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.
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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.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
