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The taming of the public sphere

2019–2020 saw an unprecedented intensification of attacks by state agencies on public universities and the academic community in India. In December 2019, the police entered the campuses of Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia against the background of protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, resulting in extensive physical violence and material damage in both places. Since then several students and teachers have been arrested, charge-sheeted or called for interrogation by the police, ostensibly in relation to instances of violence. Even before this, names of academics and intellectuals had appeared prominently in the lists of arrests made in several cases, including the Elgar Parishad case. Well-known scholars and university teachers such as Anand Teltumde, Hany Babu and Shoma Sen, young research scholars such as Umar Khalid, and students including Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal, are all in jail in relation to various cases, while several others, including Apoorvanand and Prem Kumar Vijayan, have been called for questioning and their phones seized by police. In addition to these academics, several intellectuals and artists have also been targets of similar measures. Interestingly, most of these figures have been widely known for their espousal of nonviolent forms of public criticism and protest, though investigations and charge-sheets have linked them to planning and instigating major instances of violence. Apart from specific individuals, the space of the liberal public university has in itself been portrayed in right-wing political discourse as the enclave of ‘anti-nationals’ and ‘urban Naxals’, words defined less by any specific meaning than by the hostility and hatred they express and provoke. India is not unfamiliar with governments using state agencies for political harassment: in the past and the present, we have seen ruling dispensations unleash offensives on political adversaries through income tax raids, corruption cases and probes into alleged infractions of official procedure dug up from the past. Governments and ruling parties usually portray such actions as non-political (‘let the law take its course’), applauding themselves for bringing past abusers of power to book. While such leveraging of state power to suppress political opposition has continued and become pervasive, the recent arrests of academics and students may presage something new. One needs to see these more specifically in relation to a set of interconnected interventions aimed at changing the structure of the public sphere. They were preceded over the past decade by a largely successful attempt to change the character of news media through aggressive investigations and raids, as well as through proprietorial conquests effected by buying