ALL India People’s Forum and a delegation of citizens held a symposium on 20 January 2020 and met the Collector and submitted a memorandum against the repression of democratic rights and he deportation of former IAS officer Kannan Gopinathan from Allahabad airport back to Delhi on 18 January 2020 when he was scheduled to speak at a symposium organized at Sardar Patel Institute at Opalibagh. The AIPF symposium passed a unanimous resolution condemning the behavior of the administration with the following demands: the guilty officials should apologize to the organizers of the event and the people of Prayagraj; democratic peaceful protests against CAA-NRC-NPR should be given protection and security; unnecessary slapping of false cases against protesters in the name of Section 144 should be stopped; false FIRs already registered should be withdrawn; the administration should guarantee that such incidents are not repeated in Prayagraj; stopping Kannan Gopinathan from speaking is against the ‘Ganga-Jamuni Tahjeeb’ (composite culture) of Allahabad and is almost unprecedented in Allahabad.
The delegation comprised former MLA Anugrah Narayan Singh, former MLC Shiv Sewak Singh, Ganga, Dr Kamal Usri, Ram Sagar, Risheshwar Upadhyay, Subhash Pandey, Vinod Tiwari, Om Prakash Pal, Anil Verma, Akhil Vikalp, Annu Singh, Anand Malaviya, Tariq Anwar, Arif Siddiqui, Rajan Pandey, Avinash Mishra, Bhupendra Pandey and other distinguished citizens of Prayagraj. The delegation was led by OD Singh.
