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Who owns the land? A history of migration in India

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In a country shaped by movement, the idea of “original inhabitants” has always been more myth than history.

Who, then, is the “original” Indian? The question surfaces repeatedly in public debates, political rhetoric, and everyday conversations, often charged with emotion and certainty. Yet history, when examined closely, offers a far more unsettling and fascinating answer. India is not a civilisation built by a single people who arrived, settled, and stayed. It is a land shaped by movement. Everyone, quite literally, came from somewhere else—some earlier, some later, but all through migration.

The peopling of India is neither linear nor simple. Long before borders, nations, or even written records, early hunter-gatherers moved across landscapes that would later be called the subcontinent. They were followed, over millennia, by pastoralists, agricultural communities, traders, conquerors, refugees, and pilgrims. The story includes debated Dravidian movements, Indo-Aryan migrations, Indo-Greeks, Central Asian groups, Arabs, Persians, Turks, and Afghans, as well as Europeans under colonial rule. Alongside these were smaller yet enduring communities—Jews, Zoroastrians, and Armenians who arrived seeking refuge and made India their home.

This layered history complicates modern obsessions with ancestry and first claims. If India is a land of migrations, then belonging cannot rest on who came first but on how diverse peoples learned to live together over time. To understand India is to trace these waves of movement, each leaving an imprint on its languages, cultures, beliefs, and identities.

The earliest migration into India predates history itself. Anatomically modern humans reached the subcontinent from Africa around 60,000–70,000 years ago. Archaeology and genetics suggest a slow dispersal of hunter-gatherer groups across the region, forming the deepest and most widespread layer of Indian ancestry. These early populations were not culturally uniform, nor were they stationary; movement and adaptation were defining features of life in the prehistoric subcontinent.

The idea of a distinct Dravidian migration is far more contested. Earlier colonial scholarship proposed a “Dravidian race”, but historians today reject such racial frameworks. As Romila Thapar has argued, “Dravidian” is best understood as a linguistic and cultural category rather than a biological one. Whether Dravidian languages spread through migration or internal cultural diffusion remains debated, and the absence of clear archaeological breaks cautions against simplistic migration models.

The Indo-Aryan migrations, by contrast, are more securely traced through linguistic and textual evidence, though they were neither peaceful nor uniform. Beginning around the second millennium BCE, Indo-Aryan-speaking pastoral groups entered northwestern India, encountering established agrarian societies. The Rig Veda itself records conflicts over land, cattle, and resources, suggesting friction as well as interaction. Yet it is precisely through these tensions, conflicts, accommodations, and syntheses that early social hierarchies, ritual traditions, and political formations emerged. The Vedas were not the product of a single migrating people but of prolonged encounters that laid the foundations of what would later be recognised as early Indian civilisation.

From the early centuries BCE, India emerged as a crossroads of transcontinental movement, where armies, traders, and entire ruling elites entered the subcontinent and stayed. The Indo-Greeks were among the earliest of these new arrivals. Following Alexander’s campaigns, Greek-speaking rulers established kingdoms in northwestern India, minting bilingual coins in Greek and Kharosthi and patronising local religious traditions. Menander I (Milinda), for instance, is remembered in Buddhist texts such as the Milinda Panha as a ruler deeply engaged with Indian philosophical thought. Their presence did not displace Indian culture; instead, it produced striking hybrids in language, governance, and art.

This pattern continued with successive Central Asian groups such as the Scythians (Shakas), Kushans, and later the Huns. The Kushan Empire, stretching from Central Asia deep into northern India, exemplified cultural synthesis at its height. Kushan rulers adopted unmistakably Indian royal titles such as Maharaja and Devaputra (Son of God), while their coins depicted a remarkable pantheon—Greek, Iranian, Buddhist, and Hindu deities side by side. Images of Shiva (often labelled Oesho), along with Buddha and Mithra, appeared on Kushan coinage, signalling an accommodation rather than rejection of local beliefs. It was under Kushan patronage that Gandhara art flourished, producing the earliest anthropomorphic images of the Buddha, shaped by Greco-Roman artistic conventions.

As historian Upinder Singh notes, India’s political history reveals a recurring pattern: outsiders became insiders. Migration, in this context, was not a rupture but a historical process, one that transformed both newcomers and the societies they ruled, forging a syncretic culture that became a defining feature of the subcontinent.

The arrival of the Mughals in the sixteenth century complicates any simple understanding of migration and colonisation in India. Though of Central Asian origin, the Mughal rulers did not remain an external ruling elite. Within a few generations, they governed from Indian capitals, relied on Indian agrarian revenues, and embedded their authority within local political structures. Persian functioned as the language of the court, but administration operated through established Indian systems and regional intermediaries. Emperors such as Akbar forged durable alliances with Rajput elites through marriage and service, while later Mughal princes were born and raised entirely in India. Imperial culture reflected this rootedness: Mughal architecture fused Timurid forms with indigenous traditions, court ateliers blended Persian and Indian aesthetics, and Sanskrit texts were translated into Persian to circulate Indian knowledge within the empire. Migration here evolved into settlement and identification with the land.

British colonial rule marked a decisive break from this pattern. European officials, soldiers, and traders arrived not to integrate but to govern from a distance. Authority rested on bureaucratic control rather than cultural accommodation. Through censuses, legal codification, railways, and centralised administration, the colonial state reordered Indian society, fixing identities that had earlier been more fluid and embedding the subcontinent within a global imperial economy. Migration under colonialism thus reshaped India structurally rather than socially.

The most violent migration accompanied independence itself. The Partition in 1947 triggered one of the largest forced movements of people in modern history, displacing millions and inflicting lasting trauma. Unlike earlier migrations that unfolded over centuries, this rupture hardened borders and identities almost overnight, marking a painful culmination of India’s long history of movement.

Read Also: The Reformed Identity of Bengal: Tracing the History of an Exodus

Image Credits: “Belgians fleeing” by Leo Gestel

Madhav Choudhary
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Understanding Ambedkar: lessons from an elective course

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Lessons from the Elective Course explores the Delhi University paper’s continued relevance today, demonstrating how Ambedkar’s ideas on caste, democracy, feminism, and social justice continue to challenge and inform contemporary debates.

In a moment when Ambedkar’s legacy is being relentlessly appropriated across the political spectrum, Delhi University’s paper Understanding Ambedkar acquires an uneasy relevance. The contemporary debate surrounding UGC guidelines on caste equity has further heightened this urgency: caste politics and Ambedkarian thought are inextricably linked, regardless of institutional attempts to sanitise one from the other. My engagement with the paper was intellectually uneven, characterised by stimulating readings and conceptual breakthroughs, yet weakened by pedagogical fragility–a classroom experience that nonetheless yielded powerful theoretical insights. This contradiction mirrors Ambedkar himself: complex, difficult to contain, and resistant to being flattened into ideological comfort. To “understand Ambedkar” is not to canonise him, but to confront the discomfort his ideas generate— regarding caste, power, nationhood, gender, and democracy. It is this discomfort, rather than consensus, that truly defines his relevance.

Critically Reading Understanding Ambedkar

The paper offers scope for genuine critical engagement precisely because of its reliance on primary sources—Ambedkar’s own books, essays, Constituent Assembly debates, and speeches. This direct encounter with his voice enables students to engage with his thinking on society, economy, history, politics, and democracy without excessive mediation or interpretive filtering. One of the paper’s most valuable intellectual interventions is its decisive dismantling of the myth of Ambedkar as a demi-god. He emerges instead as a rigorous, evolving thinker—brilliant, yet not infallible; transformative, yet marked by intellectual limitations, including constrained readings of history and selective analytical frameworks.

