Professor grilled over link to rebels

New Delhi, April 4: A Delhi University professor was today detained by police and questioned for over three hours for suspected links to Maoists, two months after another academic was named in a chargesheet against a guerrilla leader.

Sunil Mandiwal, an assistant professor of Hindi at Dayal Singh College, was picked up around 4pm by a joint team of Delhi and Andhra Pradesh police from his residence where Maoist literature was found, sources said.

Mandiwal was released after being questioned for over three hours.

“They made me meet this person called Krishna Rao, who they said is a Maoist leader arrested from Andhra Pradesh. I told them that I did know someone by that name. They took some Maoist literature that I had at home with them and kept asking me if I had any Maoist links. It was after hours of denial that they finally let me go. They asked me to come to the police station at 10.30am to sign a list of the books that they had taken from my home,” said Mandiwal who has been a professor at DU for the past five years.

Mandiwal said the police had just one line of questioning – “Are you a Maoist sympathiser?”

The professor said he was not involved with Naxalites but was a member of rights organisations like the Democratic Front of India.

Last year, soon after the arrest of CPI (Maoist) politburo leader Khobad Ghandy, it had emerged that Delhi police were drawing up a list of Maoist sympathisers among academics and writers in the city.

Sources said tonight that although Mandiwal had been given a “clean chit’’ by the police, the government was expected to turn up the heat on Naxalite sympathisers in the capital.

The sources confirmed that the list of sympathisers included doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and professors at the Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The chargesheet submitted by the special cell of the Delhi police to a court here recently in the Ghandy case has named another DU professor, G.N. Saibaba, and members of rights organisations such as Darshan Pal of the People’s Democratic Front of India, Rona Wilson, the secretary of the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners, and Gautam Navlakha of the People’s Union for Democratic Rights. They have been accused of playing “a very important role to broaden the base of the (CPI-Maoist) outfit”.