Stop Administrative Crackdown on Our Right to Dissent and Freedom of Expression! Revoke the ‘Restraint’ Order on JNU Forum and Withdraw the Disciplinary Action on Students!

2 November 2011

The series of repressive and authoritarian measures taken by the administration targeting the student community in this year after the present VC has taken charge is quite unprecedented in the history of the campus. First was the set of two circulars in the month of May which ‘restrained’ all activities of JNU Forum against War on People as a punishment for using an image which artistically depicts state repression and peoples’ resistance against Operation Green Hunt. Such an act of ‘restraining’ of an organisation has never been heard before in the campus. Soon after, the administration locked the JNUSU office in order to prevent the Forum from conducting a public meeting. This again was an act without precedence in the forty years JNUSU’s history. Then making an excuse of the ‘restraint order’, two Forum members have been arbitrarily fined for ‘facilitating’ a subsequent public meeting. Similarly, many other students have been individually targeted, threatened and intimidated by the administration for associating with the Forum’s activities. This is followed by sending a show-cause notice to an office-bearer of AIBSF for reproducing sections of a scholarly article in its poster which exposed the dominant Hindu-brahminical ideology inherent in the Durga-Mahishasur myth.

All these dictatorial administrative acts of suppression and crackdown run totally counter to the much-cherished democratic culture of JNU where freedom of expression, criticality of thought and voices of dissent which are not only respected but also encouraged. Its political culture and democratic space has been a result of decades of struggle by the students and teachers of this university, which are now under unprecedented attack from an administration which has proved itself to be out-and-out communal, casteist and reactionary. The administration is increasingly becoming intrusive in student’s matters and specifically interfering in progressive students’ politics in an effort to police and ‘discipline’ the students according to its own benchmarks. This is while allowing full freedom to the ABVP’s sangh-giroh to indulge in blatant acts of targeted violence and communal hate-speech. The unprecedented assault by the administration is not a threat to just one or two organisations, but is a crackdown on the collective rights of the entire student community. So it must be confronted in a similar manner – by building broader unity and through mass participation in the ongoing resistance.