Shehla Rashid is now a college teacher in Kashmir: ‘Democracy cuts everyone down to size’

Before Shehla Rashid came to Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2013, she briefly considered pursuing a career in journalism. To a Srinagar-based reporter who met her at that time, she came across as an ambitious person in a hurry. Even as she asked about opportunities in the media, she told him that her long-term goal was to enter politics.

Three years later, she was on national television, leading protests as the vice president of the JNU students’ union against the arrests of three student-activists on charges of sedition.

The leadership she showed at that time earned her admiration not just on the campus but across the country among critics of the Modi government who saw the sedition case as evidence of its anti-democratic impulses.

But the admiration evaporated years later, when Rashid praised the Modi government for its handling of Kashmir.

Today, even as her political U-turn continues to be discussed, Rashid has retired from the limelight. She teaches sociology at the Government Degree College in Budgam, a nondescript public institution about 15 km away from Srinagar.

Asked why she had abandoned her political dreams, she told me, “Democracy cuts everyone down to size.”

A national storm erupted in February 2016 when the Modi government ordered a police crackdown against students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University for slogans raised at a campus event. Three students were arrested on charges of sedition, sparking a debate on nationalism and democratic freedoms.

Ten years later, we revisit the legacy of that moment by tracing the trajectories of four student-activists – the choices they made, the outcomes that followed, and what that reveals about political life in India.

Rashid, 37, was born to a middle-class Kashmiri family in downtown Srinagar. Her mother, a government employee, raised her and her elder sister alone for the most part. Her father, whom she has previously accused of abusing her mother, has been estranged from them for years.

Getting admission in JNU offered Rashid a chance to leave Kashmir, where she had completed her engineering undergraduation, and pursue her political ambitions. She embraced the opportunity with both hands and, in 2013, enrolled herself at the university for a master’s degree in sociology.

On her first day in JNU, one of her seniors, who assisted Rashid with admission formalities, tried to recruit her into the political outfit that he was associated with.

But she was keen to bypass the rigmarole of organisational politics and directly get into a position of power. “I want to join only JNUSU [the students’ union],” he recalled her saying to him.

In her early days at the university, Rashid would often be seen driving a car to the campus, stylishly dressed, according to several of her contemporaries. But once she joined the All India Students’ Association, the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, she adopted a more modest look.

“After she started interacting with the masses, she changed some things about herself,” said Sucheta De, who was also associated with the leftist student organisation. Noting that such a transition is “something that every activist goes through”, De added that Rashid’s effort did not come across as insincere.

Others must have agreed with De’s assessment because Rashid rose through the ranks rather quickly. It took her just about two years to make it into the students’ union, becoming arguably the most famous vice president in JNU’s history.

During her term, the police picked up Kanhaiya Kumar, the president, on sedition charges after a controversy broke out over slogans raised at a gathering. The police claimed that the political activities of JNU students were inimical to the territorial integrity of India. But Kumar and the students’ union maintained that no one connected to the university had said or done something against the law.

As a Kashmiri woman, Rashid was particularly vulnerable. The event which had triggered the storm was about Kashmir. Several other students from the region had gone into hiding to dodge arrest. Yet, Rashid resolutely led a sit-in protest against the police crackdown. This left even her critics impressed.

Once Kumar came out of prison, some in the university wanted to call off the sit-in, a close friend of Rashid claimed. But she made sure that the protest continued for two more weeks till Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, the two other arrested students, returned to campus.

“She was under pressure from various interest groups within the campus,” recounted the friend, who requested not to be named. “Kashmiri students wanted her to do one thing, others wanted something else. But she was clear that the other two arrested students won’t be abandoned at any cost.”

With the release of Khalid and Bhattacharya, life and politics in JNU slowly limped back to older rhythms. In the next students’ union elections, Rashid campaigned extensively for her organisation. Soon after that, though, she began to drift away from it and think bigger.

Politics in Kashmir

In March 2019, Rashid, who had by then abandoned her PhD and returned to Kashmir, joined the Jammu and Kashmir People’s Movement, a political party launched by the Kashmiri bureaucrat Shah Faesal.

Faesal shot to fame in 2009, when he topped the national-level civil services exam. Rashid was still studying engineering then. A decade later, they came together to promise opportunities to other Kashmiris like them, stressing the fact that they did not come from political dynasties.

But it did not take Rashid long to realise that she was not cut out for electoral politics.

“She discovered that voters were desperate for things like medicines,” her friend explained. “They would ask her for job recommendations and other such favours. Unlike other politicians, she did not have deep pockets to help them.”