This makes the paper equally important for two opposing constituencies: those who revere Ambedkar uncritically and those who dismiss him ideologically. Both are compelled to confront their caricatures. However, the paper’s omissions remain structurally indefensible. There is no substantive engagement with reservations or affirmative action—central to Ambedkar’s political praxis. The absence of a serious treatment of Ambedkar–Gandhi relations further weakens the framework. Most indefensible of all is the exclusion of Annihilation of Caste as a core text. A paper titled Understanding Ambedkar without it is not merely incomplete; it reflects a fundamental failure of academic judgment.

Ambedkar as a Feminist

Ambedkar can be read as a proto-feminist in the deepest political sense—not through symbolic gestures, but through structural interventions in law, social reform, and institutional design. His sustained work on women’s education, labour rights, marriage, inheritance, and legal equality constitutes one of the most comprehensive early frameworks for gender justice in modern India, unmatched by most nationalist contemporaries. Sharmila Rege’s intervention highlights that feminist thought in India has long marginalised Ambedkar, even while canonising figures such as Gandhi and Nehru. She locates this erasure within nationalist historiography and academic co-optation, where Dalit politics was absorbed without engaging its epistemological challenge. Rege argues that caste and gender cannot be analytically separated or simplistically equated; violence against Dalit women is neither merely “caste atrocity” nor solely “sexual violence,” but a structurally entangled condition. Reclaiming Ambedkar, for her, means rejecting binaries of sameness and difference and recognising graded caste patriarchy as a distinct system. Consequently, a feminist turn to Ambedkar becomes not symbolic inclusion, but a theoretical reconstruction of feminism itself through an anti-caste lens. The most significant institutional expression of this feminist vision was the Hindu Code Bill—Ambedkar’s most radical and far-reaching intervention for women’s emancipation. This bill sought to dismantle the legal foundations of Brahmanical patriarchy by reforming marriage, inheritance, property rights, divorce, and adoption, directly challenging the sacred authority of Hindu personal law. For the first time, women were recognised as legal subjects rather than custodial dependents within family structures. 

Ambedkar as a Historian: Limits of His Historical Method

Ambedkar’s engagement with history, unlike his work in law, economics, or constitutional theory, represents one of the weaker dimensions of his intellectual legacy. Trained historians often encounter significant methodological challenges in his historical writings. Although his rejection of racial explanations for caste and untouchability was a critical and progressive move, the alternative frameworks he constructed are analytically fragile. For instance, his theory of “Broken Men” as the origin of untouchability lacks empirical grounding and relies more on speculative reconstruction than historical evidence.

Much of Ambedkar’s reading of ancient India is shaped by an overly theological framework, reducing complex social processes to a binary struggle between Brahmanism and Buddhism. This religious reductionism flattens historical plurality and substitutes social history with moral conflict. His essay Buddha and Karl Marx exemplifies this problem: in attempting to discredit Marxism, he advances ahistorical claims—such as the absence of non-Kshatriya kings before the rise of Buddhism—that are demonstrably inaccurate. These are not interpretive disagreements but factual distortions.

It is unsurprising that professional historians have largely refrained from engaging deeply with Ambedkar’s historical scholarship. His historical method is frequently speculative, ideologically driven, and weakly evidentiary. Ambedkar’s enduring significance resides not in his historiography, but in his political theory, constitutional vision, and anti-caste philosophy—domains where his intellectual rigor remains both defensible and transformative.

Caste — Jaati Jo Kabhi Nahi Jaati

Ambedkar’s discourse on caste remains as urgent today as it was seventy-five years ago. Constitutional guarantees of equality, by themselves, have never been sufficient to dismantle caste as a lived social reality. Law can prohibit discrimination; it cannot erase social reproduction. In recent years, caste pride among the youth has not only resurfaced but intensified, circulating through digital cultures, identity politics, and performative assertions of “heritage,” revealing how caste mutates rather than disappears.

It is within this context that the current controversy surrounding the UGC guidelines on caste equity must be considered. The resistance to institutional recognition of caste is not a neutral demand for “merit” or “universality,” but a political anxiety regarding structural privilege. The paper Understanding Ambedkar becomes particularly relevant here, as it exposes how caste politics is consistently lethal; however, the refusal to recognise caste as a problem is equally dangerous. Ambedkar argued that annihilation requires more than constitutional text—it demands social consciousness, institutional courage, and moral confrontation. Without that, caste does not die; it only changes form.

Read Also: The queer case of dalit queers

Image Credits: Library of Congress

Madhav Choudhary

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The queer case of dalit queers

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Who do we see when we think of an Indian queer person? Whose voices are centred and who has to blend in quietly? Whose queerness makes the cut?

The most that many dominant, urban queer spaces in India can manage to address is the concept of intersectionality. Tote bags quoting Maya Angelou’s “We are not free until we are all free,” or lapel pins of Ambedkar placed next to a pride flag, often represent the outer limit of savarna queer politics. This frequently produces a performance of inclusivity— an image of joy, safety, and community—without sustained engagement with how caste continues to structure access, voice, and legitimacy within queer spaces themselves.

Queer spaces and collectives do offer a great deal, particularly to students and young people newly arriving at an understanding of their gender and sexuality. These spaces promise, at the very least, that one will not be discriminated against for being queer. They offer affirmation, vocabulary, and recognition. For those raised in unsafe or hostile environments, queer spaces can feel like the first place one can rest. Yet inclusion alone cannot be mistaken for equality. Formal membership does not automatically guarantee fair treatment, equal benefits, or the absence of hierarchy. Being allowed into a space does not mean being centred within it.

Queer theorists have long challenged the notion of complete internal solidarity within these spaces. The histories of the modern LGBTQ+ movement are rooted in bars, discos, urban commercial spaces, and academic institutions in the West. Though often well-intentioned, this meant that institutionalised queer theory and politics were disproportionately shaped by the people with access to capital–wealthy, white, cisgender men. In Fear of a Queer Planet, Michael Warner includes a correspondence touching on this: “As a gay man of colour, I find certain aspects of my identity empowered within the space of an ethnic family, and others negated within the same space. I fall in between a split between the ethnic family and the white gay man.” The problem, then, is not difference, but which differences can define queerness.

This early shaping of queer movements offers an explanation for the racism that has historically marked queer spaces. Asian-American men were stereotyped as passive or feminine, and Black men marked as aggressive were not marginal accidents but structural outcomes of who was allowed to shape queer desire and politics.

Social movements often arise from shared experiences of structural inequality, insufficient access to resources, and collective identity. During the AIDS crisis, discrimination and state neglect were experiences that cut across queer communities. In contemporary India, however—particularly within elite urban, savarna-dominated spaces where decriminalisation and corporate anti-discrimination policies are increasingly the norm—queer spaces function less as sites of survival and more as sites of identity formation.

This idea of collective identity comes with several nuances. Many queer spaces attempt to build community through cultural experiences and queer media. The savarna queer community here often remains blind to the role caste has played in shaping their queer experience. Wattpad and AO3 crushes, Tumblr conversations with other savarna queers, and eventually coming out at home are some of the narratives I have encountered repeatedly. They find solidarity in the freedom of performing their queerness—through thrifted clothes, niche artists, and cultural references. Silently, there is little space for inclusion for an Indian queer not already acquainted with the queer movement via their networks, early internet access, and wealth. A standard of queer episteme, sensitivity, and ‘style’, achieved through your upper-caste background, becomes the norm. You risk being seen as insensitive, uncultured, or unsure of yourself.

A savarna friend once told me that his mother would rather he be gay than marry someone from a “lower” caste. This is telling.  As Akhil Kang argues, caste works through ideas of purity and pollution, and queerness is absorbed into this logic. A savarna gayness can be accommodated as long as it does not threaten caste boundaries. The “dirty” queer, then, is not the gay son, but the Dalit partner.

Yashica Dutt speaks of the performances a Dalit must make every day, particularly in savarna spaces and educational institutions. Being Dalit is a constant performance of class, culture, and effortless wealth. The same is true for the Dalit queer. 

