The Foreigners Regional Registration Office in Kolkata has gone on overkill in its response to students’ agitations against the Government of India’s essay towards a redefinition of citizenship 73 years after Partition. It begs the question as to whether it was really necessary to serve a Quit India notice, so to speak, to a student from Poland (Jadavpur University) and another from Bangladesh (Visva-Bharati).

The deportation order was an exaggerated response to an act best described as an indiscretion by two students from two different parts of the world who had come to Kolkata in search of learning (Comparative Literature and Bengali). It is pretty obvious that the FRRO has played to the gallery of the BJP leadership. That indeed was the message conveyed to the Centre last Thursday by Calcutta High Court (coram: Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, J).

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The Centre’s notice asking Kamil Siedcynski, a Polish student to leave India for participating in a protest rally in Kolkata against the Citizenship Amendment Act, has been stayed. That rally was organised by students in general, artists and intellectuals. He had been served with a “leave India” notice on 14 February, directing him to leave the country within 15 days.

A not dissimilar notice was given to Afsara Anika Meem, the first year Bangladeshi under-graduate at Visva- Bharati which Tagore had once described as “a nest” that accommodates teachers and the taught from around the world and with perceptions as varied as their nationalities. The issue calls for serious reflection by the Centre, indeed a fundamental imperative that was overwhelmed by the siege in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh, the CAA, the National Register of Citizens and the National Population Register.

Arguably, the FRRO ought to have known better. Articles 14, 20 and 21 allow a foreigner to challenge a government decision in writ jurisdiction. There are reports that the “field report”, so-called, that was crafted in January was less than comprehensive. But the more worrying aspect of the decision is that it places India alongside totalitarian regimes that tolerate no dissent. Our democracy cannot be so thin skinned.

Over the past few months, there have been protests against the Centre’s citizenship initiative in most colleges and universities, pre-eminently JNU, Jamia Millia and Jadavpur University. Viewed through a wider prism, students have historically been in the vanguard of major upheavals in different parts of the world, but they have never suffered consequences for the same.

There is little doubt that the Centre’s response to Kamil and Afsara’s participation in protest rallies was decidedly strong considering that the students had only clicked photographs. More basically, they had done nothing against the interests of the country, let alone the perilously skewed agenda of the goli maro brigade. The FRRO notice is arbitrary, to say the least.