The Press Club of India, along with the Indian Women’s Press Corps, Delhi Union of Journalists, Press Association and Kerala Union of Working Journalists, issued a joint statement on September 3 condemning the alleged assault and seeking action against police personnel posted at Saket Police Station, including the Station House Officer (SHO).

The Press Club of India, Indian Women’s Press Corps, Delhi Union of Journalists,
Press Association, and Kerala Union of Working Journalist strongly condemn and
call for punitive action against Delhi Police officials posted at the Saket Police Station,
including the Station House… pic.twitter.com/aC7P19Hbkw

— Press Club of India (@PCITweets) September 3, 2026

Subsequently, the NWMI and the Editors Guild of India also issued separate statements expressing solidarity with the two journalists and calling for an investigation into the allegations. The NWMI demanded that the police personnel allegedly involved be suspended pending inquiry, while the Editors Guild sought an immediate independent and unbiased probe and strict action if the allegations were substantiated.

The Network of Women in Media, India unequivocally condemns the brutal assault on Shaheen Khan and Nafisa Khan, both journalists with 4pm News, and demands strict action against the police personnel involved. pic.twitter.com/Tju6M6egom

— NWMIndia (@NWM_India) September 5, 2026

What the journalists alleged

Shaheen Khan and Nafisa Khan, associated with digital news platform 4PM News Network, were covering the inauguration of a new wing at Max Smart Super Speciality Hospital in Saket on September 3. The event was attended by Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta.

According to the journalists and statements subsequently issued by press organisations, the two were stopped by police personnel near the venue when they sought to ask questions as part of their journalistic coverage.

The journalists alleged that they were manhandled and taken to Saket Police Station. They further alleged that they were subsequently taken to a room inside the police station and assaulted by police personnel, including women officers.

According to the NWMI statement, the journalists had sought to ask questions during the event, including queries concerning an alleged cycle scam. NWMI stated that the journalists were allegedly handled roughly near the venue and later beaten at Saket Police Station. It further referred to the journalists’ allegation that the assault intensified after police personnel became aware that both women were Muslim and that religion-specific abuses were allegedly used.

We demand that the police personnel involved in the assault be suspended pending inquiry.

Such attacks on journalists are unconstitutional and against freedom of the press, which is an essential part of freedom of expression.https://t.co/LMuXFhq2nQ

— NWMIndia (@NWM_India) September 5, 2026

On September 5, the Editors Guild of India similarly stated that the journalists had alleged that they were manhandled and taken away in a police vehicle after attempting to pose a question to Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta. According to the Guild’s statement, the two alleged that they were beaten by women police officials at Saket Police Station and subjected to abuse targeting their religion.

Statement on Assault on Women Journalists by Delhi Police pic.twitter.com/cecTcQKjKU

— Editors Guild of India (@IndEditorsGuild) September 5, 2026

Videos circulated by the journalists and their organisation showed injury marks and bruises on their bodies. The allegations led to statements of condemnation and demands for action from several journalists’ organisations.

Delhi Police denies allegations

Delhi Police has, however, rejected the allegations of assault and religious targeting.

According to the police version, the two journalists were briefly detained after allegedly obstructing or violating a designated VVIP route near the event venue. Police officials have described the allegations of assault and religious targeting as “factually incorrect”, “misleading” and baseless.

Reports quoting South Delhi police officials stated that the journalists were asked to move from the designated VVIP security route and were taken to the police station following an altercation. The police have maintained that no physical assault took place.

The Editors Guild of India, while referring to the police version, stated that Delhi Police had maintained that the journalists were removed because of an allegedly improperly parked scooter and obstruction of access. The Guild nevertheless sought an independent and unbiased examination of the allegations.

Thus, the circumstances surrounding the incident remain disputed, with the journalists alleging assault and religious targeting during their detention and Delhi Police denying the allegations.

Press Club and journalists’ organisations seek action

In its joint statement, the Press Club of India, along with the Indian Women’s Press Corps, Delhi Union of Journalists, Press Association and Kerala Union of Working Journalists, called for punitive action against police personnel allegedly involved in the incident.

The organisations urged Delhi Police Commissioner Anurag Kumar to ensure a free and fair investigation into the allegations and called upon the Press Council of India to take suo motu cognisance of the matter and conduct an independent inquiry.

The statement was issued by Press Club of India President Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty and Secretary General Afzal Imam and was supported by the four journalists’ organisations.

NWMI demands suspension pending inquiry

In its statement issued on September 5, the Network of Women in Media, India unequivocally condemned the alleged assault on Shaheen Khan and Nafisa Khan and expressed solidarity with the two journalists.

NWMI urged the Delhi Police Commissioner to investigate the conduct of the police officers allegedly involved and demanded that the personnel accused of assault be suspended pending inquiry. The organisation stated that attacks on journalists were inconsistent with freedom of the press and freedom of expression.

Editors Guild seeks independent and unbiased probe

The Editors Guild of India also strongly condemned the detention and alleged assault of Shaheen Khan and Nafisa Khan by Delhi Police personnel attached to Saket Police Station.

The Guild referred to the journalists’ allegations that they were manhandled near the event venue, taken to the police station and assaulted by women police officials. It also noted the allegations concerning religion-specific abuse.

Referring to the injury marks shown by the journalists in videos, the Editors Guild called for an immediate independent and unbiased investigation into the allegations.

The Guild demanded strict action against police personnel if the allegations against them were substantiated. The statement was issued by Editors Guild of India President Sanjay Kapoor and General Secretary Raghavan Srinivasan.

Demand for CCTV footage and legal action

Following the incident, the journalists and representatives of 4PM News Network sought the preservation and release of CCTV footage from Saket Police Station.

The journalists have maintained that CCTV footage could establish what transpired inside the police station. Reports stated that Shaheen Khan and Nafisa Khan, along with their editor Sanjay Sharma, were considering approaching the Delhi High Court seeking preservation and production of the relevant CCTV footage.

According to reports, Sharma said that the police personnel found responsible should face action and that the CCTV footage should be made available for examination.

Background

The incident took place during the inauguration of a new wing at Max Smart Super Speciality Hospital in Saket. Shaheen Khan and Nafisa Khan have said they were present in the area for journalistic coverage of the event and had sought to question the Delhi Chief Minister.

Their allegations of detention and assault emerged through videos and social media posts on September 3, following which the Press Club of India and several other journalists’ organisations issued statements demanding accountability.

The Network of Women in Media, India issued its statement on September 5, followed by the Editors Guild of India’s demand for an independent and unbiased inquiry. The statements by the organisations have collectively called for an examination of the allegations, accountability for police personnel if wrongdoing is established and protection of journalists carrying out their professional duties.

Delhi Police has maintained that the journalists were detained because of an alleged obstruction of the designated VVIP route and has denied allegations of physical assault and religious targeting. 

The differing accounts have made an independent inquiry, including examination of available CCTV footage and other evidence, central to the demands raised by the journalists and press bodies.

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The post Press bodies condemn alleged assault on women journalists at Saket Police Station, seek inquiry and action appeared first on SabrangIndia.

It is important, however, to understand the change in Vande Mataram’s status beyond the simple paradigm of it being a diversion tactic to shift debate away from the Jantar Mantar-NEET protests. Why?

Because some 122 years ago, the slogan Vande Mataram galvanised large sections of Indians against British rule and became an integral part of the national imagination. Now, Vande Mataram is being sought to be used as a tool by the BJP to further its project of cultural imposition upon Indians.

This essay argues that the 2026 Amendment represents a transition from the idea of a more personal nationalism to a paradigm of imposed nationalism, arriving in the wake of the loosening grip of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The amendment, along with the push to bring Vande Mataram on par with Jana Gana Mana, fits neatly within the Hindutva project of rewriting the symbolism of the Congress regime. Through an examination of the song’s literary, political, and constitutional history, this essay will demonstrate that the 2026 Amendment does not represent historical continuity, but rather a contemporary majoritarian redefinition of a complex national symbol.

What does the law say?

Before I go further, it is important to state the change brought in by The Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Act, 2026 (hereafter, the 2026 Amendment), which amends the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971 (the 1971 Act).

Section 3 of the 1971 Act, before the amendment, read as follows:

Prevention of singing of Indian National Anthem, etc. — whoever intentionally prevents the singing of the Indian National Anthem or causes disturbance to any assembly engaged in such singing shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years, or with fine, or with both.

The 2026 Amendment substituted the above section with the following:

3. Whoever, intentionally — (a) prevents the singing of the National Anthem or the National Song; or (b) causes disturbance to any assembly engaged in such singing, shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years, or with fine, or with both.

The question is why?

A simple question to ask while analysing any material event is to ask why. Why should any law be made? Naturally, to address and engage with an issue in society that needs the moral, political, and social force of the law for it to be solved. Why should this specific song be given protection? Because it is being disrespected, and therefore, a proper protection regime is needed.

However, if one looks at the Statement of Objects and Reasons (SOR) for the 2026 Act, one would be amused by the lack of a problem statement, that is, the issue the amendment seeks to address. The SOR is an interpretative tool used to understand the circumstances surrounding the enactment of a law, or the problem the law was intended to solve. The SOR for the Vande Mataram Act says, essentially, three things:

1. Jana Gana Mana is a protected National Symbol.
2. Dr. Rajendra Prasad said in a speech that Vande Mataram shall be equally honoured on par with Jana Gana Mana.
3. Therefore, to ensure that Vande Mataram is respected and protected, this amendment is being enacted.

There is no problem statement here. A problem statement would have looked something like this, even with minimum amount of effort on part of the government:

Owing to the fact that incidents of disrespecting the National Song have become frequent in recent times, it is fit to follow the ideal propounded by Dr. Rajendra Prasad to honour the National Song on par with the National Anthem, and to accord the former the same protection as the latter under the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971.

We find no such basis for the amendment in the first place. We do, however, find the real reasons ex post. How? The government sent orders across the steel frame that is the Indian bureaucracy stating that official functions should be opened by singing the full version of Vande Mataram, that is, all six stanzas as opposed to the current convention of singing only the first two.

To put it in one sentence: the BJP wants India’s imagination with respect to its National Symbols reimagined in the way it sees them. Right now, Jana Gana Mana, the National Anthem, is written by Rabindranath Tagore, someone who a Modi can only try to imitate before an election but cannot claim to be either his guru or ideological predecessor. After all, Tagore’s nationalism was more humanistic than the most liberal ideas of nationalism. The flag, the song, and every other symbol bear the imprint of the Indian National Congress (INC) and its role in the independence movement. Therefore, the BJP wants to rewrite them using the means of law and power.

It is in this context that any further analysis of the current political developments, and of the Act, should be undertaken.

Reading between the lines

The operative provision of the act does two things. It punishes anyone who intentionally prevents the singing of the National Anthem or the National Song. It also punishes anyone who causes disturbance to an assembly engaged in that singing. Three years, a fine, or both.

Section 3A of the parent Act, inserted in 2003, adds a mandatory minimum of one year for a second conviction. Vande Mataram has thus been placed in the same level as Jana Gana Mana.

Weber’s old distinction between legality and legitimacy is useful here.[1] A statute may be perfectly legal, passed with the required majorities and notified on the appointed day, and still lack legitimacy, because it answers to the will of those in power rather than to any demonstrable public interest. The missing problem statement and reliance on a speech of a single leader is a testament to the fact that the government does not have a proper legitimate reason to do this, except for its aggressive enthusiasm to irk the cultural fabric of the country. Invoking Rajendra Prasad in these circumstances is a prop, not a justification. There is something faintly comic about a party pressing the words of a 1950 Congressman into service to authorise its own coercive statute.

What the government cannot invoke is more revealing than what it can. National integrity is off the table, because that would be a confession of failure over twelve years in office. The government’s own ideological ancestors on Vande Mataram are off the table too, because Savarkar, Golwalkar and Hedgewar were peripheral figures in the freedom struggle, and their writings on the song, where they exist, wilt on any honest comparison with those of Bose, Nehru or Tagore.

Historical Context

Origins

Bankim wrote the song around 1875 in a heavily Sanskritised Bengali and published it in Bangadarshan.[2] It was a regional lyric to the beauty of Bengal. It addressed the population of the Presidency and made no Pan-Indian claim. Seven years later Bankim placed it inside Anandamath, and its meaning was rewritten. The nation became a goddess, deified as a triad of Jagaddhatri, Kali and Durga. The song became the battle hymn of the santanas, the children who wage war for her honour. That war, and the point tends to get buried under a century of nationalist reception, is not fought against the British. It is fought against Muslims. The santanas torch houses, loot properties, and dream aloud of building temples on the sites of demolished mosques.[3] The novel’s climax welcomes British rule as friendly and necessary. A supernatural physician arrives to tell Satyananda to cease fighting, on the ground that the English will protect Hindu spiritual knowledge from further contamination.[4] It also important to note here that the current issue with the debate is not its origins. The analysis of the origins of the song should be done in a context that is more mature and is not charged with the fact the government wants every citizen to own it.

The slogan India chanted and the aftermath

Coming back to the timeline, in 1905, Lord Curzon partitioned Bengal along communal lines. Within months the opening stanzas of Vande Mataram were being sung at protests across the province. The stanzas travelled on their own, without the novel behind them. Protestors, weavers, students, boatmen carried the words into streets where most of those chanting had never opened Anandamath.

The ecumenical moment did not last. Aurobindo Ghose, writing in his weekly Bande Mataram between 1906 and 1908, undertook a deliberate sacralisation of the anti-colonial struggle. He called Bankim a seer. He called nationalism a religion. Patriotism, on his account, was Karma Yoga, Shaktipuja, a devotional discipline addressed to the Mother.[5] Aurobindo aligned the vocabulary of the national struggle with the theological structures of one religion, at the very moment the movement was acquiring a mass character.

The trouble was not that Hindus imagined the nation in Hindu terms. Every community imagines the nation in the vocabulary available to it.[6] The trouble was that this particular imagination was then offered as the imagination of all Indians, and those who could not sign on would be positioned first as reluctant, then as suspect. The line from Aurobindo’s Shaktipuja to the twenty-first-century slogan Iss desh mein rehna hai to Vande Mataram kehna hoga is neither short nor straight but it is a very real line.

The objections

By the late 1930s the fracture visible in the fine print of Anandamath had become audible in the public life of the Congress. Vande Mataram was by then the customary opening of party gatherings, and it was drawing objections. Muslim organisations found in it an idolatrous invocation of the motherland as a Hindu deity. Christian and Sikh groups objected too.

At the Muslim League’s Lucknow session in October 1937, Jinnah pressed this into a central charge against the Congress. His argument was that to insist on Vande Mataram was to insist on a majoritarian theological culture, and to require of the citizen that she be, in her aesthetic and religious sensibility, first a Hindu.

The Congress Working Committee met in Calcutta on 26 October 1937 under Nehru’s presidency, and it understood the danger. A subcommittee was set-up: Nehru, Gandhi, Azad, and Bose. The subcommittee with able advice from Rabindranath Tagore decided to endorse the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram and leaving out the later stanzas for they refer the country in a rather Hindu imagination or that other communities have objections to it.

