For more than one month, the students of Maths Department have been protesting against mass failure in MSc course. Instead of having a dialogue with the protesting students, the administration allowed police to get inside and thrash the students. The police force forcefully cleaned the protest site. And when that too didn’t break the spirit of the students, the administration sent a show cause notice to students who participated in the protest.
I am a student of Law Faculty and was actively involved in the protest they sent a show cause notice to me for. The university administration has constantly been telling me that I can’t be the part of movement going on in another department. This is the way they ensure that localised movements get curbed. But this time, the students have proclaimed that they won’t let the struggle be fragmented.
Students from English, Physics and Economics department have joined the struggle against the neoliberal assault on higher education. Below is my reply to the DU administration.
This reply was mailed to the proctor yesterday, i.e. on March 22, 2019, at 6:00 pm.
To
Office of the Proctor
Conference Centre, 1st Floor
Opp. Botany Department
Chatra Marg, Delhi- 110007
Sub: – Reply to the show-cause notice dated 15/03/2019
“Awards will honour me if I were to live like a corpse.”
-Tamil poet, Inquilab (died December 2017)
I received a letter dated 15/03/2019 from the section officer of L.C.2 on 19th March 2019 besides the same letter was sent to my address at Burari in Delhi. When I tried interacting with the highly bureaucratic text of this notice, I discovered that the notice is an instrumentality to produce a space of fear whereby the unity of the oppressed is to be smashed. The notice is supposed to have a chilling effect whereby every student of the campus is to self-censor herself or himself while expressing her or his fundamental right to free speech and expression inside the university. The notice, therefore, is a draconian procedure to impede an individual from the rightful exercise of one’s fundamental rights. On this basis, it is arbitrary and unconstitutional. It’s a direct assault on my right to dissent against the institutional paralysis in this university.
The violence intended through the discourse set up in the notice has serious dimensions that need to be addressed in this reply. So instead of looking for a two-line reply, I request her/his highness to go through the dimensions carefully. After the use of connotations and imageries that symbolizes bureaucratic power over an object shaped as a student, you talk of “unlawful activities.”
The use of this word is so vague that it presents no particular meaning throughout the letter. But connecting few words and letters like Mathematical Science, inconvenience, disruptions, and 14th Feb 2019 I can discover the legal space that rests upon a sovereign understanding that any sort of peaceful protest is unlawful activities. I know that the administration knows that the students of Maths department started a movement against the abnormal results and they were later joined by the students from the English and Physics department.
How nice it would have been if you would have initiated a dialogue with the protesting students! But you might have not considered it fit to do so. For my own part, I was there to express solidarity with the protesting students. And you must know that expression of solidarity with any movement on campus is my fundamental right that is protected by Article 19(1)(a) read with Article 19(1)(d) of the Constitution. I have all rights to defend my fundamental rights and along with that I have all rights to speak for the gross injustice done to other students but your highness loves overlooking it. You must know that if Ordinance XV-B, Clause 3(i) comes in conflict with any of the provision in the constitution then according to Article 13(1) the constitutional provision shall prevail.
I appeal the esteemed feudal bureaucratic authority to have a look at the law of land.
1. Article 19(1)(b) confers the right to assemble and, thus, guarantees that all citizens have the right to assemble peacefully and without arms. “It hardly needs elaboration that a distinguishing feature of any democracy is the space offered for legitimate dissent. One cherished and valuable aspect of political life in India is a tradition to express grievances through direct action or peaceful protest. Organized, non-violent protest marches were a key weapon in the struggle for independence, and the right to peaceful protest is now recognized as a fundamental right in the Constitution,” said the Bench.
2. When it comes to democracy, liberty of thought and expression is a cardinal value that is of paramount significance under our constitutional scheme.
-Supreme Court of India, Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, March 24, 2015.
3. “Dissent is a symbol of vibrant democracy” and “Voices in opposition cannot be muzzled by persecuting those who take up unpopular causes.”
-Justice D.Y.Chandrachud.
4. In the case of S. Rangrajan vs. P. Jagjivan Ram, the court laid down an important principle that said, “Freedom of expression protects not only idea that are accepted but those that offend, shock or disturb the state or any sector of the population.”
Instead of introspection on the question of mass failure, the university administration is escalating the issue by targeting the people involved in the protest. Instead of engaging in a dialogue with the students and resolving their basic and genuine grievances, the university authorities, led by the vice-chancellor, chose to allow them to be physically brutalized late into the night by police forces.
I find the use of sections and acts in the notice as a means to create fear inside me, thereby intending to stop me from extending solidarity to the ongoing protest in the department. The act used is the Delhi University Act of 1922, which is a colonial law that had been used by colonial masters to thwack dissent by the objects which are at the margin of sovereign power.
At that time imperial powers used all violent means at their disposal in order to establish their hegemony in the country and now we have an administrative organ like yours that uses the text in colonial law to crack down the voice of dissent in the university campus.
The discursive legal hegemony manifested in the notice is of feudal authoritarian type and hence doesn’t even care to recognize the democratic and progressive contents present in Indian legal system.
The fear of space which this notice creates has the potentiality to erode the rightful exercise of fundamental rights under Article 19(1)(b) of the Indian Constitution. But I would not take legal course of action against the authority for I believe that dialogues and not litigation are the way to resolve the logjams.
The act of disciplining is perhaps the single most reason for which the university as space has been designed by the ruling class. So the use of language like “why disciplinary action should not be taken against you under…” and “failing which appropriate disciplinary action shall be initiated against you” is to be understood as the legal instrumentality to transcend constitutional limits. This transgression from the constitution is clearly a way to reproduce obedience to extra-legal authoritarian practices, Giorgio Agamben would have called this the power of the sovereign to create state of exception.
Therefore, I think that if the administration initiates actions against me then it will only prove its authoritarian character for it is neither me nor any other student who has been disrupting day to day affairs in any department but it is the department and DU administration at large that have systematically disrupted students from building their bright academic career. I and all other progressive students support the scientific attitude of education and to ensure that we will express our discontent against every undemocratic practice on the campus. I take immense pride to state that I have taken an active part in the peaceful movement against mass failure in the Mathematical Science Department and will continue participating in any such protest. And if any action is taken by the administration then the court of the land will ensure that rule of law prevails.
Yours faithfully,
Ujwal Punyark
Roll Number: 177897
Law Centre 2
University of Delhi