A fig leaf called ‘vandalism by University of Hyderabad students’ - Issued by SC and ST Faculty Forum and Concerned Teachers
A fig leaf called ‘vandalism by UoH students’
(SC and ST Faculty Forum and Concerned Teachers
of University of Hyderabad)
For the past three
days the news media has been circulating widely, stories about ‘vandalism’ by
students of the University of Hyderabad that led to the police crackdown.
Surprisingly little information is actually there on the actual context,
timing, duration and nature of the vandalism. It appears that the claim that a
group of students indulged in acts of vandalism is enough to justify a full
scale war on the entire campus community of over 4000 students. Yet this charge of vandalism is no more than
a fig leaf .
● Naam kya
hai tera? Acchaa tu Pakistani hai. Chal main tere ku sabak sikhata hoon! (What
is your name? Oh, you are a Pakistani? Let me teach you a lesson)
● Tu kahaan
ki rehne wali hai? Itti kaali hai! Aa tere ku sabak sikhata hoon! (Where are
you from? You are so dark. Let me teach
you a lesson)
● Kiskaa
Fotu khenchraa re tu? Abhi bataata hoon tere ku! (Whose photo are you shooting?
Let me show you …)
This was how the
police read out the rights to the students and faculty member of University of
Hyderabad as they were ‘arrested’ on March 22. Arrested from different places
all over the campus much later in the day when most of them were nowhere near
the lodge that morning.
Two teachers Prof. K Y
Ratnam (Centre for Ambedkar Studies) and Dr. Tathagatha Sengupta (School of
Mathematics and Statistics) known for their commitment to social justice were
targeted, roughed-up, and arrested. Prof. Ratnam, who was in a selection
committee meeting till 2pm and then came to the VC Lodge saw the police beating
up the students sitting on the lawns and went to dissuade them was himself
roughed up and thrown into the van. When a female faculty member rushed there
to urge the policemen to stop beating up Prof. Ratnam, she was told that she
was welcome to jump into the van. When a female student tried to intervene when
a male student was being dragged into the van, she was told she would be raped.
Thus began a three-track ordeal for the University of Hyderabad community.
Track I- Denial of food, water and basic
amenities
Electricity, water,
food and internet were all shut off for two days by the non-teaching staff who,
according to the Vice-Chancellor, were on strike. 14 hostel messes were
completely shut down affecting the 5000 odd students on campus. For 48 hours,
volunteers from across the city were desperately trying to supply food and
water to the students through the barricaded gates. Many students protected
themselves from dehydration by drinking water from the bathrooms. On March 23
some students tried to cook food on the campus. They were stopped from doing
so. D. Udaya Bhanu, a research scholar,
who was cooking for the starving students at the shopping complex was beaten up
brutally despite him pleading that her was just recovering from a surgery. In
fact, he was then hit at the spot of the surgery and on his head, and had to be
rushed to a hospital in a critical condition. The police taunted him about his
political views and activities on campus, and indicated that he was receiving
his just desserts. A security officer of the university who was watching the
events told the police personnel to beat the excess fat out of Uday. All this
while the ‘nationalist’ students affiliated to ABVP were circling them on motor
cycles shouting slogans cheering India’s win in a cricket match and taunting
the others.
The University of
Hyderabad campus could easily have been any of the police camps that dotted
Telangana region in the 80s. The younger
generation of students who are not familiar with such images have been
describing it as Jallianwala bagh, surrounded as they were, by armed, hostile
men.
Track II - Seemingly random detentions
As of now, precise
numbers of people arrested, detained, mentioned in FIRs are all up in the air.
What we do know is that the bail orders for 27 persons are reserved till Monday
(March 28) 3pm in the Miyapur court. We
are told that several other FIRs against many more students have been filed.
These are all supposed to be based on video and photo evidence—the
Vice-Chancellor announced graciously in a faculty meeting that those against
whom there is no evidence will be let off.
The atmosphere on campus is one of trepidation and uncertainty, with
students being arrested at whim and moved from one police station to another,
and with information being deliberately withheld. While the Cyberabad
Metropolitan Police’s website puts up all FIRs relating to gendered offences
including (often) sensitive data regularly, it does not upload the FIRs for the
offences that the students are being charged under. The only option left for
family of those who are possibly accused to get hold of the FIRs in question,
is to get a court order requiring the FIRs to be made available; a tall task,
given the intervening holidays.
Track III - Denial of civil rights
Long after the said incident of vandalism, which resulted in some damage to
furniture in the building, a large number of students arrived on the lawns of
the lodge in a state of shock and dismay, questioning the sudden and
surreptitious return of a Vice-Chancellor who had not been cleared of any of
the serious charges levelled against him.
These students were evicted from the lawns by around 5pm and soon after
that the crackdown began. It was as if the police were not looking for the
vandals, but for those who could be potentially accused of vandalism and beaten
up with impunity. If the comments from
the police addressed to the detainees as cited above indicate that anything
from tone of your skin, the way your name sounds, the way you look at the
policeman, the way you plead on behalf of the students, your political views,
your personal history, any of these could mark you, then look
at what the relatives of the detainees were treated to later on.