The 1937 compromise is usually described as an accommodation of Muslim sentiment. That is true, and it is incomplete. What the CWC actually did was closer to what Isaiah Berlin later called value pluralism.[7] If a society is an amalgamation of communities with various commitments, be that of religious nature or otherwise, a single symbol cannot represent that society as a whole. The good thing about political wisdom is that in these kind of situations, it constructs bridges between various groups and creates a space that does not ask one section to fit into the imagination of the other. It is not a concession but a link in a long chain of actions that strive to create a pluralist society.

The Constituent Assembly and the Settlement of 1950

The compromise of 1937 cast a long shadow over the Constituent Assembly. As the Assembly moved towards finalising the national symbols, the argument that had been fought inside the Congress in the 1930s was fought again, this time on the floor of the House drafting the constitution of a new republic.

Purushottam Das Tandon led the conservative wing and pressed for the adoption of Vande Mataram as the sole National Anthem. The argument did have its force. The song had been sung on the gallows. It had been chanted in jails. It had been the last word on the lips of men and women marched to their deaths. To choose any other song, on this view, would insult the memory of the movement itself. Against Tandon stood a coalition of liberal Congressmen, minority representatives and others who saw that the historical memory of a movement cannot be the sole ground on which the symbols of a state are chosen. Jana Gana Mana had emerged in the interim as an alternative. Its language had no similar objections.

The Assembly did what has not been sufficiently appreciated. It chose not to resolve the argument by vote. It chose to resolve it by settlement. On January 24, 1950, Rajendra Prasad, in his capacity as President of the Assembly, made a statement rather than moved a resolution. Jana Gana Mana was the National Anthem. Vande Mataram was the National Song. The two would be honoured equally, and the National Song would have equal status.

Granville Austin noticed the framers’ persistent aversion to producing textual solutions that would freeze the resolution of live cultural disputes.[8] A statement by the presiding officer does not carry the force of law. It carries the force of morality. They were leaving room for the conscience of those who could not, for reasons rooted in the depths of their religious sensibility, sing the song without violence to themselves.

Compelled Speech and the Rights of Conscience

The 2026 Amendment converts this symbolic honorary status into a penal obligation. Its defenders will say, correctly, that the text prohibits only the intentional prevention of singing and the causing of disturbance to an assembly engaged in such singing. It does not, on its face, compel any citizen to sing. This is a formalist reading, and it disintegrates the moment one considers the environment in which the law will operate.

The Supreme Court addressed precisely this environment in Bijoe Emmanuel v. State of Kerala in 1986. Three Jehovah’s Witness children had refused to sing the National Anthem in their school, on the ground that their conscience forbade singing an anthem to anything other than God. Chinnappa Reddy J. held that standing respectfully during the anthem was sufficient, and that compelling the singing violated Article 19 (1) (a), which contains within the right to freedom of speech the right to remain silent, and Article 25, which protects freedom of conscience. The judgment is short. It rests on a proposition of considerable constitutional depth. The state cannot demand of the citizen a positive act of expression as the price of belonging. If the singing of the National Anthem itself cannot be compelled, the singing of Vande Mataram, whose theological register is far more textured, cannot be compelled either. Anything else would be a constitutional absurdity.

The trouble is that the Amendment does not need to compel singing on its face in order to compel singing in practice. In a polarised atmosphere the silent refusal that Bijoe Emmanuel protects can be re-characterised by a local complainant, an aggrieved neighbour or an ambitious sub-inspector as an act of causing disturbance or of showing disrespect. When the boundaries of a law are unclear and its penalties are severe, it poses a risk of citizens retreating well behind the boundaries. The right to remain silent becomes the risk of remaining silent, and the risk becomes prohibitive.

Briefly, the argument for the Vande Mataram Amendment is three pronged. One, if it was declared that anthem and song are to be treated same, then the statutory protections also should be the same. Second, the act does not ask everyone to sing. It asks people to not disturb the singing or prevent the singing. Third, the more boilerplate that the Parliament in its own wisdom has chosen to protect a national symbol and it does not need to give a layered justification for its decision.

These are respectable arguments but they fail for reasons worth spelling out.

If the framers wanted to legislate it or settle it, they would have, then and there. To make an active choice to not move it for vote shows that they let the national symbols be adoptable for all communities. Secondly, in an atmosphere where people have been deliberately charged with jingoism, the test in Bijoe Emmanuel will only hold until the Courts show the intention to. Once the crowd starts to expect that the whole of the song is to be sung, it is to the Crowd’s wisdom to act when someone does not sing the whole of the song, although it is not legally mandated. Thirdly, a polity’s right to protect its symbols cannot exceed the polity’s own core commitments. India’s foundational commitment, spelled out in the Preamble and vindicated across sixty years of adjudication, is to a plurality that does not require assimilation as the price of belonging and therefore, if the state wants to nevertheless protect the song, it should give not just a layered justification but also a constitutional one.

There is a deeper worry beneath all three of the above arguments. Ambedkar closed his final address to the Constituent Assembly with a warning about hero-worship in Indian public life. Bhakti in religion may be a road to salvation, he said. In politics it is a sure road to degradation and eventual dictatorship.[9] The 2026 Amendment is not, of course, a dictatorial measure. But its logic is the logic Ambedkar was warning against. It is the transfer of devotional intensity from the temple to the state, and the enforcement of such devotion, by criminal sanction. Once the state acquires the taste for compelling public affirmations of its own sacredness, the appetite tends to grow and that is a slippery slope.

Conclusion

The 2026 Amendment is best read not as a technical amendment to a sixty-year-old statute but as a political act of considerable ambition. Its ambition is to redraw the symbolic constitution of the Republic, and to accomplish through the ordinary instruments of legislation what its authors could not accomplish through the constituent process. It substitutes for the delicate settlement of 1937 and 1950 a punitive uniformity. And it does so in the absence of any demonstrable public harm that might justify the criminal law.

Defending the song against this treatment is not diminishing it. It is insisting on the terms on which the song became precious in the first place. It was sung by Bose in Berlin and by peasants in Chittagong. It was sung by Muslims in Bombay and by students in Madras. It was sung, in its truncated form, at Congress gatherings for a decade after 1937, and it was sung with more feeling for having been truncated, because the truncation was itself an act of respect towards those who could not sing the whole.

A republic honours its symbols by permitting their voluntary embrace. It dishonours them by conscripting the criminal law to enforce their recital. The framers understood this in 1950 with a clarity that their successors have chosen to forget. The task of the citizen in the years to come is to remember what has been forgotten, and to insist, patiently and in public, that a song sung under threat is not the song manifesting the true national consciousness.

(The author is part of the legal research team of the organisation)

[1]Weber, Economy and Society, on the distinction between legality and legitimacy in modern domination.

[2]Bhattacharya, Vande Mataram: The Biography of a Song, chapters 1 and 2.

[3]Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, on the maternal figure in Bankim; Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness, on the novelistic construction of nationalist imagination.

[4]Noorani, “How Secular is Vande Mataram?”, Frontline, 2 January 1999.

[5]Ghose, Bande Mataram (weekly edition, 1906 to 1908).

[6]Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, on the “inner” spiritual domain of Indian nationalism and its Hindu inflection.

[7]Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” and the essays in The Crooked Timber of Humanity.

[8]Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, on the framers’ preference for procedural over substantive resolution of cultural disputes.

[9]Ambedkar, address to the Constituent Assembly, November 25, 1949: “Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”

Related:

Rajya Sabha passes Vande Mataram bill as NCRB data reveals high pendency, low convictions

Vande Mataram Requiem for Jana Gana Mana

Identity issue to the fore: Vande Mataram controversy

The post Vande Mataram and the 2026 Amendment: From voluntary honour to penal coercion appeared first on SabrangIndia.

That is also the nature of Shaheen’s wider ground reporting. Her videos show her going into neighbourhoods and public spaces, documenting local conditions, speaking to people and questioning authorities. Her reporting has focused on issues that are experienced directly by ordinary people rather than remaining within the confines of official briefings.

Her videos on the fire that broke out in Malviya Nagar, Delhi may be viewed below:

According to Shaheen’s written statement, police personnel objected to the recording and attempted to take their phones. Women police personnel were called and the sisters were eventually put into a police vehicle. Shaheen says they were told they would be dropped home but were instead taken to Saket police station.

Detailed report may be read here.

A detailed complaint against named personnel

Shaheen’s written statement is specific about the alleged events at Saket police station. She names SHO Dinesh Kumar and women police personnel including Sonam Solanki and Renuka Chaudhary. She says the sisters were threatened with being put in the lock-up and that the SHO threatened to file multiple FIRs against them. She alleges that when she asked what offence they had committed and said they would cooperate, the threats continued.

She then alleges that Solanki demanded her phone. When Shaheen questioned the basis for taking it, she says the officer snatched it and slapped her. Nafisa was allegedly assaulted as well. The sisters say they were subsequently dragged through the station and taken upstairs. Shaheen alleges that they were pulled by their hair and clothes, slapped, kicked and beaten with a baton. She says she tried to seek help from the SHO before being taken upstairs.

In her interview with Alt News, published on September 7, Shaheen gave substantially the same account, saying that she and Nafisa were dragged upstairs and assaulted for an extended period. She described being slapped, kicked, having her hair pulled and being struck with a baton. Alt News also published photographs showing bruising on Nafisa’s leg and Shaheen’s upper arm.

The allegation of communal abuse

According to her written statement, an incoming call on her forcefully seized phone displayed the name “Mohd. Khan”. Shaheen alleges that the officer saw the caller ID, realised she was Muslim and then made a remark about giving her additional slaps and baton blows. Speaking to Alt News, Shaheen repeated the allegation, saying the officer’s behaviour changed after seeing the name and identifying her as Muslim. She said the assault then intensified and that other women constables were also instructed to beat the sisters.

Sabrangindia has spoken to both sisters and accessed a copy of the criminal complaint.

The sisters described the same sequence in their September 6 interview with Nous Network, titled “Is Being Muslim Our Biggest Crime?” They alleged that they were beaten for roughly 30–40 minutes, including through slaps, kicks, hair-pulling and baton blows, and said the treatment became more severe after the officer allegedly realised that they were Muslim. Nafisa also questioned the relevance of their religion during the alleged assault.

The CCTV evidence

The sisters have repeatedly pointed to CCTV footage as potentially decisive evidence. Shaheen’s written statement identifies the areas through which she says they were dragged and assaulted. In her interview with Alt News, she said CCTV cameras covered parts of the station, including the reception and corridor, and that this footage could establish what happened. She said the room where she alleges the later assault occurred did not have a camera, but the route leading to it did. Article 14 reported that Shaheen and Nafisa were demanding the preservation and release of CCTV footage from Saket police station. The report noted that the women believe the footage could help test their allegations against the police account.

What happened after the alleged assault?

According to Shaheen’s statement, the sisters eventually made their way back to the reception area, where Nafisa collapsed. Shaheen says the police did not arrange for them to contact their family or obtain immediate medical assistance. They eventually contacted relatives and called the police control room. The women were taken to hospital and underwent medical examination before returning to the police station to pursue their complaint.

The medical evidence is now an important part of the case. Videos circulated after the incident showed injuries on the women, while Alt News reported photographs of bruising on Nafisa’s leg and Shaheen’s arm. The Indian Express also reported that a video released by 4PM showed bruises and welts that the women attributed to the alleged assault.

Alt News also spoke to their colleague Neetu, who alleged that the women were not immediately assisted in obtaining an MLC and that police instead sought a compromise. She alleged that the women themselves called the police and went for the medical examination, returning to the station later that night. She further alleged that they remained there for hours without an FIR and were asked to remove two names from their complaint.

Newslaundry reported that Shaheen remained at the police station for hours demanding that an FIR be registered. The report said police accepted the complaint but did not register an FIR. At the time of the publishing of this report, there was still no FIR against the police personnel named by the sisters.

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Midnight Arrest, Daylight Questions: Why was Santosh Pandit taken into custody?

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The post Six Days On, Still No FIR: What happened to Shaheen and Nafisa Khan at Saket Police Station? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Let me first clarify that I am not making a value judgement here. Nor am I pushing forward an argument that students of yesterday were avid readers, while students of the present time are an anti-knowledge lot.

To make such a sweeping generalisation, one would need to conduct a scientific study and take into consideration multiple factors. On the occasion of Teachers’ Day, I simply want to share my own experience—something that has been troubling my mind.

One of the first major signs of the decline of reading culture is the disappearance of shops and stalls selling books, magazines, and newspapers. Even the Xerox shops around colleges and universities are now busy printing and photocopying documents to be submitted to the administration, rather than essays, articles, or relevant portions of books and magazines.

Even newspaper hawkers are hardly visible, not only around colleges in semi-rural areas but also at those located in district headquarters and cities. Around college and university campuses, what one mostly sees is the mushrooming growth of fast-food kiosks. Since the administrations are often unable to run the canteens properly, students have little choice but to go outside and eat junk food.

Inside the campus, library culture is also on the decline. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of library staff. Most of the library staff are contractual workers who are poorly paid. As a result, they often do not work there with a sense of commitment. Even among those who are working, many are not trained in library science. Nor are they sensitized to the needs of readers. The reading hall is also poorly maintained. The seating arrangements and lighting are inadequate. The books are not properly arranged, making it difficult for readers to access them.

However, the growing corruption within the publishing world has also infected our campuses. As a result, a large portion of the books purchased in recent years are simply garbage. Even in the journal sections, substandard journals are purchased while quality journals are often ignored. Everywhere, there are cuts in the budget, and even when money is spent, it is rarely spent on the welfare of students or the promotion of genuine academic activity.

The administration is happy to display this garbage on the shelves of the library in return for hefty kickbacks, while caring little about valuable books that are damaged by pests or due to neglect.

I do not know much about the complex rules and norms that determine how colleges and universities are ranked among the top institutes by government agencies. But my yardstick for judging whether a college or university is academically vibrant is very simple. Whenever I visit a new academic institution, I first try to visit its library because a well-attended library is a sign of a healthy academic environment.

While no bhajan (devotion) is possible without bhojan (food), I next visit the canteen inside the academic premises. A canteen not only provides food but also creates a space for interaction, debate, and discussion. I am sad to say that most universities and colleges cannot boast of having such a happening place. If there are a few such eateries, they are highly commercialised, serving mostly fast food. While the food may be ‘hot’ and ‘spicy’, the public culture there is dull and lifeless.

The shrinking democratic space is no less responsible for the declining reading culture. The administration is becoming more authoritarian day by day. The regime of security and surveillance is intensifying with each passing day. Even teachers often maintain a sense of superiority. Most teachers favour students who act meekly before them, touch their feet, and flatter them at every opportunity.

The caste network is also deeply pernicious on campuses. It is not a coincidence that the students or research scholars favoured by a teacher are often those who belong to his caste. While our teachers project themselves as the biggest “patriots” in public life, in their personal lives they often indulge in what can only be described as anti-national behaviour by practising caste-based discrimination.

Worse still, our educational campuses are not adequately sensitised to the needs and concerns of female students, religious minorities, and differently-abled people. The syllabus has been framed to glorify the past rather than to meet the needs of students in the present. Students from marginalised sections often find it difficult to relate to the course structure and feel alienated from the academic environment. The rise of majoritarianism and intolerance, along with the display of religiosity on campuses, has further alienated minorities.

