Students Won't Be Quiet

A democracy dies when critical voices are absent. We, in India, are in danger of a silent democracy. Either we let the rulers suffocate our voices or we get the courage to stand up, raise questions, and fight back. Students Won’t Be Quiet is a book that documents the stories of how students across the country have fought to define our idea of India.

Students Won’t Be Quiet records some historic student movements, which began with issues at the local level but became national issues. Each of the struggles documented in this book is fought on two levels, simultaneously separate yet integrated – they raise the immediate demands of the students, and they fight to keep Indian democracy alive. At the heart of these struggles is the fight to defend the inheritance of the freedom movement and of the early decades of nation-building: democracy, pluralism, secularism, and socialism.

The book has a pan-India character, with essays on Banaras Hindu University, Delhi University, Film and Television Institute of India (Pune), Hyderabad Central University, Indian Institute of Science (Bengaluru), Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Jadavpur University (Kolkata), Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi), Pondicherry University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai), as well as on students’ struggles in Assam, Kerala and Himachal Pradesh.