It has been over a year since our relationship began. I thought, for once, rather than you asking me questions, what if I were to put you in the dock for a change?

For the past few nights, I have been receiving frantic phone calls from my mother. She has been in agony and quite concerned about my well being after watching many of your news reports and debates. She asked me if I have any more details about what is being shown on television. She asked me several questions: has the Delhi Police filed any report – or a “draft chargesheet” as many of you reported on Tuesday – and am I going to be re-arrested? I have tried to calm her and told her that she should not pay much attention to what is being shown on the idiot box, and preferably switch it off altogether.

But as I put the phone down, a sense of tiredness overtook me. It has been more than a year since the entire witch-hunt began against us at Jawaharlal Nehru University. While the police have not been able to file a single document in court till now – a pre-requisite for the trial to begin – many of you in television studios (though not everyone) have been relentless in your campaign against us by hook or by crook. And in doing so, you have put our lives and well-being at serious risk.

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I seriously do not know what a “draft charge-sheet” even is. As a PhD student, the only drafts I am familiar with are the draft chapters that we submit to our supervisors. So, I wondered as I looked at these reports whether the Delhi Police is an independent agency – or do they also have a supervisor above them that “corrects” their drafts? Where do these supervisors sit? Inside television studios, inside Parliament, or at the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh headquarters in Nagpur?

Planted news

I have an eerie feeling, and not without reason, that many of you have once again come to the rescue of the government and the police by planting such news in the media. Rather than focussing on the violence unleashed by Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, how you spun the violence at Ramjas college is a serious question mark on your claims of objectivity and neutrality.

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