Delhi: Sharanya Verma, a first-year MA student in performance studies and the treasurer of the students’ council at Dr B R Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), was incredulous and distraught at being suspended on 11 April 2025.
Her distress stemmed from the fact that Verma, 21, was stopped from attending classes because she and four other suspended students had simply protested the suspension of three fellow students—Nadia (identified with one name), Anan Bijo and Harsh Choudhary—who reported a bullying incident.
On 1 March, Nadia and Bijo—in emails accessed by Article 14—narrated, on the university’s official email chain, how a BA student who had accidentally spilled food on the floor was mocked and mentally harassed by peers.
On 5 March, the university suspended 11 students—three who reported the bullying and eight alleged bullies.
On the evening of 11 April, Verma stood at AUD’s main gate, hoping to intercept the car of vice chancellor Anu Singh Lather. When the car arrived, Verma walked alongside it, trying to speak with her.
“I tried to plead for a conversation, but the guards were pulling my salwar,” said Verma. “I kept saying, ‘Please leave it, it will tear.’ But they didn’t, and it did. That moment really shook me.”
“I couldn’t understand why the university was responding with such violence,” said Verma. “None of us did anything that deserved this kind of violence.”
On 15 April—four days after the guards tore Verma’s salwar—the university informed the Delhi High Court that it would revoke the suspensions of Nadia, Bijo, and Choudhary.
This decision followed a petition filed on behalf of these three students on 1 April, which was heard on 2 April.
“The delay cost us over 40 days on campus—revocation wouldn’t have happened without legal and political pressure,” said Bijo.
However, when this story was published, the suspensions of the five students who protested the suspensions of Nadia, Bijo, and Choudhary—including Verma—had not been revoked.
In response to questions from Article 14, AUD’s public relations officer Aditya Pratap Singh, shared a press statement related to the 15 April revocation of suspensions for Nadia, Bijo, and Choudhary.
The statement stated that the university was “committed to upholding academic freedom, due process and a respectful campus environment for all students, faculty and staff”.
The statement did not respond to queries about the 11 April suspensions of Verma and four others who had protested in solidarity, instead reiterating the high court’s direction that students “shall not take part in any protest or demonstration, directly or indirectly, with regard to the incident being inquired into”.
The suspensions have disrupted their academic work, the students said.
Shubhojeet Dey, a suspended PhD student in development studies, said, “I can’t renew my library card without a bonafide certificate, which is not possible to get as I’m suspended.”
Declining Academic Freedom
That the events at AUD were finally addressed in court instead of on campus is a pointer to the growing reluctance of university officials to talk to students, as protest and dissent are increasingly frowned upon, said observers.
The events at AUD are a piece of similar and growing friction with university authorities and union and state governments nationwide, especially in public universities, such as AUD, friction now causing a decline in India’s academic freedom rankings.
The 2025 Academic Freedom Index (AFI) report—released in March by Sweden’s V-Dem Institute—ranked India 156 of 179 countries globally and identified it as one of several countries experiencing a “statistically significant and meaningful decline” in academic freedom over the past decade.
In five years since 2020, India’s ranking has fallen 41 places, when it was ranked 115 of 144 nations.
The ranking considers five factors: the freedom to research and teach; the freedom of academic exchange and dissemination; the institutional autonomy of universities; campus integrity; and the freedom of academic and cultural expression
Among its neighbours, India ranked above China, Myanmar and Afghanistan and below Pakistan, Bhutan and Bangladesh.
The ranking, said Ashish Goel, lawyer at the Supreme Court of India, indicated that the attack on the intellectual autonomy of students and academics had been “more frequent, more direct, and more damaging under the Modi government (than before)”.
“Anti-protest policies are being drawn and aggressively implemented with consequences,” said Goel, pointing to cases filed against students, violating their constitutional right to free expression.
“Given how the judicial process works in India, a student can be casually deprived of her dignity and liberty for several years, and the process almost always becomes the punishment,” said Goel.
Growing Clampdowns
A clampdown on student protests is also evident in other states, such as Congress-run Telangana, where police attacked and detained Hyderabad University students trying to stop the destruction of a forest on their campus.