Indian queer histories existed long before contemporary movements—Hijras and other gender-diverse communities have lived and been marginalised for centuries. Yet it was only with the influx of Western frameworks that sections of the savarna population began to make peace with queerness. “Queer” became upper-caste queer, no longer poor, lower-caste, or “abnormal.” It became acceptable.

Warner denounces queer political aspirations that restrict themselves to anti-discrimination. The politics of a queer planet, he argues, must be far-reaching—encompassing healthcare, care for the elderly, housing, and access to rights. What savarna queer spaces in India often miss is the disproportionate access within the queer community. Realities of social exclusion, acceptance at home, and lived queer experience are ruled out. Being queer itself becomes tied to savarna experience, and so being a political queer becomes tied to savarna political aspirations.

This is not to scorn queer savarnas as immoral. There is a recognition of caste as an institution that needs to be abolished. But Dalit political aspirations are not placed at the forefront. 

Much of this engagement appears to stem from savarna guilt. Often, the only intersectionality offered is one that imagines the Dalit queer solely as a victim—a fictionalised figure living on the edge of poverty and violence. Kang critiques intersectionality itself when it freezes Dalit queerness as suffering rather than agency.

Assertions against caste oppression, patriarchy, and heteronormativity are not new. In recent years, certain articulations of Dalit identity have taken the form of pride. Ginni Mahi speaks of the importance of overcoming the shame attached to her caste and asserting pride in being called a Chamar. The transformation of shame into assertion disrupts norms in deeply queer ways. 

One of the anxieties that Dalit queerness produces is the expectation that queerness must come from certain imagined bodies and performances. It ignores the possibility that anti-caste struggle itself is inherently anti-patriarchal and anti-heteronormative. 

Within university queer spaces, therefore, what we need isn’t just inclusion. It is reckoning with the terms on which Indian queerness exists.

Read Also: Taking off the Blindfold : Uncovering Caste in DUSU

Image Credits: Times of India

Anjali Paruvu

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Former DUSU President Ronak Khatri Challenges DU Over Withheld Law Degree

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Ronak Khatri, former DUSU president, has challenged Delhi University over the withholding of his LLB degree due to alleged dues of ₹10 lakh, prompting a legal dispute with the University.

Khatri, representing the NSUI party, was officially elected as the president of the Delhi University Students’ Union (DUSU) for the 2024–25 session. He completed his three-year LLB degree from Campus Law Centre in 2025 and demitted office from the post of DUSU president in August the same year.

However, even after fulfilling the required criteria of attendance, payment of fees, and semester examinations, the University refused to issue his degree and official mark sheets because of the alleged outstanding bills. The bills in question were from bookings made for the International Guest House between February and August 2025, including catering expenses.

Khatri allegedly stated that these bookings were made for official student union events after obtaining prior approval from university authorities and under the supervision of the staff adviser. According to him, these actions are unjustified, since the expenses were meant to be cleared from DUSU funds.

The issue, however, is that the DUSU staff adviser, Surender Kumar, denied granting approval for booking the International Guest House. “International Guest House does not fall under the venues permitted for DUSU activities that can be paid from the DUSU fund. No approval was given by me for such bookings,” he claimed. Meanwhile, Khatri questioned why he was informed about the outstanding dues of nearly ₹10 lakh only after his tenure was over, and not earlier. “No bills were provided when I was president, but after my tenure ended, I was told that these bills have to be paid by me as I was the president,” stated Khatri.

He completed his degree in 2025, and it is provisionally required for his enrolment with the Bar Council of Delhi. While his classmates reportedly received their degrees in October, the staff adviser wrote to the Controller of Examinations directing that the release of his degree and mark sheets be withheld until the pending payments were cleared. Consequently, Khatri was not issued his academic documents.

He has since filed a petition before the Delhi High Court, and a notice has been issued. In an interaction with the Hindustan Times, Khatri described the action as “arbitrary” and said it constitutes mental harassment of students. He further stated that the delay in receiving his degree has jeopardised his career prospects.

The matter is now scheduled to be heard in March, as per the notice issued by the High Court.

Read Also: Violence Erupts at Arts Faculty Protest: Journalist, Students Allege Assault 

Image Credits: The Indian Express
Ipshita Grover
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Violence Erupts at Arts Faculty Protest: Journalist, Students Allege Assault

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A pro-UGC protest turned into a scuffle between journalist Ruchi Tiwari and AISA members, with both sides alleging assault, caste-based targeting and police inaction.

 

Footage of a scuffle between student protestors and journalist Ruchi Tiwari went viral on Friday following an incident near the Arts Faculty of Delhi University during a pro-UGC guidelines public meeting. Both sides have since offered sharply opposing narratives, alleging physical assault, verbal abuse, threats and police inaction.

All India Students Association (AISA) Secretary Anjali shared her version on Instagram, condemning what she described as national media “painting her as a villain” and circulating incomplete footage. According to her, she noticed a scuffle near the protest site and saw Tiwari allegedly choking a man identified as Naveen, a Dalit journalist, while holding his phone. Anjali said she attempted to retrieve the phone when she was assaulted and briefly knocked unconscious. She further stated that AISA members tried to take Tiwari to file a complaint. Later, when Anjali went to Maurice Nagar Police Station to file an FIR, she alleged that a large mob gathered outside, engaged in physical violence, ripped clothes, banged on the police booth and issued rape threats. She also reported that her personal details, including her parents’ names and apartment location, were leaked online, leading to cyber abuse.

Tiwari, speaking to ANI, rejected what she termed “false narratives.” She said she had arrived near the Arts Faculty to cover the protest when a man allegedly recognised her from her YouTube videos and repeatedly asked her name and caste. She claimed a crowd of around 500 people surrounded and attempted to choke her, and that footage of her being chased came after she faced rape threats and intimidation. Tiwari describes herself as a ground reporter running a YouTube channel and alleged she was targeted on the basis of caste, citing taunts such as “Iska nanga naach hoga.” She maintained that multiple police officers were present during the scuffle but did not intervene, remarking there was “no protection for General Category.”

In a statement, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) alleged that a woman journalist associated with a YouTube channel was attacked around 2 pm while covering the protest. ABVP Delhi state secretary Sarthak Sharma claimed left-wing student activists manhandled her after she questioned protestors, further alleging that several involved were not Delhi University students and demanding strict action from police and university authorities. Meanwhile, police told PTI that a medico-legal case (MLC) has been filed and that investigation is underway. Both parties have accused the police of inadequate intervention; Anjali also claimed officers took her and fellow members’ phones to “calm down the crowd” while she was attempting to file a complaint.

The incident unfolded amid protests over the University Grants Commission’s (UGC) newly notified Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations, 2026, which aim to curb caste-based discrimination in universities and colleges. The rules mandate that all Higher Education Institutions establish Equal Opportunity Centres (EOCs), equity committees, helplines and monitoring mechanisms to address complaints from SC, ST and OBC students, and fix accountability on institutional heads for compliance. The regulations are currently under consideration by the Supreme Court, which has put them on hold citing “vagueness” and potential misuse.

Delhi University Vice Chancellor Yogesh Singh urged students and teachers to maintain harmony and avoid activities that “increase mutual discord,” appealing to the university community to await the Supreme Court’s decision and maintain trust in the Government of India. The regulations have drawn criticism from sections of general category students, including a group identifying as the “Savarna Sena,” who argue that the framework lacks clear provisions for grievances from upper-caste students and could lead to misuse.

