As Kashmiri students prepare for the unimaginable, Ashoka sits still: Kashmiri students’ open letter to the student body

For over ten hours now, friends and family have been sending videos of rushing airplanes and explosions. We write this, in fear, in exhaustion, in dread, in abandonment, in silence, and in disbelief. While Kashmir prepares for the unimaginable, its students at Ashoka have been left to fend for themselves. We oscillate between the uncertainty of whether we’ll be able to go home at all in the coming days and, if we do, whether we’ll ever be allowed to return. Around us, people plan their summers, sit for exams, and make holiday plans. We watch, unable to move, stuck between the threat of clashing borders and the silence of those who claim to stand for justice. Not a word has been said, not a hand extended; not even the courtesy of acknowledgement. The institutions built on the language of care offer none. It is not that we are abandoned. It is that no one even notices we are here. 

It started when, on 22nd April 2025, a militant attack in Kashmir’s Pahalgam claimed the lives of 26 individuals, most of them tourists. Following this tragic incident, Kashmiris across Indian states, especially students, became instant proxies for nationalistic rage. In Dehradun, members of the Hindu Raksha Dal circulated a threatening video, demanding that all Kashmiri Muslims leave the state by 10 a.m. the next day. Two days later, students abandoned their hostels and spent the night at the airport, desperate for safety. Across cities like Jammu, Chandigarh and Mohali, Kashmiri students were physically assaulted, verbally hounded, and in some cases, evicted by landlords. There was no national outrage or institutional protection accorded to them.

Whenever violence flares or nationalism mobilises, Kashmiris, no matter where we live, become suspect. Kashmiri students in India often occupy a state of permanent suspicion. We are constantly observed, frequently questioned, and precariously suspended between conditional belonging and outright hostility. This cycle is neither new nor surprising. What remains shocking is the patterned indifference that follows. In 2019, after the Pulwama attack, dozens of Kashmiri students were violated across universities. Now, after Pahalgam, the script repeats with more speed and less shame. This time, very few national leaders appealed for calm, and no educational institution took preemptive steps to protect its Kashmiri cohort. 

In this climate of fear and uncertainty, Ashoka University has remained conspicuously silent. There has been no public statement from even the very celebrated, so-called student-centric student government acknowledging or planning with regard to the lynching attempts, hate-fueled evacuations, or the distinct precarity faced by Kashmiri students. There has been no internal communication offering psychological aid to us. Notably, no logistical support, especially transport, has been offered to Kashmiri students preparing to leave at the end of the term i.e. the first two weeks of the month of May. During a period where mob vigilantism and targeted suspicion render public travel unsafe for visibly Muslim, Kashmiri individuals, the absence of institutionally arranged transport is not just an inconvenience. It is a quiet complicity that forces the most vulnerable to navigate danger alone. 

Our friends, fellows and professors may speak of empathy, representation, and care in classrooms, but when our windows burn, no one asks us how we are. There is no academic support, no emails, no pauses…no one checks in. It is as if we exist in their imagination but not in their institution. I don’t know how to write to my professor, what language to use for wars which punctuate their reading lists but await me at home anytime now. They don’t reach out either. And, of course, this is not new — to perform normalcy, to be buried under it, to not be given a choice but to be normal. It may not be on you to understand us, but it is not on us either. It is not on us to explain ourselves when we get accused of doing identity politics if we are conscious of our troubled identity. If our identity pushes us to speak of being abnormal all the time, so much that you hate us for it, for being too much and “too political”, then it is equally a function of your identity that you can afford to not think about it. After all, whose window is still burning?

At first glance, Ashoka might claim distance since no assaults have occurred on our campus. Our students are comparatively ‘safe’. But institutional complicity begins with the decision to look away from acts of violence. When universities like Ashoka refuse to acknowledge the specific vulnerability of Kashmiri students who, in this moment, are being hunted in other academic and social spaces, they become participants in a broader ecosystem of invisibilisation. Ashoka’s silence should not be read as neutrality. In moments of hate, silence performs a politics of its own. It allows majoritarian sentiment to pass unchecked and minoritized fear to remain unacknowledged. It reifies the idea that some bodies require protection while others must earn legitimacy to earn it, except it comes only with the accident of birth. 

The university that has previously mobilised resources, issued statements over multiple pressing concerns and projected itself as an institution of inclusive excellence has thus failed to acknowledge a violent, identity-targeted crisis affecting its own students. For over two weeks, our fellow students were being harassed and lynched in colleges, hostels, streets and metros, as we crumbled under fear. Today, again, we sit here, with our flights cancelled, airports shut down and assignments unfinished. There was no support then, there is no support now. If Ashoka can not name this violence, cannot extend protection, cannot speak to the fear held in the bodies of its Kashmiri students as we pack our bags and book rides home, then its claims of inclusive excellence must be questioned. And, if a university does not claim its Kashmiri students in moments of danger, it should not claim them in its diversity brochures either. 

This article has been written by a group of Kashmiri students at Ashoka University. The authors have chosen to remain anonymous for reasons of personal safety.