The Arrest of Ali Khan Mahmudabad Isn’t Just About a Social Media Post — It’s About the Slow, Relentless Death of Dissent in India.

The recent arrest of Professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad — an academic, writer, historian, and, for many, a quiet but powerful voice of reason in a noise-heavy democracy — feels like a microcosm of everything slipping through the cracks in India today. It’s not just about one man and a social media post. It’s not even about Ashoka University’s tenuous relationship with political neutrality. It’s about a country slowly becoming allergic to thought. And we should all be deeply, sincerely afraid.

Mahmudabad, known for his work on nationalism, communal identity, and political history, did what many scholars around the world do routinely: question the motives behind national optics, especially when it involves a complicated intersection of religion, gender, and statecraft. In a post about “Operation Sindoor,” the government’s military response to a terror attack in Kashmir, Mahmudabad questioned the strategic visibility of two women — one Hindu, one Muslim — fronting the press coverage. Was it a performative gesture, he asked, aimed at constructing a digestible narrative about unity and inclusion in a deeply fractured socio-political landscape? He didn’t defame the military. He didn’t incite violence. He asked a question. But apparently, in today’s India, even questions are crimes.

The state responded with characteristic overkill. FIRs were filed accusing him of promoting enmity, threatening national integrity, and “insulting” the dignity of women officers — charges so wildly disproportionate they’d be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous. He was arrested in the dead of night and lodged in a Haryana jail. Let’s pause there: an Oxford-educated professor who teaches political theory and Islamic history, who has written essays echoing with nuance and deep compassion for a pluralistic India, was locked up because he refused to be seduced by state propaganda.

To say this was a chilling moment for Indian academia would be an understatement. It was a thunderclap. It shook the already-cracked scaffolding of intellectual discourse, fractured by years of silencing dissent, punishing students, censoring syllabi, and politicizing faculty. And yet, what made this moment particularly piercing was the silence that followed from the institution he called home — Ashoka University. The same Ashoka that sells itself as a haven for critical thinking, progressive scholarship, and academic independence. Where was the outcry? Where was the unequivocal support for a professor penalized for doing precisely what his job demands: thinking, speaking, interrogating power?

Instead, what we got was a measured, bureaucratic distancing that read like a press release from a company caught in a PR scandal. Ashoka didn’t defend its scholar. It defended its brand. In doing so, it reminded us that even private universities, those supposedly immune to state coercion, are now complicit in the slow erasure of academic courage. And if the “safe” spaces aren’t safe anymore — where do the rest of us go?

Of course, the students weren’t silent. Mahmudabad’s class, poetically titled Banish the Poets, released a statement condemning his arrest and celebrating his integrity. They spoke of a teacher who taught them to think beyond binaries, who emphasized compassion as much as critique. Their words were raw, defiant, and honest in ways institutional declarations rarely are. Because students, unlike institutions, aren’t driven by funding, political connections, or fear of headlines. They’re driven by a sense of justice — and perhaps a little naivety, the good kind, the kind we should all cling to in times like these.

But here’s the real tragedy: Mahmudabad is not the first to be punished for thinking out loud, and he will not be the last. The list is growing — with students slapped with sedition charges, professors forced to resign, journalists arrested for tweets, and activists imprisoned without trial. India, once a beacon of intellectual vitality and pluralistic debate, is slowly becoming a country where to dissent is to disappear. And we have normalized it. We have explained it away with phrases like “national security,” “social harmony,” and “anti-national sentiments.” We have allowed our fear to become policy.

What Mahmudabad’s arrest reveals — like a cracked mirror held up to the system — is not just the vulnerability of individual scholars, but the broader culture of intellectual self-censorship. Professors now second-guess their lectures. Students hesitate before quoting Arundhati Roy on Ambedkar or even Marx. Campuses, once breeding grounds for revolution, now host seminars on “how not to get in trouble.” And slowly, insidiously, the boundaries of acceptable thought shrink — until all we’re left with is an echo chamber of applause for the powers that be.

And let’s talk about Mahmudabad the person, not just the professor. A descendant of the Raja of Mahmudabad, with lineage rooted in the rich, complex legacy of Muslim political identity in pre- and post-partition India, he is not merely a man of books but of history. His presence in Indian academia is itself a reminder of the country’s intertwined, plural past — one inconvenient to the current monochrome narrative of nationalism. To arrest him is to symbolically arrest a certain idea of India: one intellectual, inclusive, layered, and unafraid to confront itself.

There’s also a deep irony in the fact that his critique centered around the tokenization of identities — women, Muslims — within state structures. The outrage against him only proves his point. The state loves a compliant minority. It loves diversity as long as it doesn’t talk back. It loves women officers who carry guns, but not women scholars who carry books. The moment identity intersects with critique, it becomes intolerable. And that is why Mahmudabad had to be punished — not for what he said, but for who he was when he said it: a Muslim intellectual with the audacity to demand more than symbolic justice.

As I write this, Mahmudabad is out on interim bail, restricted from commenting on the case — as if thought can be paused like a badly buffering YouTube video. The court has ordered a Special Investigation Team to examine the intent behind his post. Imagine that. A team to study what a professor meant when he raised a critical question on social media. Orwell would have blushed at the efficiency.

The academic community must not let this moment pass in silence. Not because Mahmudabad is a celebrity scholar or because Ashoka is a prestigious university, but because this is not about prestige. It is about precedent. If this arrest goes unchallenged, if it becomes just another headline in our overwhelmed news cycles, it will teach every young student in every university that thinking is dangerous, and safety lies in silence. That’s not a democracy. That’s an intellectual death wish.

We owe it to every future classroom, every library, every messy college debate, every half-scribbled revolutionary thought in a hostel notebook, to fight back. Because when a professor is arrested for speaking truth to power, we aren’t just losing a voice — we’re losing a future.

And we’re running out of futures to lose.

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