JVP shows its true colours

Leaders of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insinuated a few months ago that they would launch several campaigns to make their presence felt.

True to their word, today, thousands of innocent undergraduates and the entire country are witnessing the stark reality of what the JVP predicted.

As spotlighted in our editorial last week, the masses still recall how the JVP exploited innocent students and undergraduates in 1971 and 1988/89 to achieve their extremist political agendas.

JVP history has revealed that the party has more often than not reposed more faith in the bullet than the ballot. Whenever the JVP leaders felt that they had been rejected by the masses, they resorted to an armed struggle to capture power by any means.

The JVP always turns to the country's youth, especially undergraduates, to instill in them their controversial political culture. While the JVP leaders, including their founder Rohana Wijeweera and his successor Somawansa Amarasinghe enjoyed a life of luxury, they preached to their followers to face all hardships to achieve liberation.

The JVP leaders shed buckets of crocodile tears to show they care for the working class to enlist youth to their organisation. Hence, a section of the youth in the country too was made to believe that the JVP could take them towards true liberation.

The country's higher education institutions and universities have been a breeding ground for JVP activists to market their ideology which has always been rejected in toto by the majority in society.

Each time a new batch of students enters a university, JVP activists invariably brainwash these freshers through inhuman ways of ragging. Two such horrific incidents were disclosed by the Minister of Higher Education S.B. Dissanayake last week - how a lecturer, during a lesson at a leading university, noticed blood dripping along the feet of a first year female undergraduate.

Assuming that she had a leg injury, the lecturer had asked her to attend to her wound. But the female student broke down in tears, and told the lecturer that the senior JVP students had banned first year students from wearing undergarments and added that she was having her menstruation.

In another incident, a female undergraduate had walked up to Minister Dissanayake on stage at a function to hand over a letter where she disclosed how leaders of the JVP-led Inter-University Students' Federation forced her and some female students to carry tills to raise funds for the party.

Explaining her gruesome experience, the female student had said that she and her colleagues collected funds for the Federation until dusk. The pro-JVP student leaders had thereafter offered them refreshments veiled with drugs. The girls only recovered the following morning and found to their horror senior students with them on the same beds. The girls who had been raped were threatened against disclosing the incidents.

These are merely two incidents of the ghastly student politics conducted by the JVP-led Inter-University Students' Federation, better known as Anthare. There is little or no room for gentlemanly politics for any other party at most of the universities as the JVP goons used thugs to ride rough-shod.

JVP goons of the Inter-University Students' Federation consider themselves superior in the mistaken notion that they could do anything and everything and get away scot free. They seem to think that they are above the law. They fail to realise that the law of the land applies to university students too.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa, in his Convocation address at the Sir John Kotelawala Defence University at the BMICH on Thursday, said that the law of the land applies to all citizens of the country equally. The President stressed that Sri Lanka needs a highly disciplined and law-abiding generation to take the country forward. The country being developed would serve no purpose, if the people are not disciplined, he said.

Vice Chancellors of the universities, at a meeting with the President last week, emphasised the importance of identifying the handful of recalcitrant students who are attempting to cripple the entire university system in the country. There should be a common mechanism to ensure discipline in universities at all times.

A viable mechanism is urgently needed to rehabilitate extremist students affiliated to the pro-JVP union for the benefit of the majority students. Unruly student activists should be eliminated from the universities to ensure development of the higher education system. Else, a sizeable portion of the large sums allocated for the country's free education would be squandered. The JVP under no circumstances should be allowed to dissipate valuable public funds allocated for higher education and the valuable time of the next generation of professionals.

It is an open secret that most students engage in violent activities due to the undue pressure of a handful of senior students, who pay homage to the JVP. Hence, it is also the bounden duty of parents of the undergraduates to ensure that their sons and daughters are not ensnared to JVP tactics and propaganda.

University students belong to an intelligent section of the society and are being groomed for the country's future. A viable program should be drawn up to integrate university students into society as a disciplined lot. The talents and skills of university students should be channelled for the development of the country. Unfortunately, the murky politics practised by the JVP goons have spelt doom. Should the JVP be permitted to continue these shameful acts and besmear the character of our youth?

University lecturers, non-academic staff and the parents should spare no pains to redeem innocent undergraduates from extraneous forces and ensure that they achieve their educational targets.

The sub-culture associated with torture and violence which the JVP has introduced to universities should be eliminated sooner rather than later. Leadership qualities and positive attitudes should be inculcated in the minds of students.

The Higher Education Minister has pledged to restore normalcy at universities within three months. All loyal and patriotic citizens in the country, irrespective of party politics, should support this move to the hilt.