ThePrint’s latest report on the nine Tata Institute of Social Sciences students booked over the 12 October 2025 tribute to G.N. Saibaba is, on its own terms, a sympathetic and well-reported account of collateral damage, lost placements, seized devices, and derailed dissertations. What it is not is an account of why a Sessions Court, working through the case diary rather than the campus rumors, granted anticipatory bail to seven of the nine and refused it to two. This selectivity in presenting the facts is the actual story, and it deserves more scrutiny than the “students punished for lighting candles” framing allows.
A careful reading of the four bail orders in the applications of Abhirup Paul, Kamakhya Prasad Das, Satyam Yadav, and Hardika Bhagat, among others, suggests that the coverage has reduced a nuanced judicial decision to a single general grievance. In doing so, it has underplayed the one thread in the case that most obviously calls for closer examination: the pattern connecting TISS’s institutional history of anti-nuclear field research to the “field work” explanation now being offered for the seized digital material.
The Sessions Court’s four orders, running to several thousand words apiece, are unambiguous that the nine were never treated as a single class of accused. Uttkarsh Khuntia, Yash Kaundilya, Avantika, Ishpreet Kaur, Hardika Bhagat, Satyam Yadav, and Nikita Dsouza were granted pre-arrest bail because, in the court’s own words, nothing beyond attendance and, in some cases, reading a poem was found against them: no criminal antecedents, no incriminating material, or prior cooperation with the investigation.
Abhirup Paul and Kamakhya Das were treated differently, and the orders explain why: slogans demanding the release of Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, both under UAPA trial, both denied bail by the Supreme Court itself, raised at what the court explicitly noted was not a public protest site but a closed campus gathering; downloaded Maoist literature; and deleted data recovered from their devices. WhatsApp exchanges the investigating agency read as documenting “field work” for banned organizations rather than coursework and, in Das’s case, an intervening police complaint alleging she threatened an investigating officer during the pendency of her own bail plea. The court was careful to say that paying tribute to an acquitted man is not, by itself, a crime. What moved it to order custodial interrogation was the combination of slogans, seized material, and alleged intimidation, not the candles.
This is where the case for closer scrutiny gets more specific, and where ThePrint’s report is thinnest. The claim “details about fieldwork” recovered from student devices were merely routine coursework rests on an assumption that TISS field research and organized political activism against state infrastructure projects are separate categories that happen to look similar on a phone. TISS’s own institutional record complicates that assumption considerably.
The Jamsetji Tata Centre for Disaster Management at TISS produced an “independent social impact assessment” of the 9,900 MW Jaitapur Nuclear Power Project in Ratnagiri district, a report that concluded the government had misrepresented the site’s seismic risk and was not transparent about the project’s social costs. That assessment was subsequently cited by activist groups opposing the plant, at a moment when protests at Jaitapur had already turned violent, with a fisherman killed in police firing in April 2011 and dozens arrested in earlier land-acquisition demonstrations. That same year, TISS students publicly refused their convocation certificates from the then Union Environment Minister, staging a placard protest against Jaitapur on the university’s own campus.
None of this is being cited to suggest that the current nine students, or any specific present-day faculty member, directed anyone toward a nuclear site. No such claim appears anywhere in the case diary excerpts reflected in the four orders. The point is narrower and more important: TISS has an institutionally documented history of “field work” funded, credentialed, and published under the university’s own name, which has been used as input for organized opposition to a strategic national infrastructure project. Given that history, an investigating agency finding downloaded Maoist literature, deleted chats, and travel records described internally as “field work” on two students’ devices is not acting on a baseless suspicion.
It is following a pattern the institution itself created. That is precisely the kind of institutional memory a ground report should surface before reassuring readers that “fieldwork” is a self-evidently innocent explanation and it is the angle that has gone almost entirely unexamined in the reporting so far.
The broader implication is that “academic fieldwork” functions at TISS as a term flexible enough to cover both a dissertation chapter and a courier trip, and that the ambiguity is not incidental. Universities that fund and legitimize field research into contested state projects should expect that credential to be invoked, sooner or later, by people using it for purposes well beyond a thesis. Whether that is what happened with Paul and Das is exactly what custodial interrogation is meant to establish, which is the court’s own stated rationale, not an outside accusation.
ThePrint’s report relies heavily on the students’ own account: a reading group, two poems by Saibaba shared in advance, and a modest gathering near a hostel. That description may be entirely accurate for most of the nine. It does not, on its own, account for what investigators say was recovered from two specific phones. An ordinary account of shared readings does not explain deleted WhatsApp chats and advocates Vijay Hiremath’s question to ThePrint: how can honoring an acquitted man be a crime? It is something The court agreed in the case of seven students whom it granted bail, but for Paul and Das, the issue was not limited to what the advocate claimed.
This also draws on TISS’s more recent institutional history. Mahesh Raut, a TISS alumnus, spent more than five years in custody in the Elgar Parishad case before the Supreme Court granted him interim bail on medical grounds in November 2025, a case built substantially on the same Maoist-linked ecosystem the current FIR gestures toward, and one in which the trial is still pending nearly eight years after the initial arrests. That history does not establish anything about the guilt of the nine current students, and treating alumni association as evidence would be exactly the sloppy reasoning that undermines legitimate scrutiny. But it does mean the investigating agency’s caution in this instance did not emerge from nowhere, and a report that omits it leaves readers with an artificially clean slate.
Kedar Naik, assistant professor of geopolitics at the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, has made a related argument in his earlier writing on TISS’s institutional churn since its 2023 shift to direct central oversight: that “academic freedom” and “field work” have increasingly functioned as institutional cover rather than description. A syllabus that includes Marxist theorists does not, by itself, explain possession of banned organizational literature obtained through channels outside that syllabus. A university’s own funded research into a contested infrastructure project does not, by itself, explain a student’s undisclosed travel to sites tied to banned organizations. In both cases, the academic framing is doing more work than the facts on record support, and the burden of distinguishing genuine scholarship from proxy activism should fall on the institution and the accused, not on a court asked to take the word “research” at face value.
Stripped of the framing built around loss and derailed careers, the Sessions Court’s order is a fairly restrained document: seven released without much argument, two held back on specific and articulated grounds, and an explicit finding that honoring a dead man is not itself illegal. That is a court drawing a line between mourning and mobilization, not an institution criminalizing grief. The nuclear-research history, the Elgar Parishad precedent, and the specific digital evidence against two named individuals are the parts of this story that argue for more caution before treating the case as a simple morality tale about campus repression, and they are, as Naik has separately argued, exactly the parts missing from the reporting.
Editor’s note: This article is based on the anticipatory bail orders passed by the Sessions Court for Greater Mumbai in ABA 2071/2025, ABA 2072/2025, ABA 2074/2025, and ABA 2082/2025.
