Curiouser and curiouser. Only Jadavpur University is not Alice’s wonderland: it is an educational institution into which an ordered group in army fatigues marched in and arranged itself before the administrative building. Its claims were various, from being part of the Indian army to being connected to the National Human Rights Commission. Apart from the wildly divergent nature of these two claims, the impossibility of an NHRC team in camouflage gear did not seem to have struck the group. Chillingly, it used the official logo and insignia of the Indian army, not just the fatigues, and it is on this basis that the police filed a suo motu case against it when the Eastern Command denied any knowledge of it. But the enigma about its identity did not end there. The letters on the members’ shoulder lapels were supposed to stand for “World Human Rights Peace Force” and the letterhead they carried said “Asian Human Rights Society”. They claimed to have come to establish peace in the university campus, to provide security and ‘human surveillance’. Who were they and where had they come from? How did they get to wear army fatigues with the army’s official logo? Who invited them?

The officiating vice-chancellor, a pro-Bharatiya Janata Party teacher, did not say he had invited such an outfit, but it was his resistance to permit complaints to the police that appeared to have delayed the university’s first information report for two days. The police are not allowed in the campus without the vice-chancellor’s say-so. But the officiating vice-chancellor had no objection to an apparently military-minded force — he called them an ‘NGO’ — volunteering to ensure security within university premises. The recent horror of a fatal ragging appears to have been the raison d’etre of the outfit’s entry. Later he claimed that objecting to them was acceptable since the police had found they were not part of the army. Did that mean that he would welcome official military presence in the university? Or was it just politic withdrawal after a mysterious toe-dipping exercise? Whatever the outfit’s claims, the blossoming of a private army in the city at the heart of a leading educational institution augurs severe danger. The police need to uncover the identity and origin of the group to stop its proliferation.