A day after the Delhi Red Fort bomb blast, hateful anti-Muslim graffiti reading “Muslims and dogs should not enter the premises” and “No dogs and Muslims” surfaced on the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) campus in Kolkata, Alt News reported.
The graffiti was smeared across both sides of the main entrance door of the boys’ hostel, the CV Raman Hall. On one side, an old message reading “Dog shouldn’t enter the premises,” scrawled in black years ago, had been altered after someone added the words “Muslims &” in white chalk, changing it to “Muslims and dog shouldn’t enter the premises.”
On the other side of the door, fresh graffiti declared “No Muslim” and “No Muslim allowed.” The railing of the hostel’s east-wing staircase was also defaced with the message, “No Dogs and Muslims.”
Students first approached the administration with a verbal complaint, after which ISI Kolkata director Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, dean Biswabrata Pradhan, and hostel warden Subhamoy Maitra later inspected the graffiti along with members of the campus’s general affairs (GA) committee, a student body informally selected from the senior-most batch, as the institute does not hold student-union elections. Students told Alt News that the director condemned the act publicly.
A written complaint was subsequently filed. “We sought an investigation to identify who was responsible. There is a CCTV camera near the hostel gate that might have captured the perpetrator. We asked to see the footage, but the administration denied the request, though they said they would look into the matter. They also suggested organising a sensitisation programme with compulsory attendance,” a student told Alt News.
On November 12, a group of 10 students, including research scholars and undergraduate and postgraduate students, met Dean Biswabrata Pradhan to request an official response.
“He spoke about holding sensitisation seminars sometime in January and said a guard had been posted at the hostel gate. These were the only steps taken in 36 hours. When we asked about a proper inquiry, he said only the director could decide that,” one of the students said.
The dean also assured them that the institute would issue a public statement, but none had been released by late evening on November 12. A section of students told Alt News that the delay made them fear the administration was attempting to hush up the incident.
The Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), one of India’s premier higher-education centres and an ‘Institution of National Importance’ since 1959, has campuses in Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Tezpur.
The graffiti surfaced a day after an explosive-laden private vehicle blew up near the Red Fort in Delhi around 6:50 p.m., killing at least 13 people.
The blast triggered a swift surge of Islamophobic reactions both online and offline, with social media flooded within hours by hate speech targeting the entire Muslim community.
Verified journalists and influencers amplified unverified narratives, fuelling a wave of communal hostility. Islamophobic attacks, particularly against Kashmiris, intensified sharply after the explosion.
In Rajasthan’s Barmer district, police on November 12 escalated railway checks, visibly singling out Muslim passengers. Videos circulating online show officers targeting men wearing skull caps and sporting beards, frisking them, inspecting their seats, and rummaging through their luggage in search of “evidence.”
Within hours of the blast, social media users had already declared the “culprits.” On a reel posted by Instagram influencer Prafful Garg, featuring an unverified image of a man beside a similar car, one commenter wrote, “It’s high time, we need internal cleaning.” Another responded, “He means my community’s genocide.”
Even as the police appealed for restraint, some right-wing journalists transformed speculation into primetime certainty. Senior journalist Rahul Shivshankar declared that “terror has a religion,” linking the blast to unrelated arrests of Muslim doctors. India Today’s “open-source investigation” described the blast site as “opposite a temple,” highlighting only Hindu and Jain places of worship while ignoring the many mosques in the vicinity.
Platforms like X saw thousands of posts calling Muslims “terrorists” and demanding collective punishment.
The incident also sparked a renewed wave of anti-Kashmiri backlash, echoing patterns seen after the April 2025 Pahalgam attack, where early targeting of Kashmiris quickly expanded into broader anti-Muslim violence.
Sensational TV coverage labelled the explosion as “white-collar jihad,” portraying educated Kashmiris as inherent threats, while hashtags like #BoycottKashmir trended, urging a halt to Kashmiri tourism “until extremism ends.”
Threads blaming “Kashmiri radicalization” amassed over one million impressions.
The escalated hostility has translated into real-world consequences for Kashmiri migrants and students, who now face heightened suspicion, evictions, job denials, and harassment.
Reports have emerged of landlords in Delhi–NCR evicting Kashmiri tenants, while students in Uttar Pradesh colleges have faced ID checks and slurs such as “terrorist doctor.” Calls to halt Kashmiri tourism and business mirror the backlash seen after the Pahalgam incident, when crackdowns and even property demolitions followed.
Gurugram police on Tuesday asked residential societies to provide a list of all residents from Jammu and Kashmir as well as foreign nationals living on their premises.
 campus in Kolkata, Alt News reported.){kind=link}