Discussions and jokes in staff rooms and classrooms are often anti-women. The rampant misogyny prevalent on campuses makes women feel unsafe. Parents, too, often seize this opportunity to further control the freedom of their daughters.

The lack of student activism and the disappearance of debating and seminar culture are among the major reasons why students do not feel motivated to read. Often, student organisations are banned on campuses by the administration on the grounds that they are involved in violence. It is true that some student bodies have been involved in violent activities, and no one is arguing that they should not be held accountable for their misdeeds. But one also needs to recognise that banning student politics is not the solution to violence. Even elections are sometimes marred by violence, but no one argues that elections should be abolished.

Even the seminars held within campuses often fail to achieve their intended purpose. This has much to do with the relationship between funding agencies and the ideologies they seek to impose on the organisers. Seminars have now turned into occasions to facilitate politicians in power and echo the political lines of the establishment, without critically examining whether such policies are indeed framed in the public interest or merely serve vested interests. Since students and researchers are required to produce certificates of participation, they are often more concerned with obtaining the certificate and filling the chairs in the audience than with participating in any meaningful and fruitful discussion.

It is not only the academic spaces that are responsible; parents, too, often impose their own will on their children. We hardly find parents who facilitate their children in pursuing the goals of their choice. Most are in a hurry to see their children settle into high-salaried and secure jobs. Both at home and in our society, a person is often judged “successful” on the basis of how much wealth they have amassed, how trendy their clothes are, and how luxurious a car they drive.

The anti-intellectual environment at homes get extended into our academic spaces. The teachers hardly read. They have forgotten that a good teacher is the one who is first a student. The advancement in career is the bigger concern for the teachers rather than acting as the source of knowledge. They hardly speak on the pressing political issues because they want to remain in the good book of the establishment.

Even if our Constitution gives every citizen the fundamental right to freedom of speech, and the highest court of the country has held that dissent and criticism are integral parts of democracy, a large section of teachers have imposed self-censorship on themselves. They write only when they need papers for promotion, and most of these papers are poorly written and make little sense. Yet they get published as “research papers” because the authors pay publishers huge amounts of money.

Even in the staff room, teachers hardly discuss academic issues. The favourite gossip among male teachers is often about the clothes of their female colleagues, accompanied by rumours about their personal lives and sexual relationships. Worse still, many teachers are excessively flattering towards their seniors while being rude and dismissive towards their students.

All these factors contribute negatively to the lives of our young students. The smarter among them have come to realise that knowledge is not the first criterion for getting jobs in academia. That is why they spend a large amount of their energy flattering their teachers and developing networks with those in the administration and politics. Sensing that joining the political outfits of the ruling party is a more secure way of getting jobs, they are often too busy attending sectarian political programmes rather than spending time in the classroom and library.

Since a large number of students hardly read, they are unable to write. Whenever they turn up to submit their assignments, their writings are often copied and pasted from the internet. These are some of the more disturbing trends that I have noticed while working as a teacher. I do not know how these issues can be addressed. But if India has to excel in the field of knowledge and ensure that its democracy remains meaningful, policymakers cannot afford to ignore these questions.

(Dr Abhay Kumar teaches Political Science. His recently published book is Muslim Personal Law: Definitions, Sources and Contestations (Manohar, 2026). Email: debatingissues@gmail.com)

The post Why are reading habits among Indian students declining? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Bhardwaj was traced to Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh and detained by a Delhi Police Crime Branch team on September 4 afternoon, hours after representatives of the CJP, Nishu Azad, Congress workers and MPs Chandrashekhar Azad and Pappu Yadav gathered at the police station demanding action. The detention followed a FIR and police assurance to the protesting delegation that Bhardwaj would be arrested within 72 hours. He was detained by UP police.

Finally, Delhi Police have registered an FIR against the Sanghi goon and said he will be arrested within 72 hours.

It took two months and a protest just to get an FIR registered for a hate crime that happened right in front of the police.

POLICE DEPARTMENT THIK KARO!

— Abhijeet Dipke (@abhijeet_dipke) September 4, 2026

#Announcement

From Day 1, we have not let any student or protester fight this battle alone.

Nishu’s father Sanjay ji’s case is harrowing. Gang members like Swatantra Bhardwaj are openly flaunting that they attempted murder on Sanjay ji who was simply peacefully protesting…

— Saurav Das (@SauravDassss) September 3, 2026

According to The Indian Express, the police team traced Bhardwaj to Bulandshahr after he travelled there earlier in the day. The Times of India reported that he had stayed at a local resident’s house in Naithla village and left on a motorcycle after his presence became known. Police subsequently tracked him down and took him into custody. The detention came after Bhardwaj himself appeared in a widely circulated podcast discussing the alleged assault and claiming that political connections had helped him avoid jail.

The case began at a CJP protest at Jantar Mantar

The controversy began during a CJP protest at Jantar Mantar, where Nishu Azad, then a 14-year-old student protester, was participating. Her father, Sanjay Kumar, was at the protest site when a confrontation allegedly broke out. According to the FIR-based account reported in the material provided, Kumar was recording the proceedings on his phone when he was questioned by a young man about making a video. An argument followed, after which two or three people allegedly joined in and assaulted him. Kumar alleged that he was punched on the head and struck with a kada or bracelet-like object.

He was taken to RML Hospital for treatment. The medical record referred to two deep wounds on his head. Lawyer Feroz Gama, who said he witnessed the incident, told The Indian Express that he took Kumar to hospital and that Kumar received stitches for his injuries. The precise nature of the injuries subsequently became one of the central points of dispute in the case.

While Kumar’s supporters and CJP described the assault as serious, Delhi Police said the injuries were simple in nature. Police rejected claims that Kumar had suffered a skull fracture and said that the injury was caused during a scuffle involving the kada worn by one of the accused, as reported by The Indian Express.

Detailed reports on brute force used by police on the protestors may be read here, here, here and here.

Bhardwaj was initially detained—but not arrested

The first police response to the alleged assault became one of the most troubling aspects of the case. Delhi Police said Swatantra Bhardwaj and another accused, Suraj Kumar, were detained at the protest site, questioned and served notices. But after that, they were not arrested and were allowed to remain out of custody while the case proceeded.

For Nishu Azad’s family and CJP, that was not an adequate response to an alleged assault that had left her father with serious head injuries. The question they raised was straightforward: if the accused had been identified and detained at the scene, why was there no immediate custodial action? And why did the initial FIR omit the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act despite the family’s demand that the caste dimension of the alleged attack be formally recognised?

देखिए, स्वतंत्र भारद्वाज अपना बचाव इस तरह कर रहे थे पापा के सर पर कड़ा मरते हुए सेल्फ डिफेंस कर रहे हैं स्वतंत्र.. pic.twitter.com/DkB6geSsHl

— Nishu Aazad (@Nishuazad11) September 4, 2026

A podcast puts the case back in the spotlight

The case returned to the headlines after excerpts from a lengthy podcast featuring Bhardwaj began circulating widely. In the interview, Bhardwaj appeared to speak about the confrontation with Sanjay Kumar and claimed that he had “cracked” his skull. He also spoke about how he had not been jailed after the incident. Notably, he invoked the names of political figures while describing his connections. Bhardwaj referred to Delhi minister Kapil Mishra and Union minister Chirag Paswan as “elder brothers” and also invoked Prime Minister Narendra Modi while speaking about his political support.

वीडियो में साफ़ सुन सकते हैं कि स्वतंत्र भारद्वाज खुद अपने किए की बात कबूल कर रहा है। दिल्ली पुलिस को इससे ज्यादा क्या सबूत चाहिए? अब कानून के तहत सख्त कार्रवाई होनी चाहिए।@DelhiPolice @PSParliamentSt @ChandrashekharAzad @RahulGandhi#स्वतंत्रभारद्वाज #DelhiPolice #Justice pic.twitter.com/Zn9dQnjSu4

— Nishu Aazad (@Nishuazad11) September 5, 2026

When demands for his arrest started being made, Bhardwaj later disputed his own words. He claimed that he had acted in self-defence after being surrounded by a group of people and said his references to political leaders were sarcastic. Delhi Police, too, rejected allegations that political pressure had prevented his arrest. But the video fundamentally changed the public conversation around the case.

The allegations were no longer based only on what the victim, witnesses or protesters said had happened. The accused himself had publicly discussed the confrontation and his alleged political connections, creating a fresh basis for demands that the police revisit the matter.

CJP takes the issue back to the police station

CJP responded by organising a fresh protest outside the Parliament Street police station. The organisation’s representatives Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, along with supporters, went to the police station demanding Bhardwaj’s arrest and stronger charges. CJP had been involved from the beginning because the alleged assault took place during its protest. The organisation’s campaign subsequently became the mechanism through which the demand for police action was kept alive after the initial detention and release of the accused.

CJP demanded the addition of provisions relating to attempt to murder, criminal intimidation and the SC/ST Act. It also raised the issue of threats and online abuse directed at Nishu following the controversy. The protest brought Nishu and her father back to the police station as well.

@Cockroachisback @SauravDassss @AshutoshRanka A special thank you to you both as well for providing us with such strong and capable lawyers who are working hard to make our case as strong as possible. Me and my father truly appreciate your support…

— Nishu Aazad (@Nishuazad11) September 4, 2026

Congress joins Nishu and CJP

The mobilisation soon widened beyond CJP. Indian Youth Congress Delhi president Akshay Lakra joined Nishu at the police station and demanded action against Bhardwaj. Congress also provided legal assistance. According to the reports, the AICC legal department deputed a team of lawyers led by Rishabh Ranjan to assist Nishu and her family with the matter. The legal intervention focused not only on the assault case but also on the threats allegedly directed at Nishu after the incident.

मेरे बुरे वक़्त में मुझे जान से मारने की धमकी मिल रही थी उस समय मेरे साथ एवेंजर्स की तरह साथ देने वाले एडवोकेट्स, उनकी पूरी टीम को धन्यवाद
Sr Adv & Member of Parliament Shri @DrAMSinghvi Sir & AICC Law Dept
Ayesha, @Lawyermdkhan @omarhoda46@rishav_ranjan18 @akshaylakra17 & ors

— Nishu Aazad (@Nishuazad11) September 5, 2026

मुझे आशा नहीं थी कि @RahulGandhi जी की सच में ट्वीट करेंगे अब मुझे राहुल गांधी जी जैसे बड़े नेता का साथ मिल चुका है अब मुझे न्याय मिल कर रहेगा और स्वतंत्र भारद्वाज जेल जाकर रहेंगे.. https://t.co/t055GHxOAY

— Nishu Aazad (@Nishuazad11) September 3, 2026

This became an increasingly important part of the case because Nishu said she had faced rape threats, abuse and online harassment, including the circulation of objectionable or morphed images. She said the harassment had affected her education and that she had stopped attending school for several weeks.

Chandrashekhar Azad and Pappu Yadav join the protest

The protest then drew two opposition MPs. Chandrashekhar Azad, Nagina MP and president of the Azad Samaj Party, reached Parliament Street police station and joined the delegation. He questioned why Bhardwaj had not been arrested despite the video in which he appeared to discuss the alleged assault. Azad also raised the threats allegedly directed at Nishu, including threats of rape, acid attack and death.

मेरे @BhimArmyChief बड़े भाई ने जिस तरह से मेरा हाथ पकड़ा है ना हमें उससे कोई मतलब नहीं है कि मेरे बड़े भाई मेरे साथ है, आखिरी दम तक साथ खड़े है.. pic.twitter.com/CxYLf6k7qy

— Nishu Aazad (@Nishuazad11) September 4, 2026

Pappu Yadav, the Independent MP from Purnia, subsequently joined the protesters and sat with them outside the police station. He spoke about violence against women and Dalits and held up the Constitution while demanding action. Their involvement marked a significant expansion of the mobilisation: what had begun as CJP’s campaign over an alleged assault during its protest was now being taken up directly by elected representatives.

बीजेपी का आतंकी स्वतंत्र भारद्वाज को बंदी
बनाने से ही न्याय नहीं होगा बल्कि, उसे स्पीडी
ट्रायल से उम्र क़ैद भी हो!

वहीं उसे बीजेपी सरकार में किस-किस का
संरक्षण प्राप्त है, गृह मंत्री अमित शाह समेत
सबकी जांच होकर उन पर कठोर कार्रवाई हो! pic.twitter.com/gN2tygKwrl

— Rajesh Ranjan Pappu Yadav (@pappuyadavjapl) September 4, 2026

The New Indian Express reported that the CJP delegation, joined by Chandrashekhar Azad and Pappu Yadav, demanded both the attempt-to-murder and SC/ST Act provisions and an FIR over the threats allegedly made against Nishu.

Police add the SC/ST Act and other provisions

After negotiations at the police station, Delhi Police agreed to add provisions under the SC/ST Act to the case. The police also added provisions relating to criminal intimidation and other offences under the BNS. The question of attempt to murder was more complicated. Police indicated that the applicability of the provision would have to be assessed in light of the medical evidence and investigation into the nature of Kumar’s injuries. This was an important shift from the police’s initial position.

The police had earlier described Kumar’s injury as simple and rejected claims of a skull fracture. After the renewed protest, however, the FIR was expanded to include the SC/ST Act and additional criminal provisions.

A separate FIR was also registered after Nishu complained about the threats and online harassment she had allegedly received. The new case invoked provisions of the POCSO Act, along with BNS provisions and Section 67 of the Information Technology Act.

Nishu asks for protection

As the protest continued, Nishu also raised concerns about her own safety. She said she did not know when or where she could be attacked and asked for protection for herself and her family. Hindustan Times reported her concern that she was living under a continuing threat after the controversy surrounding the assault and the subsequent online abuse.

Her position became an important part of the renewed campaign because the case had by then moved beyond the alleged assault on her father. It had expanded into allegations of intimidation and sexual threats against a teenage protester herself.

It was at this stage that Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, publicly intervened. Nishu had appealed to Gandhi for support, saying that she had lost faith in the police response. Gandhi responded publicly, assuring her that she should not panic and that he stood with her. He questioned why Bhardwaj remained free despite the statements attributed to him in the viral video.

निशु, घबराने की ज़रूरत नहीं है। मैं तुम्हारे साथ हूँ।

साफ है कि तुम्हें इसलिए निशाना बनाया गया क्योंकि तुम अपने समुदाय और छात्रों के हक़ की आवाज़ उठाती हो।

अमित शाह की दिल्ली पुलिस एक तरफ़ छात्रों के साथ अमानवीय बर्बरता करती है। दूसरी तरफ़ एक दलित लड़की के पिता का सिर फोड़ने… https://t.co/m1mgH655hw

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) September 3, 2026

Gandhi also directly questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah about the alleged political protection claimed by Bhardwaj. His intervention brought the case substantially greater national political attention.

Support also came from across political parties, with the Aam Aadmi Party, Samajwadi Party and Trinamool Congress questioning the alleged political protection being claimed by Bhardwaj.

