JNU students rise against casteism and the neoliberal university
by InSAF India
The lawns of School of Language and School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) once again filled with slogans of freedom or ‘Azadi’ on 15 February 2026. Thousands of JNU students joined a protest raising a number of demands toward the university administration:
First, the students demanded the implementation of University Grants Commission (UGC) Equity Rules based on the Rohith Act, a law to combat caste discrimination in higher education, named after Rohith Vemula, a doctoral scholar at the University of Hyderabad who committed suicide in 2016 following years of experiencing systemic bias on caste grounds, and whose death sparked outrage and attention to the structural embeddedness of casteism in the Indian higher education system. The JNU administration had announced a stay on implementing the UGC guidelines following a wave of protests and legal and political mobilisation by predominantly upper-caste groups against the equity measures.
In addition to these demands, the students also called on the university to withdraw the rustication of JNUSU student union office bearers and other activists, who were suspended for their involvement in protests in November 2025 against the installation of a digitised library access system using facial recognition software. The students publicly removed the equipment and drew attention to its breach of privacy norms by collecting facial and biometric data and effectively surveilling every entry into the library. In an extraordinary and unprecedented move on 4 Feb 2026, the JNUSU office bearers and ex-JNUSU President were rusticated for two semesters and prevented physical entry on campus, designated in the casteist language of university administration as 'declared out-of-bounds'. On the same day, several lay students received a fee ranging from fifteen to twenty-five thousand each, with an email notification claiming they participated in protests and raised slogans or caused damage to university property. Not even during Indira Gandhi’s emergency years did university student associations ever face such severe criminalization and repression. The heavy-handed responses, effectively leaving the university without any officially elected student representative, demonstrate the active efforts of the BJP government at both state and central levels to crush the democratic culture and active campus political life of JNU.
The series of protests culminated in an encampment on campus accompanied by a university strike announced on 15 February. The students of JNU, committed to their goal of education, continued their classes outside the classroom, in the tradition of the 2016 Nationalism lectures at JNU, with lectures by Nivedita Menon, Jayati Ghosh, Prabhat Patnaik, and Amir Ali, among many others.
A few days into the successful university strike, JNU's Vice-Chancellor made racist and casteist remarks on a public platform, condescendingly claiming that Dalits, like Black people, 'cannot progress by being permanently a victim or playing the victim card'. This further intensified the already agitated student community at JNU who then decided to do a long march to the Ministry of Education on 26 February, demanding action against the incompetent and vicious Vice-Chancellor, and further calling for the removal of arbitrary fines against lower-class students of JNU (known as the CPO Manual). While the issues may seem to be very different, they are all facets of the increasing neoliberalisation of university systems across India.
Although the JNU Students’ Union were granted permission to protest, the JNU main gate was locked on the day of the protest, with several barricades outside the gate. Students living outside JNU documented the presence of police vans and buses, lined up until at least 300 meters from JNU. In what seemed to be an obvious attempt to copy US police actions, riot police and sniffer dogs were brought on campus. Indeed, what occurred at JNU on 26 February was no less than what students at Columbia University and other higher educational institutions across the Global North went through during the Palestine solidarity encampments almost two years ago.
The students who found themselves locked in, pulled open the locked gate, only to encounter barricades and police. Several plainclothes police personnel were mistaken by the protesting students to be members of the BJP-aligned student union of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) or paramilitary thugs of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), leading to confusion and further agitations.
The police dragged specific people out of the huge crowd, as if they knew who to arrest beforehand. In one of the videos that is now banned on Meta following a legal notice by the Government of India, the Delhi Police is seen viciously and purposely smashing a photograph of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, revered revolutionary thinker and leader of the anti-caste movement. This once again reiterates the Brahminical nature of police in India. Fifty students were detained and kept overnight in various police stations across Delhi, with 14 incarcerated under serious and fake charges of assaulting police officers. Five of the fourteen students arrested were women, two of whom sustained serious leg injuries from police assaults.
The JNU14 include JNUSU President Aditi, JNUSU Vice President Gopika, JNUSU General Secretary Danish Ali, ex-JNUSU President Nitish, All India Students’ Association’s President Neha, Ranvijay, Manikant, Rahul, Ansh, Gowri, Varckey, Vicky, Shyam and a freelance journalist Vishnu Tiwari. Booked under sections 212, 121(1), 132, 3(5), the court ordered that a verification of their home address be done in order for them to be out of jail on bail.
Besides, the court demanded a bail bond of Rs. 25,000 each, an exorbitant amount for most, especially marginalized students. The students were prevented by the authorities from contacting those who were arrested in Tihar Jail, or who tried to give them a fresh pair of clothes. The timing of the arrests turned out to be convenient to the fearful JNU administration as well as the state BJP government, to stifle the momentum built in the campus as the courts remain in holiday for an entire week starting 1 March.
In the meantime, the students have all been released on bail. The criminal legal system, weighed down by its colonial legacies, once again stayed at the forefront of repressing freedom of expression by fabricating charges against peaceful student protestors. While this incident may soon be shelved, the core issues of structural caste discrimination and the policing of campuses remain. This post is written in solidarity with and with the aim to archive the efforts of the JNU students who, despite outright repression, continue their struggles against caste and class discrimination as well as the neoliberalisation of higher education in India.