A Pune Police raid at Delhi University professor Hany Babu's house drew sharp reactions on Wednesday from a section of the varsity's students and Jawaharlal Nehru University teachers, who dubbed it as an attempt to "intimidate and harass him".
The students of the Delhi University's (DU) English Department, where Babu has been teaching for close to a decade, staged a protest against the raid. They said such surprise raids "without warrants" were "illegal".
The Pune Police had on Tuesday searched 45-year-old Babu's house in Sector 78 of Noida, adjoining the national capital, in connection with the 2017 Elgaar Parishad case for alleged Maoist links.
The search conducted at Babu's residence is another "shocking episode in the ongoing authoritarian attempts by the current regime to intimidate and silence activists, writers, professors, journalists, and human rights defenders across the country," the Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers' Association (JNUTA) said.
"This raid on him also foregrounds the heights that police paranoia about critique and dissent has scaled, so much so that reading and writing are now seen to be suspicious activities," it said.
The JNUTA claimed that police spent an inordinate amount of time going through Babu's book collection, ultimately settling on confiscating two books that are freely available in the public domain, and not on any list of banned publications.
The teachers' body said it sees this act as embodying a message being sent out to all academics -- "If you read (or write) about what a ruling dispensation determines to be impermissible, expect the state to come calling."
Given how much the professor cares for language equality and the inalienable right of every language in the country to advance, it is indeed "shocking" that he is being harassed, one of Babu's former students said
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