आज कौशांबी के समाजवादी पार्टी सांसद @Pushpendra_MP_ जी से बात हुई। उन्होंने हर संभव साथ देने की बात कही, जिसके लिए उनका हृदय से बहुत-बहुत धन्यवाद। pic.twitter.com/TMG5L25ljW

— Nishu Aazad (@Nishuazad11) September 5, 2026

@RahulGandhi @BhimArmyChief @yadavakhilesh @ArvindKejriwal @CJP_for_India
Thankk uuu so muchh pic.twitter.com/bY5c3y1fvf

— Nishu Aazad (@Nishuazad11) September 3, 2026

Chirag Paswan files his own complaint

The political claims made by Bhardwaj also prompted a response from one of the people he had named. Union Minister and Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) chief Chirag Paswan filed a complaint with the Parliament Street police against Bhardwaj, objecting to the alleged misuse of his name.

As reported by The Hindu, Paswan’s complaint sought an FIR and strict action against Bhardwaj and asked that it be formally recorded that neither Paswan nor the LJP (Ram Vilas) had any connection with him or with the incident. Paswan said that Bhardwaj had falsely invoked his name to create an impression of political protection and called for an impartial investigation.

Have you observed this disturbing pattern? The more you abuse Muslims, target Dalits, spew hatred make derogatory remarks about a community and sexualize women, the more access you seem to get to the top leaders of a particular ideology. Unfortunately, Such conduct is rewarded… https://t.co/TaCINb4Nlm pic.twitter.com/HxpCShegug

— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) September 3, 2026

Police trace him to Bulandshahr

While the political and public pressure was mounting in Delhi, police began looking for Bhardwaj. He had travelled to Bulandshahr, where reports said he stayed with a local resident in Naithla village.

According to India Today, Bhardwaj fled the village after police began looking for him. The Times of India reported that he left on a motorcycle after media attention around his presence increased. Police teams eventually traced him and detained him.

The Indian Express reported that Crime Branch officers took him into custody at around 2 pm on Friday. The arrest/detention therefore came on the same day as the CJP-led mobilisation at Parliament Street.

Related:

Maharashtra’s schools are struggling to survive as students protest, infrastructure crumbles and Marathi-medium institutions disappear

After NEET protests ended, the battle moved online: Women protesters face threats, doxing and criminalisation

Bihar: Not just Delhi, Patna, Siwan too saw brute police violence against demonstrating students: PUCL

Maharashtra: After backlash, govt. moves to withdraw FIRs against student protesters but questions remain

Water Cannons Instead of Answers: Bihar’s recruitment crisis and the state’s crackdown on protest

Amnesty Investigation finds unlawful and deadly force against CJP-led protesters in Delhi and Siwan

The Supreme Court’s Uneasy Middle Path on Protest Policing

Governments begin rolling back cases against protesters, but questions over violence, arrests and accountability remain

July 2026: A dissent that was brutally put down, a crackdown after the protest ended

The post Days of Demands, Hours of Protest: Swatantra Bhardwaj finally detained in assault case appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The assault was not an isolated disagreement over music. It was the latest and most disturbing episode in a controversy that has exposed a larger question: who gets to decide how much noise a religious celebration can impose on everyone else?

The Indian Express reported that Bapat was attacked while giving a live interview, with the assault captured on camera. Pune Police Commissioner Amitesh Kumar said the accused had been arrested and that a cognisable, non-bailable case would be registered. Bapat was subsequently provided police protection.

JUST IN: Footage shows Vidyanand Bapat being slapped while giving a byte to TV9 Marathi in Pune earlier today. A man approached and allegedly hit Bapat as he spoke to the channel, after which others joined in. Raising your voice on civic issues shouldn’t invite a mob. pic.twitter.com/x3CxMKB0vU

— Varad Bhatkhande | Journalist (@VaradBhatkhande) September 3, 2026

A protest was held at Kalakar Katta on Fergusson College Road in Shivajinagar, Pune, demanding justice for Santosh Pandit and Vidyanand Bapat.

Citizens and activists gathered under the banner of Jagruk Punekar, raising slogans and calling for justice for both individuals.… pic.twitter.com/Uqzz2pdn1v

— Punekar News (@punekarnews) September 4, 2026

From one voice at a civic meeting to a statewide debate

The controversy began on August 24, when the Pune Municipal Corporation held its preparatory meeting for Ganeshotsav, scheduled to begin on September 14. Among several hundred people present, Bapat was reportedly the only person to object to the use of DJs and dhol systems. His argument was straightforward: the festival should not become a source of excessive noise, traffic disruption and public inconvenience. He invoked the history of Ganeshotsav, pointing out that when Lokmanya Tilak popularised the public festival, DJ systems obviously did not exist. He argued that amplified music was neither intrinsic to the festival nor necessary for its celebration.

I don’t want publicity only! I am perfectly okay if the alley dogs don’t know who I am.
What I want is a solution to the problems citizens are actually enduring. This isn’t about getting attention, it’s about getting things fixed. He is talking in crystal clear terms.
Our…

— Shilpa Godbole (@godbole_shilpa) August 30, 2026

The response was hostile. Bapat was shouted down and eventually escorted out by the police as tensions rose. But footage of the confrontation circulated widely on social media, transforming an otherwise ordinary civic meeting into a national talking point. The controversy was then amplified by Marathi television.

ABP Majha brought Bapat face-to-face with BJP Pune city president Dheeraj Ghate. During the debate, Bapat calmly explained his position on noise pollution. Ghate reportedly mocked him, asking who even knew Bapat in his neighbourhood. The exchange subsequently went viral. Within days, television channels, YouTube platforms and social-media personalities were interviewing Bapat. He repeatedly made the same argument, drawing on Sanskrit texts, the Mahabharata, Greek and Latin literature and his own rationalist worldview. His fluency in Marathi, Sanskrit, Hindi and English and his refusal to be provoked made him a social-media sensation.

The real issue is not whether festivals should be celebrated

The debate has sometimes been presented as a conflict between religious devotees and people opposed to Ganeshotsav. That is a misleading frame. Bapat has not argued against Ganeshotsav. Neither have many of the citizens who have subsequently joined the campaign.

At a Goodluck Chowk gathering, protesters explicitly said that their objection was to excessive noise from DJs, loudspeakers, dhol-tasha systems and other high-intensity sound equipment — not to Ganeshotsav itself. Hindustan Times reported similar assertions from participants who said the restrictions should apply to every religious celebration, irrespective of religion.

Hundreds gathered at Goodluck Chowk in Pune on Friday, protesting Santosh Pandit’s arrest and demanding answers over the 1am police action. Protesters also expressed solidarity with Vidyanand Bapat, who was assaulted while speaking against high-decibel DJs. pic.twitter.com/SxfuX6TNs7

— Varad Bhatkhande | Journalist (@VaradBhatkhande) September 4, 2026

A constitutional democracy does not give religious expression a licence to override the rights of everyone around it. Freedom of religion does not mean freedom from regulation. Public celebrations take place in shared civic spaces, and their exercise necessarily has to coexist with the rights of residents, children, elderly people, patients, workers, motorists and others. The question, therefore, should not be whether Ganeshotsav is important. It plainly is. The question is why excessive noise has been allowed to become synonymous with celebration in the first place.

The numbers make the argument harder to dismiss

The College of Engineering, Pune has measured noise levels on Lakshmi Road during Ganesh immersion for roughly 25 years. With the exception of the pandemic years, readings have consistently exceeded 80 decibels. The levels recorded in recent years were particularly stark: 105.2 decibels in 2022, 101.3 in 2024 and 94.8 in 2025.

The Union Environment Ministry’s prescribed limits are substantially lower. In residential areas, the permissible limit is 55 decibels during the day and 45 at night. Even commercial areas have limits of 65 and 55 decibels respectively.

For years, the state has known that noise levels during major processions can far exceed permissible standards. The more uncomfortable question is: why has enforcement remained so inconsistent?

The politics of noise

Several Ganesh mandal representatives and BJP leaders initially opposed Bapat’s position and defended DJs and dhol during the festival. Yet once the issue gained significant public support, political leaders began positioning themselves on the side of noise control.  BJP leader and Maharashtra Higher and Technical Education Minister Chandrakant Patil appealed to Punekars not to overuse DJs and laser beams. Bengaluru South MP Tejasvi Surya similarly welcomed citizen mobilisation around clean air and reduced noise. Neither, however, publicly challenged the BJP’s local leadership that had been supporting the use of DJs.

Chief Minister Fadnavis adopted an equally cautious position at the BJP state executive meeting in Pune on August 31, calling for festivals to be celebrated in a “cultured” manner without directly taking a clear position on the DJ controversy. That changed somewhat after the assault.

On September 4, Fadnavis described DJ noise as being comparable to the sound of an earthquake and called for a return to more traditional forms of Ganeshotsav. Hindustan Times reported that he also argued that consensus and dialogue were necessary to reduce the use of such systems. But there is an obvious political contradiction here. If excessive noise is genuinely harmful, the state does not need to wait for a viral citizen campaign or an assault before taking a firm position. The legal framework already exists.

Solapur shows that another model is possible

Pune is not the first Maharashtra city to confront this issue. Solapur has moved towards a DJ-free Ganeshotsav, with the campaign emerging from citizen mobilisation rather than merely being imposed from above. The effort followed growing concern about the health and civic consequences of high-decibel celebrations.

The campaign acquired particular force following accounts of two incidents in 2025 involving the alleged health consequences of excessive festival noise. A citizen who objected to loud music during Shiv Jayanti reportedly suffered permanent hearing loss after being forced to sit near speakers, while another young man reportedly suffered a fatal heart attack after dancing to loud DJ music during a procession. The resulting campaign brought together lawyers, doctors, senior citizens and students and reportedly collected tens of thousands of signatures. Solapur demonstrates that religious celebration and restraint do not have to be opposites.

The movement is now larger than Bapat

Bapat may have become the face of the Pune controversy, but the demand predates him. The campaign against DJs has been building for several years. In 2023, Sunil Mane, an Ambedkarite and former journalist who is now associated with the NCP (Sharad Pawar), petitioned against DJ use during Ambedkar Jayanti processions, Hindustan Times reported.

By August 30, hundreds of people had gathered at Goodluck Chowk despite the cancellation of a proposed march by Sakal Hindu Samaj, as per the report of Free Press Journal. One participant told reporters that elderly residents and heart patients were particularly affected by the noise. Another directly warned the BJP leadership that voters who had supported the party could change their political loyalties if they felt their concerns were being ignored.

Nagpur has moved from appeals to enforcement

Nagpur Police have imposed restrictions on high-powered DJ systems, customised sound trucks, multi-speaker systems and other high-intensity amplified equipment under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita. The order, effective from September 3 to November 1, covers multiple festivals, including Ganeshotsav, Eid, Navratri, Durga Puja, Dussehra and Diwali. Importantly, systems operating within permissible noise limits are not covered by the prohibition.

Nagpur has also restricted high-intensity laser and beam lights on public-safety grounds, citing the possibility of temporary visual impairment for motorists and consequent accidents. The city has simultaneously created a mechanism through which citizens can report noise pollution, upload evidence and track complaints, with the system reportedly requiring action within 30 minutes and providing for escalation if no response is recorded.

The state must protect dissent, not merely condemn violence after the fact

The assault on Bapat should not become another moment when political leaders condemn violence only after it has occurred while ignoring the conditions that allow intimidation to flourish. Bapat was not attacked while obstructing a procession. He was attacked while speaking to journalists.

His position could be challenged. His arguments could be criticised. His understanding of tradition could be disputed. His demand for a ban could be opposed. But none of these disagreements legitimises physical violence.

The Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti, while condemning the assault, warned that allowing violence to replace argument creates a dangerous precedent: if people become afraid to speak about noise pollution, they may eventually become afraid to speak about corruption, superstition, pollution or injustice more broadly. NCP (SP) chief Sharad Pawar similarly said that assaulting someone for exercising the right to express an opinion amounts to an attack on democracy. He also backed restrictions on DJs and loudspeakers and pointed to Solapur and other districts as examples.

Former MLC Sandip Joshi has supported a complete ban on DJs and laser systems and described the assault on Bapat as an act of cowardice. He has been campaigning for restrictions beyond the immediate festive period. But BJP city president Dayashankar Tiwari and MLA Pravin Datke have opposed the restrictions. Datke questioned why restrictions were being imposed during Hindu festivals, while the BJP maintained that the leaders were speaking in their individual capacities.

Related:

Maharashtra SIR draft rolls leave 2.07 crore electors out; Pune records highest exclusions at 28.66 lakh

Two women journalists allege police assault after questioning Delhi CM, say attack intensified after police heard they were Muslim

Maharashtra’s schools are struggling to survive as students protest, infrastructure crumbles and Marathi-medium institutions disappear

3,404 SIR Forms Found at Kharghar Xerox Shop: CJP, VFD and BCS demands answers from Maharashtra SEC

The post Pune’s DJ Controversy, Ganeshotsav and Assault: The politics of who gets to make noise appeared first on SabrangIndia.

It was hardly two weeks since Jason Arday’s ordeal, which resulted in his suicide- I am rather inclined to term it systemic murder of marginalised bodies. When another Google search, returned with the headline, another IIT student allegedly committed suicide, at what is purportedly the country’s most ‘meritocratic shop’, producing efficient docile bodies for the neoliberal industry!

The recurrence of suicides across IITs compels a question: what makes a student at an institute celebrated as a guarantor of upward economic and social mobility take their own life? Possibly, the explanation lies not within the student at all; rather, the institution itself becomes the focal lens of our inquiry.

Why are these campuses becoming deathscapes?

At dawn on a Saturday in August, a second-year M.Sc. student took his life at IIT Delhi. His suicide stirred the same question that each lost life before his has opened- Is it the institutional environment of the IITs that produces this recurrence?

Recurrence of Suicide:

According to the statistics compiled by independent trackers, drawing on partial government data, records a staggering 160 suicides across IITs within the past two decades. The recent ruling by the Central Information Commission (CIC) flagged a persistent crisis of suicides across IIT campuses. At IIT Delhi alone, eight students have died by suicide in the past two and a half years, roughly once every fourth month at this institution. Nationally, IIT Kharagpur and IIT Kanpur, the notorious ones, have been designated “concentration zones” owing to the high intensity of cases, alongside other premier institutes such as IISC Bangalore.

The rate of recurrence sprouts a question about the institutional experience of students who lost their lives. IITs as institutions invested in the fraught ideal of meritocracy, often function as competitive, toxic workplaces obsessed with productivity optimisation. The institutional environment of IIT needs to be viewed through this framework, in which intense academic pressure, coupled with social burden, creates conditions in which a student’s worth is seen as inseparable from their academic performance.

It is worth stressing that this burden isn’t evenly distributed nor does it reflect the collective institutional experience among students. The vulnerability gets compounded for students specifically hailing from marginalised social locations. Besides the relentless scholarly strain, they also carry the burden of representation- the weight of representing their community in a space that was never designed keeping them in mind. Caste, class and institution isolation intersect here, making the burden heavier. Therefore, framing this as a uniform institutional experience would inadvertently obscure those at greater risk. Each of these deaths lays bare the underlying reality of institutional negligence, the absence of robust student support systems, and the conditions students are left alone to endure. This isn’t merely an anomaly, it points to the long trend of “administrative lapses”, a refusal by universities to acknowledge these deaths as a systemic problem, and a corresponding negligence in curbing further deaths.

