alt Hacker NewsThe college was being abusive and they probably cannot take your phone and delete your stuff. What an awful thing to happen. By the way, the dean was not being nice by visiting you, don't go through Stockholm Syndrome, he was checking on you because he knew what he did was wrong.
IIT Delhi is in India so I'm not sure what the law looks like there, but yeah a university physically stealing an adult's phone and deleting his personal photos would definitely be illegal in the states.
I wonder if Delhi is the equivalent of a one-party or two-party consent state in the US? If it's one-party then OP recording their conversation wasn't even illegal.