The police maintained that there were plainclothesmen among their ranks while the students insist that these were Trinamool Congress (the ruling party of the state of West Bengal) cadres.

The official position of the Calcutta Police is that "minimum lawful force" was applied to escort the vice-chancellor and other members of the committee out of the university.

[2][3] Demonstrations showing solidarity with the students started in Kolkata and across India, including in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru.

[4][5][6][7] There was progressively increasing turnout in protest marches in Kolkata;[8] it culminated in a rally on 20 September, at the end of which a delegation of students met Governor of West Bengal, Keshari Nath Tripathi.

[14] An Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) was formed in accordance with the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013 to investigate the matter.

However, the committee was compromised when two of its members visited the girl's home in Bidhannagar on 5 September, refusing to identify themselves and asking questions about her dress on the night of the incident.

On the evening of 16 September after the meeting of the executive councils finished, students encircled some of the university officials, including Vice-Chancellor Chakrabarti, in their offices.

The incident of the beating of students by the police sparked nationwide reaction, with a high amount of protest on social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

[19] The rally ended peacefully with student representatives holding a meeting with the Governor of West Bengal, Keshari Nath Tripathi, who was also the chancellor of the university.

According to newspaper reports, school and college students from suburban and rural areas were dragged to the rally in order to showcase the power of the ruling party.

The campus was full of posters and graffiti; students wore black badges, burned effigies of the vice-chancellor, and shouted slogans demanding his resignation.

[25] Final year students who were to accept their graduation certificates and medals personally from the vice chancellor on 24 December refused to do so calling for a boycott of the convocation ceremony.

The top graduating student from the arts faculty, Gitasree Sarkar, politely refused to accept her certificate and medal in the presence of the vice chancellor as a mark of protest.

[34] A citizen's convention condemning the police brutality was arranged in the university campus on 24 September, which was attended by eminent educationists and intellectuals.

According to Vice-Chancellor Chakrabarti in an interview with a news channel, the outsiders-alleged to be from rival political parties or to be drug-dealers who supply the student population-were the main element of the rowdiness that justified the use of punitive force.

[39] After the administration's decision which abolished the 50 percent internal quota[40] for Visva Bharati's two school Patha Bhavana and Siksha Satra in undergraduate and postgraduate courses, about 400[41] students blocked the entry to the central and vice-chancellor's offices to protest.

[42] Siddharth Sivakumar who is an alumnus of Patha Bhavana, wrote in an article, "Those who have been drawing parallels between our and the Hokkolorob movement are misreading the situation.