Satyam Surana, an Indian student in the UK who has alleged hate campaigns and smears against him during student union elections in London, has strongly criticised the handling of the case and accused a London university of “biased” treatment towards him.
In an ANI interview this week, Surana claimed his charges of harassment had been ignored with his submissions cited as “insufficient”. Last year, he had alleged hate and smear campaigns targeted at him during Student Union elections at the London School of Economics. The Pune-born student, who has also practised law at the Bombay High Court, was pursuing an LLM at the London institution.
Surana said: “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.
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“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 alleges that the university deliberately took long to investigate in order to favour the accused students, with most of them going to complete their course and leaving the university over that period.
“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 said.
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The student also claims that most of his allegations have been brushed off as “freedom of expression” and “free speech”.
He added: “They (university) have purely said that students are free to express their thoughts and opinions, but there needs to be some limitations.
“This is the double standard that these universities are applying while dealing with cases of Hinduphobia as against while dealing with cases of Islamophobia.”
(ANI)