In December 2024, Article 14 reported how Delhi University (DU)’s expulsion—stayed by the Delhi High Court—of an MA student for writing a slogan on wall calling for protests against a government examination agency, reflected a larger clampdown on freedom of speech and activism across India’s educational institutions.
During 2020 protests against the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act, many students at Jamia Millia Islamia and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi were arrested and accused of a range of crimes.
In 2023, Ramadas Prini Sivanandan, a Dalit scholar at Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), was suspended for two years for participating in protests against the National Education Policy (NEP), illustrating the growing trend of penalising students for activism.
The same year, several universities restricted, banned and even expelled students for screening the BBC documentary “India: The Modi Question,” which questioned Prime Minister Modi's role during the 2002 Gujarat riots.
On 4 February 2025, the Delhi police detained four members of Bhagat Singh Chhatra Ekta Manch—a students’ organisation—for painting murals on a wall inside JNU, criticising Operation Kagar, a counterinsurgency operation in Chhattisgarh and alleged extrajudicial killings in Bastar.
Early on 13 February, 14 Jamia students were detained by the Delhi police while protesting against the university’s disciplinary actions.
These actions included show-cause notices issued to four students who had organised a “Day of Resistance” in remembrance of a 15 December 2019 police attack on students in the university library.
The detained students were split into smaller groups and taken to police stations far from campus.
On 12 and 13 February, the chief proctor’s office of the university suspended 17 students, including many of those detained by the Delhi police.
Moushumi Basu, an associate professor at Delhi’s JNU, said faculty had also “faced action” from university authorities.
She pointed to the June 2023 suspension of four professors—Snehashish Bhattacharya, Srinivas Burra, Irfanullah Farooqi, and Ravi Kumar at Delhi’s South Asian University (SAU) for supporting students protesting a stipend cut and lack of representation, and a March 2025 show-cause notice by AUD to Kaustav Banerjee, an associate professor, accusing him of inciting disorder during a student protest.
“As a society, we are becoming increasingly intolerant of dissent and more pliant—an attitude that bodes ill for the health of universities, where the mind should be free and the head held high,” said Basu, quoting Rabindranath Tagore, India’s poet laureate and writer of the national anthem.
The Spiral At AUD
The events at AUD began on 1 March 2025, when Nadia, an MA student, sent an email—accessed by Article 14—on the university’s official email chain, flagging the alleged bullying of a BA global studies student and naming four individuals responsible.
Following this, Bijo, another student, sent a second email—accessed by Article 14—adding two more names in connection with the same incident.
Choudhary—one of those suspended alongside Nadia and Bijo—was contacted by the student’s mother to raise the issue, although he did not write any email regarding the case, according to sources familiar with the case.
The student had accidentally spilled food on the floor during class and was mocked and forced to clean it up.
Distressed, she ran to call a cleaner, tripped, and injured her leg. Even after being hospitalised, the harassment continued in a group chat.
After receiving a complaint from her mother, the university initiated a proctorial inquiry.
Based on the findings of the investigation, the administration suspended 11 students involved in the case.
The university later revoked the suspensions of six students—all girls—out of the eight alleged bullies, leaving Nadia, Bijo, and Choudhary suspended.
The remaining two alleged bullies continue to remain under suspension.
In response to the university's decision not to revoke the suspensions of Nadia, Bijo, and Choudhary, members of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI)—a left-wing student organization affiliated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—began a sit-in on 7 April, followed by a relay hunger strike on 9 April.
On 11 April, Sameer Asif Mohammad, a BA sociology student, fainted due to the heat and lack of food during the protest.
Two emails were sent that day—accessed by Article 14—one by Verma and another by Dey, raising concerns about arbitrary suspensions, barricades on campus, and Mohammad’s condition.
In the first, Verma wrote, “We wish to meet you regarding the suspensions that are served to the students arbitrarily, and barricades that are kept everywhere inside campus.”
“A student on the sit-in, Sameer from BA Sociology Third Year has fainted due to being on hunger strike,” said Dey’s email. “We are (sic) trying to meet you since (sic) the last five days. It is very worrying that students' health is now falling apart but there is no communication from your end.”
