The International Solidarity for Academic Freedom in India, a group of organisations of students at various institutions across the world has released a statement condemning the legal violence on educational campuses in India.
It is signed by SOAS Bla(c)k Panthers, the SOAS Ambedkar Society Progressive South Asia Collective (Purdue University), the Prof. G.N. Saibaba Study Circle, the India Labour Solidarity (UK), the Oxford South Asian Ambedkar Forum (OxSAAF), other indias (Netherlands), the South Asian Diaspora Action Collective (SADAC), and the Canadian Forum for Human Rights and Democracy in India.
This joint statement highlights the implications of the increasing clampdown on intellectual freedom on university campuses and urges all academics, public intellectuals, and broader society to stand with and speak out against the ongoing assaults on scholars and students.
It is produced in full below.
§
Normalising the delinking of mission/vision from praxis: legal violence in the tale of two universities
We highlight two recent incidents in two of Delhi’s most reputed and progressive universities, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Jamia Milia Islamia University, as illustrative of how the now clearly evident patterns of an escalating neoliberal Hindu supremacism are dismantling the fundamental principles of education as it emerged in post-1947 India. The goal of preparing citizens committed to social justice and equity, whatever role they occupied in their professional and personal lives, was crucial to a republic freed from the exploitations and humiliations of British colonial rule. JNU was founded on such principles as declared in its vision statement: ‘To become a world class institution, to disseminate and advance knowledge by providing instructional, research and extension excellence while promoting the philosophy of nationalism, pluralism and use of education to serve the nation in dealing with new and emerging challenges…We can say proudly that Jawaharlal Nehru University is a unique university not just in India but the world with its diversity, its commitment to social justice and intellectual attainment.’
In the early hours of February 4, 2025, four student activists associated with Bhagat Singh Chhatra Ekta Manch (bsCEM), one of the many student organisations in JNU, were highlighting the exponential increase in extrajudicial killings by the state’s armed police forces of Adivasi Indigenous peoples in the Bastar region of central India by writing on the University walls. Students expressing dissent by writing on walls is a common practice at JNU. In this case, however, the students were detained in the early hours of the morning (about 3am) by the university’s security guards. Soon, police personnel in a cavalcade of about six to seven vehicles arrived and whisked the students away to Vasant Kunj Police Station. Here, they were first physically assaulted and interrogated by the police, including Sub-Inspector Vinay Bhardwaj, for ‘defacement of public property and trespassing’. Later, they were further interrogated by India’s elite intelligence agencies, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and Intelligence Bureau (IB), whose members arrived with masks to avoid recognition. Once inside, the officials removed their masks and were recognized by the students who had been interrogated by the same personnel previously. The students’ mobile phones were also forcibly taken, and the students were tortured when they questioned the illegal interrogation. During all this time, the police denied knowing about the whereabouts of the students, who were also threatened and told not to talk about the proceedings in the police station when they were subsequently released after several hours. bsCEM is among civil society organisations and activists, such as trade unionists being ‘red tagged’ to instil fear of questioning the state.
Just a few days later, on February 10, 2025, news emerged of repression of students participating in sit-in protests in Jamia Milia Islamia University against disciplinary action being taken against four fellow students who had organised a meeting for commemorating the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests that had swept the country in 2019-2020. The CAA has been unequivocally shown to be the equivalent of the Nuremberg code to exclude Muslims from India’s richly diverse yet syncretic social fabric. Besides the intimidation of the four students and crackdown on peaceful assembly as a method of dissent, postering and wall writing were also targeted. The repression was first led by the administration, but the methods of intimidation were similar to JNU, including delegitimising dissent by ‘tagging’ (where the ‘activist’ becomes the target) to revealing their personal details in notices, not confiscating phones but using them to make threatening calls, getting faculty to put pressure, and cutting off access to basic amenities. On 13 February 2025, video messages from Delhi University All India Students Association (AISA) recounted how several Jamia students had been taken into ‘missing detention’. That is, while they knew the students had been picked up by police and taken to the police station outside which the AISA students were sitting, the police were denying any knowledge of the missing students. By 18 February 2025, 17 students were also served suspension notices by the University.
