Across South Asian communities, Cambridge University in the United Kingdom has long been a mark of social prestige. It is an aspiration that can make years of sacrifice seem worthwhile. Parents mortgage property, sell their assets, students chase scholarships and entire households reorganise themselves around the possibility of admission. Cambridge promises intellectual rigour, institutional protection and membership of a bold international community.
That promise deserves scrutiny at a time when young Indians have taken to the streets demanding accountability from institutions that govern their futures. The protests over examination irregularities that grew into a bigger discourse and mobilisation make one thing clear: young people recognise that educational institutions and authorities do not deserve undue reverence simply because they possess prestige or power.
Delhi Police’s reported methods – facial recognition, recording social media handles and visiting protesters’ homes – show how the machinery of intimidation is unfolding in India. Transnational repression carries that machinery across borders. The jurisdiction changes but the logic remains: identify dissenters, map their relationships and make private life feel penetrable enough to criminalise real dissent. States can deepen that pressure with spyware such as Pegasus, or outsource human intelligence gathering to local proxies, preserving distance and plausible deniability while the target feels constantly watched.
I recognised that pattern because, in another form, it had already followed me to the UK, at Cambridge University.
When surveillance crosses borders
I am an exiled documentary filmmaker, human rights activist and researcher, currently living in the UK. My research concerns enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and military abuses in Balochistan. This subject is not remote from my life. My cousin, the human rights defender Idris Khattak, was forcibly disappeared in 2019. He was later sentenced to 14 years in prison by a Pakistani military court on bogus charges.
Several of my activist friends have also been forcibly disappeared and tortured, while others have been brutally murdered. Behind Pakistan, a nuclear armed state with one of the world’s largest militaries, stands a regime that still appears terrified of the words of its own citizens.
I arrived at Cambridge University in September 2024 having disclosed the sensitivity of my research and the possible dangers surrounding it. By December 2024, I was receiving threatening messages warning me that “neither Cambridge nor Britain was safe”. The messages referred to my work, everyday movements and personal information. Human rights organisations have treated the danger as a serious case of transnational repression: the export of intimidation across borders to silence a critic in exile.
Since December 2025, there have been increased attacks on Pakistani dissidents in Britain and elsewhere, with a frequency and apparent coordination that represent an unprecedented escalation in the UK’s experience of transnational repression. I too have received death threats, and other exiles have been assaulted inside their homes and had their properties ransacked.
My friend Barrister Shahzad Akbar, a former member of Imran Khan’s cabinet, was assaulted at his Cambridgeshire home, and the property was subsequently attacked on two further occasions – once with gunfire and attempted arson – all three within 17 days. He had previously survived an acid attack at his home in 2023.
Back in 2020, two Baloch citizens, Sajid Hussain in Sweden and Karima Baloch in Canada, were found mysteriously dead in bodies of water. Many experts have alleged that they were targeted by ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence agency. While investigating Sajid’s death in 2022, in Sweden, I had experienced what was highly likely a targeted theft of my cameras, passport, hard drives and other equipment from my hotel room. In December 2025, the death threats against me referred to that incident and its exact date. These dates were known only to the Swedish police.
The seriousness of these concerns was underscored by veteran human rights defender Peter Tatchell. In December 2025, Tatchell wrote to Daniel Zeichner, Member of Parliament for Cambridge, urging him to escalate my case: “I respectfully urge you to urgently raise these matters with the UK head of counter-terrorism and the heads of the UK security services, MI5 and MI6.”
He later wrote to me directly in even starker terms: “I would also advise that you consider writing your last will and testament… in case the worst happens. I know this sounds morbid and extreme but it is very important. If you were killed tomorrow I need all the information to challenge the inaction of the authorities.”
As a member of the Working Group on Tackling Transnational Repression, which advises the UK government and Parliament, I have also heard numerous testimonies from victims that reveal worrying shortcomings in the UK’s response to transnational repression.
Protection withdrawn, research obstructed
What happened to me following the threats in December 2024 should concern every South Asian student considering a prestigious Western university.
Just a month later, in January 2025, Wolfson College sought to terminate my accommodation, changed the locks to my room while I was abroad and shut down a computer containing sensitive research. My repeated requests for meetings with the President of Wolfson College, Ijeoma Uchegbu, were met with cancellations rather than a meaningful security plan. After pressure from supporters, the first accommodation decision was reversed. In July 2025, however, I was told to leave again. At the same time, my doctoral progression was blocked.
