When the Campus Stops Feeling Like a Safe Place

On September 27, students at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Kolkata locked the gates of their campus as a crowd gathered outside.

Inside, the aftermath of a confrontation over an event organised by the Akhil Bharatiya Grahak Panchayat, an RSS-linked organisation, was already visible. Students and faculty members were injured; police were deployed; and by the following day, three FIRs had been registered. Around 30 students and two faculty members were reported injured, with several students taken to hospital. The two sides have given sharply different accounts of who initiated the violence. The students say they were assaulted after objecting to the event; ABGP members allege that the programme was disrupted and that they were attacked first.

The immediate dispute was over an auditorium.

But the images from SRFTI raise a different trigger: what is a university supposed to guarantee before it asks a student to become educated, employable and responsible?

Safety and dignity by what we know. A grievance mechanism that works before a confrontation becomes a clash.

And the assurance that the institution will not become the place from which a student needs protection.

That question is now appearing across Indian campuses in forms that look unrelated until placed beside one another.

At Aligarh Muslim University, MA Urdu student Yasir Fahad has been on an indefinite hunger strike demanding restoration of the Aligarh Muslim University Students’ Union and fresh elections. The last AMUSU election was held in the 2018–19 academic session; students say the absence of an elected union for nearly eight years has deprived them of formal representation. Fahad has also demanded withdrawal of his suspension, while the university has cited an unauthorised protest and violation of campus rules. By September 27, the hunger strike had entered its seventh day and had received support from women students.

At first glance, AMU and SRFTI belong to different stories.

One concerns student elections.

The other concerns an outside organisation using an institutional auditorium.

But both expose a similar vulnerability: students are contesting decisions that shape the space in which they live without feeling that existing institutional channels are adequate to resolve the dispute. The problem, however, is bigger than representation.

The experience of being a student in India in 2026

The campus is not always a safe place. The recent violence at SRFTI follows the August 19–20 confrontation at Jadavpur University, where clashes between ABVP and Left-leaning student groups left students injured and parts of the campus vandalised. Police later sought CCTV footage in connection with allegations of outsiders entering the university, arson, vandalism and intimidation. The Calcutta High Court subsequently observed that ensuring student safety within universities was the responsibility of the State and asked state universities to submit affidavits on security measures. The significance of Jadavpur is not only political. It is physical.

Students described a campus in which a night-time confrontation could turn into a security crisis. It was reported students saying that they no longer felt secure, particularly women students.

Within days, the conflict travelled to Medinipur College, where an SFI protest over the Jadavpur violence was followed by a clash with ABVP workers. Reports said students and teachers were among those allegedly assaulted. The contagion here is not necessarily ideological.

It is violence itself.

A campus that is already politically polarised can become physically insecure very quickly when outside actors, rival organisations and institutional authority begin to overlap.

Punjab offers a different and more unsettling version of the same problem

At Chitkara University, unverified social-media claims about two female students allegedly missing or having died by suicide triggered a large student protest. Police and university authorities said the claims were false; police confirmed that no students were missing and no suicide had been reported. The unrest nevertheless escalated into vandalism, damage to police vehicles and a confrontation with officers. The university subsequently announced holidays until October 5.

The important fact is not that a rumour was false. It is that hundreds of students acted on it before official information could establish what had actually happened. That itself is an institutional-trust problem.

If students immediately turn to WhatsApp groups, Instagram accounts and peer networks for answers about whether women in their own hostel are safe, the question is not simply why young people believe rumours.

It is why the institution is not trusted to answer first.

The Punjab State Women Commission has now sought reports on both Chitkara and Lovely Professional University, including FIRs, police action and the safety arrangements on the campuses. It has specifically sought details about CCTV surveillance, security personnel and hostel entry and exit systems.

At LPU, protests erupted after an allegation that a female student had been raped on campus. The university denied that the alleged incident had occurred, while police registered an FIR against unknown persons and constituted an SIT. Students subsequently vandalised parts of the campus, blocked NH-44 and clashed with police. The allegation remains a matter for investigation.

But the fear it produced was already politically and physically real.

The question of dignity is harder to measure

Not every threat to a student is a mob at a gate. Sometimes it is the institution itself.

At Allahabad University, questions around hostel life have included security, restrictions and the treatment of women students. The university has also faced repeated complaints concerning hostel safety and ragging; in an earlier hostel case, first-year students reported being subjected to abusive and obscene conversations by seniors, prompting a midnight inspection and disciplinary action.

The problem becomes especially stark when safety is translated into restrictions placed on students rather than accountability imposed on those who threaten them.

A woman student being told where she can go after dark is technically a security measure.

But it also raises a more uncomfortable question:

Why does the burden of making a campus safe so often end up on the person being asked to restrict herself?

That tension is visible beyond Allahabad.

