India’s Supreme Court ordered police on Wednesday to put five prominent rights campaigners suspected of links to Maoist guerrillas under house arrest as outrage grew over their detention.

Critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government have dismissed the allegations against the activists, who were detained a day earlier, and said the crackdown was part of ongoing attempts to stifle all dissent.

Police detained the campaigners, seized their laptops and mobile phones, in raids on their homes in different cities, triggering protests and a petition in the Supreme Court challenging the action.

Sudha Bharadwaj, who has been fighting for the rights of workers in parts of India such as Chhattisgarh where left-wing guerrilla groups operate, said the action against her was part of a broader crackdown on opponents of the government.

“The effort is whatever is the opposition to this regime, whether it is workers rights, tribal rights, everybody who in the opposition is being rounded up,” she told reporters outside her home in Faridabad, a short distance from New Delhi.

The arrests follow months of tensions between right wing nationalist groups and advocates of free speech that has played out in college campuses and spilled over into the streets.

Critics also say several top journalists have been forced out of their jobs for their critical reporting of the government.

The others detained on Tuesday included were Varavara Rao, a prominent poet from the southern city of Hyderabad, activists Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira from Mumbai and civil liberties activist Gautam Navlakha from New Delhi.

Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has faced mounting criticism from activists and academics, who accuse it of undermining the secular and pluralistic principles of India’s constitution.

The BJP denies these allegations but says it is opposed to appeasement of any community and has long advocated tough action to protect national security.

“These five are no threat to anyone,” said Prashant Bhushan, a lawyer for a group of leading academics that has petitioned the Supreme Court to release the activists.

“The charges against them on the face of it appear indiscriminate, unwarranted, part of a malicious campaign to threaten human rights defenders, independent journalists, writers and thinkers in the country from critiquing the government and its policies, and an attempt to muzzle dissent,” the petition said.

INTELLECTUAL FORCE

Police have also accused the five of inflammatory speeches at a rally in western India last year which led to violent clashes between Dalits, the lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy, and right wing organisations.

A police officer said the main case relates to speeches made during a rally held in the city of Pune on Dec. 31, 2017 commemorating the valour of Dalits. The following day, violent clashes broke out between members of the lower caste and hardline Hindu groups.

The police officer, who could not be named because he was not authorised to speak to reporters, said police had seized documents relating to the long-running Maoist insurgency afflicting parts of the country.

The guerrillas are fighting for the rights of the landless in parts of eastern and southern India, dubbed “the Red Corridor”.

The police officer said the five activists gave intellectual force to an insurgency in which thousands of people have been killed over the years.

Modi faces an election next year and opposition parties are trying to forge an alliance to stop his Hindu nationalists from coming back to power.

The Supreme Court headed by the Chief Justice Dipak Misra said it would hear the petition challenging the arrests of the activists next week and until then they would be placed under house arrest, and not police custody.

Judge D.Y. Chandrachud, one of the judges on the bench, said the right to criticise was a crucial for democracy.

“Dissent is the safety valve of democracy. If dissent is disallowed, then the pressure cooker may burst,” he said.

Police in riot gear stormed an apartment in southern China on Friday where about 40 student activists and others supporting factory workers seeking to form a labour union were staying, according to activists who said they received a video of the raid as it was taking place.

The video footage, which was shared with Reuters, showed police armed with shields and helmets bursting into the activists’ accommodation and scuffling with the occupants.

The footage appeared to show an apartment where the students were staying in Huizhou, near the southern city of Shenzhen, that had been previously visited by Reuters. The video could not be independently verified.

It was not immediately clear what happened to the activists. Calls to police in the area and five activists who had been staying at the apartment went unanswered. Labour activists in other parts of the country who are following the case and had been in touch with various activists on the scene said they were unable to contact them.

The raid is the latest step by the Chinese authorities to clamp down on a growing labour movement in the southern province of Guangdong that started brewing last month when workers at a welding machinery company, Jasic International, were fired when they tried to create a union.

Labour activism is viewed as a challenge by the ruling Communist Party, which opposes independent unions and punishes protesters.

On July 27, police detained 29 people, including laid-off workers, their families and supporters. Fourteen people remain in detention.

Since then, support has poured in, with about 50 labour activists, most of them students, travelling to Guangdong to back the workers.

An activist who shared the footage of the raid with Reuters said the raid Friday took place just after 5 a.m. The activist, who declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the footage, said the images were received directly from students in the room when the police entered.

GROWING PRESSURE

Pressure had been mounting on the activists.

In interviews with Reuters a day before the raid, 15 activists involved in the Jasic case described a multi-pronged effort to force them to disengage from the workers’ cause.

The authorities have flown many of the young activists’ parents to Guangdong and put them up in hotels to undergo “training sessions” about how to raise their children, according to interviews with several students.

Authorities lectured the parents on text messages to send to their children. They also arranged to have parents show up at various places where their children were, including the apartment and shopping areas where protests have been staged, they said.

The Ministry of Education issued a notice five days ago to universities across the country telling them to stop students from travelling to Guangdong to participate in the protests, according to screenshots of messages sent by universities to students.

The universities gave a range of explanations to students about why it was unsafe for them to go to Guangdong including an approaching typhoon and the risk of being recruited into a pyramid scheme, several students said.

Reuters was unable to verify the order and the ministry did not respond to faxed questions.

The hashtag “What’s up with Guangdong?” started trending on Weibo as the Ministry of Education notice spread.

Several of the students’ university advisers had apparently also flown to Guangdong to try to persuade them to leave, according to some of the activists.

The protests have spread to Beijing where, on Wednesday and Thursday, a group of 20 students, activists and two worker representatives from Jasic submitted petition letters at the headquarters of the All-China Federations of Trade Unions and the All-China Women’s Federation.