We Want to Go Back to Class, Says FTII Student Who was Arrested
Satchith Paulose is one of the 5 FTII students who were arrested in the midnight campus raid.
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Satchith Paulose is one of the five students of FTII who were arrested from the campus in the middle of the night on Tuesday.
The students were charged with obstructing a public servant from doing his duty, destruction of property, punishment for voluntarily causing hurt, criminal intimidation, rioting, wrongful restraint and unlawful assembly.
The faculty members and students present on campus protested the arrest, called senior officials of the university – but nobody interfered.
Satchith, who spoke to us at length about the incident, is the General Secretary of the Students’ Association of FTII.
Satchith Told The Quint What Happened
On August 14, the faculty members of the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, appealed to the Institute Director, Prashant Pathrabe, to postpone the assessments, suggesting that the current controversial atmosphere was not conducive to the same. The Director said that he would consider it and let them know. He called for a review meeting on Monday at 3:00 pm.
On Monday morning, Pathrabe issued a notice declared that the assessment could not be postponed – a declaration that was greeted with much hue and cry. The students and faculty members assembled for a meeting scheduled by him on Friday.
The Director informed them that the decision wasn’t his, and that the order had come from ‘above’. To add insult to injury, he also said that the students would have to vacate the campus, once the assessments were over.
The students demanded that the matter be decided by academicians and not the ministry.
The meeting went on till post working hours, but there was no violence whatsoever, we were in fact even cracking jokes now and then.
– Satchith Paulose, 2nd Year, Cinematography
The students’ persistence led to the registrar calling the police and upon their arrival, Prashant Pathrabe got up and tried to leave. It was at this point that the students gheraoed the FTII Director.
When the argument began to heat up, some cops started to push the students around and in the process, caused damage to property.
All this, in front of the police – but no student was held, no arrests were made.
Tuesday was a regular day on the FTII campus. Everything was peaceful. The day went by without incident.
Yet, 24 hours later, the Police entered the FTII campus, in the middle of the night and arrested five students.
But if these were the very students who had indulged in unlawful activities on Monday evening, then why hadn’t the police present during the meeting arrested them then and there?
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