In Delhi, hundreds of students marched on September 23 after a 17-year-old reported that she had allegedly been gang-raped by three men posing as police officers. The reported assault occurred close to Lady Shri Ram College, and protesters demanded safety and the freedom for women to move through the city at night without fear.

The campus boundary, therefore, is porous.

A student does not stop being a student at the university gate.

And caste does not stop at the classroom door

The crisis of safety also has a social dimension.

At the Dr Rajendra Prasad National Law University in Prayagraj, a Dalit student alleged caste-based humiliation by the Head of the Law Department, who was also the hostel warden. He alleged derogatory remarks, discriminatory treatment and harsher evaluation of his answer sheets after he performed well in Constitutional Law. The Allahabad High Court ordered an independent inquiry, directed an independent re-evaluation of his papers and removed the HoD-warden from administrative responsibilities pending the inquiry. The court expressly said it was not making a finding on the truth of the allegations.

At IIT Bombay, the death of 22-year-old Sahil Wakode has reopened an older and unresolved question about caste in elite institutions.

Wakode’s parents have alleged that their son faced casteist remarks and discrimination. Police have registered an FIR that includes provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, while the institute has denied that he had complained to its SC-ST cell or administration. The case is being investigated by the Mumbai Crime Branch, and the National Commission for Scheduled Castes has conducted a spot inquiry. There are competing accounts of what happened.

One student has publicly questioned the allegation of casteist remarks; a faculty forum has also called for the inquiry to establish the facts.

But that does not make the broader issue disappear.

Darshan Solanki’s 2023 death and the continuing concerns of his family have returned to the conversation alongside Wakode’s case. Parents of earlier IIT Bombay students have joined the current protests, arguing that the questions being asked about student welfare, discrimination and institutional accountability have not been adequately answered.

These cases cannot be collapsed into one narrative of caste discrimination.

Some remain allegations.

Some are under inquiry.

Some concern speech rather than physical violence.

But together they demonstrate how fragile the promise of an equal campus remains for students entering institutions through reservation, migration, economic mobility and academic competition.

When academic pressure becomes a question of survival

The question of institutional care becomes even harder when the student is not protesting after an assault or discrimination, but after a death.

At IISER Pune, students occupied the corridor outside the dean’s office from August 27 after a woman student died on campus on August 16. The institute said she had been found seriously injured outside a hostel building, taken to hospital and later died; police registered an accidental-death case and said the investigation was continuing. Students, however, demanded accountability, an overhaul of mental-health infrastructure, restoration of student representation and protection against administrative retaliation.

By the seventh day of the protest, their written demands included six permanent counsellors and three permanent psychiatrists, relaxation of attendance requirements, changes to hostel mobility rules, additional “third spaces” where students could gather outside working hours, and a guarantee against retaliation for peaceful protest. IISER subsequently said it was working towards most of the demands, including expanded counselling support and relaxation of attendance requirements.

The details matter because they show what students were asking for after a death: not merely a memorial or an investigation, but changes to the ordinary architecture of student life.

Mental-health support. Mobility. Attendance.

Hostel rules.

Places to exist outside classrooms and bedrooms.

The demand for a third space is particularly revealing. A university can have laboratories, lecture halls, hostels and administrative offices and still leave students with nowhere that feels genuinely theirs.

The Supreme Court-appointed task force on student suicides had already warned in June that India lacked a dedicated statutory, regulatory or institutional framework for preventing student suicides in higher education. Its interim findings said 65% of surveyed higher-education institutions did not provide access to mental-health service providers.

The IISER protest therefore belongs to a larger national question: what happens when academic institutions recognise distress only after it becomes a crisis?

That question is no longer confined to elite research institutions.

At IIT Bombay, Sahil Wakode, a 20-year-old BTech student, died by suicide in September after he was allegedly caught using ChatGPT during an examination. The circumstances surrounding his death remain under investigation. The professor who had invigilated the examination, Suryanarayana Doolla, was initially removed from his administrative position amid student protests and was later sent on leave; the Mumbai Crime Branch summoned him for questioning. Student representatives stressed that asking for his temporary removal was a precautionary demand and not a declaration of guilt.

The case has since forced a wider debate among IIT faculty members about what should happen when a student is caught cheating: what disciplinary procedures should apply, what support should be available, and how academic misconduct can be handled without reducing a student to the act for which they are being disciplined.

Cheating cannot become acceptable simply because a student later passes away.

But neither can the death be treated as irrelevant to the way academic discipline is designed and administered.

The question is whether an institution can enforce standards without losing sight of the person standing before it.

And IIT Bombay is not the only place where the punitive edge of academic rules has come under scrutiny.

In January, an 18-year-old student at a government college in Doda, Jammu and Kashmir, died by suicide after being accused of cheating during an examination. Her family and classmates alleged that public humiliation and the threat of disqualification contributed to her death. The Jammu and Kashmir administration suspended the assistant professor involved and ordered an inquiry.

