“Is it Mahmoud?”
It was five minutes past midnight on Sunday, 9 March, and that was the message I sent frantically to a close friend of Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old Palestinian who had been a lead negotiator on behalf of student protesters at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment in Columbia University last April. This protest had inspired similar encampments across the US and the globe, in solidarity with Gaza.
For the past hour that night, we had been hearing unconfirmed claims of immigration officials having entered more than one residential building of Columbia University. One of the rumours making its way across in hushed whispers was that someone had been taken by law enforcement from one of the buildings.
At around midnight, I heard from a fellow journalist that it may have been Khalil. I messaged his friend immediately.
Minutes later, I called Khalil’s number, thinking there was a chance it’s a rumour, and that maybe he would pick up. He didn’t. We soon got confirmation that he had been arrested by agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Saturday night, in front of his wife Noor Abdalla, who was eight months pregnant.
In the hours that followed, we worked to report the story. Reporting on the protests, counter-protests, and mass arrests at Columbia over the past year and a half, I had come to know Khalil and we had spoken several times. The last of those conversations was just two days before his arrest.
On Thursday, 6 March, Khalil and I had a detailed chat, in which he told me how he felt he was a victim of anti-Palestinian racism, because of how Columbia University treated him. The conversation kept playing in my mind as we went over the details of our story on Khalil’s arrest.
Parallels in Persecution: Khalil and Khalid
As we worked on the story, a similar arrest from another day kept flashing across my mind. 13 September, 2020. The day another activist I had reported on, spoken to, interviewed, and met on numerous occasions, had been taken into custody by the Delhi Police. Umar Khalid.
The striking similarities between Khalil and Khalid’s stories are impossible to ignore. They both had been student activists at embattled universities considered to be hubs of liberal thought—Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi and Columbia University in New York.
Both the student leaders were subsequently subjected to crackdowns by authoritarian governments, intolerable of their dissent. Both their profiles, and the attacks against them, came into sharp focus due to their roles in historic protest movements—Khalil through his contributions as a lead negotiator of Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, and Khalid through his speeches and participation in the nationwide protests against India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
The identities of both were akin to targets on their backs—Khalil, a Palestinian critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza, and Columbia’s response to them; Khalid, a Muslim critical of the impact of Hindutva politics and policies on India’s minorities, and of the Narendra Modi government’s role in the process.
But that’s not all. Look deeper, and there are more similarities between the two. Both their arrests by law enforcement authorities had been preceded by online campaigns targeting them for their role as protesters and calling for them to be arrested.
Khalil was targeted for his presence as a pro-Palestine protester at Columbia and his role as a negotiator, by pro-Israel individuals and groups who wanted to see him arrested and deported. They carried out a two-day-long targeted online campaign against him, sharing their demands on social media and tagging US President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
On the third day, DHS agents arrested Khalil from the university housing building he resided in.
Khalid’s arrest, too, was preceded by a similar pressure campaign that focused on his speech at Amravati. Despite the intense efforts of their online detractors and the state apparatus, neither Khalid nor Khalil have been presented with any credible evidence to substantiate claims of criminal activity.
Rather, to the contrary, their targeted speeches speak volumes about their commitment to human rights. In fact, for both, the bogey of terror was brought up without substantiation—the DHS accused Khalil of leading activities “aligned with Hamas” but provided no proof for it.
Later, White House officials said that Khalil wasn’t being held because he had violated any law, but rather because his presence in the country "would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States".
Khalid, meanwhile, was arrested under a draconian “anti-terror law” on evidence that has repeatedly been reported to be full of gaps in logic and fact.
But why are pointing out these similarities even important? We know that authoritarian playbooks across the world draw from each other. However, when the parallels are this sharp, there are lessons waiting to be learned from a closer inspection of these similarities, not just in how independent institutions can become compromised in the face of authoritarianism, but also how such wanton exhibitions of power, discrimination, and glaring injustice can be met.
The Shadow of Authoritarianism
In a stunning caving into governmental pressure, Columbia University on Friday, 21 March, announced a slew of measures that demonstrated that it had effectively given in to several of the demands made by the Trump administration eight days ago as a “precondition” for federal funding. The demands had been made six days after the government had announced the cancellation of $400 million in federal funding to Columbia.
Among the measures was the empowering of campus security to make arrests, punishing students for wearing masks during protests, and fundamentally altering the functioning of the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) department.
The Trump administration had demanded that the department be placed under academic receivership for a minimum of five years. Academic receivership refers to a system in which control of the department is handed over to an individual or group outside it, that is, the faculty of the department no longer runs the functioning of the department. Sheldon Pollock, a former chair of the MESAAS department and professor emeritus of South Asian studies at Columbia, called the move a "ransom note" from the government.
