New Delhi: Over 950 feminist activists, actors, academics, students, civil society organisations and concerned citizens from all walks of life have issued a joint statement condemning the brutal police assault on students and citizens protesting at Jantar Mantar.The statement expresses unequivocal solidarity with protesting students and with demonstrations taking place across the country in support of their demands.The signatories expressed grave concern over images, videos and testimonies showing police personnel physically assaulting protesters and subjecting young women to sexualised violence. They have demanded an independent, credible and time-bound inquiry, with responsibility extending to the personnel involved, commanding officers and political authorities who authorised the use of force.The statement also recognises the extraordinary care sustaining the protests. “Students have shared food, water and medicines, tended to the injured and supported one another through exhaustion, detention and violence. Protesters have even been seen offering water to tired police personnel deployed against them,” they said.The joint statement demands an end to police violence, release of detained protesters, accountability for physical and sexual assault, transparency in examination and recruitment processes, compensation for affected students, and the resignation of the Union education minister, the home minister and the prime minister.Among the signatories are:Ratna Pathak Shah, Prakash Raj, Ruth Manorama, Sylvia Karpagam, Uma Chakravarti, Syeda Hameed, Shabnam Hashmi, Maimoona Mollah, Dev Desai, Anjali Monteiro, Kalyani Menon Sen, Hasina Khan,Navsharan Singh, Anjali Bharadwaj, Papori Bora, Vrinda Grover, Chayanika Shah, Nivedita Menon, Meera Sanghamitra, Bittu K R, Farah Naqvi, Pamela Philipose, Laxmi Murthy, Geeta Seshu, Lakshmi Lingam, Rajashri Dasgupta, Roshmi Goswami, Vibhuti Patel, Radha Kumar, Arundhati Dhuru, Rinchin, Veena Shatrugna, Rohini Hensman, Ajita Rao, Mohan Rao, Savita Sharma, Sadhna Arya, Indu Prakash Singh, Malavika Rajkotia, Rita Manchanda, Cedric Prakash, Amrita Johri, Soma Sen, Deeptipriya Mehrotra.Among groups that have signed the statement are the Saheli Women’s Resource Centre, Pragatisheel Mahila Sangathan, Feminists in Resistance (Kolkata), Forum Against the Oppression of Women (Mumbai), Vimochana (Bengaluru), Hasrat-e-Zindagi Mamuli (Mumbai), and the Manasa Women’s Group (Bengaluru).The full statement is below: There are moments when anger ceases to be a feeling and becomes a public duty. This is one of those moments.We condemn, with all the fury this moment demands, the continuing savage police assault, sexual violence, use of pellet guns, nail-encrusted batons, tear gas and other vicious acts of violence on students and concerned citizens protesting at Jantar Mantar since 20 July 2026. Young people who came to the capital carrying the weight of stolen years, fraudulent examinations, broken promises and futures systematically foreclosed, were met with barricades, boots, blows and sexualised violence. The government that has robbed them of education, employment and dignity now seeks to rob them of the right to name what has been done to them.This protest began with the crisis in education, but it has exposed the anatomy of the present government. It has revealed a political order built on corruption without accountability, institutions without integrity, examinations without certainty, recruitment without employment and governance without even the pretense of responsibility.But the streets are no longer silent.Across the country, students are gathering, marching and raising their voices in solidarity. They are refusing the isolation on which this regime depends. Examination bodies collect fees from lakhs of candidates even when vacancies remain unfilled and recruitment processes remain suspended for years. For years, students have been told to wait. Wait for the notification. Wait for the examination. Wait for the results. Wait for the investigation. Wait for the court. Wait for the government to notice that their lives are passing by. Each postponement has been presented as a minor administrative inconvenience, as though young people possess an endless reserve of time, money and hope.We stand with them without qualification. We stand with their demands, their courage and their refusal to accept that an entire generation can be cheated and discarded without consequence.They do not.The patience demanded of them has always been another name for their exploitation.Behind every application form is a material sacrifice. There are coaching fees, books, rent, travel, internet expenses and years withdrawn from other possibilities of work and study. There are parents who spend savings, sell jewellery, borrow money and cut back on food and healthcare so that a child could prepare; young people whose labour has been repeatedly consumed by a system that refuses to account for its own corruption; students who organise their entire lives around an examination calendar that can be arbitrarily destroyed. When a paper is leaked or an examination cancelled, the loss is not corrected by announcing another date.Re-conducting an examination may address an administrative requirement, but it does not deliver justice. It makes students repeat labour already completed because those entrusted with public responsibility failed to do their jobs. It compels families to bear the financial burden again and forces the public to pay twice for institutional corruption.The dam has now broken, and the rage spilling onto the streets is neither sudden nor irrational. It has been built form by form, fee by fee, cancellation by cancellation, suicide by suicide. It carries the accumulated grief of students who studied for years only to discover that the examination had been compromised.We are heartened by the extraordinary ethic of care emerging from these protests. Students are sharing food, water and medicines. They are holding one another through exhaustion and injury. They are returning to the streets after being beaten and detained. Even as the police act as the armed shield of those in power, protesters have been seen tending to exhausted police personnel, offering them water and recognising their humanity. In this contrast lies a devastating political truth: the protesters have preserved an ethic of care that the state has abandoned.We are also enraged and horrified by the images and testimonies of police personnel sexually assaulting, groping and violating protesters. As history has shown, sexual violence is not an accidental by-product of policing. It is one of the state’s most brutal instruments for punishing the people, especially women, queer and trans* persons who refuse obedience, who occupy public space and who challenge authority. When the police assaults their bodies with impunity, the message is unmistakable: dissent must be humiliated, terrorised and forced back into silence.We refuse that silence.We demand:Every allegation of sexual and physical violence must be investigated through an independent, credible and time-bound inquiry. Responsibility cannot be confined to a few personnel identified in videos. It extends to the commanding officers, administrators and political authorities who sanctioned the use of force and created the conditions for such violence. There must be criminal prosecution, institutional accountability and public disclosure of the chain of command.We demand the immediate resignation of the Union Education Minister, who must bear political responsibility for the catastrophic breakdown of the country’s examination and recruitment systems.We demand the resignation of the Home Minister, under whose orders the police brutalities are being unleashed.We demand the resignation of the Prime Minister, under whose leadership corruption has flourished, institutions have been degraded and police violence has become the routine response to democratic dissent.We demand that the government not treat education as a business and students as a source of revenue and protest as a law-and-order problem. These systemic problems should be addressed urgently to address issues of violence and sexual violence by the state, affordable education, corruption in exams, employment opportunities for the young, and, most importantly, accountability of all institutions.The Supreme Court must recognise that hearing the case of the severe atrocities against unarmed civilians isn’t a “waste of its time”; it is a matter of the students’ right under Article 32 of the Indian Constitution to directly approach the Supreme Court for the enforcement of their fundamental rights. In this case, their Right to Life.