On Thursday, the leader of Opposition in Bengal, BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari, posted a video on his social media showing a flag of Palestine being waved during a procession in Murshidabad district. Adhikari demanded police action “against such anti national elements”.

A day later, at the 61st convocation of IIT Madras, a brilliant student spelt it out from the dais: “There is a mass genocide going on in Palestine.”

Even Adhikari – whose party leaders seem to love the term antinational, using it liberally for all and sundry who criticise the Narendra Modi government – would perhaps not dub Dhananjay Balakrishnan, a fifth-year undergraduate student at IIT Madras and this year’s governor’s medal winner, as an anti national.

Balakrishnan, who is pursuing his BTech in mechanical engineering and MTech in data science, reminded the audience at the convocation – that included his batchmates, other students, teachers, guests and his parents – that “inaction is complicity”.

In a speech that is being widely shared on social media, Balakrishnan said: “I feel like I will be doing myself and everything I believe in a great injustice if I do not use the stage I am presented with to speak on something very important, that needs call for action.”

The student, who is from Kochi in Kerala, added: “There is a mass genocide going on in Palestine. People are dying in vast numbers and there is no visible end in sight.”

Balakrishnan, who received the governor’s medal from Nobel laureate Brian K. Kobilka for best all-round proficiency in curricular and extra-curricular activities in a dual degree in mechanical engineering, spoke for little over two minutes in his acceptance speech that came towards the end of the more than two-hour-long event.

An avid quizzer, Balakrishnan reminded his fellow IITians that STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – have often been used for the destruction of humankind.

“STEM as a field in itself has historically been used to advance the ulterior motives of imperial powers such as Israel,” he said.

Balakrishnan, whose LinkedIn profile says he is interested in the fields of applied mathematics and statistics, said the tech giants that most IIT graduates look for to advance their careers were guilty of crimes against the people of Palestine.

“Many of these prestigious companies are directly or indirectly implicated in the war against Palestine by providing the state of Israel with technology. Technology that is used to kill,” he said.

Balakrishnan’s speech at the convocation ceremony has happened at a time when students in the West, especially the US and the UK, have been at the forefront of protests against Israel for its indiscriminate and often cruel killing of men, women and children in Palestine since October last year.

In May this year, the University of Columbia had cancelled its main graduation or commencement ceremony following protests by students. In the US alone, over 2,000 students have been arrested for campus protests in favour of Palestine.

Protests and crackdowns at campuses have been reported from nations as far apart as Canada to Australia and parts of Europe including the British universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

South Africa had become the first country in the world to drag Israel to the International Court of on 29 December 2023 Justice alleging the latter’s conduct in Gaza during the war ongoing since October 2023 amounted to genocide.

Following the Israeli airstrike in the southern Gaza city of Rafah that killed 45 Palestinians including children, many Indian actors including the likes of Priyanka Chopra, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor, Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Konkona Sen Sharma, Vir Das, Dia Mirza, Triptii Dimri, Bhumi Pednekar, Rakul Preet Singh, Swara Bhasker, Gauhar Khan, Fatima Sana Shaikh, Radhika Apte, Amy Jackson, Naakul Mehta and Jawaan director Atlee had shared an image with the words “All Eyes on Rafah” embossed on it on their social media accounts.

Raising the banner of protest in his own way, Balakrishnan admitted he did not have the answer to the questions that he had raised.

“I do know this as engineers graduating into the real world it is our job to be aware of the consequences of the work we do and also to interrogate our own position in this complex system of power imbalances,” he said.

Calling for introspection, Balakrishnan said it was time to attempt to understand what one can do to liberate the oppressed on lines of caste, class and creed.

“I believe this would be our first step to curb the never-ending cycle of suffering,” he said. “…we owe it to them [the magnanimous people of India] to lift every single person out of their misery. Inaction is complicity. I hope you and I and all of us can take action to make the right decisions, however hard they might be.”

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, more than 38,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched its military offensive on October 7 in retaliation to deadly Hamas attacks.

The true death toll in Gaza could be over 186,000 people, according to a study published in the journal Lancet.

And the same day that Balakrishnan spoke up, a 15-judge panel of the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel's presence in the Palestinian occupied territories is unlawful and called on it to end and for settlement construction to stop immediately, issuing an unprecedented condemnation of Israel's rule over the lands it captured 57 years ago.