Protests are most significant show of dissent in nearly six years of Modi in power

Student protests are not unusual in India. Nor is police violence. But the scenes of officers entering one of Delhi’s Muslim-majority universities, teargassing the library and beating demonstrators and bystanders have shocked a country thought to have become inured to both.

Fuelled by the apparent police brutality, protests against a controversial law to fast-track citizenship for everyone but Muslim asylum seekers were spreading on Monday to other major universities and cities across the country, in what is becoming the most significant show of dissent in the nearly six years since Narendra Modi took office.

Modi’s thumping re-election in May has been the green light to ram through the most-wanted items on the Hindu nationalist wishlist. The restive Muslim-majority region of Kashmir has been annexed, with its phones and internet blocked and leading politicians arrested. The government says it will soon force hundreds of millions of people in the country to prove their citizenship, modelled on a disastrous exercise in Assam state that has left up to 2 million people in legal limbo.

Q&A What is India's controversial citizenship law? Show Hide The new citizenship law provides a path to citizenship for religious minorities who have immigrated into India from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan before 31 December 2014. It explicitly lists Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians as being able to take advantage of the new provisions, excluding Muslims. Besides stoking concern among Muslims, the proposed changes have also led to protests by residents unhappy about an influx of Hindus from Bangladesh, who stand to gain citizenship.

On Monday, as the protests raged, Modi’s right-hand man was boasting to a rally of the “sky-high” Hindu temple he would build in the north Indian city of Ayodhya on the torn-down remains of a medieval mosque.

Perhaps most contentious among Indians was the passage last week of a citizenship bill that explicitly excludes Muslims, which has prompted the cancellation of state visits from Bangladesh and Japan and a warning from the UN that it is “fundamentally discriminatory”.

Play Video 1:10 Police fire teargas inside university library during India citizenship protests – video

Each of these recent developments have sparked demonstrations and a forceful police response. But those in Kashmir were largely obscured by a continuing digital blackout, the longest of any democracy in the world. The internet has also been blocked in past days in north-eastern cities such as Guwahati, where protesters have clashed with special forces and police. Both areas are on India’s periphery, where state violence is regularly reported and rarely makes waves.

In the capital, Delhi, the popular rage – and the forceful response of authorities – is not so easily hidden.

Mainstream newspapers have been able to give blow-by-blow accounts of Sunday’s police violence against protesters, students and even campus guards. Demonstrators have used social media to publish footage including of officers dragging an unarmed man to the ground and beating him with sticks until a group of women, many wearing hijabs, shielded him with their bodies. Videos of terrified students cowering from teargas in a library, breaking windows to try to ventilate the room, have been played on national TV.

Police say the crackdown was in response to rock-throwing and violence on the part of the demonstrators, who they accused of burning a bus and other property damage.

The images of students and Muslims, two groups who claim to be targeted by the Modi government, coming under attack by police, appear to have crystallised a wider feeling of unease about the direction of the world’s largest democracy. In an extraordinarily diverse country, they may provide a rare national rallying point for discontent.

They also come at a time of renewed scrutiny of India’s human rights record in Washington and European capitals in the wake of the Kashmir decision.

On Sunday, the prime minister played to his base, telling a rally in Jharkhand state that those who were violently opposing the citizenship law could be “identified by their clothes” – taken to mean to their Muslim religious garments.

The following day, to his global audience on Twitter, he struck a more statesmanlike tone, writing that the law posed no threat “to any citizen of India of any religion”. “No Indian has anything to worry regarding this act,” he said.