Why Reading has Become a Threat to the Right-Wing Authoritarian State
Vidyasagar Sharma | 25 May 2026 | The Wire
The recent protest at Jamia Millia Islamia against a centenary event of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the university’s forceful response to students, once again reminds us that the Indian campus has become a site of ideological confrontation. What is at stake is not only the right to protest, but something more fundamental: the right to read, interpret, discuss, and collectively produce meaning.
This is not an isolated event. It belongs to a wider political trajectory in which universities are being restructured not merely as institutions of learning, but as sites of ideological discipline. The university social spaces where students sit and read together are increasingly viewed with suspicion and threat. The authoritarian state does not fear reading because reading is passive. It fears reading because, when done collectively and critically, it produces a reader autonomous of interpreting and countering hegemonic meaning…