The Language of Evasion:

Media treatment of these suicides often frames this recurrence as a consequence of a “chain reaction”, the idea that one student’s suicide triggers suicidal ideation in another with pre-existing suicidal ideation. “Unofficially we are not supposed to discuss it amongst ourselves. Officially everyone knows, as if silence doesn’t spread just as fast, and trigger just as much”, Adarsh*, revealed an IIT student, characterising an undercurrent which runs through whisper networks. Beneath this, as an unofficial and incognito practice, students are advised to refrain from discussing suicide on campus, stemming from fear of “suicide contagion”. Though the clinical validity of this practice is questionable, the social effect of this approach does succeed in suppressing the conversation around this phenomenon, thus concomitantly aiding the institution evade confrontation. Even the administrative responses are composed in a deflecting register. Every death follows the same customary email template, under the header, “Sad news”, a performance of concern that changes nothing, while actively obscuring institutional accountability narratives. Further, the pattern of vocabulary across institutions deploying phrases such as “isolated incident”, “mental health” and “committee formed” remains consistent. This language reduces structural issues into a pathological and an individual predisposition.

Suicide cannot be adequately understood as a purely individual or psychological phenomenon. Notwithstanding the solitary nature of the act itself, the degree to which an individual experiences a sense of belonging, connectedness, and social integration constitutes as equally significant determinants. When this integration weakens, or when the society’s moral framework becomes either too rigid or too loose, a state of crisis unfolds within an individual. Institutions do not merely create rules; they actively structure an individual’s perception of the self and of success and failure. These normative rules constitute the very persona of the “successful individual”.

At the IITs, this image resonates with extraordinary intelligence, relentless competitiveness, and interminable productivity optimisation, all without exhibiting any vulnerability. A student’s failure to live up to this created image is not read as failure of the system, but as a matter of personal inadequacy. It’s framing as an individual’s inadequacy makes the pressure so effective, thereby requiring no external enforcement. The internalisation by students towards relentlessly performing and optimizing themselves, becomes both the source of pressure and its target. Academic competition curdles into self-exploitation, where any inadequacy towards meeting these high-academic standards is experienced as a moral and existential failure of the self, never as a flaw in the standard itself. Thus, the individual becomes the site of issue, their personal dejection becomes the victim, while the institution remains unquestioned.

Speaking of the recent death, when a death is coded as mental illness rather than the outcome of institutional negligence, issues such as “denial of hostel facilities”, “denied major academic project” never come close to being registered as evidence of a structural pattern. In the wider frame, explaining such a crisis through individualisation escapes scrutiny of deeper machineries such as the graded caste hierarchy and class inequality. These deaths aren’t mere idiosyncrasies; they’re better understood as failures of a system infused with institutional apathy. With regard to the structural pattern, there’s another dormant failure compounding the individualisation narrative: the absence of a standardised, consistent national database tracking students’ suicide across IITs. The existing data from the Supreme Court, Parliament, or the Ministry of Education are fragmented and mutually inconsistent, with figures either overlapping or spanning different timeframes. The very state apparatus meant to hold these institutions accountable is operating in the absence of a stable object of knowledge. This form of instability isn’t merely a clerical failure; it puts the political class in an uncomfortable position. Taken together, the individualisation narrative and the absence of reliable data reflect the practice of evasion by both the state and its institutions.

Fracturing the culture:

The culture of protest at IIT Delhi isn’t ordinary. It is highly unusual for IIT students to ruffle the administration’s feathers with this kind of agonistic confrontation, since the fear ingrained in the students here is deeply structural, not incidental. Any dissent has historically carried consequences, sometimes strained relationships with supervisors, rigged academic records, or being unofficially marked as an “unserious” student. Oftentimes, the culture of being indifferent to injustices within these institutions also emanates from the fear of getting penalised.  This suppression, and the fear of being labelled, has long dissuaded any dissent from emerging at all. The silence over this many deaths can plausibly be attributed to why these suicides became routine, rather than rupture. Yet this protest cannot be read in isolation, it also shares the wider wave of dissent witnessed across the state in recent months.  Weeks earlier, the nationwide protest drew the same generation onto the streets, ferreting accountability towards the precarious state of the Indian education system. The scale of mobilisation followed by Hrishikesh’s death is something that none earlier deaths within IIT, in recent memory, has produced.

The sloganeering of “Investigation, Compensation, and Resignation”, by the student collective in the Lecture Hall of IIT Delhi speaks to a demand for redistributive justice, from the administration to recognize these deaths as failure of institutions. In doing so, it has succeeded in rekindling the demand for institutional accountability from the institutions, in which earlier deaths, despite their recurrence, remained absent from public discourse. The protest extends beyond symbolic administrative fixes towards challenging the structural flaws persisting within the system. Beyond individual diagnosis, redistributive justice here would require adequately funded mental health personnel, not the faculty sporting a counsellor label, mandatory compensation for the deceased’s family, and ensuring faculty diversity proportionate to student diversity within committees. Such demands challenge the system to rethink and requisition the existing mechanisms and their speculation in academic spaces, which are deemed sufficient once the pressure becomes overwhelming.

According to Hrishikesh’s mother’s account, shared publicly during the protest, the deceased who lost his father years ago, had been battling mental health issues, previously been hospitalised for the same and later resumed his studies. He had also confided in the counsellor at the institute about his struggles. In the time since, he was denied “a major academic project under his supervisor, “denied hostel facilities”, due to his mental health illness. These facts reflect the administrative indifference shown towards his distress, despite having sought support from what the institute offers. When an institution flags a student as “severely depressive”, or exhibiting “suicidal ideation”, this identification should be followed by institutional duty of care, rather than employing this diagnostic function to depriving the student of essential amenities and pushing them towards further precarity. This scenario, in its most precise sense, is the institutional betrayal the deceased went through.

The larger question is, not merely to counsel students to survive within these institutions, but to confront the relentless culture of self-optimisation, and other structural harms such as caste-based discrimination, class inequality, and cultural alienation. Counselling isn’t the panacea for student’s survival, no specific remedy is, least of all counselling alone. Institutional redressal mechanisms such as counselling and campus wellness centres cannot mitigate the kind of distress manufactured by the institution themselves. Placing such mechanisms equivalent to addressing academic pressure silently shifts the blame onto the student’s incapacity to cope, rather than introspecting into conditions they are expected to cope within. It is worth situating this issue in a wider frame. When in a hyper neoliberal environment, where job markets are contracting, mental health concerns are soaring, even meritocratic showcase institutions such as IITs are no longer reliably delivering the economic security it once seems promising, it is worth laying out briefly here to not read these deaths as outcome of individual inadequacy, but these vulnerabilities as produced by the society itself. These deaths are often accumulated results of adverse conditions infused within the institutions.

*Adarsh (name changed for the reasons of maintaining anonymity of the respondent) is a scholar at IIT Delhi who shared his experience of being in the institute following a student’s suicide.

(The author is a second-year PhD scholar at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her doctoral research examines the student suicide crisis in higher educational institutions in India, with a particular focus on caste-based structural discrimination as a contributing factor)

Related:

67 suicides in central institutes of higher learning despite 80 % claiming SC/ST cells for “assistance”

Another student, belonging to the Scheduled Caste community, dies by suicide in IIT

SC deems caste-based discrimination in higher education system to be a ‘very sensitive matter’

Lessons Unlearned: Nine years after the Thorat Committee report

The Death of Merit: Dalit Suicides in institutes of higher learning

Systemic Prejudice, Absence of Grievance Redressal reasons for Dalit Suicides: Teacher Testimonies

A letter that should shake our world: Dalit scholar suicide triggers outrage

Rohith Vemula’s ‘institutional murder’: Five years on, family and friends still wait for justice

REPLUG: Rohith Vemula, Your Sacrifice was Not in Vain

“Highly appalling to see SIT ignoring rank caste discrimination Darshan faced despite overwhelming evidence”: Ramesh Solanki

IIT Bombay Dalit student death: Dr Bhalchandra Mungekar, ex Rajya Sabha member, demands SIT probe into his death 

Mumbai Dharna for Darshan Solanki makes calls for law against caste discrimination

The post The Normalisation of Suicide at IITs: Institutional blindness and failure appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The journalists, Shaheen Khan and Nafisa Khan, said they had gone to cover the inauguration of Max Smart Super Speciality Hospital when police personnel stopped them. Shaheen alleged that she attempted to ask Gupta a question but was prevented from doing so and was taken to Saket police station along with her colleague.

Two women freelance journalists have alleged that Delhi police slapped and beat them up because they wanted to ask questions at an event featuring Union home minister Amit Shah and Delhi chief minister Rekha Gupta and that the assault was exacerbated because they are both Muslim pic.twitter.com/zWJ8RTC1eh

— The Telegraph (@ttindia) September 4, 2026

What followed, according to the journalists, was not merely detention but physical assault. In a video released by 4PM News Network, Shaheen alleged that she and Nafisa were beaten and subjected to mental harassment at the police station. She displayed injury marks on Nafisa’s body and alleged that the assault became more severe after police personnel asked their names and learnt that they were Muslims.

“Delhi Police Assaulted Us, But the Assault Intensified After They Asked Our Religion and Learned Our Muslim Names,” Says 4PM Journalist Nafisa Khan. pic.twitter.com/AETfmoWVXA

— FOEJ Media (@FoejMedia) September 3, 2026

Newslaundry also reported the journalists’ allegation that Shaheen was caught by police while attempting to question the Chief Minister and taken to the police station. The most serious allegation made by Shaheen is that the assault intensified after police personnel heard the surname “Khan”. That claim cannot simply be treated as an extension of the dispute over the parked scooter.

Shaheen Khan alleges that Nafisa’s health deteriorated following the alleged police brutality. She claims she heard police personnel say, “If she’s dying, let her die,” while Nafisa was in distress, and alleges that police personnel did not come forward to provide her medical… pic.twitter.com/WLo2g6CQqu

— FOEJ Media (@FoejMedia) September 3, 2026

Journalists’ organisations demand action

At the time of the publication, no case had reportedly been registered in connection with the allegations. Police said senior officers were in touch with the two journalists. The absence of an FIR is significant given the nature of the allegations being made: two Muslim women say they were physically assaulted after being taken to a police station, and one of them has alleged that religious identity influenced the severity of the assault.

#delhipolice पर महिला पत्रकारों को बुरी तरह पीटने का आरोप है. आरोप महिला पुलिसकर्मी पर है.

पुलिस प्रशासन चुप क्यों है? प्रशासन को बताना चाहिए कि कल दोपहर 11 बजे साकेत थाने में क्या हुआ? अगर कुछ नहीं हुआ तो कह दें पुलिस ने कमरा बंद कर महिला पत्रकारों को नहीं पीटा. लेकिन सब चुप… pic.twitter.com/BA3L4RZXrj

— Rajat Pandey (@RajatpandeyJF) September 4, 2026

The allegations have drawn a strong response from the press community. The Press Club of India, Indian Women’s Press Corps, Delhi Union of Journalists, Press Association and Kerala Union of Working Journalists issued a joint statement condemning what they described as the “brutal assault” of the two journalists. They demanded punitive action against the police officials allegedly responsible and called upon Delhi Police Commissioner Anurag Kumar to ensure a free and fair investigation.

The Press Club of India, Indian Women’s Press Corps, Delhi Union of Journalists, Press Association and Kerala Union of Working Journalists have condemned the alleged assault of freelance journalists Shaheen Khan and Nafisa Khan by Delhi Police personnel posted at Saket Police… pic.twitter.com/CnPFjM9V3A

— United News of India (@uniindianews) September 3, 2026

Political leaders have also criticised the alleged assault. AAP Delhi chief Saurabh Bharadwaj condemned the incident, while Congress leader Pawan Khera described the alleged assault as “utterly reprehensible” and questioned whether Delhi was becoming a “police state”. Both highlighted the allegation that the treatment of the journalists intensified after their Muslim identity became known.

What are these horrifying visuals coming out of a Delhi police station?

Women journalists being beaten and thrashed for asking questions about the Delhi CM.

And when the police allegedly discovered that one of these journalists was Muslim, the assault intensified.

Is this a… https://t.co/jHH7E6metC

— Pawan Khera ಪವನ್ ಖೇರಾ (@Pawankhera) September 3, 2026

The way two women reporters of @4pmnews_network were beaten by police is very shameful.

I feel all other news reporters & journalists should takeup the matter.

BJP Govt always tests things in Delhi’s Laboratory and then it’s scaled up in every state.

— Saurabh Bharadwaj (@Saurabh_MLAgk) September 4, 2026

AAP leader Somnath Bharti separately urged Lieutenant Governor Taranjit Singh Sandhu to intervene and ensure action against officials found responsible.

This is not done, Shaheen, in addition of being a journalist, is a resident of my assembly constituency and I am aghast at this development. I request Honble @LtGovDelhi to intervene and fix accountability of the involved officers. A FIR must be lodged and responsible officers be… https://t.co/UBIze5FdrK

— Somnath Bharti सोमनाथ भारती (@attorneybharti) September 3, 2026

The FIR had to be fought for at the police station

The response to the alleged assault did not end with the journalists leaving the Saket Police Station. Instead, the early hours of September 4 saw activists and political workers remain outside the same police station demanding that Delhi Police formally register Shaheen and Nafisa’s complaint against the officers they accused of assaulting them.

All India Students’ Association (AISA) president Neha Bora was among those who joined a sit-in at the Saket Police Station at around 1 am. According to Siasat, activists alleged that the police were initially refusing even to receive the women’s complaint. Bora publicly demanded that an FIR be registered against the police personnel involved.

With Shaheen and Nafisa who faced brutal assault at the hands of Delhi Police today.. we will ensure the FIR is filed against the communal and violent police personnel involved.

This is nothing but a communal targeting of two Muslim Women Journalists simply for reporting the… pic.twitter.com/xCpBqGCwzY

— Neha (@neha_aisa) September 3, 2026

The pressure intensified when Congress workers from the party’s Minority Department reached the police station in large numbers and raised slogans against the Delhi Police. The complaint was eventually registered around 3 am, according to 4PM News Network, after Shaheen insisted that an FIR be filed against the accused officers and that they be immediately suspended.

Saket Police Station: FIR Delay Sparks Protest by Journalists & Lawyers#SaketPoliceStation #DelhiPolice #FIRDelay #JournalistsProtest #LawyersProtest #ViralVideo pic.twitter.com/ADpKnKYnpt

— Savera Times Haryana (@Savera_Haryana) September 4, 2026

Delhi: Female Journalist Confronts Police Over FIR Registration at Saket Station#delhi #saketpolicestation #delhipolice #femalejournalist #firregistration #viralvideo pic.twitter.com/XbEgHFVJUD

— The Savera Times (@thesavera_timep) September 4, 2026

VVIP security cannot become a shield against accountability

Delhi Police has denied the allegations in their entirety. DCP (South) Anant Mittal described the journalists’ claims as “factually incorrect and misleading”. According to the police, the two women had parked their scooter near the hospital in a way that obstructed the designated VVIP movement route during the visit of the Home Minister and Chief Minister.