Read Also: Water Hurled at S Irfan Habib During People’s Literature Festival 

 

Image Sources

Ruchi Tiwari – https://share.google/images/UKDi9Fq5ddD5JCwlY. Shared by IANS network on Twitter

Anjali – NDTV website

 

Anjali P

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Water Hurled at S Irfan Habib During People’s Literature Festival 

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On 11th February, S Irfan Habib, a historian and a public intellectual, got attacked with a bucket filled with water being thrown at him. The incident occurred near Gate 4 of the Arts Faculty at the North Campus of Delhi University. The incident occurred at ‘People’s Literature Festival: Samta Utsav’, organised by the All India Students’ Association (AISA). Some faction of the student organisation believes that this attack was orchestrated by the members of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) to sabotage the event. 

The Literature Festival commenced with a session on ‘Caste in Society and University’, taken by Habib, who spoke on what AISA described as “attempts to rewrite history and marginalise discussions on caste within higher education”.

Professor Habib said, 

The bucket did not hit me, but the water fell on me. I was overwhelmed for a few minutes—the bucket could have had anything, even stones.” He further added, “I have been to DU several times and spoken here, and this is the first time that something like this has happened to me. The past two years… things have changed drastically.”

 To another source, he said, 

I was invited to speak by the students. Some 200 students had gathered. I had just begun my address and spoken for about 20 minutes when suddenly water from a bucket was thrown from a wall behind me. For a few seconds I was unsettled, but then I continued. It is disturbing and shocking for me. Universities are places for diverse voices, which should be respected.” 

AISA further made a public statement: “Despite a planned and violent attempt by the ABVP members to sabotage the event, the festival concluded as a massive success.”

Meanwhile, the authorities denied any such happening, “We have not received any complaints of any attacks or mischief on campus,” said Joint Proctor Manoj Singh.

This act of violence against Prof Habib is a testimony to the extent the academic atmosphere is vitiated in the University of Delhi at the behest of the University administration and the affiliates of the ruling party. The impunity of the action shows that the culprits have the protection of the University administration: hence all such acts of violence will go unpunished to encourage more such acts.

It is pertinent to mention here that the current DUSU Joint-Secretary was caught on camera assaulting a teacher in front of police and the college administration. She was allowed to walk free without any punishment and that incident encouraged more such acts of violence by the ruling dispensation. The violence against Prof Habib was pre-meditated as the University administration and the upper caste goons of the ruling party do not want the Rohith Act to be implemented across the country. This is in sync with the policy of NFS adopted by the University administration to deny livelihood to hundreds of teachers in the categories of SC/ST/OBC as an illustration of its caste prejudice,” Rudrashish Chakraborty, Associate Professor at Kirori Mal College and Treasurer of DTF remarked. 

Sharply critiquing the attack, CPI General Secretary D Raja said,

This is not disagreement or debate; this is cowardly intimidation. Ideas must be fought with ideas, not with violence, threats or hooliganism. Such acts expose the deep insecurity of right-wing forces who fear free thinking and open discussion.”

He further added,

Because of their narrow and intolerant ideology, university spaces across the country are being turned hostile and inward-looking, where questioning and critical thought are attacked. There is no place for violence or intimidation in academic and public life.”

Read More: On Record with Anish Gawande

Image Credits- The Indian Express

Divyanshi Dusad 

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Campus Central

DCAC Hosts A Freshers’ Welcome For The Journalism Department

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After waiting for over five months, the students of the Journalism Department at Delhi College of Arts and Commerce finally received their much-awaited freshers’ welcome, Satrarambh, an event that students fondly described as unforgettable.

The Delhi College of Arts and Commerce hosted its freshers’ welcome for the Department of Journalism for the 2025–26 session after a delay of over five months. The event finally took place on February 10, 2026. The initial reasons for the postponement were not clearly communicated. However, following repeated delays, students were informed that logistical challenges were responsible for pushing the event forward.

DU Beat reached out to students from the Journalism Department to reflect on the celebration. One of the students, Rajarshi Ghosh, said, “The freshers’ programme was an emotional roller-coaster—from prolonged disappointment due to repeated postponements to overwhelming joy. Once it finally began, students were completely captivated, soaking in performances filled with music, laughter, ramp walks, shayaris, and fun games. It felt like a refreshing break from routine and a meaningful space to connect with peers, forming bonds that will be cherished throughout college life.”

The responsibility of organising the event rested with the second-year students. The theme for the occasion was “cosplay”, with first-year students showcasing a range of remarkably intricate costumes. Packed with a variety of activities, the event offered a memorable experience for the freshers. Juhi Bansal, a 2nd-year student, said that “Journalism Freshers’ 2026 was a long-awaited event, finally held after nearly five months of delays and internal challenges. It came together through the persistent efforts of second-year students, who managed everything from rehearsals and promotions to logistics and backstage coordination. Being part of the backstage team—handling music and the chaos behind the scenes—made the experience especially memorable.”

The teacher-in-charge for the current tenure, Dr Neha Jingala, welcomed the new batch with a heartfelt note, highlighting the core ideals of the journalistic profession and expressing hope that the students would grow into ethical and responsible journalists. She said, “I felt immensely proud to welcome the freshers into the Department of Journalism, Delhi College of Arts and Commerce. Watching them take their first steps into a profession built on truth, responsibility, and courage was truly special. I am hopeful that they will learn to question critically, report ethically, and use their voices meaningfully in the service of society.”

The title of Ms. Freshers was awarded to Akshita Bohra, while Mr. Freshers was bagged by Yash Pawar. The titles of Mr. Well-Dressed and Ms. Well-Dressed were won by Purab Sehrawat and Afra Un Nisa, respectively. The event concluded, with the dance floor alive with energy during an open DJ session.

 

Image Credits – Department of Journalism, Delhi College of Arts and Commerce

Rahul Kumar
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On Record with Anish Gawande

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As power changes seats and the world wrestles with new players, Anish Gawande ruminates on education, policy, and India’s location on the global political landscape.

Shikhar: There’s a growing feeling among students that India’s education system is under strain. From what many of us see at DU, things feel like they’re slipping, and friends at Mumbai University say the same. It often feels like the larger educational infrastructure is slowly breaking down. As someone who’s been vocal about youth concerns and has also studied abroad, how do you look at India’s education system today in comparison with foreign education systems? Where do you think the real gaps lie?

 

Anish: To start with, I think it’s important to acknowledge that there is a systematic assault on public education that is taking place across the country, whether that’s in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, or Kolkata. Our central universities, which used to be the pride and prestige of our country, have crumbled. We are witnessing politically motivated appointments to professorial positions, an absolute lack of funding in any sense for research, and, more importantly, a complete dismissal of the social sciences and the humanities as valuable disciplines to pursue.

 

So, in some ways, I think it’s very important to acknowledge that we’re in a moment of crisis. Public education is very important to me. My grandfather used to be a professor of Sanskrit at Ruia College in Mumbai before he went on to become principal of Government Law College and then the vice-chancellor of Mumbai University at a time when the university still had some stature. Even then, it was important to acknowledge that the vice-chancellorship of a central university came with unprecedented independence.

 

It was important that when you were the head of a university, you were accountable to nobody, including the political elite that may have put you there in the first place. The chancellor may be the governor, but he was a ceremonial chancellor. And therefore, there was a level of independence afforded to the vice-chancellors, to university administrators, and to those in charge of these universities to develop these universities in a true sense.

 

What you’re seeing today, unfortunately, is not only a political overturning of these long-standing principles, but also a lack of freedom given to the political appointees who have been put into power in these universities. It’s not just that a different ideology is now in power in the country, but also that those who profess that ideology and are heading some of our public universities are not given the ability to revamp or rehaul these universities, because they are faced with political pressure, including from those who are ideologically aligned with them. What this means is a double-edged sword. One, the quality of education suffers because ideology and political ideology are being preferred over some semblance of academic merit in the selection of teaching staff. But more importantly, it also means that administrative order has collapsed completely, which is why you see paper leaks becoming the new normal across the country, and protests over the paper leaks, whether that’s the SSC paper leak or the massive paper leaks that happened in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, going entirely unpunished.

