Chennai: Convicted in the assassination of former Prime Minister of India Rajiv Gandhi, A G Perarivalan was invited by the Asian College of Journalism, one of the premier institutions for journalism, for a guest lecture.
Under the aegis of the Media Development Foundation headed by Journalist Sashi Kumar, the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) is based in Chennai. The Hindu’s N. Ram is also a founding trustee of the Media Development Foundation.
The Project 39A organises the guest lecture which is an initiative of the National Law University Delhi. The Project 39A also has a chapter at ACJ and the lecture by the sentenced criminal will be held at the ACJ venue.
According to the Project 39A website, the lecture is supposed to take place on the 17th of December at the MS Subbulakshmi auditorium at the Asian College of Journalism.
While Project 39A and the ACJ have tried their best to colourise the convicted man as an innocent man hounded by the state, several individuals recognised the dangers of platforming and humanizing the assassin of Rajiv Gandhi, and took to Twitter to criticize the guest lecture.
Political analyst Sumanth Raman expressed surprise at the decision by ACJ to host AG Perarivalan. Others said that perhaps they have served their time and must be released, however, painting them as innocent does no good for society.
The lecture is titled “The denial of justice and a quest unfinished”, which in itself indicates the institution’s intention of painting the criminal as an innocent victim of the Indian state. However, that is not all. The initiative by NLU Delhi, in collaboration with ACJ, has gone a step ahead and claimed that the Indian judiciary and the system in general dehumanised Perarivalan. They also claim that his release was ordered after “grave doubts were cast on his role in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination”.
50-year-old A G Perarivalan, alias Arivu, is the son of Tamil poet Kuyildasan. When he was a teenager, he was a sympathizer of LTTE and on the evening of 21st May 1991, when former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated at a rally in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, he was 19 years old.
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