No elections since 2018, a hunger strike since September: AMU students block four gates for the right to vote

The demand is the oldest one in a democracy — the right to vote. At Aligarh Muslim University, students are now blockading their own campus to win it. Protesters blocked all four entry gates of AMU on Saturday amid an ongoing agitation demanding elections to the Aligarh Muslim University Students' Union, according to The Hindu. The university's proctor, responding to the escalation, said an "outsider" had been detained from a hostel — a claim that framed the agitation as infiltrated rather than legitimate. The blockade is the latest turn in a protest now into its third week. Its face is Yasir Fahad, a first-year MA Urdu student who began an indefinite hunger strike on 21 September demanding the restoration of the students' union and a published election schedule. He reported his weight falling from 67 kg to 63 kg within the first week. The university suspended him "with immediate effect pending a detailed inquiry" — a letter that arrived, he says, at 2 am on the night of the march for the union's restoration. He has alleged that the proctorial team dragged him by the collar at the protest site and that a medical team from Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College was stopped from examining him. On Sunday the protest widened. Women students marched from Allama Iqbal Hall to Duck Pond, sat in a dharna, and wrote "We Want AMUSU or Death" on the ground. Solidarity has travelled beyond the campus: the JNU Students' Union president publicly backed the students, noting that no union election has been held at AMU since 2018–19, and the Students Islamic Organisation of India sent its general secretary to address the protesters. The administration's position has hardened on two fronts. It has made no announcement of an election date — despite promising students in August 2025 that polls would be held in December 2025, a commitment never fulfilled. And it has moved the courts: the Allahabad High Court has banned all public protests at the main gate of the administrative block and within a 100-metre radius of the Vice-Chancellor's residence, permitting CCTV installation in those areas while directing AMU to earmark a separate protest zone. Eight years without an elected union means entire cohorts have graduated without ever casting a campus ballot. In that vacuum, hostel grievances, fee disputes and disciplinary actions have no elected channel — only the proctor's office on one side and informal mobilisation on the other. An elected president can be voted out; an informal intermediary answers to no one. The students blocking the gates are not rejecting the institution. They are asking for the mechanism the institution itself once promised them.