 

This is because you simply do not have today an infrastructure where those who are in charge of administering the universities have the power to administer those universities. Finally, I think an important distinction needs to be drawn between Mumbai University and Delhi University. Delhi University, despite all of its flaws, still has student elections and student politics. Since the 1990s, Mumbai University has been systematically depoliticised to ensure that these concerns do not make their way into the national consciousness, and indeed into the mainstream political frame.

 

That has had two consequences. One is that students have nobody to go to except the administration, which means that they have no voice except one that requires them to bow down and bend in requests that the administration may or may not consider. More importantly, it means that the political pipeline that existed to ensure that student leaders were then becoming leaders in their own right, in civic corporations, assemblies, and even in parliament, no longer has that political pathway, which also means that you don’t have student leaders in positions of power who can reform this university system. We thus find ourselves in this catch-22 situation where our public university system is crumbling, and a private university infrastructure has emerged to take its place.

 

We all know that these private universities do not have a diverse student body, which means that they cannot offer the same kind of learning that happens in a DU, which becomes in many ways a temple of Indian democracy. This is what Nehru envisioned as a temple of Indian democracy—the IITs, IIMs, DU, Mumbai University; the spaces where people from around the country meet each other from different class backgrounds and disciplines. They meet each other,  get a cigarette at their local shop, and then go party on their college campus. I mean, these are spaces that are not just for learning, but also for national integration. It’s a shame that the party in power today, in its attempt to promote national integration, has destroyed those very temples of democracy that allowed for that national integration to take place in the very first place. I think it’s a very worrying moment. How we counter it is a much longer question and a much longer answer. 

 

Aayudh: I think you read my mind at the end, because I was going to ask you whether it might have something to do with the push for privatisation of higher education, as we’ve seen in the last five years, perhaps. But that, I think, allows us to move on to a broader question. Two years ago, Palki Sharma had argued in favour of the motion that Modi’s India is on the right path at an Oxford Union Society debate. How would you believe that claim has aged today, especially in terms of both foreign relations and welfare at home, keeping in mind that we are a welfare state? 

 

Anish: I’ll answer that in two parts. The first, which is very important, is that governance is about continuity. Therefore, while we must acknowledge the significant democratic backsliding that has taken place, including the crumbling of institutions, under the present BJP-led government, this is neither an isolated moment nor, certainly, one that began in 2014. We must also acknowledge that the progress being made by the government today is not progress that happens in isolation either. The schemes that are introduced—for example, direct benefit transfers—require the experiments carried out in Nandurbar with DBTs back under the UPA regime. They require the backbone of Aadhaar that was introduced in the previous government as well. The economic policy and foreign policy that you see today also build upon the economic and foreign policy of the last few decades. Inasmuch as that policy is developed over the course of decades and as a process of continuity, I think in some ways India as a country, despite all of these challenges, regardless of whether it’s Modi’s India or otherwise, remains in many ways on the right path.

 

I say this with caution and trepidation: Even though we’ve had significant concerns around the independence of the judiciary, about how we seem to be increasingly alienated by our neighbours from Bangladesh to Nepal to Sri Lanka, and a precarity in the economic realm that has led to youth unemployment reaching record highs, we have still seen a growth level that has remained fairly positive, a foreign policy that has remained fairly comprehensive in terms of its outlook and independent in terms of its ability to respond to the world. We have witnessed, in many ways, India stand up and respond to global crises that are unfolding at a record pace today with a level of maturity that has always characterised our foreign policy. However, I’m worried because in many ways we’re also bowing down where we’ve never bowed down before. If you talk of Russia and Ukraine, territorial sovereignty has been the founding principle of Indian foreign policy. It’s precisely because we have a hostile neighbourhood that we have reiterated time and again that territorial sovereignty cannot be compromised at the international stage. Therefore, when we do not take a strong stance for Ukraine, we make it very easy for the international community to not take a stance for India when there are incursions into Arunachal Pradesh by China. These are difficult positions to adopt that I think the government needs to be cautious of. This is precisely why the non-alignment movement was born, right? The Nehruvian idea, which he shared with leaders of the global south, of a non-aligned world, was, of course, idealistic. The Bandung Conference was a dream of a different kind of globalisation. But it was also a practical and strategic idea. It allowed you to have a moral scaffolding that, in many ways, permitted a kind of mobility and a nuanced flexibility in foreign policy that seems to be lacking today. It’s precisely why, in the face of this lack of flexibility, we’ve seen India falter when it comes to questions of Palestine. We’ve seen India falter when it comes to questions of Ukraine. We’ve seen India falter when it comes to questions around Venezuela as well, right? At the same time, I think it’s very difficult to ignore that domestic policy has far-reaching foreign policy repercussions. You cannot be spreading disinformation and misinformation about minorities in India and not expect countries around the world to then judge you in a particular light and have their foreign policy reflect that.

 

You cannot take the kinds of gambles that you did with Sheikh Hasina and the support for her regime without acknowledging that Bangladesh has perhaps the largest contiguous land border with India and therefore the largest potential to wreak havoc upon this country when you engage with a new government in that country. The fact that we haven’t been able to go beyond mere platitudes about Hindus in Bangladesh and using them for domestic elections in India is a testament to the fact that we have forgotten what our foreign policy has looked like and why we cannot let a domestic narrative veer too far a certain way because it might impact our foreign policy. We are seeing a kind of turning point on the foreign policy front, at least in India, which requires us to rethink. It requires us to have a newer set of principles to engage with the world as it stands today.

 

For example, when we had Operation Sindoor, the opposition, including my party, was the first to support the government. In fact, we went and broke ranks with the India Alliance and said that, “When Operation Sindoor is underway, we cannot have a special session of parliament. We must stand with the government because when India is under attack, there are no political parties.” Unfortunately, that strategic rhetoric was not used effectively by the government to claim that a ceasefire was what they were after. Instead, a belligerent rhetoric of teaching the enemy a lesson was propagated by news channels, which claimed we’d conquered Sindh and Multan, and was broadcast live to the world in a way that made us a laughingstock. Additionally, it allowed the US to take credit for a ceasefire that arguably India should have taken credit for from the very beginning. The reason we have always pursued a principle of de-escalation even after the first shot has been fired is that, at the end of the day, when you’re dealing with two nuclear powers, the solution will always be a ceasefire. The person who takes credit for it first is going to be hailed as the grandmaster of that ceasefire, which has been the United States, after a tweet from Donald Trump. Therefore, I think strategic foreign policy is something that’s lacking.

 

Economic policy is something that’s faltering in terms of foreign investments. I think we’ve forgotten that domestic consumption is the only way we can drive the engine of an economy as large as India. When the world is retrenching, when the rupee is devaluing, you cannot expect foreign funds to invest in India because the returns are simply not good enough to justify investments. You cannot only depend upon manufacturing. I think “Make in India” has unfortunately not been the resounding success that it was meant to be. You’re witnessing the impact of that currently across the country. You are witnessing a services sector that has not been able to bridge that gap between the manufacturing sector and the broader economy and pull up the jobs that it needs to.

 

I don’t think we know what we’re going to do when AI starts replacing jobs. I don’t think we know what we’re going to do when lakhs, if not crores of young people, will have been skilled through syllabi that are so out of touch with the demands of the job market that they’ve created a peculiar situation where the number of people who want jobs has never been higher than it ever has been before and the number of employers who are saying they can’t find effective candidates has never been higher than it has ever been before either.

 

So this mismatch, which is imperative to solve if you want to find some way of ensuring that our population, whose median age is 29, gets employed, has not been resolved 

 

Aayudh: India at independence, including Gandhi and Nehru, had its Jewish sympathies. But at the same time, Gandhi acknowledged Palestine as a case of settler colonialism. Under Nehru’s leadership, India voted against the UN Resolution 181. But now under Modi’s India, the channel of domestic relations and foreign policy regarding Israel-Palestine seems to have shifted decisively in favour of Israel. How would you reflect on this evolution that has taken place in an India that has suffered a partition, understands the weight and the devastation of colonial rule, and is still grappling with trying to define and chart the contours of what it means to be a post-colonial subject? 