This room cancellation letter was issued two weeks after I received death threats, while I was out of the country.
My work interrogates whether Pakistan’s repression in Balochistan – enforced disappearances, military violence, political exclusion and the securitisation of resource extraction – has itself become a principal driver of the insurgency it claims to suppress. It also examines how China’s growing strategic and economic involvement through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the crown jewel of Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has intensified the region’s securitisation and silenced local and native resistance and voices. It looks at Gwadar Port’s strategic significance, including the possibility that its port could eventually host a Chinese naval presence near the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most vital corridors for shipping and energy.
My supervisor, Cambridge sociologist Thomas Jeffrey Miley, has in a letter to the university written that my thesis could become “one of the department’s strongest doctoral projects in recent years”.
Two other Cambridge sociology professors, one of whom I have never met and who had no involvement in my case, similarly raised concerns about my treatment in correspondence submitted to the university. One described it as “unprecedented”, adding: “I believe that the University stands to benefit from his continued presence.” Another noted: “he earned a Distinction, a very rare achievement among our students..” and added: “I would estimate that he is among the most capable students I have encountered… at Cambridge.”
My proposed external supervisor, Clive Stafford Smith, one of the world’s leading human rights lawyers, wrote to the university: “He has the ability to make a significant impact in his field.” He added: “Across the hundreds of students, interns and young researchers I have trained and supervised throughout my four decades of human rights work, I would place him in the top 1%.”
Taken together, these assessments raise a more troubling question: is Cambridge willing to damage its own academic interests, losing or marginalising work that its own senior scholars regard as exceptional, in response to foreign pressure?
Priyamvada Gopal, Professor of Postcolonial Studies at Cambridge and one of the academics on my proposed supervisory team, wrote in an email to me, to university officials and to the Office for Students: “Cambridge University is deeply imbricated with the financial and political forces that sadly shape our society right now, and you are not wrong to sense that outside pressures have contributed to this situation.”
That concern deepened when a person identifying themselves as a whistleblower contacted me by email in March 2025. They alleged that, during an internal meeting, a senior staff member said that representatives of the Pakistani state – acting through its embassy and other networks – had conveyed their displeasure about my research to the University and questioned why Cambridge was facilitating it.
When administration becomes complicity
Cambridge University may describe these as separate administrative decisions. But that is precisely how institutional abandonment works. A lock changed here, a meeting cancelled there, an academic decision placed in another file – viewed together, they left me without secure institutional protection and unable to continue the research that had attracted the threats.
This concern is shared by academics inside the varsity. Professor Miley wrote to the university that there is a growing perception among colleagues that the circumstances suggest the university was “bowing to pressure” and becoming “complicit in international repression of dissident voices”.
OBE Clive Stafford Smith warned that institutional decisions assisting efforts to silence [mass] atrocity research could amount to “facilitative complicity”. In an earlier letter to the university, he wrote: “I am confident that his work holds the potential to contribute meaningfully to the reduction of crimes against humanity in Balochistan.”
This is no longer simply my account against a world-famous university. British MPs, including John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott have signed a parliamentary motion expressing alarm at Cambridge’s response and calling for procedures to address transnational repression. Human rights organisations including Amnesty International, National Union of Journalists, ARTICLE 19, Freedom House, Index on Censorship and others too have raised concerns.
In July 2026, ARTICLE 19 said that British authorities had done little to protect or even engage with me, and argued that Cambridge’s actions reinforced the silencing effect of the threats.
This month, things got worse as attempts to report my case came under attack. The 21 Group’s website was bombarded with tens of thousands of botnet requests from servers in Pakistan within an hour of publishing about me, and Index on Censorship suffered two cyberattacks this year – incidents that have raised fears of foreign interference. These attacks repeatedly brought the websites down.
Death of a professor
The recent death of Cambridge professor Jason Arday has made questions of institutional responsibility even more urgent.
Some academics and commentators have described his death as “institutional murder”, while others have raised concerns about whether Cambridge fulfilled its duty of care towards a vulnerable Black and disabled scholar subjected to an extraordinary public onslaught.
