With Delhi police entering the university library in Jamia Millia Islamia in wake of anti-CAA and NRC protests with batons and tear gas and JNU students being assaulted by university guards and police personnel for writing slogans against anti-maoist exercise ‘Operation Kagar,’ the crackdown has even often taken scary violent forms.
“One student started bleeding from one ear when the police personnel beat him up during questioning,” JNU student Gaurav told Newslaundry. He and three other students were first assaulted by JNU guards and then taken to the police station. “The police personnel beat us up to get us to give them our phone passwords,” Gaurav said. Their crime? Writing “Stop the war on the people” on a wall in Jawaharlal Nehru University.
So much so is the stifling of freedom on campus that even a bunch of students sitting around for a group discussion draws the ire of the university administration, students allege. “Any open ground where students would sit around after class has been covered with flower pots and fences have been installed around them to discourage students from spending time in university outside the classroom,” said Shubhojeet, a student, on how space for dissent has been clandestinely reduced in Ambedkar University Delhi.
In Delhi University, at least eight students were suspended and two were debarred from the campus over a protest held against the ban on screening a BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The protestors allege that they had also been subjected to brutal use of force.
“The students had just started to gather and over a hundred guards from the university surrounded us and started to assault us,” Badal, a DU student and one of the protesters, told Newslaundry. “Male or female, no student was spared. The guards even tried to remove the hijab of Muslims students. Soon, buses filled with Delhi police personnel arrived at the spot. They beat us up and then detained us,” she said.
The students see the curb on protests and suppression of all kinds of forms of expression in universities not only as an attack on their voices but as part of a larger systematic attempt at subverting India’s democracy. “The attack is on the democratic tradition that public universities like JNU and HCU [University of Hyderabad] represent,” said Aakash Bhattarcharya, a former JNU student.
With the ever increasing police presence on campus grounds and the university administration issuing notification after notification against student gatherings, these universities – which were once vibrant spaces for debate and dissent – are now the battleground for a larger war on free speech and critical thought. Mainstream media has also joined the ruling dispensation's siege against campus freedom. TV channels have often dubbed Delhi’s universities as hubs of “anti-national” activities and even presented them as “one of the biggest threats to the country”.
The image of these universities has been maligned to such an extent that their students often face difficulties in finding job opportunities. The onslaught has even reached the academic realm . “The attempt is to ensure that every university classroom has a teacher who propagates communal venom,” DU student Abhigyaan said. “You don’t need to declare an Emergency [like in the 1970s] to achieve what has been achieved by fascism today.”
Newslaundry’s documentary investigates the systematic assault on student voices and what it says about the state of democracy in India.
Watch.
Small teams can do great things. All it takes is a subscription. Subscribe now and power Newslaundry’s work.
Newslaundry is a reader-supported, ad-free, independent news outlet based out of New Delhi. Support their journalism, here.