The Trump administration did not publicly explain on what basis it was demanding a private university to censure a particular academic department as part of its supposed fight against antisemitism at university campuses. Yet, despite that extraordinary attack on the academic functioning of a private university, the Columbia administration has pretty much agreed to the demand.
Columbia University has now stated that they are “appointing a new Senior Vice Provost this week with a focus on promoting excellence in Regional Studies.” The portfolio of this provost will include “a thorough review of the portfolio of programs in regional areas across the University, starting immediately with the Middle East.”
By doing so, the university effectively issued an indictment of its own faculty. The MESAAS department was served up as people in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa often have been, as “collateral damage” in the pursuit of US interests.
In India, the government’s crackdown on JNU had a long-lasting impact on other institutions, such as St Xavier’s College in Mumbai, (which, like Columbia, is also my alma mater). The college would even hesitate to invite speakers who were critical of the government, to events and talks. This, at a college where Dr Binayak Sen had been invited after he was released from jail on trumped-up charges of sedition, where dissidents such as author Arundhati Roy and documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan were frequent visitors and speakers, screenings of films such as Final Solution and Ram Ke Naam were commonplace, and critics of extremist politics were welcome and not personas non grata.
But with the Modi government in power, and especially since the crackdown on JNU, all of that changed quicker than one could say “restrictions on academic freedom”.
The Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), also long considered a liberal hub, similarly changed tack under the Modi regime. In 2024, it revised its honour code for students by banning participation in demonstrations which are “anti-establishment” and telling them to keep away from “unpatriotic discussions”.
Following widespread criticism, the controversial honour code was withdrawn, yet the changes in institutional outlook at TISS over the past several years under Modi have been significant. For instance, in April 2024, TISS had suspended PhD scholar Ramadas Prini Sivanandan for participating in a student-led protest rally in New Delhi. Sivanandan was accused of engaging in “political activities”. The institute reportedly called him “anti-national” after the rally criticised the BJP-led government’s National Education Policy.
Chilling Effect Across Campuses
Going by the signs witnessed in the past few weeks in the US—Trump’s attacks on Columbia, the arrests and visa revocations of students, his threats to go after dozens of other universities that had witnessed pro-Palestine protests last year, the cancellation of federal funding to the university where the movement of encampments in solidarity with Gaza was born, and the capitulation by Columbia that followed—the chilling effect witnessed across campuses in India, especially those considered to be hubs of liberal education, could replicate itself in the US.
Yet, like the cowardice of the Indian mainstream media, particularly the television media, has shown us, compromises on integrity are a slippery slope and authoritarians keep demanding ever-greater compliance. It is not a binary of whether you are on their side and toeing their line, it is a spectrum of subservience that they will push you further and further on, in pursuit of the institutions serving the agendas of the government.
If the academic freedom at US universities is to be protected, it will come down to the resistance offered by the faculty members and the pressures they can apply on their administrations, to refuse to give in to more demands, and to continue to teach the ideas they have taught in the classroom, regardless of their university’s changing stances to the powers that be.
The tricky part here is that professors at Columbia and elsewhere in the US will have to figure out how they can most effectively register their dissent and create an impact.
By Friday night, multiple Columbia University professors were mulling resigning from the university. But a string of mass resignations by miffed faculty members at Columbia, for instance, might be received positively by a Trump administration who would love to see such professors gone anyway. And if they don’t resign but continue to operate under more and more restrictions applied by the university at the behest of the government, that too is a win for the Trump administration.
How, then, can they proceed, in a way that they potentially continue to stay at the university and teach, while also opposing the impingements on academic freedoms by the university and the government?
When the Process is the Punishment
Over the course of this battle for academic freedom at universities in the coming months and years under the Trump administration, there will be a thousand ways in which repression is executed by the long arms of the state, and by compliant university administrations. Groups will be sought to be silenced, individuals punished over and over again in attempts to break their spirit, as has happened in India.
For instance, the women’s rights advocacy group Pinjra Tod, which helped conduct protests in college campuses in different parts of the country, has been relatively dormant since the arrests of two of its leaders, Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita, in May 2020, in relation to the same Delhi riots cases under which Khalid was arrested four months later.
Let’s go back to Khalid as an example here. He had to fight even to receive his PhD degree from JNU, which sought to withhold it from him. They had also refused to accept his PhD thesis. Khalil, too, despite having completed his program at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) last December, had faced several issues with the university regarding whether he would be allowed to graduate.
Prior to his arrest, Khalid had stated that he was accused by the university’s office of misconduct just weeks before he completed his program in December 2024.
