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Thought Police: Is Penalising Dissent The New Normal In Indian Universities?

Are Indian universities turning into suffocating spaces where constant censorship and surveillance is leaving no room for protests or dissenting voices?

Joining Hands: Students, activists, actors and singers participated against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Kolkata in 2020 Photo: Getty Images

More than a century after French philosopher Claude Helvétius published Essays On The Mind (1758), Evelyn Beatrice Hall, an English writer, narrated a particularly striking anecdote about the opposition the book faced in its time. Such was the outrage that critics took to burning its copies publicly, she notes in her 1906 biography.

“What a fuss about an omelette!” François-Marie Arouet—better known as the French philosopher Voltaire—had remarked upon hearing of the incineration. The book by Helvétius may have failed to impress Voltaire. But his persecution for writing it made a mark on him. In Hall’s words, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” became Voltaire’s attitude.

In ‘new’ India, Voltaire is passé. The ethos of the injustice he felt at the persecution of a fellow philosopher has been thrown out of the window. Now, those studying works like his are told by their universities that “Activism and a Liberal Arts University are not joined at the hip”. Academics and intellectuals, having anything to say that is remotely critical of the current regime, are wilfully thrown under the bus by their own institutions. Worse, institutions now lead the mob hounding individuals who exercise their right to free expression—a fundamental right enshrined in the constitution.

In May this year, Ali Khan Mahmudabad, a professor of Political Science at Ashoka University, Sonipat, was arrested by Haryana police for writing two social media posts relating to the India-Pakistan military conflict in the aftermath of the Pahalgam terror attack in April. A response that Ashoka university’s co-founder, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, wrote when he was held accountable by an alumnus of the institution for not standing behind Mahmudabad, gave rise to a heated debate on where dissent stands today in the country.

“Activism at Ashoka is a choice and it does not go with the territory. You can be a great liberal arts university and not be activist. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar,” were his clinically-penned words. But he did not stop there. He went on to enunciate a difference between what does and doesn’t qualify as “academic scholarship”.

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Prof. Ali Khan Mahmudabad
Prof. Ali Khan Mahmudabad Instagram
Academics and intellectuals, having anything to say that is remotely critical of the current regime, are wilfully thrown under the bus by their own institutions.

While there can be many avenues to contend his perspective, a more fundamental question lies hidden in this line of thinking—what distinguishes education from literacy? What really is the purpose of “critical thinking”—taught enthusiastically in classrooms, condemned and punished when applied to the larger society?

Reportedly, the Supreme Court, while delivering an interim bail to Mahmudabad, compared his words to a missile, “seemingly shown as going in one direction but actually intended to travel the opposite way.” Can intellectualism be compared to warfare? A famous film once called ideas bulletproof. But can ideas be bullets themselves?

 Jamia Students Holding a Press Conference after Suspension
Jamia Students Holding a Press Conference after Suspension X/Twitter

This language of conflating dissent with criminality has emerged as a disturbing new normal in the past decade across India’s universities—both private and public. A few months prior to Mahmudabad’s arrest, Jamia Milia Islamia, one of the country’s oldest and most reputed universities, placed hoardings across its campus with the names and details of certain students. These weren’t posters congratulating them on their academic achievements—they were meant to “name and shame” these students for organising a protest without ‘due permission’ from university authorities.

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In December 2024, the students of Jamia had come together to mark five years since the state-sponsored violence carried out by the Delhi police inside their campus on December 15, 2019. The attack—that led to several students being grievously injured, including one student losing his eye—had culminated in the Shaheen Bagh protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act passed by the central government earlier that year. Students at the Aligarh Muslim University had suffered a similar fate in their campus on the same night at the hands of UP Police.

The act of shaming this handful of students by the Jamia Administration—subjecting them to public harassment by putting their personal details out in the open—was meant to serve a dual purpose. Not only was it meant to penalise them for not toeing the line in the present, it was also to suppress the remembrance of a past defiance. In both situations, the administration’s intent seemed to be evading their responsibility towards protecting the students. While exposing their details and “crime” to public scrutiny left the students open to threats in 2025, the permission for the police to enter the campus in 2019 resulted in students being assaulted in spaces meant to be safe, including their library.

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Ramadas KS
Ramadas KS Facebook

Dissent has increasingly come to be seen as an act of “indiscipline” in the administrative parlance of Indian universities, whenever the conversation has pivoted on government policies. In April 2024, Ramadas KS, a Dalit Ph.D scholar, was handed out a two-year suspension by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and barred from entering any of its campuses. His ‘crime’?—participating in a Parliament march against the BJP government’s legislations, including the National Education Policy.

In their response to the outrage over his suspension, the TISS administration castigated Ramadas for being a “repeat offender”.

“Throughout his tenure, Ramadas KS exhibited a shift in focus towards activities unrelated to his academic pursuits, engaging in events, protests, and other activities influenced by personal political agendas,” they stated in their defence.

“Despite repeated verbal and written advisories from the TISS Administration to prioritise academic commitments, Ramadas KS failed to comply.” Ramadas is a doctoral student of Development Studies, where critical inquiry of state policies lies at the very core of the discipline. Once again, the question arises—where does ‘academic pursuit’ end and ‘personal political agenda’ begin? Moreover, how does criticism directed at government action translate into an activity “not in the interest of the nation”?

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Do intellectuals, students and teachers, overstep their professional boundaries when they speak or agitate on matters of public interest?