The police said the journalists were repeatedly instructed to remove the vehicle and clear the route but allegedly refused to comply. They were subsequently taken to the local police station “for further enquiry”. The police specifically denied that the women were assaulted for asking questions to the Chief Minister, calling that allegation “false, misleading and baseless”. That explanation, however, does not by itself dispose of the allegations of physical assault.

Related:

Maharashtra’s schools are struggling to survive as students protest, infrastructure crumbles and Marathi-medium institutions disappear

3,404 SIR Forms Found at Kharghar Xerox Shop: CJP, VFD and BCS demands answers from Maharashtra SEC

Allahabad HC quashes NSA detention of Aakriti Chaudhary, questions ‘concocted’ State narrative in Noida workers’ protest case

Six-year-old detained during Patna teacher aspirants’ protest, parents allege police assault

Water Cannons Instead of Answers: Bihar’s recruitment crisis and the state’s crackdown on protest

The post Two women journalists allege police assault after questioning Delhi CM, say attack intensified after police heard they were Muslim appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The contemporary economic crisis, dangerously hollowed out middle classes and mounting unemployment (of their children) has brought Indian youth to the brink of becoming Weary Generations (udaas naslein), an expression used by the Urdu novelist, Abdullah Husain (1931-2015), for the generation wasted in Partition, violence, migration and traumatic displacement.

How does one then place or read the energies and fearlessness of the present upsurge be it in Bihar, UP, Delhi or Mumbai? It is not just these seemingly apolitical mobilisations but also smaller left formations (AISA, SFI) that have sustained protests, a) spoken and highlighted education and access for all b) examined structural failures, yes, but also lack of voice and representation c) refused to be black-holed into the Hindu-Muslim paradigm d) broken through a paralysis of fear; e) while in Delhi and Mumbai these may have been dominated by a class difficult for the far right to pigeonhole, in Bihar they are subaltern students. Plus, a protest by Adivasi/tribal students in Maharashtra reached a successful end (though they had been fasting for over 47 days) after Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi highlighted their demands. LOP Gandhi speaking of withdrawing criminal cases, getting an FIR lodged, and speaking on youth issues of access and social justice together show how the narrative is for once not being dominated by the regime. The icing on the cake is the union government’s concrete withdrawal of FIRs against many/most if not all the protesters.

Global history demonstrates that youth energy in times of crisis takes one of two distinct paths: violent criminal implosion or revolutionary democratic renewal. In May 1968, France witnessed an explosive student movement that began on university campuses like Nanterre and Sorbonne. French students did not merely demand educational reforms; they linked arms with the working class, paralysed a Gaullist state, and fundamentally reshaped modern European political consciousness through raw democratic assertion. Conversely, where youth energy is denied legitimate political expression and institutional avenues of dissent, it devolves into structural criminality. In 20th-century Sicily (in Italy), the complete absence of democratic avenues for youth advancement permitted underworld gangsterism to swallow an entire generation—a social decay famously captured in Mario Puzo’s literary studies of omertà, patronage, and syndicate power.

Indian campuses today stand precariously at these very crossroads. The current stagnation stands in sharp contrast to the analytical framework established by Philip Altbach in his books, Turmoil and Transition: Higher Education and Student Politics in India (1968) and Student Politics in India (1972). Altbach demonstrated that students in developing democracies operate as a vital “incipient elite” and a primary political conscience. Unencumbered by institutional vested interests, they function as a catalyst for broader societal democratization. This theoretical reality materialised during the 1960s and 1970s across northern and western India. The Navnirman Movement in Gujarat in 1973–1974 began over price hikes in university canteens and escalated into a mass agitation that dissolved the state legislative assembly. Shortly after, the Bihar Movement of 1974, spearheaded by student leaders under Jayaprakash Narayan (1902-1979), directly challenged state authoritarianism and catalysed the nationwide opposition that eventually defeated Congress rule in 1977, after the Emergency (1975-77).

The anti-Congress political forces that seized state power on the back of these youth mobilisations recognized a key reality: an organised, democratically elected student body is an unpredictable, counter-hegemonic force. Consequently, once in power, the anti-Congress and regional regimes (communal reactionaries, single caste, personalized, dynastic and champions of identity-based divisive political forces) systematically disarmed the very machinery that elevated them. Province after province, most notably Uttar Pradesh, campus elections have been suspended across state universities for years, banning, curbing, or neutering Students’ Unions.

Crucially, this structural paralysis of student democracy was not merely a post-2014 phenomenon under the BJP regime; key policy frameworks that enabled this containment were set in motion earlier, notably under UPA-II through the implementation of the Lyngdoh Committee recommendations. As Albeena Shakil highlights in Economic and Political Weekly (2008), the Lyngdoh Committee was constituted following Supreme Court orders to frame guidelines on student union elections—focusing on ‘curbing criminalisation’, ensuring financial transparency, and setting eligibility criteria. However, the committee’s recommendations introduced rigid constraints, such as a maximum age limit of 28 years for research scholars and restricting candidates from contesting office-bearer positions more than once.

The fundamental flaw in this approach was its mechanical, uniform enforcement across vastly different universities without accounting for their specific institutional characters. The Lyngdoh Committee report itself explicitly acknowledged the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) model as an exemplary “model to be followed”—a peaceful, direct election process conducted entirely by students through an independent, elected Student Election Committee without administrative interference, money, or muscle power. Yet, despite JNU’s flawless democratic track record, the Supreme Court stayed the JNUSU elections in 2008 on technical procedural grounds like the candidate age limits and re-contesting of posts. By imposing arbitrary eligibility constraints and administrative control over a self-regulated, highly participatory student democracy, the policy environment under UPA-II severely weakened the capacity of student bodies to function as independent, capably led representative unions.

To understand how youth energy is absorbed in the absence of democratic representation, Craig Jeffrey’s 2009 essay on Meerut University, Fixing Futures: Educated Unemployment, Youth, and Politics in North India, provides the necessary framework. Jeffrey demonstrates how structural unemployment converts campuses into waiting rooms. Deprived of representative unions to bargain collectively against systemic failures, young people are forced into individual survival mechanisms. They become fixers (jugaad intermediaries, or brokers, dalals), trading political compliance for minor administrative concessions or informal rents. The failure of contemporary campuses to rise up in the style of global youth protests or digital mobilisations is not due to apathy; it is the direct structural result of an environment where collective bargaining has been replaced by atomised patronage networks akin to the Sicilian boss-client relationship.

This suppression of student democracy occurs alongside a mounting crisis of economic precarity backed by grim statistical realities. Data from the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Institute for Human Development (IHD) India Employment Report reveals that educated youth bear the brunt of the nation’s job crisis. Youths account for nearly 83% of the total unemployed workforce in India, with the unemployment rate for university graduates standing at an astonishing 29.1%—nearly nine times higher than for those without formal schooling. Furthermore, the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) metrics continuously highlight that urban youth unemployment hovers at elevated levels between 13.6% and 14.3%, while roughly 90% of employed youth are pushed into informal, unprotected work. Despite holding degrees, millions of graduates remain trapped in underemployment, gig work, or endless competitive exam preparation. Yet, because campuses lack elected Students’ Unions to channel this systemic frustration into organised political demands, this massive reservoir of youth precarity remains politically inert, barring the latest ongoing movements. India, like the Germany of the 1930s, is on the brink of driving the unemployed youth and the campuses towards political extremism, crime, and murderous narco-culture.

Compounding this crisis is the wholesale capture of university governing bodies by pliant, regime-acolyte administrators and accomplishment-deficient academics. In his scathing critique of Indian higher education, Asking for Trouble: Crises with a Meaning (1984), veteran educationist Amrik Singh (d. 2010) laid bare how the Indian university system was being subverted from within by weak administrative leadership and corrupt appointments. Decades later, in the mid-2020s, Amrik Singh’s earlier warnings have metastasized into absolute reality. A knowledge campus must be led by scholars of recognised distinction, who exercise moral and inspirational influence upon the students. Instead, the internal governing bodies of Indian universities, such as Executive Councils, Academic Councils, Selection Committees, and Vice-Chancellorships, have been stuffed with under-accomplished, pliant, sycophantic individuals whose primary credential is ideological compliance and administrative servitude to the ruling political apparatus.

Across state and central universities, appointments to the highest academic offices routinely bypass scholars with high citation indices, major research monographs, or international peer recognition. Instead, pliant, regime-acolyte Vice-Chancellors with minimal publication records and negligible scholarly impact are installed as political commissars. To maintain their illegitimate control, these Vice-Chancellors surround themselves with similarly under-accomplished internal academics, who function as key collaborators and administrative fixers. Selection panels are shamelessly rigged to bypass highly cited, productive researchers in favour of candidates whose sole qualification is political alignment. Consequently, statutory bodies intended to protect academic freedom are transformed into rubber-stamp committees that penalize dissenting faculty, manipulate recruitment, and ignore systemic corruption.

This institutional decay manifests in distinct ways across major, historic, residential and state-funded campuses, illustrating the stark difference between passive compliance and active resistance.

At the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), an internal administrative oligarchy has long controlled key university apparatuses. With the prolonged absence of elected student union checks, a small network of senior teacher-administrators has maintained an unchallenged hold over the campus. This environment has allowed serious institutional irregularities to persist—ranging from a huge fee scam, illegal annual increments, illegal placements in the Old Pension Scheme (OPS), and financial opacities in civil construction contracts to administrative nepotism, the illegal retention of perks, unauthorized security deployment, and questionable pension schemes. Rather than challenging these abuses, executive bodies and elected teacher associations have largely chosen silence. At the same time, they offer instant, sharp, and unparliamentary reactions against internal whistle-blowers who expose the internal rot of the administration as well as elected bodies. The narrative-setting elites among Muslims rally desperately to fight for the minority status of AMU, but go silent on rampant irregularities within the very university of theirs. Further, they don’t mobilise themselves with equal alacrity and enthusiasm on other issues of social and gender justice, caste exclusions and economic grievances.

To make things far worse, this specific kind of minority-ism finds support from Left-Liberals. Operating under an unwritten code of Omertà, reminiscent of the institutionalized silence of Sicilian mafia structures depicted in Mario Puzo’s novels, they shield administrative failures under the pretext of protecting institutional identity from external hostility. In AMU this code of Omertà is turned into a more dangerous tool. Internal whistle-blowers are hounded, maligned, vilified, and humiliated by plunderers disguising as men of religiosity. They play dangerous politics of demonstrative religiosity and piety, giving a drum-beating clarion call of “Qaum in danger”. It is an open secret among campus insiders that these very demonstrably and instrumentally “pious” Muslim minority professors queue up in large numbers before Sangh functionaries running the Rashtriya Muslim Manch, intending to become Vice Chancellors (Felix Pal, 2020, offers an insight as to why Muslims join it), even while surreptitiously instigating common Muslim youth that the incumbent regime is rabidly anti-Muslim.

Globally too, Peter Fleming’s 2021 book, Dark Academia: How Universities Die, rightly diagnoses that with the neo-liberalisation of higher education over the last 20 years, universities have been turned into psychological hells for professionally committed academics.

Yet, despite all these odds, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) demonstrates how active representation can disrupt administrative opacity. On August 13, 2026, the JNU Teachers’ Association (JNUTA), alongside the elected JNU Students’ Union (JNUSU), held a joint press conference at New Delhi’s Press Club of India. Rather than hiding inner ills, they publicly detailed administrative irregularities, arbitrary changes to promotion guidelines, and compromised recruitment procedures enforced by the university executive. Despite facing intense administrative pressure, the presence of an elected student union—built on JNU’s long-standing tradition of self-managed student democracy that survived even the legal curbs of the Lyngdoh recommendations—allowed JNU to maintain a counter-hegemonic force against administrative overreach.

The tragedy of contemporary Indian public universities is an existential crisis of purpose. When campuses are stripped of democratic unions, handed over to regime-acolyte Vice-Chancellors, and silenced by co-opted faculty collaborators, they cease to function as spaces of higher learning and degenerate into administrative fiefdoms. Indian youth stand at a decisive crossroads: to remain passive captives within waiting rooms of managed mediocrity, or to reclaim the historic mantle of May 1968. Reclaiming the university requires breaking the institutional code of silence, ousting unaccomplished administrative syndicates, restoring elected Students’ Unions, and transforming quiet frustration into organised political agitation. Of course, ignoring or delaying the task of employment creation is absolutely unaffordable for India at this point of time.

[The author, a Professor teaches Modern and Contemporary History at Aligarh Muslim University. His X-handle is: @sajjadhist]

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The post Closing of the Indian Mind: Campus subjugation, intellectual mediocrity, & death of democratic assertion appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Dalit, Adivasi, rural and economically disadvantaged communities have repeatedly raised these concerns, often from the sharpest end of the crisis. For children in remote villages and tribal settlements, the loss of a neighbourhood school can mean a long and unsafe journey to another village. For students in government and municipal schools, a vacant teacher’s post can mean months or years without instruction in crucial subjects. For children living in government hostels and Ashram schools, inadequate sanitation, food, security and medical facilities can turn access to education into a question of basic safety and dignity. Moreover, for families seeking education in Marathi, the steady weakening of Marathi-medium institutions raises questions about whether the State is preserving meaningful choice or allowing an entire public education network to wither.

The Maharashtra media and even some sections of the “national legacy media” have reported these failures repeatedly, but largely as separate episodes: a school without teachers here, a dangerous building there, a protest over toilets or hostels elsewhere, a proposed school merger or closure, a dispute over Marathi-medium education, or a new policy promising modernisation. The result has been a fragmented public conversation about what is, in reality, a connected and longstanding crisis. These issues crucial to access and participation in a democracy have never been the subject of a sustained media campaign. Successive governments have announced schemes, reviews, reforms and infrastructure programmes, while the underlying questions of staffing, access, funding and accountability have remained.

What is equally striking is how little political space this crisis has occupied as a sustained issue. Despite Maharashtra’s large network of government, Zilla Parishad and municipal schools, and despite repeated concerns raised by teachers, parents, educationists and marginalised communities, the condition of public schooling has rarely been made a central political question. Opposition parties have criticised individual decisions, school closures or government policies, but the broader deterioration of the public education system has not consistently been treated as a major political issue.

It was against this backdrop that the recent School Thik Karo campaign brought the condition of government schools into a more concentrated public spotlight. The campaign led by Cockroach Janta Party convenor Abhijeet Dipke has sought to document basic deficiencies in schools across Maharashtra and place them before the public. Its significance lies in something larger: it has attempted to connect problems that have too often been reported, protested and debated separately. The crisis, however, predates the campaign by years.

The evidence is now difficult to dismiss as a series of isolated incidents. Maharashtra’s own education data records schools without electricity, internet connectivity, functional computers, accessible toilets and adequate teaching staff. Students have protested because teachers are missing. Adivasi students have gone on hunger strike over hostel conditions. Parents and activists have opposed school closures, mergers and relocations. Marathi-medium schools have steadily declined. Teachers are being pulled away from classrooms for non-academic duties, including prolonged election-related work. At the same time, governments have explored cluster schools, school adoption and Public-Private Partnership models even as large parts of the public system continue to struggle with basic infrastructure and vacancies.

