NEW DELHI — Kashmiri students at a private university in northeastern India were suspended indefinitely and removed from their dorms on Monday after they cheered for the Pakistani team during a televised cricket match against India.
“You cannot pass judgments against your own national team,” said Manzoor Ahmed, vice chancellor of
Swami Vivekanand Subharti University in Meerut, explaining the decision to remove the students. “Their behavior was not conducive to peace on the campus. It creates bad blood with the local boys.”
Cricket is a national obsession in India. Some Kashmiris root against the Indian team because of resentment from decades of national policies deemed oppressive there, including routine arrests of pro-independence figures and thousands of disappearances.
India and Pakistan, once part of the same country,
violently divided in 1947 and have since fought three wars, two of them over Kashmir, a region divided between the two countries. Pakistan has been the source of repeated terrorist attacks in India, including one
in Mumbai in 2008 that killed 164 people and wounded at least 308.
The issue of the suspensions was raised in Kashmir’s Parliament on Tuesday by the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, which supports the suspended students. The Bharatiya Janata Party and Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party did not support the students and walked out of Parliament to protest the discussion.
The university hired several buses to take the 67 suspended students off campus after the episode, which happened on Sunday. Only a few of the students cheered too enthusiastically, Mr. Ahmed said, but because no one would tell administrators who had done so, all but one of the Kashmiri students in a dorm dominated by them were suspended.
“They shared guilt because nobody came out with information,” Mr. Ahmed said.
A chair and a pane of glass were also broken during the game, both of which were inappropriate, Mr. Ahmed said. But he said that cheering for Pakistan was the most egregious offense.
The Kashmiri students will have to appeal their suspension before they will be allowed to return to the university, Mr. Ahmed said.
India has an ambivalent relationship toward free speech. Statements or writings deemed hurtful to some communities are illegal, and controversial books and authors have sometimes been banned. Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” is still banned, and last month a prominent publisher
withdrew a scholarly book because of a suit claiming that it denigrated Hindus.
Hurt feelings can sometimes prompt mass killings, which have afflicted India for most of its modern history. Meerut is in Uttar Pradesh, a giant state that has suffered more than 100 deadly riots over the past year, including one in
Muzaffarnagar in August that caused 43 deaths and led thousands to flee their homes.
A shared love of cricket has sometimes brought India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed neighbors who perpetually flirt with war, closer together, but it can also be explosive. In a separate episode, a Kashmiri student at Career Point Gurukul in Kota, a test-preparation academy, said in an interview that administrators gave a dozen Kashmiri students a separate room in which to watch the match on Sunday, fearing a confrontation. The student asked that his name not be used for fear of reprisals.
When India lost, he was chased by a mob of hundreds of fellow students, whom he barely escaped, he said. Administrators eventually moved the Kashmiri students to a protected building, he said.
“I was born in Kashmir, and since childhood everyone around me supported the Pakistan cricket team,” the student said. “I don’t like Pakistan for anything else. It’s just their cricket team that I support.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/w...pakistan-cricket-team.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0
