For flimsy reasons, professors face suspension, are issued show-cause notices, and their professional activities in academia are curbed: Last of 2-part series
Since 2014, when the BJP-led NDA formed the government at the Centre, universities across the nation have seen a sea-change. The regime has chosen Right-leaning vice-chancellors and administrators across campuses, and students who don't adhere to this ideology are being relentlessly targeted.
Over the past year alone, there have been several crackdowns on protesting students by university administrations. In February, 17 students of Jamia Millia Islamia were detained and suspended for “protesting without permission”. Legal relief was sought once again by seven students, with the Delhi High Court staying their suspension.
Read part 1: How Indian universities have systematically crushed student dissent since 2014
Part 2: Rampant suspensions
While students in AUD and Jamia have been able to get temporary relief, not everyone is as lucky. At the Benaras Hindu University, 14 students were suspended last October for "disturbing the academic ambience” of the campus.
How? By protesting, a year prior, over the alleged gangrape of an IIT-BHU student. They were also deprived of hostel accommodation and library use.
At the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Dalit PhD student Ramdas Prinisivanandan was suspended last April, for two years, for participating in a protest in Delhi under the Progressive Student Forum (PSF)-TISS banner. His activity was seen as “not in the interest of the nation".
He went to the Bombay High Court, but the court dismissed his petition this March, saying it did not think it to be "an outcome of any discrimination or against freedom of expression”. Prinisivanandan has now moved the Supreme Court.
“This is a pattern whether in AUD or Jamia. They target students based on their ideology, take action and then think about what charges to put on them,” he told The Federal.
Teachers victims, too
In AUD itself, associate professor Kaustav Banerjee of the School of Global Affairs was issued a show-cause notice on March 28 for participating in a protest organised by the All India Students Association (AISA) against the suspensions on campus.
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The notice said his act reflected “doubtful integrity” and was “against the interest of the institution”.
Banerjee responded on April 1, saying, “My speech was well within the rights of the freedom of expression guaranteed to me by the Constitution of India. Further, it is pertinent to note that freedom to freely engage in discussions on topics pertaining unjust suppression, dissent, etc. are a sine qua non in maintaining the freedom of expression in our august university.”
AUD also sent an email to teachers on March 27, through the Dean of Academic Affairs telling them it was “imperative” to report incidents where students were causing “disruption”.
Similar situation at SAU
Teachers at the South Asian University (SAU) too faced a similar situation. In 2023, four teachers were suspended for inciting and leading students and “outsiders” and “antisocial acts”, by supporting protests against reduction of their monthly stipends. Many of these students were from economically weak backgrounds.
Last year, a Sri Lankan professor and his PhD student were forced to quit SAU after a disciplinary inquiry was initiated by the university against their research proposal on Kashmir’s ethnography and politics, which cited American linguist Noam Chomsky’s criticism of the BJP-led NDA government.
Old battlegrounds
Perhaps the first glimpses of this face-off between teachers and students and the managements were seen in JNU and then DU as early as 2016-17. Here, the pattern continues, albeit perhaps a bit less brazenly.
At a press conference in Delhi in support of AUD’s suspended students, Pradeep Shinde, a JNU teacher, said he was show-caused by the university administration a few years ago.
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“It was set aside by the high court, but it continues to be used as a threat, as a stick to beat us with if we don’t fall in line,” he said. Several teachers have been denied leave for academic conferences citing such reasons.
DU Professor Apoorvanand, who was to attend the 20th anniversary celebrations of the India China Institute at The New School in New York from April 23 to May 1, was denied leave after he refused to submit the text of his speech as demanded by the university administration. “A culture of fear has been established in universities in recent years. And vice-chancellors are seeing teachers and students as their enemies, for no real reason,” he said.
A national crisis
Noted economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts, Jayati Ghosh, told a press conference that there is an attack on higher education in India that had been “ongoing for the past decade and more”.
“There is a systematic attack on higher education and it happens in many different ways. One of the most important ways in which it begins is to provide a culture of impunity to the administration, to do as they are told presumably by some higher-up… and create an atmosphere of fear and intolerance of any kind of opposition,” she said.
“It is a real concern because several universities are sought to be destroyed essentially, I would say, by the Central government and its agents in different states,” said Ghosh.