This is therefore not simply a story about a few poorly maintained schools, nor is it only about the latest government policy or the latest student protest. It is a story about what happens when the State’s responsibility to provide public education is repeatedly addressed through piecemeal interventions while the structural weaknesses of the system remain.

Maharashtra now speaks the language of a “modern”, digital and future-ready education system. However, before asking whether its schools are ready for artificial intelligence, coding, smart classrooms and digital learning, there is a more basic question to answer: are its schools adequately staffed, safely accessible, properly equipped and capable of providing every child with a meaningful education? The answer emerging from the experiences of students, teachers, parents, marginalised communities and the State’s own data is far more troubling than the language of modernisation suggests.

Justice Varale questions education spending as Marathi-medium schools face closure

Nothing exposes Maharashtra state’s education policy priorities more than what was highlighted by a Supreme Court Judge recently.

Speaking about the condition of Marathi-medium schools weeks ago, Supreme Court Justice P.B. Varale on Saturday, August 22, reportedly questioned the State’s spending priorities, saying that even a fraction of the funds earmarked for the Nashik Kumbh Mela could have helped prevent the closure of hundreds of Marathi-medium schools. The Times of India reported that Justice Varale made the remarks during an event at his former school in Nashik.

Justice Varale reportedly referred to the Maharashtra government’s proposed expenditure on Kumbh infrastructure and a corridor project, while clarifying that he did not oppose such spending. However, he questioned whether a small portion of the allocation could instead have been directed towards education. He said that 0.1% of the Kumbh allocation, amounting to around Rupees 32 Crore, could have helped save more than 100–150 Marathi-medium schools from closure, according to the report.

The Maharashtra government has informed the Union government that a comprehensive development plan of Rupees 22,425.39 Crore has been approved for the 2027 Nashik Simhastha Kumbh Mela. The plan was approved at a meeting of the Apex Committee chaired by the Chief Minister on March 13, 2026, with the Kumbh scheduled to begin in October 2026.

Justice Varale also drew attention to the condition of residential schools, particularly ashramshalas catering to students from marginalised communities. Referring to reports of three girl students at an ashramshala who died after allegedly being bitten by snakes while sleeping on the floor, he reportedly said that the overall condition of several residential schools remained “pathetic”.

His remarks also pointed to a broader concern over the State’s changing budgetary priorities. Justice Varale reportedly observed that the share of the budget allocated to education, which had earlier ranged between 8% and 12%, had declined.

Modern education system cannot be built on disappearing schools

Perhaps the most significant development in Maharashtra’s education story is that students and their families are increasingly refusing to remain passive recipients of policy. Adivasi students have gone on hunger strike, Dharashiv students have sat outside the Zilla Parishad CEO’s office, villagers have locked a school in protest over teacher shortages, parents have challenged school relocations, and activists have documented failures in school infrastructure.

The protests differ in geography and immediate demand, but they share a common message: children and their families are being asked to accept gaps in a system that the State continues to describe as modern, inclusive and future-ready. Educationist Prabhu Mohapatra, commenting on the wider rise in student protests, told PTI that students were increasingly asserting themselves as stakeholders in education policy and that the protests reflected concerns over infrastructure, teacher availability and the quality of learning.

That assertion of agency may be the most important shift in Maharashtra’s education story. Students are not demanding luxury. They are demanding teachers, safe school buildings, functioning toilets, drinking water, adequate classrooms, accessible schools and the ability to continue learning in their own language. They are asking for the basic conditions necessary for education, and for the State to treat those conditions not as discretionary benefits but as public obligations. Maharashtra now has two competing narratives about education.

The first is the official narrative: smart classrooms, artificial intelligence, coding, digital platforms, teacher training, modernisation and a “mission mode” transformation of the education system. The second is emerging from classrooms, villages, hostels and protests: missing teachers, inadequate infrastructure, unsafe or unsuitable accommodation, inaccessible schools, unreliable or disputed data, and institutions facing closure or merger. Both realities have to be confronted.

The government can legitimately point to improvements and new initiatives, and its officials have disputed some of the broader allegations concerning infrastructure. But the State’s own U-DISE data, the Centre’s Project Approval Board review, the Bombay High Court’s intervention and repeated student and parent protests point to structural weaknesses that cannot be resolved through announcements alone.

The decline of Marathi-medium schools makes the problem even more consequential. This is not simply an infrastructure crisis; it is also a question of what kind of public education Maharashtra intends to preserve. If Marathi is to be protected, Marathi-medium schools cannot merely be celebrated symbolically. They must be adequately funded, staffed, upgraded and made capable of providing quality education without forcing parents to abandon the language in which their children have been studying.

If a school has low enrolment, the first question should therefore not automatically be how soon it can be closed. The more fundamental question is why enrolment is falling in the first place.

Is the school inadequately staffed? Are its buildings and facilities deteriorating? Are teachers being diverted to non-teaching duties? Is the school too far from where families now live? Has urban redevelopment displaced the community it once served? Are parents choosing other schools because the Marathi-medium option is perceived to offer poorer infrastructure or fewer opportunities? Has the medium of instruction itself become stigmatised? In addition, crucially, could targeted investment reverse the decline?

These questions become particularly urgent when the children affected are poor, rural, tribal or dependent on Marathi-medium government schools. For such families, the closure of a neighbourhood school is not simply an administrative restructuring. It can mean longer journeys, additional transport costs, greater dependence on private education and, in some cases, the eventual withdrawal of children from school altogether. And where closure is genuinely unavoidable, the State must be able to answer a more basic question: where exactly will every child go?

The Maharashtra government has now promised a time-bound transformation of the education system. The measure of that transformation, however, should not be the number of schemes announced, platforms launched, classrooms labelled “smart” or meetings conducted. It should be visible in the ordinary conditions in which children actually study.

It should mean a functioning fan in a classroom, a usable toilet, clean drinking water, adequate teachers, a safe hostel, a working computer, a laboratory that has actually been built and equipped, and a school that remains within reasonable reach of the children it serves. It should also mean a Marathi-medium school that is not forced to fight simply to survive.

Until these become ordinary features rather than exceptional achievements, the phrase “modern education system” will remain more aspiration than reality. A State cannot credibly claim to be building the schools of the future while allowing existing schools to become inaccessible, under-resourced or disappear altogether.

August 2026: Students on hunger strike for the right to study

The latest and perhaps most revealing episode came from Maharashtra’s Adivasi student community. In August 2026, tribal students in Pune and elsewhere in Maharashtra began protesting against a range of issues concerning government hostels and Ashram schools. Six students continued a hunger strike at the Adivasi Government Boys Hostel near the Hadapsar-Manjari border.

The immediate trigger was a Government Resolution issued on August 14, 2026, imposing a maximum age of 30 years for admission to tribal hostels. But the students’ demands went far beyond the age restriction.

The protest also brought allegations about the treatment of female students into focus. On August 24, Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi wrote to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis raising concerns about the conditions described to him by tribal students. He alleged that hostels were unsafe and lacked adequate food, sanitation and medical care, and referred to claims that female students returning after an extended absence were subjected to pregnancy and other medical tests.

The Hindu also reported on August 24, the protesting students demanded the withdrawal of the August 14 Government Resolution and a revised order based on the earlier November 11, 2011 framework, with allowances linked to inflation. They sought greater protection for students living in tribal hostels and Ashram schools, ₹1 crore insurance cover for tribal students, ₹1 crore compensation for the families of three tribal girls who died following a snake-bite incident in Gadchiroli, a safe and properly equipped hostel for female students in Pune, and immediate filling of vacant posts including peons, security guards and sanitation workers.

The scale of dependence on these hostels is itself significant. As The Indian Express reported on August 26, the Tribal Development Department runs 490 government hostels across Maharashtra, accommodating between 58,000 and 60,000 students every year. The government ultimately backed down on the immediate issue. On August 25, following discussions with tribal legislators and MPs, Tribal Development Minister Ashok Uike announced that the 30-year age limit had been scrapped and that there would be no age restriction for admission to Adivasi hostels. The Indian Express reported that the decision came a day after Rahul Gandhi had raised the matter with Fadnavis. The government therefore acted. However, it acted after 13 days of hunger strike.

That sequence matters. It raises the question of how many of the other problems raised by the students — safety, sanitation, staffing, food, medical care and financial support — will require another protest before they receive sustained attention.

July 2026: “We need teachers, not promises”

The same pattern was visible in Dharashiv. On July 31, India Today reported that Class 10 students of a Zilla Parishad secondary school in Sonari village had begun an indefinite sit-in outside the Zilla Parishad Chief Executive Officer’s office demanding regular secondary-school teachers. Their complaint was not new. According to the protesting students, several teaching and staff posts had remained vacant for nearly four years. Repeated representations had allegedly failed to produce concrete action. A day before the sit-in, villagers had locked the school to draw attention to the shortage.

Students particularly objected to primary-school teachers being used to teach secondary classes, arguing that students preparing for the SSC examination required qualified subject teachers. The protest carried an especially pointed message. Students invoked the government’s “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao” campaign and asked, in effect: what does saving the girl child mean if she is then denied the teachers required to complete her education? They also invoked Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s call to “Educate, Organise and Agitate”.

They said they had already approached the Zilla Parishad CEO, Education Officer, District Collector and Superintendent of Police on July 28, but claimed that no effective action followed.

This is not merely a question of staffing. For a Class 10 student, a missing teacher is not an abstract administrative vacancy. It can mean an incomplete syllabus, inadequate preparation for a board examination and, for poorer families, pressure to pay for private tuition that they may not be able to afford. Moreover, the state already knows that teacher shortages are a wider problem.

The Government’s own data exposes the gap

On July 17, the findings emerging from the Ministry of Education’s U-DISE 2025-26 data provided that Maharashtra had 108,139 schools, 21.6 million students and 750,272 teachers. But 3,201 schools had no electricity connection at all. Another 10,938 had electricity connections that were not functional. A further 23,855 schools had no internet connectivity. Of the 90,419 schools that had computer facilities, computers were functional in only 84,530. That left 23,609 schools without operational computer systems.

The contradiction is hard to miss. The state is speaking increasingly about artificial intelligence, coding, smart classrooms and digital learning. Yet thousands of its schools are still struggling with the infrastructure required to switch on a computer, let alone build a digital classroom. The problem goes beyond technology. U-DISE data showed that 9,269 schools were single-teacher schools, catering to 179,104 students. More than 32,000 schools lacked separate toilets for children with disabilities, while 16,341 did not have ramps with railings.

There were 2,019 unusable girls’ toilets and 3,280 unusable boys’ toilets, with the data attributing the problem to issues including water, maintenance and pending repairs. Another 3,932 schools lacked playgrounds and 1,099 lacked a library or book bank. Only 13,550 schools had digital libraries, leaving 94,589 without one. These figures matter because they are not merely the claims of opposition parties or activists; they come from the government’s own education database.

Teachers are being asked to do more with less

Teachers have also described the consequences of this system. Vijay Kombe, president of the Maharashtra State Primary Teachers’ Committee, told ETV Bharat that schools continued to face shortages of basic items such as mats, desks and benches. He said local-government schools lacked dedicated cleaning staff and that teachers in some places were consequently forced to clean classrooms and toilets, sometimes with students’ help.

Kombe also claimed that more than 75 per cent of primary schools run by local self-government bodies lacked headmasters, leaving teachers to combine administrative duties with classroom teaching. He criticised the staffing arrangement in low-enrolment schools, under which one primary teacher may have to manage multiple classes, while one teacher may be required to teach all subjects for Classes 6 to 8.

There is, however, an important official counterpoint. Divisional Deputy Director of Education Rajesh Kankal said drinking-water facilities were available in more than 100,000 schools, while more than 107,000 had hand-washing facilities and more than 102,000 conducted annual health check-ups. He said the administration was working to rectify the remaining shortcomings. The issue, therefore, is not that Maharashtra has no facilities.

It is that the existence of facilities in the majority of schools does not erase the thousands of schools where they are absent, dysfunctional or inaccessible. For a child attending one of those schools, the state-wide average offers little comfort.

SIR extension keeps teachers away from classrooms

The extension of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Maharashtra has prolonged the deployment of teachers as Booth Level Officers (BLOs) and support staff, affecting regular classroom teaching, unit tests and other academic activities. Teachers who were expected to return to schools by August 8 had been assigned election-related duties until August 17, with house visits, voter verification and form-related work continuing even as schools prepare for examinations and work to complete the syllabus.

The timing has added to existing pressures on schools. Unit tests scheduled for August and periodic assessments meant to track students’ learning are being affected, while teachers are also required to cover new textbooks introduced for Standards III, IV and VI under the National Education Policy. In some government and civic schools, more than 70% of teaching staff has reportedly been deployed for SIR-related work, leaving schools with reduced staff and, in some cases, forcing them to operate for only half the day. Teachers and school heads have said the prolonged absence is making it difficult to complete teaching and conduct examinations as scheduled.

The impact extends beyond teachers formally appointed as BLOs, with other teaching and non-teaching employees being assigned to assist with the exercise. In one school, Headmaster Tanaji Mane said three teachers initially appointed as BLOs were later joined by teaching and non-teaching staff who were relieved of their regular duties. Data cited by Progressive Teachers Association president Tanaji Kamble from Mumbai’s Ghatkopar East constituency reportedly showed that 184 of 283 BLOs were from the Education Department, including 157 teachers. Teachers have also faced pressure to report for election duties, with police notices reportedly issued to some who failed to do so. Educationists and teacher representatives have consequently questioned whether such prolonged deployment is compatible with the State’s responsibility to ensure uninterrupted schooling.

The issue ultimately raises a larger question about how election-related administrative work is being balanced against children’s right to regular education. Teachers have described the SIR process as continuous and demanding, while educationists have warned that prolonged absence from classrooms can disrupt learning, assessments and syllabus completion. With the electoral exercise continuing even as the academic year progresses, teacher organisations have suggested using trained personnel from other departments or other mechanisms for election work instead of repeatedly drawing teachers away from schools. The concern is not simply about teachers’ workload, but about what happens to students when the people responsible for teaching them are routinely pulled away from the classroom.

Detailed report may be read here.

The Centre’s review makes the picture worse

The Ministry of Education’s Project Approval Board raised similar concerns while examining Maharashtra’s Samagra Shiksha plan for 2026-27. Of 22,416 eligible upper-primary, secondary and higher-secondary schools, 21,009 did not have ICT laboratories. Another 4,286 lacked smart classrooms. Nearly 60 per cent of primary and upper-primary schools had fewer than 30 students each, while 7,186 schools had only one teacher.

The Union also noted that more than 4,300 villages did not have a secondary school within the prescribed distance and more than 6,500 villages lacked access to a higher-secondary school. More than 80 per cent of approved science laboratories had not been completed, while toilets sanctioned for children with special needs remained pending. The teacher vacancy figures were equally concerning; around 17% of secondary teaching posts and 25% of higher-secondary posts were vacant.

