New Delhi: Bright banners plastered across brick walls announce a literature festival along the roads leading to the various colleges in Delhi University. The festival, the banners say, was held in DU from February 12 to 14. Inside the colleges and across campus hostels, sound checks play bhajans. The brochure labels this festival as the genesis of a vibrant literary ‘parampara (tradition)’ envisioned by Vice-Chancellor Yogesh Singh. 

Ten years ago, February carried a different charge across the capital’s campuses. At Jawaharlal Nehru University, a protest meeting spiralled into arrests and a national confrontation that would come to redefine the relationship between universities and the state.

Students who have entered college in the years since, say the afterlife of that moment lingers. Dissent has not disappeared, they insist, but it is now weighed against the likelihood of disciplinary action, police attention and an uncertain future.

Protests and punishment

On February 12, 2016, several students were charged with sedition and arrested from JNU after students held a rally against the 2013 hanging of Mohammed Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri separatist convicted over the 2001 attack on India’s parliament.

The police at the time alleged that Kanhaiya Kumar, then president of the JNU Students’ Union, organised an event commemorating Guru where “anti-India slogans” were raised. Following this, JNU’s students came to be branded as ‘anti-nationals’ and the campus became a battleground for ideologies.

Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya. Photo: PTI

In the days after the February 2016 arrests, senior BJP leaders linked the controversy over campus dissent to questions of national identity. Then Union finance minister Arun Jaitley said the government had “won the ideological war” in the JNU row, suggesting that even those charged eventually adopted patriotic slogans and the tricolour. Then home minister Rajnath Singh said that anyone questioning India’s unity and integrity through such slogans would not be spared, drawing an explicit connection between the protest and national security concerns. 

Faculty members recall that administrators across universities began revisiting protocols for public meetings, security arrangements and disciplinary codes. Invitations to speakers, the granting of permissions and the management of demonstrations increasingly came to be viewed through the prism of reputational and legal risk. The possibility that a campus event could escalate into a national controversy was no longer abstract.

The tremors were soon visible beyond one university. In 2017, a literature seminar at Ramjas College in Delhi University ran into turmoil after invitations were extended to Umar Khalid and Shehla Rashid, both associated at the time with activism at JNU. Following objections from ABVP, the event was cancelled, clashes erupted outside the campus and the controversy quickly expanded into a national argument about the limits of acceptable speech in universities. For many students and teachers, it signalled how rapidly an academic........

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