ENARADA, Bhubaneshwar, August 25, 2014:
As many as 15,000 tribal girl students of Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) took out a silent candle march and held a protest meeting in Bhubaneswar on August 25 against brutal attack on tribal students of the institute on August 24.
The students, holding placards and banners, marched from Master Canteen Sq. to PMG Sq. in Bhubaneshwar city this afternoon. At the protest meeting, they condemned the attack in strong terms and demanded arrest of three staffs of two electronic media organizations involved in the attack within 24 hours.
A particular electronic media organization has been running vicious defamation campaign against KISS continuously for last three years. The protesting students warned that if that particular electronic media organization did not desist from such baseless defamation campaign immediately, they would be forced to sit in peaceful dharana in front of its office. This apart, thousands of guardians of 22500 tribal students will sit in dharana in front of respective District Collector’s office in 22 tribal dominated districts of Odisha from coming Wednesday and write about the injustice to the President, Prime Minister, Governor and Chief Minister.
Speaking at a protest meet, girl students of KISS said that mass media has a key contribution in helping KISS achieve international fame. They expressed their gratitude to mass media for this and hoped that mass media will continue to extend its valued cooperation to KISS. Only due to activities of a particular electronic media, image of mass media in general is being tarnished, they lamented. They denied the allegation as false and baseless that only staffs of a few electronic media were targeted and attacked in yesterday’s incident. A particular electronic media is running a well planned conspiracy against KISS, they alleged, while appealing other media organizations and general public to be careful from it.
According to students, representatives of two particular electronic media organizations landed in the institute in two vans accompanied by some anti-social elements and attacked the students after forcing their entry into the campus, on Sunday last at about 12 noon, while students of KISS were proceeding for lunch. As Sunday is an off day, most of the staffs of KISS were not present in the campus. Taking advantage of this, representatives of these two media organizations forcibly entered the campus with video camera breaking all established rules and started taking students’ interview. When the tribal students wanted to know the purpose of video shooting, cameramen and their accomplices threatened them. Students got agitated when they learnt that two intruders had reached the girls’ hostel and were taking photographs and making video clips of tribal girls living in the hostel. Anti-socials from the two channels attacked the students, upon which the students protested. Later, thousands of boys and girls studying in KISS gheraoed the Infocity Police Station demanding immediate arrest of the intruders who attacked them.