● Why does
your husband instigate students to take positions against government? Why
doesn’t he just do his job and teach in the classroom?
● Do you
know that your daughter does not study? She is too politically active.
And here is a sample
of what the detainees were told in the jail.
● If you
refuse to eat food in the jail, we have videos of you eating in the police
custody. We will release those and tell people that you are lying about the
quality of food in the jail.
The story of impunity
is not complete without going briefly over the manner in which the students
were produced before the magistrate. The detainees were hauled into police vans
and severely beaten. They were taken to undisclosed locations. Faculty spoke to
the ACP, who assured them that the detention was only until things calmed down
in the University and that no charges would be filed. On March 23, 2016,
members of the University’s faculty visited the Cyberabad Police
Commissionerate, but were unable to meet the concerned officials on account of
it being a holiday. From there, they went to the Miyapur Police Station where
they found 18 of the detained persons were being held. However, they were told
that the police personnel had no idea where the rest of the detainees were
being held; they claimed to have no knowledge of the situation, saying that the
University was outside of the Police Station’s jurisdiction, and the 18 were
being held there only on account of space constraints elsewhere. Here too, they
were told that the detainees would be released from custody by 3pm, and that no
charges were going to be filed. It was discovered later, when friends of the
detainees sought to visit them, that they had been moved again to an
undisclosed location, before 2pm.
Acting on some vague
information they received, the faculty then headed to Narsingi Police Station
where they were told that no students had been brought there at any point of
time. However, testimonies indicate that students were first taken there
initially and then shifted out. They went to Raidurgam Police Station, and then
to Gachibowli Police Station, where police personnel insisted that they had no
information regarding the detainees. The detainees’ lawyers too ran from one
Police Station to the next without being given any information regarding their
whereabouts.
In the meantime,
information was received that the detainees would be produced before the
Miyapur Court at 5pm. The faculty and team of lawyers went there and waited but
found no sign of them. Then they were told that the detainees would be produced
before the Magistrate at her residence; at the same time, a ticker tape on
television proclaimed that the detainees had been produced before a Magistrate
and remanded to judicial custody for 14 days. Later it was discovered that they
had in fact been produced before the Magistrate in a clandestine fashion only
at about 11pm, in contravention of the Constitutional requirement to produce
arrested persons within 24 hours, and then sent to Cherlapally Central Jail.
The team of lawyers
tried to move a House Motion in the High Court, unsuccessfully. Several
students, faculty and lawyers sought to meet the Chief Justice of the High
Court, but just two lawyers were permitted inside the premises and they too
were only able to meet the Justice’s Personal Secretary.
Taking note of the
situation on campus, a group of lawyers from Bombay offered their pro bono services to the students. They
arrived in the morning on March 24, but were denied permission to enter the
University premises by the campus security. The students whom they were due to
meet argued that they had a right to consult counsel and that there is no
mentioned restriction against the entry of lawyers, but were told that they had
been ordered to bar ‘outsiders’ from entering. They were asked to seek
permission from the Vice-Chancellor—the very person against whom the students
were protesting and the person who sought that charges be brought against them—if
they wished to take the lawyers inside. Members from civil rights organisations
who wanted to visit the campus having taken note of the situation there were
not allowed inside. The Dalit Human Rights Commission too was barred from
entering the University. Faculty members attempted to reason with the campus
security on the grounds that other ‘outsiders’ (those favoured by the
administration) had been permitted inside, to no avail. Evidently, the term
‘outsider’ had been defined to mean any person who sought to speak with the
students on campus. Both the students and the faculty demanded that the denial
of permission to enter be put in writing, but the campus security refused. Most
importantly, through the entire period, the media has been barred from entering
the campus.
A bail petition for 24
students and 2 faculty members and a video journalist was moved in the Miyapur
court on March 24, but was hotly contested by the prosecution, which sought
till March 28 to make counter arguments. The State Human Rights Commission has
taken cognisance of a complaint in relation to the events unfolding at the
University of Hyderabad, and scheduled a hearing for March 26, where the
Vice-Chancellor is required to report on the case filed. The word on the block
is that the official narrative has been tailored to make the entire lockdown of
the campus and the stoppage of essential amenities on campus seem like a
skirmish between the students and the non-teaching staff: a patently false
claim, by all accounts.
Clearly, the war on
the campus community is not simply about vandalism or about a disagreement
between students and non-teaching staff.
● A small
number of students and faculty have been targeted and persecuted for their
political views and sympathies.
● A much
larger number (almost entirely Dalit and Muslims) have been simply profiled by
their names, appearances and identities.
● The entire
campus community has been subjected to collective punishment and the larger
civil society in the city and in the country has been disallowed from reaching
out any kind of support—even the basic humanitarian support of food and
water.
● Students
and faculty and their families have been denied basic civil rights. That the
non-teaching staff were co-opted into this is more than evident by the
circumstances in which they went on a protest.
