Thirty-one Indian diasporic and international civil society organisations have released a joint statement condemning the enforced disappearances and torture of student and youth activists in and around the city of New Delhi. The statement highlights the implications of this incident and how the state authorities are flagrantly disregarding India's international human rights obligations.
This action of the Special Cell of Delhi Police on student and youth activists speaking out on state excesses in India is not an incident that happened in a vacuum but points to the suspension of democracy in India and how the state authorities are flagrantly disregarding India's international human rights obligations.
The statement recalls previous incidents and refers to the broader systemic attempt to dismantle India’s civil society. It points to the similarities in the complete inversion and disregard of the rule of law that has been more evident in some regions such as Kashmir, Bastar and Manipur and how it is increasingly becoming normalised throughout the country.
The full statement is below.
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This joint statement highlights the implications of the enforced disappearances and torture of student and youth activists in and around the city of New Delhi, the national capital of India.
A previous joint statement on repression in two universities in Delhi, published on 5 March 2025 noted that students speaking out on the ongoing state violence in the Adivasi region of Bastar, Chhattisgarh, in central India, and the increasing systematic exclusion of Muslims as citizens of India, were being “arbitrarily picked up, going ‘missing’ while known to be detained in police stations, with some of them being subject to illegal interrogation by intelligence agencies whose remit is high-level national security.” All these actions by state authorities were being justified by “a narrative that delegitimises student and wider activism in public as fearful ‘urban Naxalism’ or Muslim-led disruption against a ‘peaceful Hindu’ state.”
On 17/18 July 2025, ground reports alerted that many student and youth activists, including some of those who had been targeted in the incidents noted in our previous statement, had been missing since several days and more were continuing to disappear.
It emerged that on 9 July 2025, activists Gurkirat, Gaurav, and Gauraang of the Bhagat Singh Chhatra Ekta Manch were disappeared in Delhi. On 11 July 2025, Ehtmam and Baadal of the Forum Against Corporatization and Militarization, which has been campaigning against the state excesses in Bastar, were also disappeared in Delhi. Around the same time, Samrat Singh was disappeared from Yamunanagar, Haryana, “without the knowledge of local authorities and outside the jurisdictional mandate of the Delhi Police”. We emphasise our use of the term “disappeared” because no arrest warrants were produced, the people were simply forcibly abducted by state authorities and held in a local police station in the middle of Delhi. For some days, no-one knew where they had gone and they had no access to their family or to legal counsel. They were not produced before a magistrate as is required under the law within 24 hours of arrest. The Campaign Against State Repression’s (CASR) statement notes that while in custody, the activists were “stripped naked, beaten, electrocuted, and subjected to degrading treatment including having their heads submerged in toilet bowls. The police also issued horrific threats of sexual violence, particularly against female activists, who were told they would be raped using rods.” They were asked to sign blank documents and we can assume that these might be used against them or to incriminate other activists in due course. They were then released one by one around 18 July 2025, but on 19 July, news came of one more disappearance – Rudra, student at Zakir Hussain College, Delhi University.
Such enforced disappearances, once a feature from heavily militarized areas such as Kashmir, Bastar and Manipur, are today being seen across the length and breadth of India, rural and urban areas. While this scale is unprecedented, it is not unexpected as the groundwork for this has been in the making for a while. In 2021, India’s handpicked National Security Advisor Ajit Doval had openly declared that civil society was the “new frontier of war”. From the surveilling, silencing and incarcerating of key civil actors, organisers and mobilisers working with marginalised communities to the squeezing of financial sources, its systematic dismantling has been going on in several ways for a few years. In the fall of the following year, the Home Minister Amit Shah “presided” over a “Chintan Shivir” – translated as “reflection camp” – of home ministers, lieutenant governors and administrators of union territories, state home secretaries, director generals of police and director generals of central armed police forces and central police organizations from across the country for “brainstorming improvements” to national security strategies and tactics. This grand assembly of India’s “security apparatus” took place at Surajkund in Haryana. On 28 October 2022, Narendra Modi addressed the conglomeration by video link. Among other “suggestions”, he offered this “pearl of wisdom”: “Every form of Naxalism, be it the one with guns or the one with pens, have to be uprooted”. This echoed the order by two judges who had suspended the late 90 per cent disabled Professor G.N. Saibaba’s first acquittal in an extraordinary hearing of the Supreme Court of India on a weekend and opined that this was justified as the “brain was more dangerous” than “direct involvement”. Another useful strategy “suggested” by Narendra Modi at Surajkund was to re-route policing resources from investigating petty crimes – by decriminalising trading and business safeguards – into strengthening anti-terrorism laws and digital surveillance mechanisms. In other words, it was time to extend the suspension of the Constitution as had already been done in Kashmir, Manipur and Bastar.
