Criminalising Dissent: The Activist And The Intellectual As ‘Threat’

While opposing the bail pleas of those incarcerated for more than five years without trial in the Delhi violence of 2020, Additional Solicitor General SV Raju, appearing for the Delhi Police, is reported as telling the Supreme Court that “intellectuals when they guide terrorists, become more dangerous than those working at the ground.” He added that because of state subsidies, they become educated but then instead of practicing their professions they become “dangerous activists”.

The paucity of facts and the flourish of emotive phrases are stunning, given it was a courtroom. Activists and terrorists carry the same weight and meaning, the term “dangerous” is applied to both indiscriminately, and intellectuals can be dangerous too when they become activists/terrorists. The term “activist” has come to be used by the media and in courtrooms only to refer to opponents of the regime.

For example, in the Sabarimala case, women attempting to follow the Supreme Court directive that women may make the pilgrimage were described as activists, while the men who mobilised to physically attack them were described as pilgrims. Similarly, the takeover of public spaces by thousands of unruly young men for festivals that keep expanding in number and scope is never described as “activist”. But when the slogan “I Love Muhammad” on posters was criminalised in UP or a Palm Sunday procession was denied permission in Delhi, any protest is “activism” that can lead to arrests and persecution of the ‘activist’.

The reserving of the term “activist” for dissenting voices against Hindu Rashtra and corporate loot, and its conflation with terrorism is a key aspect of legal interventions by this regime. In this authoritarian project, the “intellectual” represents the danger of counternarratives. To speak, to write, is to be dangerous. For counternarratives open up to radical questioning what has become normalised over more than a decade—the end of minority rights, routine violence against Dalits, corporate takeover of Adivasi resources, the deep core of financial corruption in the state, the quiet burial of environmental regulations, misogyny and Brahminical control of sexuality by law (the last illustrated by the Uttarakhand Civil Code that will be replicated in all BJP ruled states). Mandatory and uniform syllabi are being handed down by the UGC to public universities (“state subsidised” as the ASG put it and therefore to be subservient to the state). One of the key goals clearly is to prevent any critical thinking, to teach only “positive” things (the glory of an eternal Sanskritik and Brahminical India which invented everything before the West did), and not bring up “negative” things (such as poverty, caste conflict, status of minorities, violence against women).

The extent of the normalisation of Hindu Rashtra is clear from the Allahabad High Court judgement in October 2025 stating that even “unsaid words” and “subtle tones” in WhatsApp messages can be understood to create communal tension and be in breach of the law. Therefore, the court refused to quash an FIR against a Muslim man. Meanwhile, Hindutva non-activists and politicians openly and by actually “said words”, promote hatred of and violence towards minorities, but not a single case against these have stood up in court. 

On a parallel course is the glorification of the RSS by Hindutva ideologues, as engaged solely in “nation-building”. It is never mentioned that the RSS is a legally unregistered organisation, whose sources of funding are opaque to the public domain, whose accounts are not publicly audited and because it does not contest elections, is unaccountable to the people. It is this shadowy organisation that directs the building of a nation that is Hindu Rashtra—Brahminical and anti-poor, misogynist, violently authoritarian towards minorities (under the cover of fraudulent and draconian “anti-conversion” and “anti-cow slaughter” laws) as well as towards any dissenting voice whatsoever. Stating this makes one an intellectual/activist, dangerous and a terrorist.

Why dissenting intellectuals are dangerous, even though they only write and speak, is because they remind a generation that was only eight years old in 2014, that nothing about the world they have known is normal and none of this is just.

Consider now the specific cases of Sharjeel Imam, Umar Khalid and many other Muslims incarcerated without trial for over five years. As Muslim citizens of India, they rightly protested the CAA of 2019 (which was widely denounced by non-Muslims as well), as the first step towards the formal disenfranchisement of Muslims. The “chronology” announced by the Home Minister at the time has been faithfully followed. The revision of electoral rolls in Bihar in 2025 just before the State Assembly elections—that predictably gave a landslide victory to the NDA—showed (according to ECI data) that five out of ten districts with the largest share of Muslim population have the highest number of excluded voters. Incidentally, in 43 of 243 Assembly constituencies, 60 per cent or more excluded are women—quite an honour for the presumed political acumen of women that the ECI considers them as dangerous as other undesirables are, to Hindutva commonsense.

Regarding the violence in Delhi in 2020, first let us note that only in the states in which the BJP was in power did the nationwide peaceful protests against the CAA supposedly “turn violent”.  Fact-finding investigations by citizens’ groups and journalists suggest possible police complicity with activists of Hindutva organisations and local “anti-social elements” in incidents of stone-throwing from within anti-CAA demonstrations, and arson on public property during protests (See The Polis Project and the report by Karwan-e-Mohabbat). In Delhi, the violence was exclusively in the seven constituencies (out of seventy) that the BJP won in the State Assembly elections of February 2020, and journalists’ reports strongly indicate, not speeches by intellectuals provoking protesters to violence, but rather, the opposite—police complicity with pre-planned assaults. Over two-thirds of the 50 killed were Muslim, and property loss too was mostly that of Muslims.

And now, what about the 758 cases filed by the police? Separate investigations by The Indian Express and BBC in February 2025 have shown that in the 100 plus cases in which the Karkardooma Court has issued orders, over 80 per cent are acquittals or discharges, as witnesses turned hostile, appeared tutored, could not establish their presence at the scene and so on. The court came down heavily on the Delhi police for lapses in investigations, criticising them for filing "predetermined chargesheets" and "falsely implicating" the accused. Where police officials were presented as witnesses to the events, for various reasons, the court did not find their testimonies credible.

It is not surprising then, that the government has no interest in starting the trial of Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam and others. In the bail hearing, when Justice Kumar pointed out that Imam had not used the word “violence” in his speech, the ASG argued that Sharjeel said “you should be able to take lathi”. The ASG interpreted a phrase meaning “you must be prepared to take beatings from the police” to mean an incitement to violence—one can imagine the kind of case they have.

One does not need to be an intellectual to understand why the government does not want anybody to use their intelligence to think. Nor to realise why such thought would be dangerous to an authoritarian regime that has rendered democracy hollow.