—by Lokesh P
Some days you go to the mess, try to pour daal in your thaali, and, surprise! There’s no daal in the so-called daal. You then dive in with your chamcha, somehow fish out three tiny pieces, and pray you don’t lose them on the way back.
Free speech on campus these days feels exactly like that.
When was the last time you saw an angry, satirical email about insti policies? Go on, think. Yeah, hasn’t happened since October 6th 2024, when our ex-SGS sent the now-forgotten email titled “Proposed Changes to IITM Email Usage” , effectively saying: “Sorry, free speech is no more. Om Shanti.”
Since then, individual students can’t email to the GSB on the late students’ group. The excuse? Saving storage and reducing inbox clutter. Cute, right? Except the policy somehow achieved the exact opposite.
Now, every ISB email goes through the DoSt office, every club email through its respective secretary. Earlier, if I didn’t want mails from a random club, I could just block them — inbox clean, Google happy. But under this genius new policy, you can’t block anyone. Everything comes from DoSt or secretaries. Block those, and you might as well block half the insti. Problem solved, right?
So what’s the real motive here? Is the admin clueless? Maybe. Is the SGS committee out of touch? Probably. But the simpler answer is the darker one: this is about curbing contrarian voices.
“All Opinions Are Equal — But Some Are More Equal Than Others”
Surely, not every opinion is good, logical, or even remotely sane. But every opinion deserves the right to exist, unless it causes immediate, non-trivial harm. Simple.
Case in point: last year’s EML speaker lineup. It had a, let’s say noticeable bias ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. One student called it out in a detailed email and tried sending it to the GSB. Guess what? He couldn’t get through, the then-SGS quietly rejected it (which they could do earlier also but the practice is legitimised and institutionalised now). A member of EML even bragged about this to me later.
You may think the student was wrong, dramatic, or attention-seeking. That’s fine. But blocking him entirely? That’s not fine. That’s not policy; that’s a muzzle.
Why Contrarian Voices Matter
Take the latest mess-menu fiasco. HAS rolled out a unified menu across all messes, annoying thousands of students. Did you see a single public email from those students? Nope. Why? Because there’s no way to send one.
Without open channels, people couldn’t coordinate, couldn’t push back, couldn’t resist. The rollout failed, quietly. And the rollback? That wasn’t because students fought back. We couldn’t. People resorted to making informal WhatsApp groups to discuss it.
Another example, sneakier this time. This year, you couldn’t enroll for the semester unless you paid your institute fees. Same policy was announced last year, remember? Back then, dozens of angry emails hit the GSB, and the institute rolled it back within days. We also saw a plebiscite, lol. Hundreds of students were saved from absurdly rude and cruel situations, like being unable to eat in mess if they hadn’t paid yet.
(Oh, and let’s not forget the brilliant new payment structure: you now have to first pay the institute fees, then hostel fees, and only after both can you pay for dining. Unsurprisingly, I’ve seen numerous students struggle to get meals simply because they couldn’t cough up lakhs upfront. You won’t see these students because they aren’t visible. The reasons deserve another article.)
This year? Silence. The same policy slipped through, unchallenged, because there’s no way for students to mobilize anymore.
You might think none of this matters to you. Maybe you didn’t care about the mess menu. Maybe you paid your fees on time. Maybe you’re fine with EML inviting whoever they want. That’s fine.
But one day, a policy will screw you over. And when you try to raise your voice, you’ll find there’s nowhere left to speak.
Christopher Hitchens put it perfectly:
“Resist it while you still can, and before the right to complain is taken away from you, which will be the next thing.”
—Edited by Eshani Bhattacharjee and Design by Neenu Elza
Article 19 