 

Anish: Listen, Palestine is not a strategic consideration. It is a moral consideration. It is a moral failure when India does not stand up for Palestine on the world stage, because it has not just been our foreign policy, but our moral policy to stand with oppressed people across the world. This is precisely what Swami Vivekananda and what Rabindranath Tagore said. This is precisely what the founding fathers of the Indian Republic said when they were fighting for independence for our country. I think it is imperative, not just for India as a country in terms of its government, but for the Indian people to stand together with Palestine at this time. At the same time, there is no denying that India has also had long-standing relations with Israel.

 

As somebody who studied the Holocaust quite rigorously, read the poetry of somebody like Chava Rosenfarb, spent time in the Łódź Ghetto in Poland and escapes but barely the violence and brutality inflicted by the Nazi regime, I think it’s important not to fall into the trap of anti-Semitism either. I think there are ways in which that kind of anti-Semitism can find utterance, particularly when it comes to a moment when we feel angry, helpless, and the easiest way to respond to the kinds of violent acts, not just of speech, but of a physical nature, is this kind of hateful retort. I think it’s important to remember the emotional thrust of the Jewish struggle that also animates some of this discourse. 

 

When it comes to Indian foreign policy, India has been relatively principled in its support for Palestine on the international stage. We’ve committed time and again to Palestinian rehabilitation and recovery. We’ve committed time and again to multiple UN resolutions, barring a few, which are aberrations that should be addressed, and have stood in support of a two-state solution, which has been an acknowledged foreign policy over decades. We have also condemned the actions of Israel from time to time when necessary. That being said, unfortunately, the domestic political discourse around Palestine has been terrifying. It’s been framed in contours of Islamophobia that are bizarre. I don’t think the question of Palestine is about whether Muslims are being killed, because Christians are also being killed in Palestine, and so are all kinds of other ethnic and religious minorities.

 

The question is not about whether or not it is important for India to support what’s happening in Palestine because of defence ties with Israel. The question is whether children are being killed. When hundreds of thousands of people are being killed mercilessly in a one-sided genocide that is placing the burden of morality entirely upon the oppressed, then it is our moral duty to stand up and support the oppressed. I think it’s shocking because, honestly, I see all of these Twitter accounts supporting Israel, and then Israeli accounts going back and calling them racist slurs. It’s a bizarre situation where you have a regime in Israel that is deeply racist, which is being opposed by principled Jewish people across the world, which is being opposed by those within Israel itself, but is being supported by a Rahool N Kanal for no reason whatsoever. I think we need to interrogate what has led to that level of hate becoming normal. We also have to interrogate what we do with that level of hate. Quite honestly, the Foreign Service is doing its job relatively decently, but the people of India have certainly dropped the ball when it comes to showing any spine on the question of Palestine. I think you’re going to find that becoming a major flashpoint in the months and years to come.

 

Shikhar: India is often framed as having moved beyond the colonial past, yet students continue to face linguistic, cultural, and global capital hierarchies. From your perspective, how does this phenomenon shape the political consciousness of the students today? What risks do you see when these structures go unnoticed?

 

In many ways, one of the essays that stood out to me most, when I read it almost a decade ago, was Tuck and Yang’s Decolonization is not a metaphor. They brilliantly argue in that essay that when you do not consider the material impetus of decolonisation, when you don’t consider the indigenous scholars, the giving back of land to the marginalised, then decolonisation remains a hollow metaphor. It becomes a term that you use, but that has no meaning.

 

In some ways, that has been the critique of decolonisation in India. In some ways, the Nehruvian state that you saw after independence was one built upon a Fabian socialism that was deeply rooted in Enlightenment rationality. The project that Nehru embarked upon considered the temples of democracy, like the IITs and the IIMs, the space research program, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the Bhakra Nangal Dam, and the river linking projects, to be the modern creatures that would not only animate public discourse but also transform an illiterate country that was plagued by superstition. That was in many ways grappling not just with a colonial legacy, but also the pre-colonial legacy that was marked by feudalism. The imagination then was that this kind of enlightenment rationality would transform the citizen subject into one who would take forward this idea of India, which has always been an idea ceaselessly under construction. Unfortunately, the last three decades have shown us that perhaps rationality isn’t the answer, because the IITs and the IIMs, or the people who graduate from the IITs and IIMs, are the ones who are spewing the most casteist or the most Islamophobic rhetoric. The most educated in the STEM fields are the ones who are becoming most hateful. Clearly, then, it is possible to embrace scientific progress without embracing a spirit of humanism that is required for us to build communities with each other, which is precisely why you’re seeing these fissures across language, region, and religion.

 

I don’t think these fissures are necessarily bad. I think they’ve animated political and social discourse in this country for centuries. I think they’ve been remarkably generative in some ways; the conflicts between these communities have also been remarkably generative. They’ve thrown up important and difficult questions around what secularism means, what it means to live alongside each other. I think, though, that what we now need to establish is a new politics and a new political imagination; a politics of care. At the end of the day, the ideals that we hold deeply valuable, such as freedom of speech and belief in democratic institutions, are predicated upon the idea of an orderly society. That idea of order necessarily being beneficial to the most marginalised is an idea that has been dismissed almost wholly and completely in the last few decades. So now I think the political project is much greater than throwing out one party in power or speaking out against the BJP or the Congress, or even the mere conception of these two political parties. It is about going back to see what we can do to revive a spirit of togetherness that is required if we are to move ahead. 

 

In some ways, India is a peculiar society, even in terms of Indian secularism. We always talk about how French secularism is very different. However, Indian secularism is a beast in its own right. Indian secularism has always been predicated upon the belief that we’re a country divided by religions, but united by festivals. We’ve always been a country that has celebrated each other’s festivals. If you go back into the archives in a city like Mumbai, you have Muharram being one of the biggest festivals of the city that everyone participated in—not just Hindus, not just Muslims, not just Shias. If you look at Ganesh Chaturthi now, it does reflect in some ways the spirit of togetherness, where people across religions celebrate the festival in the city. How do we go back to those inflexion points? How do we go back to those drivers of community to understand how to bridge these divisions between language, region, and religion? How do we go back to materiality as being foundational to understanding these divides? I come from Maharashtra. Over the last few months and years, the notion of Marathi Asmita and the questions of who should speak Marathi and who should be forced to speak Marathi have animated public discourse. Of course, one is against violence of all kinds, and one is against any imposition of a language against someone’s will. But the thrust of that Marathi language imposition is a class order that has marginalised those who migrated to Mumbai decades ago.

 

You’re seeing this situation where people from across Maharashtra who migrated to Mumbai from the 1800s until fairly recently, are now confronting the fact that a newer generation of migrants who come from UP and Bihar, and who can afford to live 20 to a room much like these previous migrants did when they moved for the first time a century or two ago, while working for mills, is displacing the jobs and the communities created by older migrants, and can provide labour at a far cheaper rate than the labour that somebody who has a family and children who live in the same city can. This is what we have to confront, not just when it comes to the violent instantiation, which is language imposition—all this kind of beating up of people who don’t speak Marathi—but also when it comes to questions around the gig worker economy. Just because somebody is willing to work at a terribly low price point, is it justifiable for that person to work at that price point? Just because people are willing to live 20 to a room, is it okay for the state to allow those people to live 20 to a room? How do we reanimate the conversations we used to have around affordable housing, rental or otherwise? In a city like Delhi, rental housing has become unaffordable. At one point, Delhi was known for affordable rental housing, where young people could live in PGs and Barsatis. But the Barsatis of the city have been replaced by builder floors. So where do young people live anymore? You’ve pushed young people in Delhi all the way to the margins, to Noida, to Greater Noida, to Gurgaon, to the back of beyond, to Faridabad, to Ghaziabad. You’ve ensured that the centre of the city, which used to be the intellectual heartland of the city, has become devoid of young people because they simply can’t afford to live there anymore.

