Jindal university asks scholar to express regret for Israel-Palestine lecture, warns faculty member

The OP Jindal Global University in Haryana has asked political scientist Achin Vanaik to express regret for the remarks that he made during a lecture on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The private liberal arts university has also warned a faculty member for allegedly violating privacy and confidentiality of students during a lecture on dating and for allegedly discriminating against students based on their ideology and religion.

On November 13, Dabiru Sridhar Patnaik, the registrar of the university, wrote a letter to Vanaik, and Vice Chancellor C Raj Kumar wrote to professor Sameena Dalwai.

Both the letters were shared by Renu W Bhatia, the head of the Haryana women’s commission, on social media on Friday night. This is despite the letter to Dalwai being marked “privileged and confidential”.

In the first case, Patnaik told Vanaik that the statements made by him during his lecture on November 1 were gratuitous and unrelated to the subject.

Leaked videos of the talk of the former professor of political science at Delhi University showed that he drew parallels between Zionism and Hindutva nationalism and questioned why one act of violence is labelled terrorism and others are not.

In his lecture, Vanaik also said that Zionism and Hindutva were different as the former was “not anti-Muslim”...

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