On Wednesday, Cambridge students protested inside the Alison Richard Building, home to the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), against the Indian government’s arrest of a student leader in a New Delhi University.

The protest is part of a wider campaign following the arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar, president of Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU). Kumar’s arrest has been widely seen as shocking, as the Indian police are not permitted on university campuses in order to safeguard dissent.

Kumar was charged under one of India’s many outdated statutes, including a law criminalising homosexuality, more precisely under a ‘sedition’ law intended to prevent anti-colonial resistance. The legislation prohibits “dissatisfaction” towards the government, and many social movements and their leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi, have been detained under its provisions.

Despite a growing coalition of progressive groups defending the right to free speech, India’s Home Minister, Rajnath Singh, stated that anyone chanting ‘anti-Indian’ slogans and “challeng[ing] [the] nation’s sovereignty [and] integrity while living in India […] will not be tolerated or spared.”

Amid these claims from the Indian Home Minister, members of Cambridge South Asia Watch met inside the Alison Richards Building on the Sidgwick Site to defend “critical thinking as political dissent”, which the group has claimed is being vilified as “anti-national”.

The event began with a brief speech in which an organiser from Cambridge South Asia Watch (CSAW) stated: “We believe that democracy needs dissent. We believe in constitutional values above parochial values; we believe in critical thinking.”

A CSAW member stated that “we condemn the arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar”, before discussing one of Kumar’s speeches, in which he considers the funding of universities and their purpose.

“Here he is saying that some people are saying that JNU runs on taxpayers’ money, that JNU runs on state subsidies. Yes, it’s true. It’s true that university runs on people’s taxes, on subsidies. But we want to ask is, ‘What is a university for?’ A university exists so that the common sense of society may be subjected to critical analysis, so that critical debate may occur in the public realm.

“If a university fails in this mission, there will be no country at all […] the country will only be grazing ground for the rich, for exploitation and oppression.”

Protestors took turns reading from Kumar’s speech, addressing the state of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in India, the role of universities, and the government’s failure.Dr Surabhi Ranganathan, a fellow of King’s College and a member of the Faculty of Law, told Varsity: “We believe that the Indian government is on a wrongful course of action. They’re trying to suppress dissent, they’re trying to suppress free speech, they’re trying to suppress constitutional values in favour of more parochial values. We believe that they are playing with the idea of India. We’re here to try and resist that.”

Dr Ranganathan called the idea of putting forward a formal motion condemning the Indian government’s actions to CUSU a “great idea” and deemed it the “next step”. She added that “it would be nice to make this a Cambridge-wide thing, not just limited to the South Asia group” and endorsed the idea of involving students from Anglia Ruskin as well.

The event ended with a speech which called for the recognition of the “common humanity of the world [and] the common humanity of India”. It continued: “We have identified today those who stand against our shared humanity. The most significant question before us today is to remember this identification. We have identified the face of caste oppression [and] economic exploitation.” The event ended with a declaration that “the people united shall always be victorious.”