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COLLECTIVE condemns the South Asian University administration’s recent move to suspend four senior faculty members — Snehashish Bhattacharya, Ravi Kumar, Sreenivas Burra and Irfanullah Farooqi. This comes after four PhD scholars and Masters students were rusticated and several others penalised for resisting scrapping of Scholarship and Freeship in the SAARC-run institute in December 2022. We stand with the struggling professors and students against this anti-democratic attacks. We have already seen several contractual faculty in public universities and even permanent faculty in private universities terminated for exercising their academic autonomy but this is another escalation in the attack on our educational institutions.
The professors suspended in SAU had written an email against the entry of Delhi Police into the campus, a first in SAU but a now repeated phenomenon in other central and state campuses. They had also opposed the disciplinary action against students this year for violating established university protocol. They have repeatedly raised that the quality of academic work is suffering from the curtailment of campus democracy. In a farcical investigation, the professors were asked to fill in a booklet with over 200 questions in a classroom which they refused — the framing of questions and statements by SAU administration during the investigation clearly indicate that the outcome of the investigation was pre-decided. On Friday, 16 June, the four professors were served suspension notices for which legal opinion is being sought.
The case of SAU shows that the privatisation of universities reduces democratic spaces and curtails academic freedom. RSS BJP’s NEP 2020 has accelerated these trends, which an united student-teacher-worker struggle must defeat today.
Issued by Shambhavi (Gen. Secretary) and Sourya (Jt. Secretary) on behalf of COLLECTIVE Delhi State Committee. Contact: 98111 07835, 88792 15570
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