Ten years without Najeeb: What happened to the ‘Idea of JNU’ and its promise of equality?

On October 15, 2016, Najeeb Ahmed, a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), went missing. The disappearance came a day after an alleged altercation with members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP). In the days that followed, students demanded answers from the university administration and sought accountability for what had happened. A movement emerged around a question that should never have become so difficult to ask: Where is Najeeb?

Ten years later, that question remains unanswered. The official investigation was closed after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filed its closure report, which a Delhi court accepted in June 2025. The Delhi High Court subsequently upheld the decision in December 2025. The courts have not established what happened to Najeeb or where he is.

But Najeeb's disappearance raises another question, one that concerns the political life of the university itself: whatever happened to the “Idea of JNU”?

I witnessed the political life of JNU from mid-2015 onwards. The university was a space where students became political not merely through elections or organised activism, but through classrooms, hostels, food courts and everyday conversations. Political socialisation was woven into campus life. The university's public image was closely associated with dissent, intellectual freedom, cosmopolitanism and the possibility of imagining a more inclusive India.

In February 2016, Professor Peter deSouza, writing in The Hindu, stated, “At JNU we produced and reproduced the idea of an India that was inclusive, anti-discriminatory, gender-just, environmentally sustainable, artistically creative, cosmopolitan and socially redistributive.” He further states, “In addition to being an incubator of personnel to the state and civil society, JNU has also been an incubator of dissenting ideas…A cosmopolitan university is a precious resource, for it continuously feeds the public sphere with questions and answers, with challenges to accepted truths and alternative readings of canonical texts. This is under threat today. Censorship of ideas and social relationships is being demanded by outsiders to the idea of JNU.”

There is much to defend in that vision of a public university. A university must sustain dissent, question authority and make room for ideas that challenge the prevailing order. Yet an idea, however progressive its stated principles, cannot be judged only by the values it proclaims. It must also be examined through the ways in which those values are practised, contested and sometimes denied.

This is where the Justice for Najeeb movement becomes significant. It asked what happens when the public sphere, which celebrates a university's commitment to dissent, confronts that same university with a demand for justice that unsettles its own institutional life.

The limits of the “Idea of JNU”

An idea can acquire legitimacy through the values it represents. Over time, those values can become idealised, repeated and protected until questioning the idea itself appears to be an act of hostility. The “Idea of JNU” was not immune to this possibility. Its celebration could sometimes become a substitute for examining the inequalities and exclusions within the university.

The problem was not that JNU had no tradition of dissent. It was that the existence of this tradition could be invoked as though it were sufficient evidence of the university's democratic character.

The Justice for Najeeb movement exposed this contradiction. Students were demanding answers about a missing classmate, the circumstances preceding his disappearance and the administration's response. The protest, including the blockade of the administrative building, became a confrontation over how the institution should respond to that demand.

The blockade was controversial. University officials objected to being confined, while protesting students insisted that the administration had failed to respond adequately to the disappearance. The disagreement itself deserves to be understood in its historical context. But the larger question remains: why did the demand for accountability so quickly become a problem to be managed, contained or brought to an end?

A public university cannot be absolved of scrutiny simply because it has a celebrated history of dissent. Nor does the defence of campus democracy end with opposing external attacks on the university. It must also involve examining the institution's own practices, its distribution of power and its response when marginalised students demand justice.

This is not to argue that every disagreement within JNU demonstrated hypocrisy, or that every person who opposed the blockade was indifferent to Najeeb. Such a conclusion would flatten the political disagreements that existed on campus. The more important question concerns the terms on which solidarity was expressed, the demands it was prepared to accommodate and the grievances it was willing to subordinate to the restoration of normality.

Whose suffering becomes visible?

One episode from the movement remains particularly revealing to me.

During the blockade, the wives of the vice-chancellor and registrar came to the administrative building seeking to meet their husbands on the occasion of Karva Chauth. The episode became the subject of public attention after the officials communicated their predicament on Twitter (now X). The resulting discussion intensified the pressure on the protesting students to call off the blockade.

The situation acquired a significance beyond the immediate disagreement over the protest. The demand for justice for a missing student was now being placed alongside an appeal to the legitimacy of family obligations and the distress caused by the officials' confinement.

What troubled me was not the desire of a wife to meet her husband. There is nothing inherently illegitimate about that desire. Nor should a mother's pain and a wife's concern be treated as mutually exclusive. The question was how these competing claims acquired public visibility and moral force, and which one became easier to recognise as deserving an immediate response.

Fatima Nafees was searching for her missing son. Her demand was not for a symbolic gesture or a public expression of sympathy. She wanted to know what had happened to Najeeb and wanted those responsible for finding him to act. Yet the university's response to the movement demanding answers was increasingly framed through the disruption caused by the protest.

The contrast was difficult to ignore. A wife's desire to meet her husband on a religiously significant occasion could readily become an appeal to public sympathy. A mother's demand to find her missing son, however, had to struggle against institutional indifference, political hostility and the pressure to restore normal functioning.