What is the justification for this war on
students and sympathetic faculty?
The story that has
been doing the rounds until now in media and among the faculty is that the
students indulged in vandalism at the VC Lodge. The said incident of vandalism
was supposed to have happened between 9:30 am and 10:30 am. At the time when students supporting the
Joint Action Committee arrived in the morning at the VC’s Lodge to protest
against Prof. Appa Rao taking charge, there were members of the ABVP, apart
from chosen faculty members, Deans of different schools, students largely from
School of Life Sciences, already inside. Some non-JAC students inside are said
to have been shouting slogans. It is understood that was a scuffle and some
damage to property. Only one section of students is being held responsible for
the incident. The University Administration justifies the arrests and beating
up of students as a crack-down on vandals. It disassociates itself from the
denial of food and water and other services to the students by projecting this
as a conflict between the students and non-teaching staff over which the
administration had no control. Indeed, the administration believes that it has
no culpability in what happened on campus.
Politically motivated and fully scripted:
It is important to
understand the broader context and timing of Vice-Chancellor Appa Rao’s return
to the campus. Social media commentaries point towards the caste nexus between
Appa Rao and the Union Urban Development Minister and thus to the broader
political nexus between the university administration and the BJP. Whatever the truth of these commentaries,
they are not adequate to explain the viciousness of the attack on the campus
community and the larger goal of political isolation.
Appa Rao has taken
extreme pains to deny any involvement of the Union Human Resources Development
Ministry in the course of events on UoH campus. But that would then mean that
the administration is directly accountable for the suicide of Rohith
Vemula. As a matter of fact, the first
thing that the MHRD delegation of officials secured in February was a statement
from the Vice-Chancellor’s office that they were not influenced in any way by
the routine communications from the Ministry regarding ‘anti nationals’. The
administration then must explain how it allowed the situation to slide into
such a disaster, ending in Rohith’s suicide.
Even as the government
appointed a judicial enquiry, the Vice-Chancellor went on leave. The next
senior most professor to take charge as Vice-Chancellor, who holds a press
conference to announce that he has everything under control, was forced to
leave in a jiffy. The next in line—Professor Periaswamy—managed to steer the
campus to the end of the semester so that the academic work could carry on even
as the larger demands for justice in the instance of Rohith Vemula and other
students continues.
This is the point at
which when the issue of institutional accountability is yet to be settled, when
the campus was hobbling towards the end of the semester, that Appa Rao returns
to the campus. And he returns to the campus with a triumphant stance of a hero
returning home - one day before there is news that Kanhaiya Kumar is visiting
Hyderabad and may visit the campus. The acting Vice-Chancellor is informed
about this by subordinate staff. Appa Rao is garlanded and welcomed and cheered
by a large number of faculty and students. This, when senior police officials
have reportedly advised him not to go to the campus yet to resume office.
Students affiliated to the ABVP were present in the lodge and on the terrace
with video cameras.
It was an incitement
to a skirmish. Students
frustrated
with the unrepentant, unconciliatory and authoritarian attitude of the
administration took the invitation at its face value and walked into the trap.
Did a group of
students barge into the Vice-Chancellor’s lodge? They may have. Did they break
furniture and ransack the front office? They may have. Did the broader campus
community camp out in front of the VC Lodge protesting? Yes. Was there a
murderous mob occupying the lawns from 11 and could only have been disciplined
by unleashing this violence ? Most certainly not!
The return of
Vice-Chancellor Appa Rao to the campus, that seemed so ill-advised at first,
seems now, in light of what happened over this entire week, like a fully
scripted war—a war to mete out collective punishment, to target individual
faculty members and students, to threaten families of students. And a mechanism
to detrack the process of bringing institutional accountability on questions of
casteism on campus and the tragic loss of life that resulted from it.
The Vice-Chancellor
has also claimed that he has a large support from faculty and students that
that those dissenting are in a very small number. Let us note that of the
nearly 450 faculty members, only a little more than 100 faculty members
attended the meeting which the Vice-Chancellor called. As far as student
support is concerned, it is well-known that except the ABVP, the rest of
students and organisations on campus stood and continue standing for Justice
for Rohith Vemula.
Let us recall the
extraordinary institutional violence including administrative lapses that led
to the suspension of five Dalit students and the consequent death of Rohith
Vemula. One must appreciate the immense maturity and patience of students in
the past three months in carrying out their struggle for justice in the most
peaceful and democratic manner under utter tremendous pressure. To forget all
this and to unilaterally implicate our struggling students in the incidents on
the morning of March 22 amounts to devaluing the life and death of Rohith
Vemula. Are we equating some broken furniture to the loss of a precious life?
The events of the last
few days in the University of Hyderabad are a wake up call to the entire
academic community. It is not the
protesting students, often from historically oppressed and marginalised
communities, that are the cause of the trouble on campuses. This is a well
orchestrated political programme with the full support of the police and other
armed forces to silence dissent, crush the liberal democratic potentials of
university campuses.
Vandalism by students
is only the fig leaf.
