Delhi University as a microcosm of a police state

The recent history of Delhi University is symptomatic of the weakening of democracy in India but in the activism of students, there is hope for the future. 

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ON the sunny morning of October 23, 2024, the courtyard of Delhi University's arts faculty was swarming with more police officers than university students. We all know how this story is going to go. By afternoon, 11 students had been detained. Their crime? Attempting to enter their university library.

Crime and punishment

You may believe this is an exaggeration for dramatic effect. But, as far as anyone could see, this was the extent of the actus reus. Still, let us play on the police's court and backtrack to understand the relevant context.

The central library of the arts faculty is an important resource for students, but one that is brimming with issues. Since September, there have been appeals to the administration for the implementation of basic reforms— reinstating 24-hour access to the research floor, opening up the computer section and providing clean drinking water, among others.

However, the librarian has steadfastly ignored these, first by denying that the problems persist despite the hundreds of student signatures pointing to the contrary, and eventually by refusing to meet with the students. This spurred students in the library movement to give a protest call for 2 p.m. on October 23.

However, the matinee began earlier than expected. At 11 a.m., two students wanted to access the library for their regular use.

"It was our routine study session in the morning. But we were stopped by the security. The librarian was standing there surrounded by his staff and security forces. He said that we students specifically were banned from using the library for three days," said Rajveer, a fifth-year PhD scholar in the Punjabi department.

Rajveer and her classmate were selectively targeted for speaking on behalf of the students. They were denied entry into the library despite showing their college identity card and library card, and eventually detained.

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"The night before, I had got a call from my head of department (HOD)," said Rajveer. "He tried to intimidate me and said we should not protest. A person from the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) was coming to inspect the college for annual rankings and our dissent would spoil the department's reputation, the HOD said.

"I told him that if the librarian would meet with us and hear us out, we would not need to protest. We are not doing this for fun, we only want our issues resolved."

Already we are seeing a strong case for unauthorised detentions by the police in violation of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) Sections 126 (on wrongful restraint) and 127 (wrongful confinement), acting on the mala fide intentions of the Delhi University administration.

But, the story continues to unfold. At 2 p.m., students gathered to speak with the librarian regarding the detention of fellow students and to submit a revised memorandum with signatures from more than students. Once again, they were stopped at the gate by university guards and police officers. This time, the arguments broke into violence. Students were physically held back and dragged across the ground. In the process, the clothes of female students were torn.

"There were more than 100 officers on the arts faculty that day. Our necks were grabbed. My hair was pulled. All this arrangement was done for a few students because the administration is so scared of the students going to talk to the librarian," stated Ravjot, a member of Bhagat Singh Chatra Ekta Manch (bsCEM) who was brutally detained.

The agitation drew in a crowd of bystanders, many of whom took videos and decried the assaults of the police and the guards.

"The police were threatening the students to leave the library. It was as if the students were the intruders. The way the guards and police behaved with girls was extremely bad," reported Safvan, a bystander who intervened to shield a female student from police aggression.

In the end, it took more than 50 university guards and police officers to detain seven students. Nine students were apprehended— seven members of bsCEM involved in the library movement, and two bystanders, including Safvan. The detainees were taken 55 km away to Nangloi station, where they were held and interrogated until late evening.

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Such incidents are by no means unique in universities at present. To enter a library is a crime. To enquire about detained comrades is a crime. To ask that the central library of the national capital's premier public institution meets basic standards of functionality is a crime.

The question must naturally arise: How does the justice system of the world's largest democracy allow this?

The despotic legacy of preventive detention

To understand this, we must turn to a jarring feature of the Indian Constitution: Article 22 (3)–(7), pertaining to preventive detention. These provisions invert the underlying logic of the justice system: instead of punishing a guilty person for a crime, they allow the lock-up of an innocent person to prevent them from committing a crime in the future.

The glaring contradiction between preventive detention and the fundamental right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 has been obvious since the very founding of this republic. In A.K. Gopalan versus State of Madras (1950), then Supreme Court Justice M. Patanjali Sastri referred to this provision as a 'sinister-looking feature' and stated that "preventive detention laws are repugnant to democratic constitutions and they cannot be found to exist in any of the democratic countries of the world".

