Is #ShutDownJNU Modi's idea of youth empowerment?

"I am wearing a JNU t-shirt today, I am an anti-national", one student told a friend. The other responded: "Which one are you, Laskhkar or Jaish?" "That, Rajnath Singh will decide," came a prompt reply.

Indian home minister Rajnath Singh, in an irresponsible statement, said yesterday that the JNU protests were backed by Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed.

The mood is mixed in Jawahar Lal Nehru University in the Indian capital. A student leader was arrested last week on charges of sedition. And there are murmurs that a few other students have also been detained.

Some, who risk arrest, have apparently gone "underground", a student tells me. "The Delhi police, which has always disliked the JNU students for participating in protests of all kinds, has finally got an opportunity," he adds.

"This is nothing but witch-hunting," almost everyone you talk to in the campus says.

The calls for the destruction of India which were heard in one of the protests last week was condemned by Kanhaiya Kumar, the JNU Students' Union Leader, who is currently under arrest.

A probe is underway to find out who were behind the anti-national slogans.

Teachers of the university, meanwhile, have come out in support of Kumar and other students who have been targeted. They stand united with the students to assert that universities are a place for dissent, and that dissent does not amount to sedition.

On Sunday evening, students and teachers gathered in the campus to form a human-chain to express their solidarity with the boy behind bars. The turnout surprised everyone.

A group of about thirty to forty people, most of them professors who had held a press conference earlier in the day, were joined by thousands of students near the popular Ganga Dhaba.

As the crowd grew bigger, so did the slogans. Shouts of "Comrade Kanhaiya ko riha Karo, riha karo" (Free Comrade Kanhaiya) filled the air, as students flooded the university streets.

They spread out across the campus, holding hands, for a couple of hours before heading to the administrative block where one of the student union leader addressed the crowd.

Slogans were made against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, human resource development minister Smriti Irani and the Delhi Police during the event. Many students carried posters of Rohith Vemula, whose suicide in Hyderabad Central University had sparked a debate about casteism in India last month.

Some posters also carried a message that the right-wing government should not advise people about nationalism. There were slogans against "paid media" too. Many students said that the country’s media had been sold out. They argued that the media had deliberately told one side of the story, and not carried some of the speeches of Kanhaiya in which he condemns the statements calling for the destruction of India.

Some students made passing remarks to the correspondent of a TV news channel that his editor, who is known for hosting heated debates, should come to JNU and debate with the students instead of doing it from his studio where he does not let student leaders talk.

There was also a lot of talk about the attack on Congress leader Anand Sharma the night before. A student told me that ABVP activists had surrounded the politician – who did not have as much security around him as Rahul Gandhi – in the dark. The politician was bleeding from his ears.

The student also claimed that the boy who led the attack was known among the ABVP ranks as "Chotta Modi". But because ABVP is essentially a youth wing of the BJP, no action has been taken against them. The murmurs in the campus do not end. It is difficult to separate fact from fiction.

The government’s over-reaction to the incident has turned student politics into a more wicked business than it is supposed to be.

Ministers such as Smriti Irani and Rajnath Singh have become the butt of jokes among students. A student leader mockingly addressed the HRD minister as "Manusmriti" in her speech. They challenged the ministers to come and debate issues with them instead of sending the police to the university to carry out raids in classroom.

There is little doubt that the government has completely mishandled the situation.

Prime Minister Modi’s hollow rhetoric about empowering India’s youth stands exposed with the incidents that have taken place in FTII, Hyderabad University and JNU in the past one year.

The high-handedness of the government does not surprise some of the students.

"This was bound to happen. With the huge victory in the general assembly, the BJP feels the time is ripe for an onslaught on all other ideologies that stands against Hindutva. JNU, for years, have stood against right-wing fundamentalists," one of them sums it up.