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 punishmentOn 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: PTIIn 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 programme could snowball into a battle.Students who enrolled in the years after 2016 say they inherited this caution as common sense. Participation in rallies, they explain, now comes with conversations about surveillance, social media exposure and future employability. The question they ask each other is not whether they can afford to speak up, but about the risk a young person can afford to carry in an increasingly intolerant political environment.Manoeuvring movements “We were beaten, a female police constable thrashed me everywhere a woman shouldn’t be touched,” a former Jamia Millia Islamia student protestor told The Wire.From 2019, several campuses across India saw a severe chain of confrontations, each reshaping how the next would unfold. In December 2019, the boundary between campus and street collapsed at Jamia Millia Islamia. Television footage and mobile phone videos, recorded by students and CCTV cameras, showed Delhi Police personnel moving through the university gates, firing tear gas and entering buildings as students ran for cover. File image of a used tear gas shell in the Jamia library. Photo: PTIImages from inside the library, of students hiding and shivering behind desks while others were emerging with bloodied faces, circulated within minutes and were replayed for days. Students protesting against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act/National Register of Citizens near the university were also dispersed using tear gas bombs. Students and civil rights groups alleged excessive force and unlawful entry into academic spaces, while police maintained they had been pursuing protesters who had left the main road. For many watching across the country, the episode redrew assumptions about the degree of protection a campus could offer. But for students who experienced this firsthand, the trauma has become a trigger; a student shared that though they’re a law-abiding citizen, the presence of police or RAF personnel makes them uncomfortable. The anti-CAA/NRC protests soon spiralled beyond what the BJP government envisioned, spreading across locations and campuses in India. Professors across universities say that after the sea of protests that the BJP saw, somehow, something changed. Campuses were being censored. Professors and observers who spoke to The Wire said that campuses across the board saw the careful and calculated installation of right-leaning deans, vice-chancellors and professors. Specifically from 2016 and increasingly after 2019, observers recall the easy appointment of ‘BJP-minded’ brains in campuses, who would suspend students, and disallow and even cancel events which remotely smelled of left-leaning or liberal ideas.For economist and retired professor of economics at JNU Arun Kumar, the freedom to differ from the establishment is being curtailed. “The establishment has become intolerant. Universities are spaces where you differ, you dissent and that generated knowledge. The BJP is just following its ideological commitment to the RSS. Just as there is no dissent there, they don’t want dissent to exist elsewhere,” Kumar told The Wire.Kumar also compared the situation before and after 2016. “It’s not like spaces are empty of ideologies. But before, universities allowed difference, dissent to be discussed. Today, that space is very narrow,” he said.Rise of the right rhetoricThe ripples of the ruckus at JNU were quite evidently felt across JMI, DU, TISS, SAU and AUD as well. Administrations at the universities often responded to protesting students and teachers with suspension letters.In March 2025, a final year MA student of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi was suspended for allegedly criticising a speech delivered by Anu Singh Lathar, the vice-chancellor of the university, on Republic Day. Lathar had said in her speech that the Ram Janmabhoomi movement is 525 years old and not a new issue. The vice-chancellor had also applauded the state for the establishment of the Ram temple and called for Dr B.R. Ambedkar to be a national figure instead of being “only” for the Dalit community.For many on campus, suspension orders have come to represent more than individual acts of discipline. Just recently, the entire sitting JNUSU was “rusticated” because they were protesting in favour of the UGC regulations on caste discrimination. JNU V-C Santishree D. Pandit not only stood by this decision in a recent interview, but said that students at public universities should treat the Union government like “god” because their education is subsidised. Decisions of this kind are read as signals about which forms of speech are likely to invite sanction and which will find institutional encouragement. Teachers say that over time, this produces a quieter, anticipatory compliance: organisers rethink guest lists, students dilute slogans, departments avoid themes that might draw scrutiny. It is within this atmosphere, faculty members argue, that decisions about cancelled seminars, altered syllabi and officially endorsed programmes acquire a wider political meaning.Controversial curriculum revisions too, have repeatedly drawn students into protest. In recent years at the University of Delhi, students and faculty groups objected both to the removal of Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd’s Why I Am Not a Hindu and to proposals that introduced readings from the Manusmriti or expanded material on the Bhagavad Gita while trimming units on the Mughals. Monami Basu, an assistant professor of economics at Kamala Nehru college, has been a careful observer of occurrences within DU. “The Colloquium with Nandini Sundar as convener was cancelled without any reason; a certain kind of discourse is being discouraged and certain kind of discourse is being pushed,” Basu told The Wire. As an academic and member, Academic Council, Delhi University, Basu has witnessed certain portions of syllabi and courses being slashed because of falling against a particular ideology and portions being included because of syncing to the ideology of the current dispensation. “I have fought this. There have been attempts to remove such portions related to caste and gender, and sometimes we have been able to retain some portions. This is another kind of censorship happening,” Basu said.Mainstreaming exclusionApoorvanand, a professor of Hindi at Delhi University, can hear loud bhajans being blasted from speakers, with ‘Jai Shri Ram’, ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’, ‘Vande Mataram’ at their core. “This is what campus has been turned into. It functions to alienate. It is becoming a platform for RSS. A few weeks ago, Saraswati Pooja was observed here, with Jai Shri Ram flags everywhere. When the consecration of the Ram Mandir happened in Ayodhya, bhandaras (feasts) were organised,” he told The Wire.“Everything happening here is being done to promote Hindutva. There is no student activity on campus which is allowed without the BJP or RSS bent. There is no question of student politics. You can already see the guest list of the literature festival,” he said. Apoorvanand adds that the situation at private universities is also following the same trends. “They can’t even voice their opinions, their employment holds them hostage,” he said.Last year, Apoorvanand was invited to deliver a talk at Jamia Hamdard, but at the last moment, it was cancelled. In 2025, the Delhi University professor was to participate in an academic event at The New School in New York, and was asked by the DU administration to submit the text of his proposed talk before giving him clearance to attend the event. After he refused, the varsity denied him permission to travel.“It is gutted, the atmosphere here,” he said.Meanwhile, the DU Literature Festival opened with Smita Prakash, Editor of Asian News International (ANI), senior BJP leader Ram Madhav, Dr. Vijay Chauthaiwale, In-charge, Department of Foreign Affairs, BJP, and also welcomed other speakers such Dr Sudhanshu Trivedi, Member of Rajya Sabha and National Spokesperson, BJP, firebrand right-wing anchors such as Anjana Om Kashyap, Rahul Shivshankar, Rubika Liyaquat, director of The Kashmir Files Vivek Agnihotri, and Shehzad Poonawalla, National Spokesperson, BJP. The DU literature fest. Photo: Facebook/@duliteraturefest.For several faculty members interviewed for this article, the guest line-up reflected the broader shift they described. A shift that also involved the construction of gaushalas in campus and VC Singh himself giving speeches titled, “Naxal Mukt Bharat: Ending Red Terror Under Modi’s Leadership, Why Campuses are Targets?” In the same environment, a poetry and story reading session featuring actor Naseeruddin Shah, co-organised by the Mumbai University’s Urdu Department, was scheduled to be held on February 1, but was cancelled with the actor alleging that he was “disinvited at the last moment”.At universities such as Jamia Millia Islamia, Ambedkar University Delhi and South Asian University, students talk about suspensions, disciplinary inquiries and the possibility of police cases as factors that shape decisions about whether and how to mobilise. Several said they had become accustomed to seeking permissions, moderating language and preparing for administrative scrutiny in ways that would have seemed unfamiliar a decade ago.