The Centre approved ₹2,494.17 crore under Samagra Shiksha for Maharashtra for 2026-27 and directed the state to complete pending infrastructure and digital projects in “mission mode”. The Maharashtra government, for its part, said most sanctioned ICT laboratories were under installation and would be completed by the end of the year.

But this creates an uncomfortable policy contradiction. The government is being asked to modernise schools while it has not yet completed the basics.

Then there is the question of closing schools

Perhaps the most consequential issue is not what is missing from schools, but what happens when the state decides a school is no longer viable. In April 2026, the Maharashtra government issued two Government Resolutions declaring 433 primary schools and 324 secondary schools ineligible for grant-in-aid. The schools were directed to apply under the Maharashtra Self-Financed Schools Act, 2012. If they failed to do so, their recognition could be cancelled, effectively leading to closure. The Bombay High Court intervened.

On April 29, 2026, the Kolhapur Bench held that the government’s action could not proceed against the petitioner schools without giving them an opportunity to be heard. As The Hindu reported on May 19, the court found that the resolutions violated principles of natural justice and directed that the petitioner institutions be removed from the list. Nevertheless, the court’s observations went beyond procedure.

The bench noted that the affected schools were predominantly Marathi-medium institutions, particularly in villages. It pointed out the contradiction in the state’s position: on the one hand, Maharashtra was insisting that Marathi be given greater importance; on the other, the government’s action could result in the closure of Marathi-medium schools.

The judges also asked questions that should have been at the centre of the government’s decision before the resolutions were issued: Could the students actually be accommodated in nearby schools? Would the medium of instruction continue? What would happen in villages where alternative schools were not available? What would happen to teaching and non-teaching staff? Could teachers be absorbed elsewhere? And could poor families be expected to bear the consequences of the shift to self-financed education?

The court concluded that these considerations had not been adequately addressed and directed the state to conduct hearings before taking action. That intervention is crucial because it exposes the danger of treating school closure as a mere question of numbers. A school with fewer students is not automatically a redundant school as it may be the only school within walking distance, or the only affordable school, or the only school teaching in the child’s language. And if it disappears, the state’s responsibility does not disappear with it.

2023: From school closures to “adoption”: A changing model of public education

The debate over low-enrolment schools cannot be separated from another policy shift: the growing role being given to private entities in the management and development of government schools. Maharashtra has increasingly presented private participation as a means of improving infrastructure and educational quality, even as questions remain about why the State is unable to adequately fund and maintain its own public-school system.

In September 2023, the Maharashtra government introduced an “Adopt a School” scheme under the National Education Policy’s Vidyanjali initiative. As reported by the Times of India on September 19, 2023, the scheme allowed private and public sector entities to adopt government schools for five or 10 years. The State proposed making more than 62,000 government schools available for adoption. Corporate entities could use Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funds for activities ranging from repairs, maintenance and painting to improving sanitation, health, enrolment and the use of technology.

Dalit groups strongly protested this move towards privatisation that would deny access to Dalit, Adivasi and OBC students especially in rural areas.

The financial commitments were substantial yet no audit of the scheme or the implementation have ever been held, nor demanded. According to the government resolution reported by The Times of India, entities adopting schools in “A” and “B” category municipal corporations, including Mumbai and Pune, were required to commit ₹2 crore for five years or ₹3 crore for 10 years. For “C” category municipal corporations, the amounts were ₹1 crore and ₹2 crore respectively, while other schools could be adopted for ₹50 lakh for five years or ₹1 crore for 10 years. The Business Standard, reporting on September 18, 2023, said the funds could be used for school-building repairs, painting, and toilets, infrastructure and sports equipment.

The government insisted that the scheme was not privatisation. In December 2023, then School Education Minister Deepak Kesarkar told the Hindustan Times that a major corporate house had expressed interest in adopting around 5,000 schools and stressed that the objective was to improve infrastructure and amenities, not to privatise schools. The government resolution also permitted an adopting entity to add its name to the existing school name for the duration of the agreement, although the original name was to be retained.

The distinction between “adoption” and privatisation, however, becomes more complicated when viewed alongside the State’s broader education policy. In July 2026, Frontline reported that Maharashtra was expanding public-private partnership models in school education, including the operation of five English-medium schools of the Pune Municipal Corporation through a PPP arrangement. The report said the same organisation that had previously operated the schools using CSR funds was subsequently awarded a contract worth ₹12 crore annually by the Pune civic administration. Frontline also reported concerns over proposals to hand over land reserved for Mumbai municipal schools to private entities under PPP arrangements.

This raises a fundamental question about the direction of public education. If private organisations are initially invited to improve government schools through CSR and are later given contracts to operate schools using public funds, the State’s role can gradually shift from being the primary provider of education to financing or facilitating private participation in its delivery. The issue is therefore not simply whether private money can improve a school building. It is who ultimately controls public educational assets, who determines priorities and whether access to education remains governed primarily by public obligations rather than the interests or capacities of private partners.

The question becomes particularly important in the context of Maharashtra’s low-enrolment and cluster-school policies. In September 2023, Mid-Day reported that the State had identified 14,783 schools with 20 or fewer students for consolidation into cluster schools. The proposed restructuring was expected to affect 1,85,467 students and 29,707 teachers. The government argued that very small schools could not provide adequate infrastructure, qualified teachers or opportunities for social interaction, and pointed to successful cluster models in Panshet and Toranmal.

Teachers and education activists, however, warned that consolidation could push students to travel longer distances and increase the risk of dropouts, particularly in rural and remote areas. Their concern was especially significant for young children, girls and students from economically weaker families for whom daily travel to a distant school may itself become a barrier to attendance.

The State subsequently sought to reassure critics. In July 2025, Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde told the Maharashtra legislature, as reported by ET Education, that schools would not be closed merely because of low enrolment. He said the government would make adjustments to ensure that such schools continued functioning and that teachers would be redeployed only after appropriate adjustments were made. Yet the same report noted that around 18,000 schools had fewer than 20 students.

The policy trajectory therefore remains difficult to reconcile. On one side, the government says low-enrolment schools will not be shut and that every child must continue to have access to education. On the other, cluster models, school consolidation and private participation are being promoted as solutions to the perceived financial and infrastructural limitations of the existing public-school network.

The issue is not that private participation is inherently harmful, nor that every small school must necessarily remain open regardless of circumstances. The concern is whether the State is addressing the reasons behind low enrolment and poor infrastructure before declaring a school inefficient, relocating its students or inviting private entities to take over functions that should ordinarily be part of public educational provision.

A government school is not merely a building that can be repaired through CSR funding or managed through a contractual arrangement. It is part of the public infrastructure through which the State fulfils its constitutional obligation to provide education. When schools are under-resourced, the answer cannot automatically be to reduce the State’s responsibility by transferring greater functions to private actors. The more important question is whether Maharashtra is investing sufficiently in making its public schools viable before concluding that they need to be consolidated, adopted or operated through PPP models.

Marathi schools: Declining enrolment or a policy-created cycle?

The decline of Marathi-medium education in Maharashtra is particularly troubling because it cannot simply be reduced to a story of parents “choosing English”. The numbers in Mumbai are stark. According to BMC data cited by ThePrint on July 24, 2025, the number of Marathi-medium schools in Mumbai fell from 460 in 2019-20 to 421 in 2025-26 — a loss of 39 schools. Around 50,000 students had moved elsewhere from the 2019-20 academic session onwards.

The longer-term numbers are even more striking. Mid-Day, reporting on May 4, 2025, said Mumbai had 413 Marathi-medium schools in 2010-11, 368 in 2014-15 and only 262 by 2023-24. That is not a temporary fluctuation, but rather a sustained decline.

The government has attributed the decline largely to parental preference for English-medium education. Parents do indeed have reasons to make that choice. English is widely perceived as providing better access to higher education, employment and social mobility. But educators and activists argue that parents are also responding to the relative quality and visibility of the schools being offered to them. As ThePrint reported in July 2025, educators pointed to inadequate infrastructure in Marathi-medium schools and alleged that English-medium institutions received greater preference when it came to development.

Deepak Pawar of the School Education Action Coordination Committee argued that Marathi-medium schools should be upgraded without changing their medium to English. Teachers cited in the report similarly described a communication gap with middle-class families and said some Marathi-medium schools had modern facilities such as Atal Tinkering Labs and robotics labs, but that efforts to publicise and develop these came only after enrolment had already begun to collapse. The important point here is thus, if the state allows a school to deteriorate, then points to falling enrolment as evidence that the school is no longer viable, it risks creating a self-fulfilling cycle. One cannot ignore the vicious cycle of how poor infrastructure erodes parental confidence, leading to declining enrolment, reduced allocation of teachers and resources, and a further deterioration of schools, creating a cycle that ultimately pushes schools towards closure. The final closure can then be presented as the inevitable consequence of “parental preference”. But inevitability is not the same as neutrality.

The fate of one of Mumbai’s oldest Marathi schools

The uncertainty surrounding Dadar’s Nabar Guruji Vidyalaya brought this crisis into sharp relief. In May 2025, Mid-Day reported that the Marathi-medium school, which dates back to the 1940s, was facing an uncertain future amid falling admissions. Thirty-five students had appeared for its SSC examination that year, but only 17 students remained in Classes 9 and 10 for the new academic year. The management clarified that it had not decided to close the school.

Trustee Satish Rama Nayak said the institution remained financially capable of functioning because it offered free education and teachers’ salaries were supported through government grants. The difficulty was the collapse in enrolment and its impact on the teacher-student ratio. Nayak also described a social transformation.

Parents who had themselves studied in Marathi-medium schools were increasingly choosing English-medium or CBSE schools for their children, sometimes even taking loans to pay for them. That is the other side of the story. It would be too simplistic to blame the government for every parent who chooses English. But it is equally simplistic to blame parents for the disappearance of Marathi-medium schools without asking why government and aided Marathi schools have not been made equally attractive, well-equipped and aspirational.

As Sushil Shejule of the Marathi Abhyas Kendra told ThePrint, the decline had been visible for years and, despite the availability of data, neither governments nor political parties had taken meaningful action.

The irony of Marathi’s “classical language” status

In October 2024, Marathi received classical-language status from the Union government. Maharashtra has also repeatedly asserted the importance of Marathi in public life and education. The Maharashtra Compulsory Teaching and Learning of Marathi Language in Schools Act, 2020 made Marathi compulsory in schools across the state, including CBSE and ICSE schools. Yet the institutions that actually provide education through Marathi continue to shrink.

The Mid-Day report of May 2025 placed the decline against precisely this backdrop: Marathi had acquired classical-language status, but one of Mumbai’s oldest Marathi-medium schools was struggling with falling admissions. The contradiction was also noticed by the Bombay High Court in its April 2026 intervention.

The state cannot convincingly claim to protect Marathi while allowing the network of Marathi-medium schools, particularly those serving poorer and rural families, to become increasingly fragile. Protecting a language is not merely about official resolutions, signboards or declarations. It also means ensuring that a child who wants, or needs, to study in that language has a functioning school in which to do so.

Mumbai’s municipal schools: when “repair” means displacement

The infrastructure problem becomes even more complicated when schools are declared unsafe and children are moved elsewhere. In December 2025, Outlook reported on the closure and relocation of Mumbai municipal schools, including New Mahim Municipal School. Students were shifted from August 2025 to another municipal school operating from a few rooms on the first floor of a residential building.

According to the report, the replacement premises lacked a playground, proper drinking-water facilities and adequately supplied toilets. The concern raised by parents and activists was not that unsafe buildings should continue to operate. A genuinely dangerous school building cannot be defended in the name of access to education. The concern was about what children were being offered after their school was shut.

When a school has to close because its building is unsafe, the replacement should provide an equivalent educational environment. It should be sufficiently close to the children’s homes, have adequate classrooms, functional toilets and drinking-water facilities, and provide children with access to a playground. Parents and children should also have a say in decisions that directly affect their education. For Marathi-medium schools, relocation should not result in the loss of the medium of instruction. These are not peripheral concerns. They determine whether a “relocation” actually amounts to continued and meaningful access to education.

When official records themselves threaten to erase students

Another warning emerged in January 2026. On January 10, ETV Bharat reported discrepancies between Aadhaar-linked records and UDISE Plus data that had left thousands of students classified as “invalid”, “not provided”, “under verification” or “out of school”. The report said that of 2,14,68,288 students registered in the relevant Maharashtra UDISE Plus data, 5,78,433 were listed with invalid Aadhaar details and 4,98,759 had not provided Aadhaar details. Another 69,688 were shown as out of school. Educationists warned that such discrepancies could have consequences for school enrolment figures and, consequently, teacher deployment and funding. The concern was particularly acute for Marathi-medium schools.

Rajan Mahadeshwar, principal of Govandi’s Jagruti Vidyamandir, told ETV Bharat that his school had 430 students actually registered, while the UDISE system showed only 380 because 50 were marked invalid or pending verification. He feared that an artificially reduced enrolment could eventually affect the school’s viability. Officials disputed the extent of the danger.

Divisional Deputy Director Rajesh Kankal said only around five per cent of students in numerous schools did not have Aadhaar updated and said he did not expect grant-in-aid schools to face major problems. Yet the larger policy concern remains valid: when funding, staffing and school viability are increasingly linked to enrolment data, the accuracy of that data becomes an educational rights issue. A child should not become statistically invisible because a database has failed to correctly reflect their presence in a classroom.

The state is promising a transformation

The government has not remained silent. On August 22, 2026, Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde held a detailed review meeting with School Education Minister Dada Bhuse and senior officials. As Deccan Herald reported on August 23, Shinde directed the Education Department to prepare a clear, comprehensive and time-bound action plan to modernise schools and bring about “real, visible and qualitative improvements”.

The proposed plan includes teacher training, capacity building, greater involvement of education experts and experienced teachers, health check-ups, nutrition, a review of the Mid-Day Meal Scheme and attention to students’ mental and emotional well-being. The state has also expanded digital education initiatives. Digital Learning reported on August 4 that the Vinoba Digital Education platform had been expanded to 45,000 government schools across 25 districts, reaching more than 31 lakh students and nearly 1.3 lakh teachers.

These initiatives may be useful. However, the timing of the government’s August review is telling. It came after weeks in which government-school conditions had repeatedly been placed in the public eye — including through the “School Thik Karo” campaign launched in Maharashtra by Cockroach Janta Party convenor Abhijeet Dipke.

On August 15, Telangana Today reported that Dipke had launched the campaign in Hingoli after inspecting a Zilla Parishad school where he alleged that toilets lacked water, windows were broken and students lacked adequate benches. He said the campaign would document basic facilities in government schools across Maharashtra. The campaign itself is not a substitute for institutional inspection or government monitoring. Its allegations must therefore be independently verified before being treated as established facts.

But its very existence points to a troubling question: Why are political and citizen campaigns increasingly having to inspect schools to make basic educational infrastructure visible?

When will policy on public education, access and representation actually be formulated with the stakeholders? Who are the stakeholders? They are communities that demand education for the young, the most marginalised and teachers who form the other crucial arc. All the policies hurriedly formulated are however top heavy and solely the creation of bureaucrats and politicians, often concealing blatant private interests.

This is not democracy but public policy turned on its head.

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