Graffiti News
Jadavpur University Walls: Erased Again, Repainted Again
The walls of Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India have been wiped clean and filled again for a second time. According to The Hindu, a group of police personnel and Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) officials arrived at about 12:30 a.m. on Tuesday, September 1, 2026 and whitewashed all the graffiti on the campus walls. By Thursday, September 3, graffiti and posters were back. Wallscape covered the first cycle, the administration's whitewash and the students' repaint, in an earlier report. This piece follows what has happened to the walls since.
The timeline of the wall
The Hindu gives this sequence:
- August 19 to 20: supporters of the ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad), a right-wing student organisation, forced their way onto the campus and tried to tear posters and burn flags of the Left students' union. A clash followed, and the university has been tense since.
- August 26: West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari directed the university to act against graffiti he called "anti-national", including slogans demanding freedom for Palestine and Kashmir and slogans about "fascists". The administration whitewashed the graffiti across the main building, Aurobindo Bhaban, the Arts Hostel and the Open-Air Theatre.
- Monday, August 31: students repainted the walls, describing it as an attempt to "reclaim" them. One new piece quoted Karl Marx.
- Tuesday, September 1, 12:30 a.m.: police and KMC officials whitewashed the campus walls again.
- Thursday, September 3: the graffiti and posters returned.
What the second whitewash removed
According to The Hindu, the September 1 whitewash did not only cover political slogans. It also removed a portrait of the artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, a painting on climate change, the Marx quotation, quotations from Ho Chi Minh and Urdu couplets. Painting a wall white does not distinguish a slogan from a picture, which is why a portrait and a climate painting appear on the list of what was lost.
This time, a poster with a QR code
Among the new material on September 3, the item The Hindu led with was not graffiti but a poster. Students put up, in the campus's green zone, a poster quoting former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on the territorial integrity of Palestine. The Hindu reports that Vajpayee made the statement in 1977 at a public meeting in Delhi, shortly after the Janata Party government first came to power, when he held the External Affairs portfolio. The poster read: "Israel must return the lands of Arabs it has occupied. The lawful rights of the Palestinians must be established." At the bottom it was credited to the "nationalist students of Jadavpur University", and it carried a QR code linking to the full speech.
The Hindu describes the poster as the students' way of justifying the "Free Palestine" graffiti by citing a former prime minister's own words. The same day, sarcastic graffiti about Mussolini and the RSS, and about V.D. Savarkar, also appeared.
Both sides now use the wall
According to The Hindu, the ABVP also put up photos and posters across the campus on September 3, of Rabindranath Tagore, Vidyasagar and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, and of Vande Mataram. A wall that one side painted and the other side erased has become a wall on which both sides post their own material.
What each side says
The Chief Minister, speaking on September 3 at the annual programme of an RSS-affiliated organisation at the Ramakrishna Mission in Golpark, Kolkata, said writing "Free Palestine" on the walls of Jadavpur was not something to be tolerated, and that he would support "Free PoK" written instead.
Srijan Bhattacharya, general secretary of the Students' Federation of India, the Left students' organisation, said at a rally at the 8B bus stand opposite the university that the students' graffiti reflects public opinion. "CM cannot decide which one of them is nationalist and anti-nationalist," he said, and asked for a students' union election so students could decide by vote. The Left students also rallied against the invitation of several BJP leaders and the local MLA to a "Nationalist Conference" held that afternoon in the university's Triguna Sen auditorium.
ABVP supporters held a separate rally inside the campus carrying the national flag. They said the Left students were spoiling the university's environment, pushing an anti-national mentality and not allowing other voices to be raised democratically.
Why it matters for street art
What Wallscape reads in this story is not the merit of any slogan but the medium. The side that erases paints the whole wall at once. The side that paints refills it within days. Each erasure pushes the painters towards faster formats: a poster goes up quicker than a sprayed piece, and a QR code on a poster links the wall to a document too long to paint. The wall becomes a doorway to an online text.
The other lesson is about whole-wall whitewashing. Object to a slogan and paint over everything, and the portrait and the climate painting go with it. Where expression ends and regulation begins is exactly what the parties here are fighting about, and Wallscape does not settle it. Recording what was on the wall before it went white is the job of a site about walls. Other contested campus walls are on the feed, and locations are on the map.