 

The institutions that were built painstakingly, like the India International Centre, the India Habitat Centre, the Kamani Auditorium, and these vibrant spaces that once were the centre of intellectual and cultural dialogue, are now filled with older people because the younger people can’t afford to live here anymore. How do you understand this kind of alienation that is now increasingly commonplace amongst young people, or come to terms with the fact that when you deal with these divides, you have to understand them from a slightly more complex angle than 9 p.m. primetime television debates that make it almost impossible to find a solution? I think we’ve now reached a point where people are talking for the sake of talking. You’re creating these divides for the sake of creating these divides. Parties are very happy to create these divides because when you create a divide that doesn’t require you to have nuance, you get votes in a far easier manner.

 

You can’t leave it up to the politicians anymore. You now have to have young people, particularly those who understand the long-term implications of these divides, come to the forefront and say, “not in my name”, right? And only then will you see these divides not disappear, but be negotiated differently. Perhaps that’s when you’ll have true decolonisation taking place, whatever that might mean in a country like India.

 

Shikhar: I am sure you would have been expecting this question since you mentioned affordable rental housing. Mamdani’s victory in New York sparked global excitement around youth participation in politics, and many online even referred to you as the “Indian Mamdani”. Do you think moments like this can create ripple effects on India’s shores as well? What do you think holds Indian youth back from active political participation, especially when politics is still widely seen as a space dominated by sexagenarians? 

 

Anish: You know, I’ve said this before. I’ll say this again: unfortunately, I would have loved to be India’s Zohran Mamdani. But India has already had Zohran Mamdanis in the past, right? A city like Mumbai has had Yusuf Meherally as its mayor, a Muslim socialist much like Zohran Mamdani, who advocated for fair labour laws and the protection of labour rights, and coined “Quit India” and “Simon Go Back”. You had Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, who, of course, was the architect of our constitution, that many forget was also the reason we got eight-hour working days, and ensured that the rights of those who were engaged in labour were protected.

 

We’ve also forgotten that it took many, many decades for us to arrive at a point where the promises that Zoran Mamdani is making in the United States today are not considered atrocious in a country like India. If Zoran Mamdani ran for elections in India, he’d probably be a centrist, not on the left, because for us, child care has always been an election promise anyway. We believe in direct benefit transfers to women, not as something that you’re divided on across political lines, but as a given and as a normal; we don’t think of affordable public transport as some kind of socialist propaganda that needs to be dismissed. We believe it’s a right. The rights-based approach that we have cultivated so painstakingly in India today is absent in the United States. The US works in a very different way. You’re supposed to pull up your socks. If you can’t afford a house, then you die on the streets. If you can’t afford good food, then you eat bad food. In this country, we don’t believe that. We believe that you can create Amma Canteens under Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu. We can create the Shiv Bhojan Thalis in Mumbai. We can make affordable messes in public universities a demand, not a request. It is imperative to remember that, because a rights-based approach is what we have forgotten to embrace as young people in this country, since we’ve been so detached from the history of politics in this country. I think we’ve been continuously taught that we don’t belong on the political table. We don’t belong within elections or within the corridors of power. It’s time to take that power back. I don’t necessarily see this as something that we won’t be able to achieve. If nothing else, it’s easier today to be a young person in politics than it ever was before. It’s easier today to contest an election with fewer sources than it ever was before. So I see a moment of great optimism. Your median age in India is 29, which means half the population is under the age of 30. This means that if the young of this country can coalesce themselves into a voting bloc, they will become a significant voting bloc. And when you do become a voting bloc, you know that political parties across ideologies have to listen to you. It’s what’s happened with women today. It’s what’s happened with caste minorities today. It’s what’s been prevented from happening with queer communities. We have to recognise the power of that voting bloc and political participation, and ensure that we are not begging for a seat at the table, but demanding it. Shifting that lens will fundamentally allow young people to take the lead. I think that today, young people are contesting elections in much greater numbers than we ever saw before. You should have younger people demand tickets more effectively. Also, young people need to start contesting at local body election levels more creatively and constructively than ever before. You need to be winning at the panchayat level, the Zilla Parishad level, and the municipal corporation level. Being an MP or an MLA is not as effective. Change is wrought from the ground up, and if we do not realise that, if we don’t have a ladder that allows younger people to climb in politics, I don’t think we’re going to be able to really radically transform that system. I think that ladder is missing. Those ladders used to be student elections at universities. Those ladders used to be mentorship by political leaders. Those ladders used to be the youth wings of political parties.

 

But as you’ve seen in DU, your youth wings are busier beating up professors than they are participating in effective political dialogue on campus. The time now is to reflect upon what those ladders can look like and to genuinely create platforms for younger people to think about politics, engage with politics, and understand how an election works, what filing a nomination looks like, what door-to-door campaigning looks like, what the caste and class dynamics of a constituency are, what political rhetoric and messaging look like, what the different functions are in a political campaign that require you to bring to the forefront certain issues. Additionally, idealistic politics will not work entirely. I think you need to have a politics that is also geared towards winning. We need to start really strategising about how we’re going to start winning.

 

Aayudh: Queer identity has always been political. However, within spaces of cultural discourse, for a lot of people, this means being forced into an assertion of political alignment before they have a chance to explore their identities. How would you reflect on this premature appellation by ideology for fear of being accused of apoliticism as an increasing trend in online queer spaces?

 

Anish: That is a difficult question. When queerness is under attack from a certain ideology, it becomes almost natural for those who have come out to presume that everyone coming out after them must also oppose that ideology in order to defend queerness as a whole. That’s a natural response. It’s an almost paternalistic instinct, which says, “you don’t know better, but you might as well learn this quickly and figure out who’s on your side and who’s not, in this grander fight.” Is it necessarily a bad thing? I don’t know. Is it something that can be deeply alienating? I definitely think so. I think it’s not so much that you are politicised or that political conversations take place in queer spaces. That’s always been the case. That will continue to be the case. The question is, how can queerness evolve new ways for us to have these conversations without them seeming like barriers to entry points into any kind of participation, right? How can we acknowledge that somebody might have a different opinion? How can we still show some level of care in hearing that opinion and engaging with that opinion? I think in many ways, we forget the kinds of privilege that allow queer folks to express themselves in ways that other queer folks might be hesitant to. What I can say as a cis gay man who comes with caste and class privilege is very different from something that someone who is Dalit and trans can say, right? A Dalit trans person is not going to be able to say the things that I can say. I cannot then say that they are not progressive enough or not “sticking to the party line”, as it were, of this queer ideology that seems to animate discussions in queer circles, simply because they’re not coming out and being as vociferously critical of the government, or of a certain statement or certain kind of ideology. So I think it’s very important to understand that people come to ideology in very many different ways. We would have to give them the space to understand why they care about something, not just tell them what to care about.

 

For me, personally, queerness has been a valuable lens to understand the struggles of others, the fight against caste discrimination and Islamophobia, and to reaffirm my solidarity with those struggles. In many ways, for me, queerness is a belief that you must stand up against oppression of all kinds, whether that is based on one’s caste, class, religion, sexuality, or gender, because at the end of the day, that is what a queer politics looks like. But that’s not necessarily everyone’s politics, right? And I think we have to allow them to embrace that politics. And we have to allow them to enter that politics, not from a space of judgment or cancel culture, but from a space of intrigue, and from a space of inquisitiveness. I think we’ve shut down the spaces for inquisitiveness. I don’t think we know how to be curious anymore. I don’t think we know how to be excited by an idea anymore. We’re so cemented in what we believe in that we don’t want to be challenged.

