Satyam Surana, an Indian student in the UK, who alleged hate campaigns and smears against him during the college elections in London, has strongly criticised the handling of the case and accused the institution of showing a ‘biased’ treatment towards him.
He has even alleged that the major university campuses today, have been “hijacked” by ‘pro-left’ ideologies and they can’t accept someone with a “vocal Hindu and Indian identity.”
In an interview with ANI, Surana opened up on his allegations and said despite his providing “irrefutable evidence” to the university’s authorities, all the charges have been ignored citing the submissions as “insufficient” and the remarks by accused students being put under the category of ‘freedom of expression’.
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Surana, who came to the limelight for retrieving the Tricolour amidst an attack on the Indian High Commission in the United Kingdom by Khalistani extremists in 2023, had previously voiced out against alleged hate and smear campaigns targeted at him during student union elections at the London School of Economics.
The Pune-born student has also practised at the Bombay High Court for some months. He was pursuing an LLM at the London School of Economics, at the time of the alleged incident.
“Immediately after all this incident of harassment, hate, bullying and all the doxing happened, I immediately approached the university’s authorities for the redressal and through every mechanism possible. I approached the security and the department to withhold the security footage right from getting the accused person’s CCTV footage of scribbling and marking my posters over the campus, to reporting the WhatsApp messages, the hate comments that I got, the abuses that I got on different platforms of social media,” he said.
He alleged that the university deliberately took the investigation for so long to favour the accused students, as most of them ended up passing out in this long duration.
“So that (incident) happened around somewhere in March 2024 and today we are in January of 2025 so it’s been almost 10 months I got the decision in late December 2024. So these authorities in LSE have decided…not to uphold the allegations that I have made and for that they have used the ground that the evidence that has been submitted is insufficient and that of all the multiple instances that I complained of, they have just pin picked one specific incident regarding the scribblings on my poster and they’ve said that the security footage is not available and the student is also no longer a student of the college he has passed out and so we cannot do anything. They’ve ignored almost every other incident that I complained of,” Surana further stated.
The Indian student further alleged that though he provided the university with the screenshots of ‘hate messages’, course IDs of the accused students, and their social media handles, at the request of the university itself, the evidence was deemed ‘insufficient’ in what Surana terms a “clear misinterpretation” of the record.
He further accused the university of “willfully and deliberately” passing the time over months just “to favour the people involved in the hate campaign” as most of the accused passed out by this time, getting out of the institution’s gambit.
Surana also pointed out that most of the allegations levelled by him have been brushed off under the garb of ‘freedom of expression’.
“They (university) have purely said that students are free to express their thoughts and opinions but there needs to be some limitations,” Surana said, adding that some highly controversial remarks were made about him and his identity.
“I was heckled with a slogan called, ‘We don’t want a Hindu nationalist or an Indian nationalist to be elected to the student union’. So, here my Hindu identity is being questioned, my proud Indian identity is being questioned, everything has been questioned keeping the political side of it aside, it is an attack on my religious identity but the university has clearly justified that in their decision letter, that this is well within the ambit of the legitimate exercise of their freedom of speech and expression how can a how can spewing venom against one religious identity be within the garb of freedom of speech and expression,” he added.
Further pointing to an incident, where he was warned by the university for his social media posts, in which Surana claims he was pointing out how the “Palestine movement was used to sympathize with radical Islamist terrorist organizations.”
“This is the double standard that these universities are applying while dealing with cases of Hinduphobia as against while dealing with cases of Islamophobia,” he said.
Surana went on to allege that major global universities have been “hijacked” by “left-wing ideology” and they are using it to spread anti-India hatred among Indian students.
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“This is not the first incidence of what I have faced there have been multiple similar incidents in the past be it in Oxford, be it in the same London School of Economics, or be it in other universities as well. So this systematic pattern highlights one very important thing these campuses are not open to accepting people who are vocal about their Hindu identity, Indian identity or any sort of identity or ideology which is incoherent with their well-established left-wing ideology,” Surana said.
He added, “We have faculties who are consistent in their anti-India stance we have a multiple number of other faculties in other universities…Their anti-India hatred stems from their anti-Hindu hatred which as a political ideology has now manifested itself in these people’s different forms of urban naxalism, and they are using and they are brainwashing these groups of young Indian students and turning them into what we may call, urban nationals, Maoists terror sympathizers and that is why they have hijacked this entire academia.”