The armed mob attack inside Jawaharlal Nehru University on January 5, 2020, has been four years in the making. Ever since the orchestrated events of February 2016, within weeks of the current vice chancellor taking charge, JNU has faced assault after assault. The first phase saw charges of being anti-national made on the basis of doctored videos of an event around what was perceived as the unjust hanging of Afzal Guru. The slogans supposedly shouted at that event by masked men (the first entry of this species into JNU), gave JNU its honorific, ‘tukde tukde gang’. For over a year after that, students and faculty faced police complaints, arrests for sedition, physical assaults outside campus and mobs gathering at its gates with aggressive slogans.