The present enforced disappearances and torture behind the walls of a police station can only be understood as the further entrenchment and normalisation of state violence as well as disregard for due process as a mode of governance, now extending from the forests of Bastar and Kashmir to the heart of the capital. It was intended. The police station that is the site of the latest accounts of torture of India’s brightest students and youth is located in a prime colony of New Delhi – New Friends Colony, a locality with a mix of social classes including former navy and army officers, businessmen and more modest residents. That the torture is happening under their noses, in the national capital under BJP, exemplifies once again the normalisation of state violence of India.
Let us go through the violations in the present still-ongoing incident that completely lacks any recourse to due process, legal documentation and procedural safeguards typically required under Indian constitutional law and established criminal procedure. There is no information of any formal acknowledgment of arrests by the competent authorities, nor any indication of judicial oversight or documentation demonstrating that the detained individuals were produced before a judicial authority within the legally mandated timeframe under Indian law. All these constitute enforced disappearance with the violation of the right to be informed of the grounds of arrest (no arrest memos or warrants were presented), the right to legal counsel, the right of families to be informed, and the right to life and dignity. The threats of sexual violence using rods are constitutive of sexual torture under laws and conventions against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
All these suspensions of rights amount to a multitude of violations of both domestic and international laws, statutes and conventions that safeguard our civil and political rights, which include the right to protest against state excesses. India is obligated under international human rights law, particularly the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which it is a State Party, to uphold the rights of all persons deprived of liberty, including protection from arbitrary arrest, prompt access to legal counsel and judicial review (Article 9(1)–(4)). International standards, as reflected in the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance – which India has signed but regrettably not yet ratified – prohibit secret detention (Article 17(1)) and require that all detainees be held in officially recognised facilities, with regularly updated, accessible and centralised registers (Article 17(2)–(3)).
We, Indian diasporic and civil society groups around the world, call for a full and independent investigation into the circumstances of the illegal detentions, torture and intimidation by the police in Delhi. We unequivocally condemn the complete inversion of the rule of law by the Indian state, the misuse of “law and order” protections and laws, and normalised and widespread use of surveillance, enforced disappearances, and custodial violence against its own citizens.
Signatories
International Solidarity for Academic Freedom in India (InSAF India)
India Labour Solidarity (UK)
South Asia Solidarity Group
Students’ Federation of India - United Kingdom
Anti-Imperialist Front (Britain)
International Council of Indian Muslims (ICIM)
12ummah.com
Prof Saibaba Study Circle
Sofia Karim, Turbine Bagh, London
SOAS Ambedkar Society
Hounslow Friends of Palestine
Indian Workers Association (GB)
Indian Scheduled Caste Association UK
Hindus for Human Rights UK
Oxford South Asian Ambedkar Forum (OxSAAF)
Justice For All Canada, (Toronto, ON)
Canadian Forum for Human Rights and Democracy in India
Hindus for Human Rights USA
Brighton Ambedkar Reading Circle
other indias collective (The Netherlands)
Alliance Against Islamophobia
Telangana Vidyavanthula Vedika - North America
Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC)
The Humanism Project (Australia)
Indian Alliance Paris (IAP)
South Asian Diaspora Action Collective (SADAC)
Institute for Policy Studies Climate Policy Program, USA
Boston South Asian Coalition (BSAC)
CERAS - Centre sur l'Asie du Sud/South Asia Forum
Progressive Students’ Group – South Asian University
ROT Collective (UK)