A demonstration took place on King’s Parade last Saturday to express solidarity with the students and faculty of Delhi University and draw attention to recent attacks on them by right-wing partisans in India.

Indian students at the University stood along the wall of King’s Parade with placards reading “#StandwithRamjas”, demonstrating their support for those who had recently been targeted by far-right groups.

On 21st and 22nd of February, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a right-wing Hindu nationalist student organisation, allegedly attacked students and faculty members at Ramjas College in the University of Delhi. The college had organised a public seminar entitled “Cultures of Dissent,” which aimed to cover a range of topics on resistance, state violence, and activism, but on the 21st the seminar room was reportedly vandalised and the students and professors present assaulted.  

One of those who had been invited to the seminar was Umar Khalid, a PhD student of Jawaharlal Nehru University. It was his presence that the ABVP was supposedly particularly opposed to, as he was arrested last February on charges of sedition for allegedly expressing anti-nationalistic sentiments when discussing the sensitive issue of Kashmir.   

The following day, students and professors staged a peaceful protest, but were again reportedly met with violence.     

“Students and faculty members were hit with stones, bricks, and eggs. Further, female students were manhandled, given rape threats, and hurled abuses at,” student Koyna Tomar told Varsity. “And everything in the name of ‘Nation’, the chest-thumping rhetoric of motherland.”

The right-wing student organisation ABVP is associated with the RSS, a pan-India Hindu far-right cultural organisation, and with the political party which currently holds power in India, the BJP. The King’s Parade protesters spoke of the BJP’s “sustained attempt to create communal divisions” since they came to power in 2014.

One demonstrator spoke of a “strong trend within the country” towards “anti-intellectualism”. Various academic appointments have been given to nationalist figures: for instance, Yellapragada Sudershan Rao, a man associated with the RSS, was appointed head of the Indian Council for Historical Research in 2014, despite his lack of credentials for the role. The BJP has also sought to get rid of those who do not share its views. In 2015, Mahesh Rangarajan stepped down as director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) due to pressure from the ruling party.

“Some of our best professors have received direct threats of physical harm,” a statement on the back of the protesters’ placards read. “They have used doctored videos over social media in an attempt to bring charges of sedition on the professors.”

The demonstrators also said that they were “deeply concerned” that the government was privatising education in India, with signs that the University Grants Commission (UGC) will stop giving grants to colleges, meaning funding for higher education would have to be raised independently.

The King’s Parade protesters said that the acts of violence associated with India’s far-right were “innumerable”, citing the murder of fifty-year-old Mohammad Akhlaq in 2015, who was lynched by a right-wing mob for allegedly consuming beef (as the cow is sacred to Hindus). The protestors said that the violence on the 21st and 22nd showed that the situation had “really accelerated in the last two weeks” and that “academic freedom is under threat.”

Opponents of the Indian government have complained that such incidents have been suppressed in mainstream Indian media, with any academic who questions the right-wing agenda being denounced as anti-nationalist. As such, the group emphasised the need to raise awareness of this deplorable incident at Ramjas College and to condemn the actions of the AVBP. As one demonstrator put it, India may be a secular democracy, but “the pillars of democracy are now fast shrinking.”