LPU, Chitkara, and India's wicked sense of rumour

Punjab has two campuses on fire and nobody can tell you for what. No named victim. No family at the gate. No roommate willing to go on camera. Just WhatsApp forwards and Instagram Reels about a rape, a suicide and, for extra flavour, a ghost. The anger is real enough. What it is angry about is another matter. And who, these days, needs to know?The students are right, of course. They are the youth, the future of the nation, and the future cannot be wrong because it has not happened yet. Facts are a boomer habit, like reading a newspaper or waiting for an FIR before setting something alight. If a Reel says a girl died, a girl died. If the police say she did not, the police are in on it. If the administration says nothing of the sort happened, they are afraid of the establishment. Only the young and restless are fearless. If the girl turns up in class the next morning, she is a ghost.Start with Chitkara University, near Rajpura in Patiala district, which the brochures prefer to call "near Chandigarh". The panic did not begin on the night of the 25th. It began two days earlier, when some girls in the hostel played a prank with horror sounds from a speaker. On the night of 23–24 September, an ambulance arrived. The university later said it had brought a student back from the hospital around 2.50 am. On the afternoon of the 25th, a priest came to the girls' hostel. He was visiting his daughter. By night, those two facts had become two dead girls, then two missing girls, then one of them a ghost walking the corridors, video available on request. Window panes were smashed. Two police vehicles were damaged. In under 24 hours, a rumour had become a paranormal special.The facts, when they arrived, were almost insulting in their dullness. Dr Sharanpreet Goraya, senior medical officer at Rajpura Civil Hospital, said no post-mortem involving any university student had been done. DSP Sukhdev Singh, asked in effect to take a ghost's statement, said nobody could tell him who was actually missing. An old-fashioned objection. If the victim is missing, how is she supposed to give her name? The university announced holidays through October 5. Police said they would counsel the students rather than book them. A day later it was Lovely Professional University's (LPU's) turn in Phagwara. This time the claim was that a girl in Girls' Hostel 3, Room 504, had been raped by an outsider (plumber, painter or construction worker, depending on which forward you opened) around September 23–24, sent home by the warden, and later died by suicide. Students poured out of the hostels through Saturday (September 26) night, blocked NH-44 from the early hours of Sunday (September 27), climbed a decommissioned MiG-23 and a donated battle tank, and set vehicles on fire.Three days later, we do not know whether the rape or the death happened. Nobody knows. No friends or family have come forward to seek justice. The university called the claims false, baseless and fabricated, and released a video of three girls from that room saying nothing of the sort had happened. The video was later called scripted. Police said they had received no complaint from the victim and found no evidence. They later registered an FIR against an unknown person under Section 64 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) on the statements of students who did not know the victim either, and set up a Special Investigation Team that includes student representatives. An inquiry into whether there is anything to inquire into, with the complainants as part of the inquiry team. Kafka would have asked for a transfer out of Kapurthala if men metamorphosed into cockroaches at this speed.Rumour after rumour, and politics making it worse. Unverified tragedy, verifiable farce. LPU's founder-chancellor, Ashok Mittal, was an Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Rajya Sabha MP who, after an ED visit, discovered the virtues of the BJP. So we now have the campus of an AAP MP-turned-BJP MP burning in an AAP-ruled state.BJP's Ravneet Bittu says it is an AAP plot to disturb Amit Shah's anti-drug rally in Jalandhar on 30 September. Congress's Raja Warring says it is AAP's law-and-order failure. AAP says it's a Congress conspiracy. Everybody is a B Team or C Team. The A Team, Punjab Police, says it used force only in a restrained way to clear the highway, which is the first time in memory they have bragged about doing nearly nothing.Every party has found a culprit in another party. No party has found a victim in either case. Rumours, however, enjoy tripartisan support. Nobody dares tell the students they may have got it wrong. The students are right, you see, even when they cannot tell you what about. Especially then.The rumour did not fall from the sky. LPU has buried real students. Laxmi Chandra, 21, a BTech Agriculture student from Telangana, died on campus on September 10 after falling from the 7th floor of a girls' hostel. There were deaths in 2022 and 2024 too, each followed by protests and each followed by a tight-lipped response.The reasons, investigations into these cases were not shared widely among students. These traumatic events should have birthed special counselling sessions, but sab changa si.In 1947, Gordon Allport and Leo Postman gave us a formula: the strength of a rumour is roughly its importance multiplied by its ambiguity. Campus safety is important. When administrations treat every death as a public relations problem, they manufacture ambiguity by the tonne. Universities that answer real tragedies with silence should not be shocked when silence is answered with fiction. Hush, and the rumour mill will fill the hush.Science has the rest of it. In 2018, Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral of MIT published in Science the largest study of its kind, tracking about 1,26,000 stories shared by