A Student Activist’s Notes From Tihar And The Events That Led To The Arrests
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[*]The rustication of members, present and past, of the JNU Students’ Union followed the protests against a Facial Recognition Technology System installed by the JNU Administration at the JNU Central Library.
[*]A Long March to the Ministry of Education, scheduled on February 26 demanding the JNU Vice Chancellor’s resignation and the enactment of UGC Regulations along with the Rohith Act, was met with police action, after which 14 students were arrested.
[*]These students spent three days in Tihar prison, before being released on bail.
I have been a student of political studies since my school days. Long before I stepped into the university, I had encountered the foundational idea that dissent is not a disruption of democracy, but its lifeblood, that the act of questioning power is what keeps it accountable. These were not merely abstract principles confined to textbooks; they found deeper meaning during my years at JNU. As a postgraduate student of Political Studies, and equally as an activist, I came to understand that theory and praxis cannot exist in isolation from one another. To study power without confronting it, to analyse injustice without resisting it, is to abdicate the very responsibility that scholarship demands. We protest, therefore, not out of impulse, but out of a deeply felt obligation, as citizens who refuse to be silent spectators.
And yet, when we were being taken to Tihar, I was not shocked. There was no rupture between expectation and reality, no moment of disbelief. This regime has, with calculated precision, normalised the criminalisation of dissent. What should have been extraordinary had long since become routine.
Perhaps, then, it is necessary to recount the chain of events that led the JNU 14 to Tihar.
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Voices From Prison: The Person Who Enters Jail Never Comes Out, Says Bhangar Activist Shankar
BY Shankar
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