This is not a competition between two forms of suffering. It is a question about the unequal conditions under which suffering becomes publicly intelligible. Why does one claim so readily invite sympathy while another becomes an inconvenience? Why is the demand for institutional accountability so often displaced by a discussion of the inconvenience caused by those demanding it?

The point is not to speculate about the private intentions of university officials or their families. It is to examine the political effects of the public framing of the episode. When the suffering of those in positions of institutional authority becomes the immediate focus, the suffering that prompted the protest risks receding from view.

The question of Najeeb's disappearance was already being fought over in a politically charged environment, including anti-Muslim rhetoric directed at those demanding justice. In such circumstances, the framing of a protest matters. It can determine whether a marginalised person's demand is recognised as a legitimate claim or recast as a threat to institutional order.

Dissent without equality?

What is dissent without equality? And what does solidarity mean if it is extended selectively?

The Justice for Najeeb movement compelled us to confront the limits of a political culture that could celebrate dissent while struggling to accommodate the independent agency of the marginalised. A commitment to left unity or a broader progressive cause cannot, by itself, resolve the inequalities within the political formations that invoke it.

When unity becomes the overriding principle, there is a danger that particular grievances will be treated as secondary to the interests of a supposedly larger collective. Those who raise uncomfortable questions may then be asked, explicitly or implicitly, to defer their demands in the name of a common struggle.

This problem is not confined to JNU, nor is it unique to the political left. It concerns any formation that assumes its stated commitment to equality exempts it from examining its own practices.

The language of inclusion can coexist with social hierarchies. A space can celebrate diversity while expecting marginalised groups to conform to the priorities set by its dominant political actors. A movement can defend dissent against external authority while becoming uncomfortable when dissent emerges from within its own ranks.

For those of us concerned with social justice, this contradiction cannot be dismissed as a minor failing. Formal equality does not automatically dismantle the inequalities that shape whose voices are heard, whose suffering is acknowledged and whose agency is recognised. Solidarity requires more than declaring everyone equal within a political community. It requires examining the conditions under which some members of that community continue to be treated as less entitled to make demands.

The celebration of JNU's democratic legacy becomes inadequate when it does not also ask whether that legacy enables the marginalised to articulate their grievances without having to seek permission from established political authorities.

The question is not whether JNU deserves its reputation as a space of dissent. The question is whether that reputation can withstand scrutiny when the demand for justice challenges the institution's own conduct.

From nostalgia to conscience

There is a difference between remembering an institution's political legacy and treating that legacy as sacred. Nostalgia can preserve the memory of struggles, but it can also prevent us from asking whether their promises have been fulfilled.

The slogan We Are JNU can express a collective commitment to defend public education, academic freedom and campus democracy. But who is included in that collective, and on what terms? Does the slogan also make room for those whose demands disturb the institution's preferred image of itself? Can the university recognise the agency of a marginalised student without requiring that student's suffering to fit within a reassuring narrative of progressive unity?

These questions matter because the defence of a university's autonomy and the pursuit of justice within it are not opposing obligations. A university's democratic character cannot rest only on its resistance to external interference. It must also be measured by its willingness to confront inequalities within its own walls.

The same applies to the idea of India. If the nation is imagined as inclusive and democratic, that imagination must be tested against the experiences of those who find themselves excluded from its promises. A nation cannot claim to defend diversity merely by celebrating it in the abstract. Nor can a university claim to embody democratic values merely by invoking its history of dissent.

The marginalised and oppressed do not need to surrender their political agency to preserve the prestige of an institution, the unity of a movement or the moral comfort of a national imagination. Their demand for justice is not an interruption of democracy. It is one of the ways in which democracy is tested.

Ten years after Najeeb Ahmed went missing, the question of his whereabouts continues to haunt the university and the wider public. The closure of the investigation has not supplied an answer about what happened to him. His mother's search for answers cannot be made to disappear simply because the formal investigative process has reached a point of closure.

Remembering Najeeb must therefore mean more than commemorating a movement or repeating a slogan. It must also mean revisiting the questions that movement forced us to confront: the responsibility of public institutions, the unequal recognition of suffering, the limits of political unity and the relationship between dissent and equality.

If asking “Where is Najeeb?” is treated as an antagonistic act, then we must ask what kind of idea is being defended, and for whom. If the “Idea of JNU” cannot accommodate that question, its claims to social justice and solidarity remain incomplete.

The test of an idea is not how eloquently it speaks of justice when its own legitimacy is unchallenged. The test is what happens when the demand for justice comes from someone whose suffering unsettles that idea.

Ten years later, the question remains. So must our willingness to ask it.

Pallikonda Manikanta is a PhD scholar in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hyderabad and a founding member of Phule Ambedkar Centre for Philosophical & English Training (PACPET), Tellapur, Hyderabad. He worked with BAPSA at JNU and was active in the Justice for Najeeb Movement. Views expressed here are the author’s own.