Two Men Documenting and Archiving the Students’ Protests Doxxed and Threatened with Police Action 

IN LATE JULY 2026, two young men leading separate efforts to archive the recently concluded students’ protests at Jantar Mantar were subjected to sustained harassment campaigns and threatened with police action. 

Shrey Gupta, an engineer based in Ahmedabad, and Ketan, a 22-year-old postgraduate student in Delhi, have no connection with each other. Shrey told me that he had never attended a protest, while Ketan is a political science scholar immersed in questions around India’s democracy. Yet, both were driven by the same impulse: to archive the current demonstrations so that mainstream narratives do not obscure or erase them in the future. 

Shrey created an online platform called The Unbadged, on which people can submit original video clips or photos from confrontations between law enforcement officials and protesters during the march to parliament, on 20 July. Ketan started a WhatsApp group on which he encouraged members to collate memes, cartoons, and Instagram reels related to the demonstrations at Jantar Mantar in Delhi and in several other cities across India.  

Both their cases followed a strikingly similar trajectory. First, their contact details were leaked on social media platforms. Then they received a barrage of calls from hundreds of unknown numbers from across India and in some instances, even other countries. Finally came the official intervention. Gujarat Police officials visited Shrey’s home and took him to two separate police stations, where they questioned him for several hours before letting him go. Ketan received a call from a man who identified himself as a member of the Ghaziabad Police’s cybercrime cell, and warned him that a first-information report would be filed against him if he did not delete his WhatsApp group.