Agitate. Organise. Educate.
With our respectful salute to Dr BR Ambedkar
InSAF India stands in unwavering solidarity with everyone protesting against the demolition of public education in India! We are electrified to see how what started out as a meme and joke in response to an insulting remark of the Chief Justice of India against the youth of India has transformed into an outpouring of collective rage against an authoritarian, corporatised regime’s continued assault on the futures of our young people. Galvanised by the leaking of exam papers for the NEET exams and student suicides in despair, the protests are now demanding accountability for the deliberate destruction of the country’s education system. Our hearts are warmed by the sight of tens of thousands gathering daily in Jantar Mantar, and with the swarms of “cockroaches” multiplying in Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Chennai, Patna, Goa and a growing number of cities around the globe. The obscene sadism of a system that thinks of its young as parasites and “cockroaches” stands fully exposed. It is also telling how the flagbearers of this system always consider the marginalised people as insects: we well remember the home minister Amit Shah's description of so-called “infiltrators” – basically indicating minority Muslims – as termites in 2019.
We are equally horrified and yet not surprised to witness the police violence and the cowardly response of the Indian government, with its Israeli-imported weapons, its bulging surveillance apparatus – using face recognition software purchased with public money – and its reserve army of tilak-brandishing thugs unleashed upon the gathered protestors. The hushed authorisation of Delhi Police to undertake preventive detentions under the National Security Act is alarming and must be forcefully opposed. This is the same regime that has put scholars, activists, journalists in jail for years without trial. In Delhi alone, we have witnessed police beating young people in Jamia Milia University, Shaheen Bagh, Delhi University, and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Dissidents have paid a huge price.
We have seen pellet bullets being fired before, especially in Kashmir, where hundreds of young people have been maimed and blinded. It’s not the first time we have heard and seen people being lathi-charged, and drones and bulldozers approaching. We also know that it is the same police officers who arbitrarily detained and tortured youth and labour activists in Delhi in March this year who are now at the protests, beating up more students, even more empowered with their gallantry award medals hanging over their pot bellies. We know that the same CRPF battalions which have massacred Adivasis in Bastar over the last two years have been airlifted to Delhi to be used against the protesting youth. The water cannons and tear gas shells used on the students today are the same ones used on the farmers five years ago. The continuous pattern of state violence – from Kashmir to the Punjab plains to Manipur to Bastar in central India – has become more than evident.
We have taken note of how our otherwise omnipotent leaders were scooted out of the parliament building via the back door. Their farts smell of fear emanating from a belly that has stuffed itself for decades without any accountability and now feels its innards churn.
We know that much more is at stake in these protests than fixing an exam leak.
For us then, the protests reflect an anger against a much deeper systemic rot which must be recognised, the exposed to the light, and properly understood in its origins: the corporatisation of education policies, the contemptuous violence toward knowledge manifesting in curricular erasures and textbook saffronisation, the suffocating rat-race imposed by competitive examinations designed to be breeding grounds for corruption, the criminal neglect of rural education and the flagrant political interference in the autonomy of higher educational institutions, the structural de-prioritisation of public education, and the continued caste apartheid in the education system as a whole.
In standing with the protesting students and youth in Delhi, we also stand with those struggling against the demolition of Rampur's Mohammad Ali Jauhar University as well as against the bill according the central government with excessive powers over higher education regulation. We stand with all educational workers struggling for a decent living wage as well as with teachers’ unions across the country fighting against structural exclusions and discrimination. We stand with all who remain incarcerated for defending the right to ask questions: Suneeta Pottam, Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, Surendra Gadling, Raghu Midiyami, Gajendra Mandavi and countless others, the majority of whom are from India’s historically marginalised communities. We stand with those who may be out of prison but remain on punitive bail conditions and the thousands others facing the risk of imprisonment and arrest.
The protests have gained their first victory by the resignation of the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, but we consider it necessary to demand much more than just a resignation of a minister or a resolution to the problems of centralised exams. For these demands to be effective, they must be accompanied by ending of internet shutdowns, campus crackdowns, bans on books and circulation of memos instructing lecturers on deshbhakti [patriotism], withdrawal of all cases against the protesting students, and ending harassing and incriminating the people who stood and are standing in solidarity with them. An education system that develops students must be free and accessible and publicly resourced, radically democratic and autonomous – that is, it must be rooted in a commitment to cultivating a free and independent-minded citizenry rather than producing only compliant parts that will fit into and serve the deepening corporate-nationalist machinery.
We say this while standing for an academic freedom that is not restricted to formal educational institutions but also has its ears on the ground and is dedicated to movements and struggles for radical social and ecological transformation. While we instead extend our hands and arms in solidarity to the current wave of youth protests, we strongly believe and sincerely hope that it will live up to and expand its radical potential to try to change all that is wrong in India, in a way which only the audacity of youth can. Therefore, to the immediate demands of the movement, we add our chants for Azadi, Inquilab Zindabad, Jai Bheem, Johar and Lal Salaam.
Finally, tomorrow, once the headiness of the moment has dissipated, hopefully without a further escalation of state repression, our work will no doubt continue. We invite people to stay with us and to commit to their little part in the slow, steady, unspectacular work of building counter-power in the everyday: let's not forget that along with agitation comes education and organisation.
InSAF India
July 2026