After refusing to sign nondisclosure agreements, Khalil reportedly said the university put a hold on his transcript and threatened to block him from graduating. But when he appealed the decision through a lawyer, he said, they eventually backed down.
Like in the case of the arrests that Khalid and Khalil are fighting in court, the process had become the punishment at their universities too, as otherwise routine steps would become laced with difficulties put in place by institutions displeased with their dissent against the government and the trouble it caused them.
A thousand cuts can break the spirit of many who resist authoritarian institutions and autocratic regimes. But, for Khalid and Khalil, and for many others like them, standing up against injustice is not an option they forego.
And despite the climate of concern that autocrats seek to create through their crackdowns, protests often fail to be quelled through extreme repression.
Despite the fears at Columbia, for instance, ever since Khalil’s arrest from within a Columbia residential building, there have been multiple protests inside and right outside the campus, where protesters have demanded Khalil’s release as well as advocated for Palestinian rights. Sometimes, even a thousand cuts aren’t enough.
Despite years of cracking down on JNU’s student protesters too, large numbers of students at the university continue to engage in political activism, advocacy and protests.
Legal Provisions, and the Last Recourse
The greatest weapon that autocrats hold is very often, the law. The power to bring in new ones, and pull out old, archaic ones, all in the interests of curbing dissent. The authoritarian playbook here too, is one that involves autocrats learning from one another.
In what could be seen as Prime Minister Modi borrowing a tactic from Trump's playbook, or perhaps a mere coincidence, the Indian government recently introduced a bill—just days after Khalil's arrest—that would reportedly grant the government the power to bar foreigners from entering or staying in case of threats to India's national security, sovereignty, and integrity, or over their relations with a foreign state.
The bill – titled Immigration and Foreigners Bill, 2025 – also covers cases related to public health concerns or any other grounds that the Central government may specify.
The part "over their relations with a foreign state" is eerily similar to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 in the US, under which Khalil is being held, which has a section that states that an "alien whose presence or activities in the US Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the US” could be deported.
Over the past few years in India, there have been increasing pressures on foreign individuals who have been critical of the Modi government. Some, like Indian-American politician Kshama Sawant, who has been a critic of Hindutva politics, have had their visa applications rejected. A French journalist, Sébastien Farcis, said last year that he had left India after more than 13 years because he was denied a work permit, a decision he called an act of "incomprehensible censorship".
Yet another French journalist, Vanessa Dougnac, left India in February 2024 after Indian authorities reportedly threatened to expel her for what they termed 'malicious and critical' reporting.
When the laws of a country are weaponised to target foreign nationals to preclude them from participating in speech critical of a government’s actions, there is little else the individuals can do but seek respite from the courts.
Over the course of the anti-CAA protests in 2019 and 2020, the matter of whether foreign nationals living in India would be allowed to protest against the Indian government had come up in court. In March 2020, the Calcutta High Court had ruled that Polish student Kamil Sedchinski of Jadavpur University could stay on in India, setting aside the expulsion order issued against him by the Foreigners’ Regional Registration Office (FRRO) for allegedly participating in an anti-CAA rally on 19 December 2019.
Six years later, like US permanent resident Khalil, Indian national Badar Khan Suri, a fellow at Georgetown University who has been detained by immigration authorities, is also relying on the judiciary to salvage his situation. In Khalil’s case too, a judge in New York has issued an order temporarily blocking efforts to deport him.
The independence of the judiciary is, therefore, crucial as efforts will undoubtedly be made by authoritarian governments to find their ways past the problem.
How Universities Die, or Survive
In the midst of all of this, however, a crucial question remains. The likes of Khalid and Khalil will continue to fight for their right to dissent, but will universities stand against an authoritarian regime that seeks to bully them into subservience?
Because when a government chokes academic freedoms, squeezes their funding, and arrests scholars who dare to disagree, a university that cowers down and caves in is as good as dead. It may still hold classes, conduct examinations, and confer degrees. But if it fails to enable an environment of free and critical thinking, and the pursuit of knowledge that challenges and questions hegemony and injustice—the university is dead. The killer may have been an authoritarian regime, but the accomplice would have been the university’s own administration.
On 21 March, when Columbia University announced its capitulation to the Trump regime by giving into demands by a federal government impinging upon its academic freedoms and administrative functioning, the university signed its own epitaph.
And that epitaph might as well have read, “We went down without a fight.”
(Meghnad Bose is an award-winning investigative journalist based in New York City, and a reporter and Delacorte Fellow at Columbia Journalism Review, a publication affiliated with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is a former Deputy Editor of The Quint. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)