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Snapshot of the day
October 29, 2026
Anirudh S.K., Kalrav Joshi
After an 18-day-long agitation for restoring an elected students' union – which has been defunct since 2006 – Jamia Millia Islamia was forced to agree to the demands of protesting students following discussions with the VC and other officials late on Thursday. The university has set May 15, 2027 as the deadline for finalising the student union’s constitution, and elections are to take place within six weeks of the next academic year beginning July 16, 2027, in accordance with the Lyngdoh Committee’s recommendations. Having wrested this basic democratic right from their administration, protesting students called off their hunger strike and celebration ensued in and around campus, incidentally on Jamia’s 106th anniversary. The university again said it would revoke all disciplinary measures, including show-cause notices and suspensions, against protesting students.
Despite the university’s announcement, concerns remain over the fate of detained students and those facing police action. The Delhi police have registered two FIRs over alleged vandalism during the protests. Two students and National Students’ Union of India activists, Zeeshan Khan and Mohd Faizan, were sent to Tihar jail for three days, after they were allegedly detained illegally for 24 hours before being produced before an executive magistrate.
The hard-won victory comes almost seven years after the state stormed Jamia’s library and assaulted students during the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act. From that crackdown to the fight for elected representation, students have continued to resist the curtailment of their rights at the institution, including by way of a closure of campus, the cutting off of water supply, the deployment of security personnel and the imposition of prohibitory orders. Earlier the Jamia administration attempted to placate students with a vague assurance that elections would be conducted within 15 days of a constitution being finalised, but the protesters weren’t having any of it.
Opposition leaders and members of civil society will hold a ‘public impeachment’ of chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar tomorrow as part of the ongoing agitation seeking his resignation and opposing the special intensive revision of voter rolls. The proceedings, which is to take place at Rajya Sabha leader of opposition Mallikarjun Kharge’s residence and feature people affected by the SIR, will be presided over by former Lok Sabha speaker Meira Kumar. Earlier this year the opposition twice introduced impeachment notices against CEC Kumar: the first time round they were rejected by the chairmen of both houses of parliament and the second one was simply put on ice.
According to home minister Amit Shah, opposition to the SIR is really a ploy to “protect infiltrators”; his comrades in the BJP have made similar statements and the EC too cited undocumented immigrants as one reason why it began the revision in the first place. Well then, with the exercise having lopped off crores of names from the voter rolls, surely it would have involved the large-scale removal of such immigrants, as Shah and others seem to insinuate? Asked for this data by the Hindustan Times‘s Himanshi Dahiya, only six chief electoral officers of 26 contacted provided any figures, and across their jurisdictions they discovered a whopping… ~1,600 suspected foreign nationals on the rolls. The electorate in these six states totals 9.86 crore individuals. Five other state officials claimed they did not have any data to furnish.
One of the states that did supply this data was Jharkhand, where in the run-up to the 2024 elections the BJP had sounded a loud alarm against ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’. How many undocumented nationals are here we do not know, but during the SIR officials have detected a grand total of three of them on the rolls, and they are not from Bangladesh but from Afghanistan. Jharkhand’s final rolls are due on November 30 (more on the SIR further below).