The students’ dissent was a reflection of the mission and vision of the university and the freedoms and rights guaranteed in Articles 19 and 21 of the Constitution of India. The administration and state, however, are bent on tearing away education from social justice and turning it into a lesson in submission to authority and producing, as the British had hoped, a nation of clerks ready to carry out its task of robbing the Indigenous people of their lands and justifying it as kind of civilizing mission.
The students of bsCEM, with the name of Bhagat Singh in their title, clearly remember this history while the administration is trying to erase it. Furthermore, the treatment of students under interrogation and their torture constitutes a clear breach of India’s commitment to human rights, including its obligations under the Convention Against Torture, which India has ratified.
Wall writings (1): the bridge between academic freedom and the basic right to think
Shaheen Baag, March 2020, just days before the artwork was destroyed. Image source: InSAF India.
The speedy destruction of the iconic artwork – the posters, the murals, the installations – as part of the forcible shutting down of Shaheen Bagh in March 2020 when India announced its Covid lockdown, giving four hours notice to a billion people, is a violent reminder of how wall writings can be a powerful site of resistance. On university campuses across India, the murals are an integral part of what is called the ‘parcha-poster-protest’ culture at JNU and involve hours of work to produce what are well-crafted artworks. In 2023, members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) student organ Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), which has become a veritable campus gatekeeper for the establishment, were involved in destroying several such murals at JNU and also disrupting it elsewhere in an attempt to silence those daring to call out social injustices. For example, in 2023, when a few students at Savitri Bai Phule University in Pune used wall writing to express their dissatisfaction with Narendra Modi, a local BJP leader said, ‘We will not let our university become a JNU‘ while the police registered a case under IPC section 294 (obscene acts and songs) and 500 (defamation) against a student. Such attacks on wall writings are not happening in a vacuum. The continuum between the anti-CAA graffiti at Jamia Milia and the artwork at Shaheen Baag and the heavy-handed interrogation of the bsCEM students highlights how the assault on academic freedoms is intrinsically tied to the wider public’s intellectual freedoms.
On 15 February 2025, alongside the campus incidents, it emerged that the 100-year-old Tamil magazine Vikatan’s news site was blocked after it published a cartoon of Narendra Modi in shackles next to a laughing Donald Trump, to signify the thousands of Indians who are being deported from the USA back to India in chains while the prime minister was a state guest in that country. Previously in 2021, the independent cartoonist Manjul received a caution from Twitter (now X) and lost his contract with News18 network and in January 2022, the Malayalam news site MediaOne was suddenly blocked over ‘national security concerns’. Members of the RSS political organ BJP had complained about both MediaOne and Vikatan. The NewsMinute team have noted that while cartoons have always been a form of popular political satire in India, this kind of shutting down was not seen during the autocracy of Indira Gandhi. They also noted that the silence in the public over the sudden shutting down of a 100-year-old magazine’s website did not bode well. It will make it easier for more digital censorship in the future but also ‘morality laws’ – which would tie in with the gatekeeping on campus, in particular around wall writing, given that both are powerful symbolic forms of expression.
Wall writings (2): bringing the violent repression in the ‘backyard’ into the ‘garden’
We also note that a sinister pattern of repression both on campus and in broader society is becoming established in which dissent, such as graffiti, is narrativised as violence, and state excesses and violence are normalised as ‘law and order’ actions. In February 2023, the state also attempted to ban the screening of the BBC documentary The Modi Question across campuses in India. Well-known non-invasive forms of resistance are being charged with vandalism, followed by people arbitrarily picked up, going ‘missing’ while known to be detained in police stations, with some of them being subject to illegal interrogation by intelligence agencies whose remit is high-level national security. All this is justified by creating a narrative that delegitimises student and wider activism in public as fearful ‘urban Naxalism’ or Muslim-led disruption against a ‘peaceful Hindu’ state.
