For the last six months, research scholars associated with the Centre of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-D), watched films, a routine event on weekends at 5 p.m., which was followed inevitably by discussions, sometimes in the presence of the director.

A process, the faculty and students looked forward to. On January 29, when the Film Society, brainchild of the centre, screened Iffat Fatima’s Khoon Diy Baarav (On a Trail of Vanished Blood), a film on Kashmir, not only were the proceedings disrupted, the viewers were asked to explain whether the screening was tantamount to being “anti-national.”