Shimla-A delegation of Himachal Pradesh University’s former student leaders and elected office bearers of the Students Central Association (SCA) on January 18, 2020, submitted a memorandum to the President through Governor Bandaru Dattatraya at Raj Bhavan, Shimla to show their solidarity with the students and teachers of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) amidst the current turmoil. The signatories alleged that the student agitation for fee rollback has been met with aggressive counter, wherein students and teachers of the University have been brutally assaulted, under the implicit support of the Professor M. Jagdish Kumar, Vice Chancellor, Delhi police and political forces whose masked goons unleashed violence on January 5, 2020.

Among dozens of students and teachers attacked with rods and bricks, Professor Sucharita Sen, Dr. Ameet Parameswaran, and Ms. Aishe Ghosh, President JNUSU, were seriously injured in the brutal organized attack. And, till date, no arrests have been made and to the contrary criminal cases have been filed against the JNUSU office bearers and other students, they said.           

They also said that JNU has been the second best ranked University in India, first being IISc Bangalore, by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), MHRD, for its knowledge generation, academic outputs, briefly, owing to five parameters viz. (i) teaching, learning and resources; (ii) research, productivity, impact and IPR (RPII), (iii) graduation outcome, (iv) outreach and inclusivity and (v) perception.

Apart from the contribution of JNU to the overall human resource development and contribution to the national development as is evident from these criteria, the last stated criterion, ‘perception’, is the most important in the present scenario wherein 24×7 propaganda machinery is working hard to defame this esteemed centre of learning, they said.  Its academic preeminence has again been affirmed recently as out of 32 candidates selected as IES Officers, 18 are alumni of JNU. Thereafter, the Union HRD Minister also had to state ‘JNU is Our Top University’, they added.

The memorandum said that along with this, it is not out of place to put here that JNU also has earlier been considered a prestigious University world around. It has kept alive the very spirit of the debate in Indian Parliament when the bill for its establishment was placed for discussion as in the Rajya Sabha on 1 September 1965 by the then minister of education, M.C. Chagla. During the discussion on the bill, Bhushan Gupta, MP, voiced the opinion that ‘….this should not be yet another university…and one thing that this University should ensure was to keep noble ideas in mind and provide accessibility to students from weaker sections of society.’ And since the JNU Act came into force on 22 April 1969, the students and the faculty of this University did not let the Indian Parliament down and hugely contributed to take this University to the top by way of a work culture unique in India.

Today, JNU is also known for its alumni who occupy important bureaucratic and ministerial positions in India including in the present central government, the memorandum said. In this backdrop, the functioning of Professor M. Jagdish Kumar, Vice-Chancellor, during his four years tenure and with focus on January 05, 2020, violent attack, on students and faculty, needs a serious look. He was selected as Vice-Chancellor by the then President of India by ignoring the HRD Ministry’s note on the appointment of a new V.C. for JNU that had a veiled warning that Kumar could be a misfit to run JNU. His functioning as VC has been detrimental to the growth of this University as comes out of his four years tenure and the recent incidents have made it obligatory that he should be sacked immediately being complicit in the mob attack on students and teachers on January 05, 2020, it said.

The signatories have given the following five reasons behind their demand to remove the JNU VC:

1. For the past four years of his tenure, the Vice-Chancellor has been working to “change the character of the University” without weighing the outcome of his measures. He has an ideological framework and is trying to plant a pre-drawn action plan, which is leading to a confrontation with students and faculty members and is the basis of the recent unrest in JNU where he is not paying attention to the elected bodies, JNUSU and JNUTA. For him, a decision means ‘no discussion’. JNU has an intellectual culture and has always been anti-establishment, and he is not fit to understand that due to his ‘robotic approach’. He could not understand the inherent strengths of JNU which has a culture of open debate between peers, teachers and students, and dissent.
2. Till date, he did not even bother to meet and see the injured students showing his biased behaviour to a particular group of students and JNUSU, while facilitating the other group of students. It is in the public domain now that Professor Kumar did not allow police entry into the campus while the masked goons were attacking the innocent students despite administration receiving panic calls of the students being attacked. Even a political party accused him of being the “mastermind” of the attacks and demanded his immediate dismissal and a criminal investigation against him and some faculty members who conspired with the attackers and the security company on the campus. Even, BJP stalwart Professor Murli Manohar Joshi, Ex-HRD Minister, has sought dismissal of Professor Kumar conveying to the powers that be that the rule of law and institutional credibility are supreme in a democratic country.
3. The Vice-Chancellor should have learnt a lesson from the Wardens of hostels, where students were attacked, who quit their posts on moral grounds taking responsibility for failure to protect students, and resigned on moral grounds on the night of January 5th itself. During the last four years of his tenure as the Vice-Chancellor of JNU, he has caused more harm than good to the University mainly sticking to his style of functioning and his ideological leaning.
4. He has been obstinate not to listen to the grievances and demands raised by the JNUSU. Despite the fact that students proposed “first step” towards resolving the deadlock that they were ready to register for the new semester by only paying the tuition fees and not the hiked hostel fees, Professor Kumar did not respond to their move. It is too inhuman for him not to see the injured students after the brutal attack.
5. He did not take any pre-emptive steps to prevent the mob attack on the students and the faculty members knowing well before the incident that something serious is going to happen on the campus between January 4 and 5. Now, after all, that has happened, he did not take any post-incident steps to assuage the feelings of the aggrieved party. That firmly confirms his complicity in this whole incident, hence he should be sacked.