The Congress on Sunday announced a legal-support helpline for students facing police or administrative action over their participation in youth-led protests over the NEET-UG paper leak and related issues, with activist Gurmehar Kaur, who works with its youth wing, sharing details.
Event Context
Unlike other youth leaders who came through student union politics, Gurmehar Kaur emerged from a non-political background 10 years ago due to a viral video that led to threats on social media.
Then a student at Delhi University’s Lady Shri Ram College for Women, she ended up in public eye by speaking out against war, when she was part of a silent film series in 2016. That was the year of two major terror attacks in India, in Pathankot and Uri.
That trajectory — a soldier’s daughter and a peace advocate, not backing down in the face of threats — landed her a wider public profile, and then politics with the Congress. She has, more recently, been working with the Youth Congress on Punjab Re-Root, an outreach campaign in the poll-bound state ahead of 2027 assembly elections.
Team Analysis
“But today, there is a list of FIRs that have been filed against students in West Bengal and Bihar,” Gurmehar Kaur. She was accompanied by Vinod Jakhar, president of the Congress wing National Students’ Union of India, and Youth Congress office-bearer Richa Singh who is from Bihar; they also spoke on the occasion.
Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi has blamed Union home minister Amit Shah pointedly for the police action — an issue that the Congress sought to raise in Parliament too.
In the video, as a 20-year-old, she held up a series of placards, the most striking of which read: “Pakistan did not kill my dad, war did.” Her father, Captain Mandeep Singh, had been killed in a militant attack in Jammu and Kashmir in 1999. The video urged both India and Pakistan to abandon hostility and “solve the problem”. Her stance attracted abuse and charges of being pro-Pakistan. By February 2017, the video resurfaced and went viral alongside a campaign titled ‘I am not afraid of ABVP’, after clashes between the ABVP, which is the student wing of the BJP’s parent body RSS, and Left-backed student groups at Delhi University’s Ramjas College. She faced grave allegations even from BJP MPs.
Time magazine later named her a “free speech warrior” on its 2017 list of emerging global leaders, and she went on to write a memoir, ‘Small Acts of Freedom’, besides a book profiling young political figures across India. She studied at Oxford University aftr her DU degree.
Youth Congress leader Richa Singh also spoke at the press meet: “The way the police in Bihar have brutalised protesting students is utterly reprehensible. Our NSUI activists, including Patna University president Shantanu Shekhar, have been taken into custody and beaten.”
Police have not reacted to specific cases, though an officer firing an AK-47 rifle at a protest in Patna has been suspended.
NSUI president Vinod Jakhar referred to the Congress’s ‘Chhatron ki Goonj’ campaign and said, “We want to assure all students that Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, the Indian Youth Congress, NSUI, and all organisations of the Congress party stand strongly with you.”
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“We unequivocally condemn all the attacks on students. The Modi government had promised during the negotiations that no student would be picked up and that there would be no police action against them,” the party posted along with a video of the press conference, referring to the Cockroach Janta Party’s protest that ended after senior BJP leader Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as education minister in Narendra Modi’s cabinet.
The party announced that if anyone has been served a legal notice, detained, asked to appear for questioning, or had any social media posts taken down, they could reach out for support via the ‘Chhatron ki Goonj’ (CKF) legal SOS helpline at 98118-67474.
A similar, though parallel, announcement was made by the CJP.
The Congress has been holding its own protests and rallies led by Rahul Gandhi on similar issues, but preferred a parallel track as the CJP aggressively billed itself as “apolitical”.
The Congress’s choice of Gurmehar Kaur to front the announcement — she was tagged prominently in the party’s social media posts — was notable as the protests were fuelled by anger among Gen Z and also saw high participation of urban classes and young women. That’s the demographic she comes from as someone born in the latter half of the 1990s, raised in smaller towns in Punjab and elsewhere as an army kid, and later having studied in Delhi and the UK.
