That is not investigation; it is intimidation wearing an investigation’s clothes — a counter-terror agency turned into a tool against dissent.

Groundxero | June 22, 2026

At 4.30 in the morning on 18 June, a dozen National Investigation Agency (NIA) officers walked into the south Kolkata flat of Jhelum Roy — a scholar, an organiser with Feminists in Resistance, and one of the organisers of the Park Circus sit-in against the SIR deletions. She lives alone. At the same hour another team reached the Santoshpur home of Tathagata Roy Chowdhury, the 24-year-old general secretary of the Revolutionary Students’ Front. In Jaguli, Nadia, a school teacher and peasant organiser Sukumar Kayal was held at his school and interrogated.

The stated reason was a 2022 Ranchi case about an alleged Maoist revival plan in eastern India. But look at what the NIA took away: unbanned magazines, a book on student movements, leaflets on the SIR and the NRC, a receipt book for a political-prisoners’ legal defence fund — and, absurdly, photocopies of the NIA’s own charge sheet in the very case it had come to investigate. When Jhelum Roy said the books were neither banned nor hard to find, an officer reportedly replied that they “look suspicious.”

The test was not whether anything was illegal, but whether it looked like dissent. The NIA is the country’s premier counter-terror agency, yet it has been sent to police activists whose apparent offence is reading magazines and participating in democratic protests. No one has been charged. None of them needs to be. The early-morning raid, the seizure of books, and the summons to Ranchi — despite the NIA maintaining an office in Kolkata — are themselves the punishment: a terror investigation hung over the head of a citizen who has done nothing more than hold the wrong pamphlet. The point is not to convict. The point is to intimidate and make an example.

That one line captures the whole logic of the operation. The NIA is the country’s premier counter-terror agency, and it has been sent to police activists whose offence it seems is reading magazines and participating in democratic protests. No one has been charged. None of them needs to be. The early morning raid, the seizure of books, and the summons to Ranchi — though the NIA keeps an office in Kolkata — are themselves the punishment: a terror investigation hung over the head of a citizen who has done nothing more than hold the wrong pamphlet. The point is not to convict. The point is to scare, and to make an example.

This is why the raid is worth dwelling on. In one pre-dawn operation the state machinery reveals its character: an agency built to fight terrorism turned instead on the voices the government finds inconvenient. The NIA increasingly appears to have become an instrument for silencing dissent.

In Bengal, the dissent being silenced is clear enough. All three activists who were raided are known for opposing the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) — the roll revision exercise that, in the name of “cleaning” the voter lists, struck off lakhs of voters names and pushed them into the limbo of “adjudication” before the elections.

Roy helped lead the Park Circus sit-in; Kayal has been organising the voters whose names were pushed into adjudication. To strike a name off the rolls is to remove a citizen from the political community without charging them with anything, and it is the poor, the minorities, and women whose names are easiest to drop and hardest to restore. A struck-off voter is still in the country but no longer part in its politics. That the state sends its counter-terror agency after people who simply demanded the restoration of their constitutional right to vote tells us how it now regards the demand to be counted as citizens.

The same agency does heavier work elsewhere, and that is where the deeper purpose shows. Across Central India, Kashmir, Ladakh and the Northeast, peoples’ movements have long charged that the resistance to land and resource grabs are being crushed under the same “Maoist” brand — that people organizing defense of forests, minerals and rivers from a handful of corporate houses are tagged as terrorists so that people’s resistance can be policed and resources seized. That dimension is sharper in those regions than in West Bengal; this is not, in the main, a fight over Bengal’s resources. But it is the same agency, and the same label. The label does precise work wherever it is used: it converts a political conflict — over right to vote, or over a forest — into a law-and-order problem with a ready-made enemy, and lets loose the full force of the state on anyone in the way.

That is what makes the raids significant beyond Bengal. Three activists whose real offence was reading magazines and organising a sit-in protest have been pulled into a Jharkhand “Maoist” case. The template built to clear protesters off resource-rich land is now being imported to silence those defending the right to vote. The NIA is the thread that ties the two together — the single instrument by which dissent is criminalised, whether the issue is a forest in Bastar or an electoral roll in West Bengal.

So this is not one agency’s excess on one morning. It is a demonstration of how a government that can no longer win people over intends to carry on — force in place of argument, the bookshelf treated as an arsenal, the citizen treated as a suspect.

And it is plainly unconstitutional. The rights to speak, publish, read, assemble, and protest are guaranteed under Articles 19 and 21 — they are not favours the state grants to those who agree with it. To raid a home for unbanned books, seize a receipt book meant for the legal defence of prisoners, and summon a citizen across state lines for holding a pamphlet is to punish people for exercising those rights, without a charge, a trial, or a conviction. That is not investigation; it is intimidation wearing an investigation’s clothes — a counter-terror agency turned into a tool against dissent. Return the seized books. Restore the struck-off names. And call the raid by its proper name: not the enforcement of law, but an unconstitutional attempt to silence voices the government would rather not hear. An assault on these three is an assault on the rights of us all.