JNU Students Union demands roll-back of Counter-Terrorism Courses

Jawaharlal Nehru University VC, M. Jagdish Kumar has termed the controversy surrounding the launch of the course as needless.

In a recent meeting of the Academic Council, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) administration has passed a course titled ‘Counter-Terrorism, Asymmetric Conflicts and Strategies for Cooperation among Major Powers’ to be taught to engineering students pursuing a dual degree programme with a specialisation in International Relations.

The JNU Students Union (JNUSU) has termed the course content as Distorted, Biased and Communal and has also alleged that it has been passed without any discussion in the Academic Council of the university.

Recently, the Vice Chancellor of the university, M. Jagdish Kumar issued a statement defending the decision to launch the course and said that the controversy surrounding the launch of the course is needless.

The students association has alleged that despite the Delhi High Court mandate to invite JNUSU for all decision making bodies regarding students’ welfare, the JNU administration has illegally kept the JNUSU out of the meeting. “In the absence of the student union, communal pedagogy is being forced into JNU curriculum,” JNUSU said in a statement.

It has come to light that two of the modules under this course are potential inciters of Islamophobia and present a myopic understanding of countering terrorism. The modules of ‘Fundamentalist-Religious Terrorism and its Impact’ and ‘State-sponsored Terrorism: Its Influence and Impact’ reveal attempts of misusing the university space to escalate propaganda-based misrepresentation of facts to satisfy the communal and anti-communist propaganda of the current regime with a total disregard to basic principles of scientific pedagogy.

As per the JNUSU, the module on ‘Fundamentalist-Religious Terrorism and its Impact’ endorses a targeted focus on "Islamist" jihadi violence as the only form of fundamentalist religious terror with a focus on ‘the rapid proliferation of a jihadi cultist violence that glorifies death by terror in suicidal and homicidal variants, as a result of perverse interpretation of the Quran’.

Talking about the module on ‘State-sponsored Terrorism: It’s Influence and Impact’, the JNUSU has claimed that the module not only wrongly labels communists as aides of various terrorist groups but also refers only to the Soviet Union and China.

“As the concerned course did not meet even the basic standard of academic rigour, therefore the JNUSU demands that course details must be made public and be subjected to scrutiny by all relevant stakeholders including subject experts, also the JNUSU must be brought into the discussion at all stages. JNUSU rejects the introduction of such courses that reek of the Islamophobic agenda of the administration and demands that the course must be rolled back,” reads a statement by JNUSU.

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