A journalist who met her during this time found her ill-suited for a role in Kashmiri public life. Her middle-class upbringing and the time she spent in JNU, he argued, had created an insurmountable gap between her and the average Kashmiri. “You don’t understand what Kashmiris are going through unless you have tasted it in some way,” he said.

Rashid’s attempts to fit in by covering her head also made headlines. For those who had seen her “declass” herself at JNU, this reinvention appeared questionable.

“It’s one thing to believe in hijab and assert one’s identity, but quite another to use it as a costume for political gain,” said Satarupa Chakraborty, an activist who was part of the JNU students’ union alongside Rashid.

Eventually, her foray into Kashmir politics came to an abrupt end when the Modi government abrogated Article 370 on August 5 that year.

Rashid was among the first petitioners to move the Supreme Court to challenge the Modi government’s shock move. Two months later, she announced her exit from politics, severely criticising what the Centre was doing in Kashmir.

A U-turn

For the next four years, Rashid disappeared from public life – until she resurfaced in November 2023 to praise Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his handling of Kashmir.

What happened in those four years?

In her book, she describes this as a period of intense soul-searching. She frames her subsequent turnaround as the normal progression of a person from their 20s into their 30s. As a left-wing activist she had learned how to identify social problems. Now, she reasoned, she was trying to be solution-oriented.

“Not only was the abrogation bloodless, but its aftermath has also seen a steady decline in violence and bloodshed,” she writes. “This has been made possible by the government’s zero tolerance approach to terrorism.”

But there is a lot more that happened to her during this period which she skips mentioning in the book. In November 2020, Rashid’s estranged father filed a police complaint accusing her of financial wrongdoing, which she denied.

“I was depressed,” she told journalist Barkha Dutt on her podcast. “I was seeing a therapist. I was also taking medication for depression during 2020.”

It was around this time that she learned the importance of looking out for oneself, her friend explained.

“Once she stepped away from political activism, she got a taste of real life,” they said. “She had no backing. She needed to get a job and make her own money.”

Starting 2021, she began to sit for competitive exams to become a civil servant or a college professor. Multiple attempts to crack the civil services exam, however, came to nothing.

The year of change

In January 2023, the lieutenant governor of Delhi gave the police sanction to prosecute Rashid in an old case about the criticism she had voiced of the Indian Army on Twitter.

About six months later, she suddenly withdrew her name from the Article 370 petition in the Supreme Court. “She was disturbed,” said Charu Mathur, a lawyer who represented her then. “She wanted to get out of the mess.”

A person whose advice she sought at the time remembered her complaining about how her politics had made it difficult for her to get a college teaching job despite her qualifications.

Then, to her great relief, the higher education department in Jammu and Kashmir published results for the recruitment process to hire sociology professors in November 2023. Rashid had topped the state.

Less than a fortnight later, she was praising the Modi government on journalist Smita Prakash’s podcast – the first in a series of such appearances that she would make in the months to come.

More good news came for her in March 2025, when Delhi police withdrew the case in which the lieutenant government had earlier granted sanction to prosecute.

Rashid refused to respond to specific questions about the change in her views. She cited service rules that supposedly forbid government employees from making public comments on politics.

Safer option?

Her U-turn has divided those who used to know her. Some like Dipankar Bhattacharya, general secretary of the CPI(ML) Liberation, are understanding, if not forgiving.

“As a Kashmiri, she was vulnerable,” he told Scroll. “She may have had to face a lot more than other student leaders. We don’t know what really happened.”

Kashmiris, too, were not surprised by the path she took, according to the journalist quoted earlier. “The alternative was to go to jail like Umar Khalid, so she chose the safer option,” he surmised.

Others, on the other hand, see what she did as a betrayal.

“She could have gone silent or she could have fought it, but she chose to get co-opted,” said N Sai Balaji, her junior and a former president of the JNU students’ union. “That is a betrayal. Common people are resisting and facing consequences. But she changed her route for personal benefit.”

Not everybody judges her harshly for becoming a Modi supporter. Some like the close friend quoted earlier point out that despite the change in her political opinions, she never stopped demanding Umar Khalid’s release.

Betrayal or not, the turn in her politics means that when she meets people she knows from her early days in Left activism, things can get a bit awkward.

One such old acquaintance is the researcher Natasha Narwal. The two ran into each other at a mall in the summer of 2024, when Rashid was in Delhi to attend Modi’s oath-taking ceremony.

“She asked me how I was so I told her, ‘You know.’,” recollected Narwal, who actively took part in the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and spent over a year in jail for her supposed role in the 2020 Delhi riots.

“She said, ‘Just take care of yourself. Take care of your health. That is the most important thing.’ I told her that this government does not let me do that. Then she made an awkward face and left.”