The reason for the exceptional nature of such laws is the flagrant violation of fundamental democratic rights: presumption of innocence, due process and fair trial. Criminal law recognises four stages in the commission of a crime— intention, preparation, attempt and execution. In essence, preventive detention allows the State to label a person criminal based on perceived intention alone.

These authoritarian provisions have a rich colonial legacy as descendants of the infamously draconian Rowlatt Act (the protest against which resulted in the inhumane massacre at Jalliawala Bagh). This was noted by the Supreme Court in April 2023 in Pramod Singla versus Union Of India.

Former Justice Krishna Murari stated, "This act of protecting civil liberties, is not just the saving of rights of individuals in person and the society at large, but is also an act of preserving our constitutional ethos, which is a product of a series of struggles against the arbitrary power of the British State."

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But the transfer of this arbitrary power from the British to the Indian State has blurred the line between preventive detention and wrongful detention to near vanishment. In the 74 years since A.K. Gopalan, the enabling provisions of the 1950 Preventive Detention Act have only evolved into an ever-expanding list of easy tools for State overreach and oppression of individual liberties.

The most infamous among these are the (repealed) 1971 Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) under which thousands were detained during the Emergency, the 1980 National Security Act which was upheld despite the Court's acknowledgment of the vagueness and uncertainty of its provisions, and the leading threat to democratic rights today— the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), a sugar-coated death sentence that has even bypassed the explicit constitutional safeguards which apply to standard preventive detention laws.

The vanquishment is also greatly aided by the normalisation of this once-'sinister' feature: the familiarity and inevitability of such police response, the fact that we all knew how the story of the Delhi University students was going to play out.

This has been acknowledged by the Supreme Court in September 2023 in Ameena Begum versus The State of Telangana: "It requires no serious debate that preventive detention, conceived as an extraordinary measure by the framers of our Constitution, has been rendered ordinary with its reckless invocation over the years as if it were available for use even in the ordinary course of proceedings."

Justice Dipankar Datta further emphasised the specificity of the grounds which warrant preventive detention, viz., the disturbance to public order: "The specific activity must have an impact on the broader community or the general public, evoking feelings of fear, panic or insecurity."

It is a matter of great irony, therefore, that in the case of the library incident, the fear, panic or insecurity among the general student body was not caused by the detained students, but by the aggression of the State authorities themselves.

The pattern of militarisation at Delhi University

The altercation on October 23 was by no means an isolated incident. Indeed, it was only three weeks prior that Muslim student leaders Shahreyar Khan and Annan, who were standing in opposition to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) in the student union elections, were brutalised and detained by the Delhi police.

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Shahreyar told journalists how he was picked out, beaten with lathis and boots, and abused with communal slurs such as 'Mulla' (pejoratively term for Muslims in India), 'deshdrohi' (anti-national), and 'terrorist'. "I repeatedly told them I was a patient of sarcoidosis, under treatment at Patel Chest Institute, but they ignored me," he reported.

Shahreyar's treatment underscores the material reality of the nature of the police: authorised for the commission of legal violence, dancing on the strings of ABVP leaders, the Delhi University administration and the Brahmanical Hindutva fascist State.

"Police are nowhere to be found when someone is harassed on campus, but when they want to suppress the political engagement of students, suddenly both the police and the cameras start working. Students don't need the protection of the police, but protection from them," said Ravjot.

The purported role of the police in our society is to serve and protect justice. Here, we must ask the crucial question: justice for whom? The job of the police is to keep the peace, but the peace for whom? As it stands today, the police are the greatest destroyer of peace for the Indian masses, and the greatest inflictor of injustice against the student activists, the kisan (farmer), the mazdoor (labourer), the trade unionist, the Dalit and the Muslim.

At Delhi University, anyone who resists the terror of the police or questions the tyrannical administration is ostracised. "As a student activist, I am treated like an outsider on my own campus," says Gurkirat, a student at Cluster Innovation Centre who was violently dragged and detained on October 23.

"They only want Delhi University to be a market for selling degrees and propagating the ruling class ideology. This administration that promotes saffronisation programmes on campus, threatens, harasses and detains us brutally when we try to speak up for even our very basic democratic demands.

