too corroborated the sequence of events and said, “In anticipation of violence after the Pulwama attack... since the state has a lot of people in the army, in the CRPF or in the paramilitary... there was a heavy deployment of police wherever there were Kashmiri students.”
JNU student leader Shehla Rashid, who was one of the first persons to tweet about the incident, was booked later for ‘spreading rumour and fear’.
Speaking to The Quint, Shehla Rashid said, “I do not regret what I did. Why is Uttarakhand police on Twitter in the first place? Are they there to make friends? Quite clearly not. They are to handle distress situations. And in some situations, the police response is very meek unless you embarrass them on Twitter/social media. Then they get to act. If we need to do it all over again, we'll do it all over again.”
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