Both emails went unanswered.
On 19 April 2025, Article 14 sought comment from proctor Satyaketu Sankrit and vice chancellor Lather over email.
Sankrit did not respond. On 21 April, assistant registrar Anshu Singh asked us to direct queries to the university’s public relations office.
Public relations officer Singh said, “The registrar has given the statement to PTI (Press Trust of India). Other than that, there is no official statement from the university on this matter.”
On 13 April, registrar Navlendra Kumar Singh, alleged to PTI that the students, who were protesting against an earlier disciplinary action, blocked his and vice chancellor Lather’s cars on 11 April, Friday.
"They hung on to my vehicle and did not allow it to move,” said Navlendra Kumar Singh. “They also blocked the vice chancellor's car and vandalised mine. Security personnel and police had to intervene. A formal complaint has been filed and an FIR will be registered.”
Allegations Are ‘Ridiculous’: Students
The suspension orders of Dey, Verma, and Shefali, an MA student—accessed by Article 14—accuse them of obstructing the university gate, pushing guards, attempting to assault the vice chancellor and registrar’s car, and damaging public property.
The students have denied the charges.
Dey said, “We didn’t attack anyone—just stood in front of the car and raised slogans like ‘vc ma'am, talk to us.’ We didn’t even touch the car.”
He added, “If anything happened, it was in self-defence—they were brutally hitting us.”
Verma called the allegations “ridiculous.”
“There were 40–50 guards and Delhi police—how could five students assault them? We were the ones being attacked as the vice chancellor and registrar left,” she said.
On 15 and 18 April, Article 14 sent emails to registrar Singh and proctor Sankrit seeking responses to the students’ allegations, the suspensions, the use of force and indications that due process was not followed—no show-cause notices were issued, and a disciplinary committee was not formed.
A reminder email was also sent, but there was no response. We will update this story if there is one.
Separately, two members of the proctorial board were contacted over call to ask whether the board was consulted in the suspension process and if any meeting had taken place on the matter.
One member answered the call and said, “I am busy in a meeting right now and I am not an authorised person to speak on this.”
The other did not pick up. Follow-up messages were sent to both members—one via text and the other via WhatsApp—but neither responded.
No Dialogue With Students
On the day of the suspension, the security advisor asked students to submit a written application to meet the vice chancellor, which they did, also sending an email to the university administration.
“The conversation regarding the meeting with the administration began by 11 am,” said Shefali.
“We pleaded with the administration to come speak with us, but no one came,” said Verma.
Verma said, “We weren’t being violent or forcing our way in—we followed all the proper processes, sending applications and emails, but no one was talking to us.”
The students remain defiant.
“From here, our struggle becomes even stronger,” said Shefali. “We will definitely challenge this.”
‘Never Seen Anything Like This’
Dey said the violence by university guards was unprecedented.
“I’ve seen many protests at AUD—anti-CAA, fee hikes—but never this,” he said. “I was holding the gate when a guard hit me on the neck with a baton and tried to choke me to make me move.”
Several students alleged that Keerthana, a master’s student in social design, had a near-death experience during the protest.
“The registrar’s car nearly ran her over,” said Verma. “If it had come an inch closer, she might not be alive.”
“We shouted, ‘Will you kill her?’” said Dey.
These were among the allegations for which Article 14 sought comment from AUD officials but got no response.
While AUD suspended Nadia, Choudhary, and Bijo, without issuing a show-cause notice, as mandated by the Dr B R Ambedkar Vishwavidyalaya Act 2007, during the high court hearing, the university’s lawyer—quoted in an 8 April order—said that AUD was “considering the appeal, but has not yet taken any definitive action”.
Nadia submitted her appeal—accessed by Article 14—on 11 March and received a response on 25 March, in which the proctor’s office stated, “Your representation is currently under review.”
On 28 March, she asked again for the status of her case, but received no response.
A day after the second court hearing, on 9 April, the university called the students for a meeting with the proctorial board.
According to those who attended, they were only asked to present their case, with no further discussion.
"The meeting lasted five minutes," said Nadia.
(Rishab Gaur is an independent journalist based in Delhi.)
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