Delhi’s streets to Chandigarh campus, a wider politics of student dissent

The student protests unfolding in Delhi this week have a quieter, parallel current in Chandigarh.

Outside the State Election Commission office, Ameen Kaur stands with others demanding the removal of Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar, which is part of the Cockroach Jaata Party’s (CJP) campaign against voter roll revision. The slogans are similar. The campus that produces them is not.

Ask who owns dissent on Panjab University’s campus and the answer is easy: the Left, the Ambedkarites, and the Punjab-first groups. Ask who owns the presidency and the answer is the ABVP.

Last year the RSS’s student wing broke a 48-year jinx, winning the top post for the first time since direct elections began in 1977. This year, it retained the seat after a last-minute alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal’s student wing, Student Organisation of India (SOI). Yet, victories tell only part of the story.

Students of Panjab University protesting near Election Commission office in Chandigarh Sector 17 on Monday. (Express Photo by Kamleshwar Singh)

The only campus that votes

Student elections have been banned in Punjab since 1984, when the Centre outlawed the All India Sikh Students Federation (AISSF), whose president, Bhai Amrik Singh, a close associate of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, was killed in Operation Blue Star. Panjab University (PU) in Chandigarh remains the exception. And it has produced a curious paradox: those who lose the vote keep winning the argument about what the university should be.

Ameen came from Kapurthala last year to study political science. Within months, she was contesting for joint secretary of the Students’ Council for the All India Students Association (AISA), the CPI(M-L) Liberation’s student affiliate. She polled 1,141 votes, she says, on the strength of the manifesto alone. There was “no money, no muscle”, just demands for lower fees, hostels for all, and greater safety.

This week, the same energy took her to the EC protest, where AISA, Punjab Students’ Union (Lalkar), and Students for Society (SFS) stood alongside identity-driven outfits such as SATH, which speaks of “Panth Punjab”, and the Ambedkar Students’ Forum (ASF).

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Students of Panjab University protesting near Election Commission office in Chandigarh Sector 17 on Monday. (Express Photo by Kamleshwar Singh)

The same anger

The alliance is loud, not seamless. Jobanpreet of PSU (Lalkar), from Faridkot’s Pehluwala village, who studies Russian at PU, sees in the protests “a deep discontent with the system”. But he wonders whether demanding one man’s resignation is a path to structural reform.

The protesters are, however, united in their grievances: fee hikes which rocked Punjabi University in Patiala in August, faculty shortages, and crumbling infrastructure. Armaan, a 24-year-old AISA member studying law at PU, sums it up as “three attacks”: privatisation, centralisation under the National Education Policy, 2020, and saffronisation. Campuses, he says, are meant for “universal values, not the propagation of any one religion”.

The 2025 Senate agitation got a Punjab colour. When the Centre sought to restructure PU’s governing body, students rallied under the Panjab University Bachao Morcha and a governance dispute became a defence of Punjab’s claim over the institution.

More flashpoints followed: an affidavit requiring freshers to seek approval before protesting, Punjabi slowly vanishing from campus signboards, and the welcome RSS-linked speakers such as Sadhvi Rithambara received this July.

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After fees, safety cuts deepest. Women are 60% of PU’s students, yet Ameen says “you still don’t feel safe walking back from the library at night”.

Students of Panjab University protesting near Election Commission office in Chandigarh Sector 17 on Monday. (Express Photo by Kamleshwar Singh)

Villages in the lecture hall

Many of these students carry their villages with them. Sandeep Kumar of SFS grew up in a landless family in Behrampur Bet, near Chamkaur Sahib. His father studied till Class 10, his mother till Class 5. He has since finished a PhD at PU and is now studying law. Is he preparing for the civil services? Pat comes the answer: “No, I am preparing for a revolution.”

His activism has meant lifting restrictions on women hostel residents after sundown and securing a union for university workers. SFS, founded on Bhagat Singh’s 103rd birth anniversary, gave PU its first woman president, Kanupriya, an MSc Zoology student, in 2018. “Bhagat Singh was fighting for a reality, not a utopia,” Sandeep says.

Jodh Singh of SATH, a practising lawyer and recently elected senator, speaks of a different arc. SATH began in 2017 as a discussion circle on Punjab’s concerns. “Then we realised we needed political power.” He lost the presidential race in 2022 and won a Senate seat this month. Meanwhile, the outfit is active on campuses such as Punjabi University, Patiala, and Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, where it led a 12-day hunger strike against a fee hike in 2024.

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Students of Panjab University protesting near Election Commission office in Chandigarh Sector 17 on Monday. (Express Photo by Kamleshwar Singh)

The scorecard problem

Their record in elections is patchy. The SFS has been quiet since Kanupriya; while SATH has two big wins in Ranmeekjot Kaur (vice-president) in 2023 and Ashmeet Singh (vice-president) last year. Others haven’t scored in a decade.

The mainstream party-linked bodies have what these outfits lack: organisational machinery and deeper pockets.

These groups claim to speak for the grassroots and the voiceless, but ideology keeps them apart. Gaganpreet, 22, of SATH, who studies human rights, opposes the EC for refusing to recognise parties such as detained MP Amritpal Singh’s Akali Dal (Waris Punjab De), calling it proof of its “anti-Punjab bias” while clarifying that he is not affiliated to the outfit.

Jobanpreet will have none of it. “Identity politics cannot give solutions,” he says. Only “inquilabi organisations” can deliver education and employment for all.

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What is stirring is neither the organised Left of the 1970s nor the Panthic politics of earlier decades. It is a hybrid. What unites these groups is the belief that the political order has failed young people. What divides them is how it should change.

Ameen remembers a student from a village who told her that even a 5% fee hike will send her back to the bank for a bigger loan. For now, the ABVP has the presidency and the smaller groups have the protests. Whether they can bridge that divide is uncertain. But as long as a student has to borrow more to stay in university, the dissent will endure.

(Manraj Grewal Sharma is National Editor, North, The Indian Express)