We also note that this kind of case-making against wall writing is now being used as a cover-up for more sinister repressions against state-corporate interests by ‘red-tagging’. In the JNU case, the bsCEM students highlighted one of the most egregious and long-standing violations of civil and political rights of a marginalised population of the country, the Adivasi Indigenous peoples. The extrajudicial killings in Bastar, over 280 in 2024 alone, and already over 80 reported killings in the first two months of 2025, are happening as part of an ongoing ‘counter-insurgency’ operation, Operation Kagar or the final solution. One mural read: ‘A republic must not kill its own children’. This was not a novel idea as the attribution noted that the Supreme Court of India itself made this observation in January 2011 when it issued notices to the union government and the Andhra Pradesh government regarding the extrajudicial killings of Maoist leader Azad and journalist Hemchandra Pandey. The stark reminder by bsCEM students of this statement came at the time when the mainstream media casually uses phrases such as ‘gunned down’ and ‘neutralised’ to join politicians in proclaiming as ‘successful’ the encounters in which District Reserve Guards battalion of Chhattisgarh Police working with the Central Armed Police Forces kill people from their own Adivasi communities.
Translation: ‘In the goal of making India Naxal-free, the security forces have achieved a big success in Bijapur, Chhattisgarh. In this operation, 31 Naxalites were killed and a huge number of arms and explosives were also recovered. Today we have lost two of our brave soldiers in the effort to end anti-humanity Naxalism. This country will always be indebted to these heroes. I express my heartfelt condolences to the families of the martyred soldiers. I also reiterate my resolve that before 31 March 2026, we will completely eradicate Naxalism from the country, so that no citizen of the country has to lose his life due to it.’ Source: X, Amit Shah https://x.com/AmitShah/status/1888524232809963700
Like in the time of Salwa Judum and Operation Green Hunt in 2005–2009, the state yet again claims that the Maoist insurgency in the region is hampering development – as envisaged by the bottomless corporate-state-bureaucratic nexus. The Adivasis, however, continue to simply point out that many of those killed are unarmed civilians, peasants going about their daily lives, and children working side by side with their families. The state has suspended the rule of law there and with its extra-judicial killings created a state of war against all Adivasis. The media that reports in these areas may be also punished. Just weeks earlier, we heard about the gruesome murder and disposal in a septic tank of the body of freelance journalist Mukesh Chandrakar, who survived the Salwa Judum as a child and who had dared to report on the corruption involved in road building in Bastar.
In the same time as the incidents noted above, the government revoked the non-profit status of the independent media organisation, the Reporters Collective, whose investigative journalism has, among other topics, unveiled how corporate houses drive India’s industrial and mining policy-making and dilute environmental regulations.
We laud the work of the brave journalists who are reporting the brutal assaults ravaging in the deep forests of Bastar and the writings on the walls of JNU in hope that they seep into the public mindset. We conclude that remaining silent spectators of the republic’s excesses on its own citizens year after year, decade after decade, in Kashmir to Bastar, to Nagaland to Manipur, has led to the current exponential increase of the same excesses – from bulldozing away Muslim lives in urban areas to the intensified genocide of Adivasis, now involving the use of high-tech weapons and drone intelligence in heavily forested areas – in the name of national security and ‘development’. But the margins have not much to lose, they do not succumb to these excesses, you cannot kill the people’s will to live freely, as we see in Gaza, Palestine, as we will see in Bastar and elsewhere here.
The concomitant repression of the depiction of broader societal repression in wall art and wall writings on university campuses is yet another signalling of a dangerous trend and the urgency to speak out.
The co-signatories to this statement condemn these most recent attacks on students in the strongest terms. We stand in solidarity with our students, faculty, journalists, activists, and others who are raising questions and unveiling an education policy that seeks to divide, not unite people, to destroy empathy and produce and to draw a state whose intention is to pull a curtain across its excesses for all times to come, to nurture atomised beings segregated by caste, class, and religion that do its bidding, as opposed to a citizenry that values the ‘social self’, builds communities and lives sustainably and equitably.