 

Even on the left, we’re very secure in what we believe in, and we’re very insecure of anything that shakes our belief in that security. I think queerness also has had a role to play in these spaces, to disrupt, to challenge, to shake preconceived notions around what queerness means, how it’s perceived, and who’s really supporting queer rights. To conclude, I must mention that often the narratives that we create around queerness are strategic in nature. Queer folks are not yet a voting bloc. Queer folks are “a minuscule minority”, in the words of the Supreme Court. Queer folks also don’t live in one region, or one constituency, and therefore the geographic spread of queerness makes it very difficult for queerness to become a politically valiant force, which means that when queerness presents its demands in front of the state, whether that’s in front of politicians or the judiciary, it has to be very strategic and tactical about how those demands are presented. When we spoke about Section 377 and got 377 read down, the argument was that this is a kind of Victorian morality that was imposed upon India, and India before the British was a great place for queer people. That’s a tactical strategy, is it not? It’s not something that’s true. It’s not that before the Brits arrived, if you’re a Dalit queer woman, you would be able to be with somebody across caste lines who was also a woman. Who queerness is accessible to, who could avail of queerness, has always been challenged. But in that moment, it was important to assert that kind of queerness to be able to become legible to the state.

 

Today, we saw that kind of queerness fail when it came to marriage equality. Certain demands are so threatening to the foundations of the patriarchy in this country that you can’t sugarcoat them, in which case you have to maybe now adopt a different narrative: one of solidarity, one where a consolidated list of demands is placed in front of the state by a coalition of identities. How can we bring queer people and those who care about the environment, disability rights, mental health, and oppression on the grounds of caste, religion and region together? How do you create this more inclusive platform through which you argue for a bouquet of rights? I don’t know if we’ve arrived at that yet, but I know that we’ve arrived at the end of this conversation. But I certainly hope that we’ll be able to arrive at such a platform, because I don’t think there’s an alternative left anymore. 

 

Aayudh: Thank you, Anish, for interviewing with DU Beat. We have asked difficult questions, but what we may take away from this interview is that it is far more important to question, agitate, and subvert than to answer, categorise, and define. That is the only lesson we might learn from a nation so principally and historically endowed with plurality, and so difficult to definitely characterise, as India.

 

With,

Shikhar Pathak, Editor-In-Chief, DU Beat

[email protected]

 

Aayudh Pramanik, Print Editor, DU Beat

[email protected]

 

Image Credits: The Hindu

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DU Students Protest Fee Hike; AISA Submits Memorandum Seeking Immediate Rollback

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Students of Delhi University, led by AISA, protest against the recent fee hike and submit a memorandum demanding its rollback, warning that rising costs threaten access to affordable public education.

 

Students at Delhi University, led by the All India Students’ Association (AISA), staged a protest on Thursday against what they described as an “arbitrary and repeated” increase in university fees, asserting that the hike will marginalise economically vulnerable students and make higher education less accessible. 

 

The demonstration took place outside university premises after a recent notification from DU revised the university’s share in the consolidated fee from Rs 3,500 to Rs 4,100, marking an increase of more than 17 per cent within six months. This was the latest in a series of upward revisions, following a 20 per cent hike announced last year, and has triggered widespread concern among student groups. 

 

Students participating in the protest chanted slogans and carried placards demanding a reversal of the fee increase. They argued that repeated hikes reflect a shift towards treating education as a paid service rather than as a guaranteed social right.

 

A delegation of protesters later met with officials from the office of the Dean of Students’ Welfare, where they submitted a memorandum seeking an immediate rollback of the latest fee increase. While the administration offered assurances during discussions, student leaders said similar responses had been given previously without yielding any substantive relief. 

 

Sanatan, Vice-President of AISA DU, told The Hindustan Times that the administration’s handling of the fee structure signals a lack of commitment to inclusive education. He accused the university authorities of adopting a market-driven approach at the expense of students’ academic rights and welfare. 

 

The issue of fee increases has emerged as a recurring flashpoint in student politics at DU. Critics of the hikes argue that they disproportionately affect students from marginalised communities and low-income families. They contend that incremental increases, especially within short time spans, exacerbate financial barriers to higher education and may deter prospective applicants. 

 

DU’s administration has not yet issued a formal public statement addressing the protest or the demands made by student groups, including AISA. However, university officials are expected to review the memorandum and engage with student representatives in the coming days. Observers indicate that the administration will likely seek to balance financial sustainability with student welfare as discussions continue. 

 

The protest underscores the ongoing tensions within Indian higher education institutions between student bodies advocating for equitable access and administrative decisions aimed at operational and infrastructural funding. As deliberations over the fee structure persist, students and campus organisations are monitoring developments closely.

 

Read Also – DU Hikes Institutional Fees Again, Colleges Flag Impact on Students

 

Featured Image source – Devesh for DU Beat

 

Madhav Choudhary 

[email protected]

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Delhi High Court directs DU to Release withheld Law Examination Results. 

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The Delhi High Court on 15th January passed a judgment requiring DU to release examination results for law students who have been detained due to a shortage of attendance, which reaffirms the decision in ‘Sushant Rohilla v. Bar Council of India’.

 

On 15th January, the Delhi High Court passed a judgment holding that Delhi University (DU) cannot withhold law results for lack of attendance, after a batch of writ petitions filed by final-year and senior-semester LL.B. students. 

 

The case was between the students from Campus Law Centre (CLC) and other law centres of DU and the University of Delhi. The students who were unable to fulfil the attendance criteria were allowed to sit for their end-of-semester either provisionally or after interim relief, but had their results withheld. Effectively, this forced the students to reappear for their examination. Furthermore, according to ‘Bar and Bench’, the detainee list was released 3 days before the examination, where no monthly or aggregate attendance records were published. 

 

The petitioners had argued that lack of attendance cannot be the reason to withhold results, citing the ‘Sushant Rohilla v. Bar Council of India.’ The petitioners further argued that the attendance data has been applied mechanically, which didn’t account for internships, competition or the abrupt last-minute cancellation of classes. 

 

The defendants, on the other hand, argued that Rules 10 and 12 of the Bar Council of India (BCI) Rules of Legal Education, 2008 mandate a minimum attendance requirement, and students who fail to meet it cannot be allowed to take exams or have their results declared. Furthermore, the DU had held an internal inquiry on 22nd September, 2025, which recommended that the results of provisionally permitted students should not be declared, which has not been challenged by the petition. Lastly cited ‘University of Delhi & Ors vs Adarsh Raj Singh & Anr’ case, those who did not challenge their detention list or approach the court in time should not be entertained in court. 

 

The court examined the claims made by both parties. Firstly, the court looked into whether mandatory physical attendance is a “non-negotiable component of the teaching and training of students of law.” The court answered that in the negative. Then, looking at the ‘Sushant Rohilla v. Bar Council of India’ case, it is clearly stated that, “No student enrolled in any recognised law college, University or institution in India shall be detained from taking examination or be prevented from further academic pursuits or career progression on the ground of lack of minimum attendance”

 

Further, the court observed that DU sought to justify its action by relying on Rules 10 and 12 of the BCI Rules; the legal position had been substantially clarified in ‘Sushant Rohilla v. Bar Council of India’. The court also rejected the University’s reliance on internal inquiry reports and undertakings obtained from students, by pointing out that undertakings could not override the law declared by a constitutional court. The court pointed out that the basis of detention was a shortage of attendance, which was held to be invalid; all consequential actions, including cancellation or non-declaration of results, could not survive.

 

The judgment affirms student rights within law education and takes a stand against the rigid enforcement of attendance norms, which does not take the ground reality into account.

 

Read More: DU Hikes Institutional Fees Again, Colleges Flag Impact on Students

 

Photo credits: Website of Delhi High Court

 

Reva Rawat

[email protected]

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