"Even when we are not doing any protest or programme, the guards specifically stop us at gates, check our bags, etc. The police force roams freely while our mobility is restricted on the campus."

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The authority of the police over students on their own campus is being increasingly institutionalised, most recently under the guise of the anti-ragging policy. In their press release dated July 25, the Delhi University proctorial board announced new measures to "ensure the maintenance of discipline and prevention of ragging", which includes "placing of police pickets outside every college" and codifies the administration's ability to seek out the police's violence "whenever the situation warrants direct intervention by them".

This is concerning in and of itself, given the administration's extremely dubious record of genuine concern for students when compared to its deference to political favours and bureaucratic bodies that prop up its rankings.

However, the statement goes a step further, authorising the police to patrol the campus and take "speedy action in case of any untoward incident", thereby creating a systematised provision for arbitrary and extrajudicial action by the police against students, which the administration can then conveniently ignore.

The blood of Professor G.N. Saibaba is on our hands

Nearly every pattern of oppression, violence and fascism laid out so far— the unconcern for Shahreyar's medical condition, the criminalisation of bsCEM students for speaking against the wrongful detention of their comrades, Delhi University's deployment of police in plain clothes inside the university and outside the premises of each college— can be seen in their most vicious form in the case of the recently martyred Delhi University professor and political prisoner, Dr G.N. Saibaba.

Professor Saibaba was a teacher of English at Ram Lal Anand College of Delhi University. He was paraplegic since age four, 90 percent disabled and confined to his wheelchair. Yet, his mind was free, empathetic and radically committed to people's justice.

This was the brain that was too dangerous for the Indian State. He was arrested in 2014 for "alleged links with Maoists", his real crime being vocal opposition to the Indian State's displacement operations against Adivasis for corporatisation of their land under the genocidal Operation Green Hunt.

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He spent 8.5 of the next 10 years in prison along with five other co-accused, where he was subjected to intentional and ruthless medical negligence. Following the death of the Adivasi-rights activist and Saibaba's co-accused, Pandu Pora Narote in August 2022 after he was denied critical medical care, Saibaba's advocate Nihalsing Rathod prophesied, "Narote's death, in its own right, implies that the institutional murder of G.N.Saibaba is a virtual inevitability."

This foregone conclusion was realised on October 12 of this year, and Professor Sai passed away a mere seven months after his acquittal.

At the public meeting for G.N. Saibaba held at the Delhi University's arts faculty on October 15, former professor Nandita Narain from St Stephen's College recalled the inhumanity of the police during his arrest.

"He was abducted by plain-clothes officers and dragged off his wheelchair by his left arm and thrown around like a sack of potatoes. He was not allowed to use the toilet for 48 hours. He eventually lost the use of his left arm, and then his right arm. He was actively disabled by the State and its agencies."

The excessive cruelty of the police was even acknowledged by the Bombay High Court in 2015, which criticised the police for "working blindly" and treating the ailing professor "like an animal".

Here again, we saw the complicity and the true loyalties of the Delhi University administration, from Sai's eviction to the raid of his university residence to his suspension to the refusal to reinstate him following his acquittal. "Teaching was Sai's entire life. I will not forgive the vice-chancellor. He did not even reply to Sai's letter," said Professor Narain.

Justice and power

The state of Delhi University today is a microcosm of the increasing militarisation across the entire country: the ever-increasing list of political prisoners who are incarcerated for years without trial and the codification of the police's impunity in the three new criminal codes.

Despite the Supreme Court's concern over the draconian legacy of preventive detention laws, despite its repeated acknowledgments of their unfettered abuse, the court has still held these provisions and their various evolutions as lawful. The obiter dictum, no matter how analytically sound and pragmatically persuasive, renders itself fruitless if it is not reflected in the ratio of the court's decisions.

The question of justice and its inextricable connection with power must be the foremost concern of every practitioner of jurisprudence. There is an imminent need to re-examine the legality of the UAPA in light of its rampant desecration of the 'golden triangle' (Articles 14, 19 and 21) of democratic rights, to consider the real implications of constitutionally enshrined police protections for the Indian people, and to liberate education, critical thinking, and civil life from the shackles of preventive detention.