On July 25, Divya Bharathi, the filmmaker behind Kakkoos, a documentary on manual scavenging, was arrested and produced before a magistrate for failing to attend a court hearing about a student protest in 2009.

Divya maintains that she was never issued summons by the court.

The 2009 protest was organised to draw attention to the state of Dalit hostels in Madurai after a student living in one of them died of a snakebite. Students blocked roads and shouted slogans. Five FIRs were filed that day, all regarding the protest that Divya characterised as ‘peaceful’.

According to Chennai high court lawyer K. Bharathi, this police reaction is not wholly surprising. Tamil Nadu has a long history of cracking down on student protesters, right from his own student days as an organiser to the present day, as the Goondas Act is increasingly used by law enforcement to silence dissent.

“Instead of welcoming (student protests) as good for democracy,” authorities tend “to look at this as rabble rousing,” said Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India progressive Women’s Association and a former member of the All India Students’ Association. Krishnan said she gets the impression that Tamil Nadu has had “a quiet crackdown on democracy, for a very long time”.