Evidently, a script has been playing out over and again in the last few years, to cement the perception of dissent as “anti-national”. The model palpably stems from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where student politics has been thriving since its inception, and which has given many leaders from across the ideological spectrum to the political arena. In and out of news since 2016, JNU has never left public discourse since three of its student activists—Kanhaiya Kumar, Anirban Bhattacharya and Umar Khalid—were arrested in February 2016 on charges of sedition. They were imprisoned for organising a poetry-reading session in the campus to protest the capital punishment meted out to Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru in 2013. Though they were released less than a month later, the perception of criminality continued to shadow the institution as a whole. Of the three, Khalid in particular was subjected to an intense media trial for his Muslim identity. The relentless hounding was directly responsible for a near-fatal attack on him by two masked gunmen in 2018.

In the latter part of 2019, students in JNU rose once more in protest against a proposed fee hike, which threatened to exclude a significant number of economically and socially marginalised students from the university’s fold. This time, their protests were met with extra judicial methods—masked goons entered the campus in January 2020 and assaulted students and professors indiscriminately, resulting in serious injuries to many, including the then Students’ Union President Aishe Ghosh.

Top to Bottom: Devangana Kalita, Sharjeel Imam, Natasha Narwal, Umar Khalid
Top to Bottom: Devangana Kalita, Sharjeel Imam, Natasha Narwal, Umar Khalid Illustration

In the months that followed, research scholars Sharjeel Imam, Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita and ex-student activist Umar Khalid would be arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, along with 14 others, for their alleged role in a “conspiracy”, leading to the communal violence that shook Delhi in February 2020. Significantly, all these student leaders were involved in the anti-CAA protests that constituted the Shaheen Bagh movement, which brought global attention to the Indian government’s treatment of its religious minorities, specifically Muslims. While Narwal and Kalita were eventually granted bail by the Delhi High Court, Imam and Khalid continue to remain incarcerated five years after their arrests.

Drawing focus to institutional discrimination facilitated by the incumbent BJP-RSS regime has come at a massive cost for students in public universities other than JNU as well. On January 17, 2016, Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD scholar, died by suicide, after being suspended alongside four other scholars for an altercation with members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad—the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—in the Hyderabad Central University. Many termed his death as an institutional murder, owing to the disproportionate penalisation handed out to the five students by then Vice Chancellor, Appa Rao Podile.

Rohith Vemula
Rohith Vemula Facebook

The involvement of Bandaru Dattatreya, a Union Minister, through his letter to the Education Ministry urging action against the students, was seen as a malicious attack on their Dalit identity. While cases of abetment of suicide and SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, were filed against Rao, Dattatreya and three other students, the Telangana Police filed a closure report in the case in 2024. The report claimed that no one was responsible for Vemula’s death and that he was not even a Dalit by caste. After massive public backlash on the closure, the DGP decided to reopen the case. However, progress in the case remains elusive.

Former Delhi University professor G.N. Saibaba with wife Vasantha Kumari during a press conference following his release from the Nagpur Central Jail after the Bombay High Court acquitted him in an alleged Maoist links case, in New Delhi, Friday, March 8, 2024.
Former Delhi University professor G.N. Saibaba with wife Vasantha Kumari during a press conference following his release from the Nagpur Central Jail after the Bombay High Court acquitted him in an alleged Maoist links case, in New Delhi, Friday, March 8, 2024. PTI

The impunity granted to those who align with the government’s stances is as absolute as the penalty for those who refuse to cow down. Jail without bail becomes a punitive principle as laws like UAPA are weaponised by the State against dissidents. GN Saibaba, a 90 per cent disabled English professor at Delhi University, remained embroiled in a UAPA case since May 2014, on the allegations of associating with banned Maoist insurgent outfits. After nearly nine years of incarceration, a wheelchair-bound Saibaba finally secured an acquittal in the case along with five others in March 2024. However, due to severe institutional neglect of his multiple ailments in prison, Saibaba passed away seven months later. The reasons for the fate he suffered lay in his relentless activism for the rights of Adivasis and Dalits.

Top To Bottom: Anand Teltumbde, Hany Babu, Shoma Sen
Top To Bottom: Anand Teltumbde, Hany Babu, Shoma Sen Illustration

Similarly, public intellectuals like Anand Teltumbde, Nagpur University professor Shoma Sen and Delhi University professor Hany Babu, along with thirteen other activists, also paid a price for being vocal critics of government policies detrimental to the country’s marginalised communities. According to investigative agencies, their participation in Elgar Parishad—a peaceful protest conclave held on December 31, 2017 in Pune to mark 200 years of the Battle of Bhima Koregaon—allegedly led to violence at Koregaon Bhima on January 1, 2018. While Teltumbde and Sen have been released on bail, Babu will complete five years in prison this July.

State-led crackdowns on dissent in Indian educational campuses have become increasingly commonplace over the years. However, the irony is that the whip is cracked on universities that consistently rank amongst the best in terms of their intellectual calibre. The paradox here glares us in the face: do intellectuals, students and teachers, overstep their professional boundaries when they speak or agitate on matters of public interest? Or are they being punished for the very insights that they bring to the table with their critical quest? Whatever be the answer, it stands to expose all that is meant to be hidden by their concerted silencing.

Apeksha Priyadarshini is Senior Assistant Editor, Outlook. She writes on cinema, art, politics, gender & social justice

This article appeared as Thought Police in Outlook’s July 21 issue Degrees of Separation, a special education issue where our reporters and columnists delved into the the business of education and its stakeholders—students, universities and education consultants.

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