Groundxero | March 5, 2026

By Mouli Sharma

Fifty-one JNU students were detained and 14 arrested by the Delhi Police on February 26 over a students’ protest march to the Ministry of Education, demanding implementation of the recently stayed UGC guidelines for the prevention of caste discrimination in higher education institutions, alongside condemning the casteist remarks made by JNU Vice-Chancellor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit in a podcast interview.

Ahead of the students’ march, the Delhi Police turned the JNU campus area into an emergency security zone, barricading and locking university gates and virtually imprisoning students within their institute. Five layers of barricades were erected outside the JNU main gate, and Rapid Action Force personnel, anti-riot vehicles, and detention buses were stationed there. This demonstrated the premeditated nature of the police repression and mass detentions that followed, when students broke down the locks and pushed past the barricades to resist the confinement.

Police initiated a brutal baton charge in response, with officers in civil outfits caught attacking students on video. Male officers were seen dragging both male and female students across the roads, beating them with batons, and assaulting them brutally enough that their bodies were left covered in bruises.

Fifty-one protesters were detained in the process and arbitrarily taken to Jaffarpur and Kapashera police stations, the former being especially remote in location, past Najafgarh near the south-western border of Delhi.

Late at night, those detained at Jaffarpur were shifted to Kapashera, where officers claimed to know neither what the protest had been about nor why the students they were holding were being detained at all. The intervening night of February 26–27 outside the Kapashera Police Station resembled a kind of grimly absurd theatre: officers, who have now become a familiar presence for those detained from protests across Delhi NCR, parroted rhetorics reminiscent of the Nuremburg defense as they pleaded: “we are just following orders”, “our hands are tied”, and most absurdly, “it is not our job to know the law.”

Eventually, FIRs were registered against 14 individuals, and they were arrested. All of them, as of March 3, are out on bail.

Photos of victory celebration

Mouli Sharma is an independent journalist from New Delhi. All photographs are by Mouli Sharma.