some 30 lakh people on Twitter over 11 years. Falsehood was 70% more likely to be retweeted than truth and reached 1,500 people roughly six times faster.The culprit was not bots. It was us. False news spreads because it is novel, and novelty is the drug. A dead girl in a hostel is news. A recovered girl in an ambulance is not. The truth at Chitkara failed for the simplest of reasons. Truth is boring, and nobody forwards boring.India needed no MIT to teach it this. On 21 September 1995, Lord Ganesha began drinking milk across the country and the nation ran out of milk. It was capillary action and surface tension, the same physics that drinks your tea off a kulhad.In March 2012, Jesus on the crucifix at a church in Vile Parle began to weep. The rationalist Sanal Edamaruku traced the tears to a clogged drain and capillary action. For solving the miracle, he was booked for hurting religious sentiments. Edamaruku lives in Finland now because the legal process itself is punishment in India. Delhi had its Monkey Man in 2001, east UP its muhnochwa in 2002, and in 2017 women across Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi woke up to find their braids chopped by a choti-katwa nobody ever caught.In 2018, WhatsApp forwards about child-lifters looking for kidneys swept the country. On 1 July that year, a crowd lynched five men in Dhule, Maharashtra. In June, Nilotpal Das and Abhijeet Nath, an audio engineer and a digital artist, stopped at a village in Assam's Karbi Anglong to ask for directions and were beaten to death as child-lifters. In Tripura, a man hired by the administration to go around with a loudspeaker warning people against these very rumours was killed by a mob that believed those very rumours.During the 2020 Covid lockdown, two sadhus wandered into an area near Palghar in Maharashtra when the region was in the grip of rumours of child-lifting gangs. The two were caught and handed over to the police, but a mob dragged them out of a police station and beat them to death.I come from Jharkhand, where mob-lynching is known as sendra, and child-lifting rumours once forced me to change my route because I was driving an SUV and the rumour had it that gangs pick children in SUVs. A study by Shakuntala Banaji and Ram Bhat for the London School of Economics the following year found that the forwarded message rarely converts anyone. It confirms. The rumour just arms your own latent prejudice with a weapon. And the law rarely punishes the ones holding the weapon, so long as it is a group.That is the powder keg. What makes 2026 different is how much gunpowder has been stacked beside it. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) began on 16 May as an online joke after the Chief Justice of India (CJI) called some of our young petition-premi lawyers "cockroaches". By 25 July it had marched on Parliament and brought down an Education Minister. That is a real achievement and nobody should sneer at it. But movements leave lessons behind, and not always the intended ones.When a 15-year-old at New Delhi's Jantar Mantar hurled filth at the PM, the PM himself asked for mentoring, not punishment. Generous. The government then assured the Supreme Court that the FIRs from the Parliament march would not be pursued, and the court quashed them in several states. Also generous. These were duly noted, on every campus, as a precedent.At LPU, the list of demands included an assurance that nobody would face action for the protest. Arson with an amnesty clause, negotiated in advance. When did our student unions become trade unions? And who are we to deny the future of the nation a small bonfire? Hum bhi toh jawan the. The young learnt that outrage will not only be acknowledged, it will come with a waiver. Impunity. The parties learnt that a crowd of students is the cheapest rally money cannot buy. Students have always been cheap fodder for politics. Students self-radicalised by Reels are cheaper.Our campuses can now become franchise grounds. At the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Kolkata yesterday, students clashed with the RSS-linked Akhil Bharatiya Grahak Panchayat over a workshop booked in the auditorium. Stones, torn banners, some 30 students and two teachers injured, three FIRs, and each side already certain the other is the enemy of the republic.A consumer-rights body at a film school. The students clearly felt short-changed. Ray, who saw most things coming, made Ganashatru in 1989, about a doctor who finds the holy water at the town temple is poisoning people and is declared an enemy of the people for saying so. Sanal Edamaruku could have played the lead.At IIT Bombay, Sahil Wakode, a second-year student, was found dead in his hostel on 18 September, hours after being caught using a phone in an examination. His parents allege caste discrimination and sat on hunger strike at Mumbai's Azad Maidan. One camp has already delivered the verdict of institutional murder. Another has delivered the opposite. Both have pre-empted the investigation. The Mumbai Crime Branch is the only party in Mumbai without a conclusion. A family in grief is owed patience and answers. It is being handed partisanship and provocation instead.Put it together. A generation that has just learnt its anger can topple ministers. Vandals who have learnt that the FIRs will be quashed. Parties that have learnt anger can be rented by the hour. And a phone in every pocket that rewards the surprising over the true, six times faster. You do not need a conspiracy for this. You need a match, and India has never been short of matches. But why worry. The students are right. The facts will catch up eventually. They always do, usually a day after the window panes are shattered.Rumour has it. Rumour has us.(Kamlesh Singh, a columnist and satirist, is Tau of the popular Teen Taal podcast)- Ends(Views expressed in the piece are those of the author)