JNU Violence And The ‘Victim Card’: When Campus Dissent Meets A Police Crackdown
Anand Teltumbde | 11 March 2026 | Outlook
The brutal police crackdown on protesting students at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on February 26 has once again laid bare the increasingly coercive reflex of the current regime in dealing with dissent. What began in August last year as student opposition to biometric surveillance on campus was steadily inflamed by the rustication and financial penalties imposed on five elected office-bearers of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU). The situation further escalated when the incumbent Vice-Chancellor remarked that Schedule Castes/Scheduled Tribes students often play the “victim card”. The reverberations of that statement travelled far beyond the campus, provoking condemnation across academic and social spaces.
The remark reopened a deep wound in India’s educational and moral imagination. Across universities and within Dalit communities, the reaction was one of shock and anger. This was not an offhand expression uttered in irritation. It strikes at the ethical core of how caste is recognised—or denied—in public discourse. To characterise the articulation of caste-based discrimination as a “victim card” trivialises centuries of structural humiliation and recasts ongoing experiences of exclusion as exaggeration or strategy…