Yet, his case has also exposed a telling contradiction. When Arday reported physical threats, Cambridge said it urgently installed panic alarms, upgraded CCTV, screened his emails and post and revised security protocols. Those were appropriate and necessary measures. But when I reported threats connected to my research, the same university claimed it had no mechanisms to protect me and repeatedly told me to find accommodation elsewhere. The issue is not that Arday received protection.
It is why Cambridge’s established security machinery was withheld from another threatened scholar, a concern also raised by the Committee for Academic Freedom and the 21 Group in their statement, “The Student Cambridge Did Not Want To Protect.”
This is not ‘Pakistan’s internal politics’
For many in India, it would be easy – and intellectually lazy – to file this entire incident under “Pakistan’s internal politics”. Coming from a marginalised ethnic minority in Pakistan, I too have witnessed the devastating consequences of that assumption. Since the 1980s, Pakistan’s military establishment has pursued the doctrine of “strategic depth” in Afghanistan, supporting militant proxies and exporting violence across a border that cuts through Pashtun lands. The consequences have been catastrophic for generations of Pashtuns.
India knows far too much about violence travelling across borders. The 26/11 Mumbai attacks remain the most searing example of how networks operating from Pakistan can project terror into another country. Pakistan was also home to A.Q. Khan’s extensive illicit nuclear proliferation network, which supplied Iran, Libya and North Korea, while investigations into terrorist attacks abroad have repeatedly alleged links between Pakistan-based militant groups and elements of the ISI.
My case concerns a different method and the distinction matters: it is not a case of mass-casualty attack, but of threats, surveillance, diaspora intimidation and the cultivation of plausible deniability.
A university that protects only those dissidents whose governments it dislikes is not defending academic freedom, and Indian students seeking independent political scholarship must realise that. The real question is whether a British institution will protect any scholar whose lawful work inconveniences a powerful state and whether withholding that protection allows a foreign state’s policy to be enacted on British soil.
That question becomes sharper when money enters the room. Cambridge itself reports £23.2 million in research-grant income from mainland China and Hong Kong over five financial years, as well as more than 2,900 Chinese nationals studying there in 2024-25. Separately, Trinity College agreed a £200 million collaboration with Beijing-based Tus-Holdings for development at Cambridge Science Park.
China has supported Pakistan in its response to the Baloch issue, including through intelligence cooperation, drone technology, satellite imagery and diplomatic backing at international forums.
When research troubles both Islamabad and Beijing, can Cambridge demonstrate that protecting their researcher matters more than protecting inter-state relationships?
How far does the ‘Cambridge’ title get one?
India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, studied at Trinity; Subhas Chandra Bose at Fitzwilliam; and Aurobindo Ghose at King’s College – yet Cambridge did not make these men anti-colonialists. They took knowledge from an imperial institution and turned it against the empire. That contradiction is part of the university’s history and part of its attraction to generations of South Asian students.
But Cambridge University’s assault on my academic quest exposes the hypocrisy of invoking the courage of dead anti-colonial figures while undermining a living South Asian dissident.
South Asian applicants, particularly those looking to produce works that challenge the status quo, should therefore think twice because prestige must not suspend scrutiny.
Before paying international fees, students and their families should ask: What happens if a student faces politically motivated threats? Who conducts the risk assessment? Can a college remove accommodation while a security complaint remains unresolved? Is academic continuity protected while complaints and appeals are pending? Are financial relationships with foreign states independently scrutinised for their possible effect on academic freedom?
These questions matter, especially to students researching Kashmir, Balochistan, Sri Lanka’s civil war, Bangladesh’s political violence, Afghanistan, or simply the conduct of powerful institutions. Universities, today, welcome such subjects when they appear in prospectuses and funding applications. The harder test comes when the research provokes a real response from power.
If the institution chooses procedure over protection, silence over scholarship and powerful relationships over a threatened researcher, South Asian students are entitled to ask what, exactly, the name ‘Cambridge’ still buys. How far does it get one?
Cambridge has maintained that the decisions concerning my PhD and accommodation were ‘administrative’ rather than political, and has ‘denied’ that my research was curtailed because of external pressure.
A comprehensive timeline recently appeared in Index on Censorship’s quarterly magazine and is available here.
Roshaan Khattak is an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker and activist living in exile in the UK. His work researches human rights issues, specifically extrajudicial disappearances and killings in Pakistan’s Balochistan province.
This article went live on October fourth, two thousand twenty six, at two minutes past two in the afternoon.
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