According to reports from the campus, Mayukh was accused of stealing laptops and was later surrounded, humiliated, assaulted, and pressured to confess by ABVP members and student union representatives. He was reportedly verbally abused and detained inside a hostel room for hours. Reports also mention that when a Dalit Assistant Security Officer tried to intervene, he was subjected to casteist remarks and mocked for not speaking Hindi.
Police later recovered a suicide note from
beneath Mayukh’s pillow cover. According to investigators, the note denied
involvement in the recent laptop thefts while referring to an earlier issue
involving a friend’s laptop that had already been resolved. What Mayukh’s death
exposes is the larger political atmosphere that has increasingly become
normalised inside campuses.
Over the past several months, concerns regarding the growing aggression associated with ABVP politics have repeatedly emerged from University of Hyderabad. This aggression operates through public humiliation, moral policing, communal targeting, intimidation, and the constant assertion of political dominance within everyday campus life.
Students questioning the ABVP-led student union have reportedly faced assault, threats, and coercion. In March, a student who questioned the functioning of the union was allegedly threatened, physically attacked, and forced to chant religious slogans. In another incident, a PhD scholar was allegedly assaulted inside his hostel room by a group armed with iron rods. Kashmiri students have also spoken about communal targeting inside hostels, while female students approaching institutional bodies such as GSCASH reportedly faced intimidation and pressure. Cultural programmes too became sites of confrontation, including attempts to stop a theatre performance through violence and slogan-shouting. These incidents point toward the gradual normalisation of organised intimidation and mob-style assertion within campus life.
This is also where caste politics becomes central to understanding campus environments. In universities, caste does not function only through direct discrimination. It often works through language, exclusion, humiliation, social power, and the unequal value given to people’s dignity. The incident involving the Dalit Assistant Security Officer clearly reflects this. The casteist abuse directed at him was not an isolated emotional reaction. It reflected the deeper relationship between caste hierarchy and majoritarian politics within aggressive right wing mobilisation.
Public humiliation becomes politically important in this context. When individuals are cornered publicly, treated as spectacles, verbally degraded, or socially isolated in front of groups, it becomes more than an individual incident. It becomes a performance of power. Such acts reinforce who holds authority within campus spaces and who can be publicly targeted without consequence.
Mayukh Kundu’s death therefore cannot be separated from the larger political environment surrounding it. The public accusation, collective intimidation, humiliation, and coercion he reportedly faced reflect the kind of campus atmosphere that has increasingly developed under aggressive ABVP mobilisation. The issue is not only what happened during his final hours, but also the political culture that made such treatment appear normal in the first place.
The role of the administration also becomes
important here. Despite repeated complaints regarding intimidation, assault,
and political aggression, institutional responses have often appeared weak or
inadequate. Such inaction gradually creates a situation where politically
organised groups begin operating with increasing impunity.
Universities are meant to be spaces of debate, criticism, and democratic engagement. But when political organisations increasingly function through intimidation, humiliation, and the policing of dissent, the nature of the university itself changes. The campus stops becoming a space centred on discussion and begins reflecting a culture of dominance and political control.
The death of Mayukh Kundu therefore demands more than surface level reporting or temporary outrage. It requires a deeper examination of how aggressive ABVP politics, caste hierarchy, communal targeting, and institutional silence interact within campuses. More importantly, it raises urgent questions about what happens to democratic student spaces when humiliation and coercion become normalised forms of political power.