The allegations remain subject to investigation.

But taken alongside the IIT Bombay and IISER cases, the episode points to a disturbing recurring question: how much institutional pressure can a student be expected to absorb before the institution recognises that the problem is no longer merely academic?

The answer cannot be to remove examinations, attendance rules or disciplinary procedures.

It has to be whether those systems contain enough humanity to recognise that students are not simply marks, attendance percentages, disciplinary files or misconduct reports.

At King George’s Medical University in Lucknow, nursing students protested in September after the death of second-year BSc Nursing student Divyanshi Yadav, reportedly from dengue. Students alleged that the administration pressured them to maintain attendance and denied medical leave even when they were seriously ill. One student told reporters that Divyanshi had continued attending classes despite suffering from dengue because she was worried about attendance. KGMU constituted a five-member committee to examine the matter. 'This was not a suicide case, and it should not be presented as one'.

But it belongs in this story for another reason.

The incident raises the same question from a different direction: when attendance becomes more immediately enforceable than illness, what exactly is the institution measuring?

A student’s presence on paper is not necessarily evidence of their well-being.

Then there is the right to dissent

Tata Institute of Social Sciences offers another dimension.

A former TISS student was arrested in August in connection with an unauthorised campus event commemorating the death anniversary of former Delhi University professor G.N. Saibaba. Police alleged that students had raised slogans supporting jailed activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam and were investigating related material. The Bombay High Court subsequently granted the former student interim protection from arrest. A magistrate later granted bail, observing that merely attending a commemorative programme did not establish an “anti-national mindset”.

The dispute is not the same as a hostel-security crisis.

But it reveals another boundary around student life: how far can a student go in expressing political ideas before dissent becomes a disciplinary or criminal matter?

That question is especially significant when placed beside AMU’s suspended student, Jadavpur’s contested student politics and SRFTI’s confrontation over an external organisation’s event.

Across campuses, the vocabulary changes — discipline, security, authorisation, indiscipline, protest, politics, safety.

The underlying anxiety does not.

From Jantar Mantar back to the hostel

This is where the CJP protests of June and July matter.

The movement began around alleged irregularities in NEET-UG and the examination system, but expanded into a nationwide youth mobilisation demanding accountability. On July 20, thousands gathered around Jantar Mantar for a proposed Parliament march; protesters faced police action, and Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan eventually resigned on July 25, with his resignation having been one of the central demands of the movement.

The significance of CJP was not merely that young people discovered protest.

They discovered that education itself had become political.

The examination determines the future.

The university determines the present.

And now students are questioning both.

For India's aspirational, educated youth, the bargain was supposed to be relatively straightforward: study, qualify, acquire a degree and enter a more secure adulthood.

That bargain has become harder to believe.

Graduate unemployment among those below 25 remains exceptionally high: the State of Working India 2026, using PLFS 2023–24 data, puts unemployment among graduates and above in that age group at 39.33%.

The examination may not guarantee a fair chance.

The degree may not guarantee employment.

The hostel may not guarantee safety.

The campus may not guarantee dignity.

And the administration may not always be trusted to provide the first answer when something goes wrong.

That is why reducing the current protests to “student politics” misses the point.

These are not necessarily one movement. They do not share one ideology, one organisation or even one demand.

What they share is a generation encountering institutions at their most vulnerable point.

A student at AMU is asking for a union.

A student at IIT Bombay is asking whether caste can be named and investigated without the institution closing ranks.

A student at Prayagraj is asking whether academic authority can be separated from caste prejudice.

A woman in a hostel is asking whether safety requires restricting her movement.

A student at SRFTI is asking who can enter an educational space — and what happens when an objection turns violent.

A student at LPU is asking whether an allegation concerning a woman’s safety will be answered before panic takes over.

A student at IISER Pune is asking what institutional care means after a death.

A nursing student in Lucknow is asking whether attendance can be allowed to eclipse illness.

And a student at TISS is confronting the increasingly consequential boundary between political expression and institutional discipline.

The common demand is therefore not simply a “say” in campus administration.

It is something more basic.

The right to believe that the space in which you are expected to build your future will protect your present.

A university cannot promise students a job.

It cannot eliminate every act of violence.

It cannot prevent every rumour.

It cannot remove caste from society by administrative order.

But it can determine what happens after a complaint, how quickly information is released, whether students are treated as adults rather than subjects, whether disciplinary power is accountable, whether political differences become physical threats, and whether safety is achieved through protection or restriction.

Those are not luxuries of campus democracy.

They are the minimum conditions under which education can mean anything.

The most revealing feature of India's student protests in 2026 may therefore be that they are no longer asking only what education will give them.

They are asking what the institutions educating them are allowed to take away.