Written by Uma Gupta and Sandhya Devesan Nambiar
A university is a space for nurturing ideas and imaginations through a process of engaged, rigorous, and methodologically informed deliberations. It is a space for strengthening the present and future of a nation through the shaping of curious, critical and reflexive minds that are capable of envisaging a better tomorrow grounded in the values of social justice, equality and democracy. Any institution that reduces students to passive recipients of discourses and trains them into uncritical subservience does a profound disservice to the country. It is not the question-asking students or faculty who threaten nation-building. It is the very project of turning them into unquestioning automatons that constitutes the real threat.
This is exactly why the recent utterances of the Delhi University’s Vice-Chancellor casting student formations such as Pinjra Tod and faculty members known to raise concerns about the rights of the marginalised and historically disadvantaged under the shadow of vague, ill-intended and ill-defined terminology of “urban Naxalism”, is so dangerous.
The term “urban Naxal” remains not just ill-defined but has been grossly abused to conflate any reasoned critique of the ruling dispensation on the grounds of injustice or inequality with subversion, thus damaging the culture of open inquiry that universities depend on. Peaceful protest, petitions, and critical discussions are not acts of sedition but expressions of democratic engagement that universities must nurture rather than punish. Faculty and students who raise foundational questions about gender justice, caste and class inequalities, and minority rights perform an indispensable function in both academia and society. Their work contributes to making universities nourishing grounds of democratic values, challenging dominant narratives and contributing to social transformation. However, when labels are used to recast critical scholarship and student activism with criminal intent, the university’s everyday practices of discussion, deliberations — and through them the shaping of the “thinking mind” — are needlessly and dangerously thwarted.
The statements of the Delhi University VC seem to suggest that inquiry and disagreements are dangerous and delinquent. It is this criminalisation of inquiry by vocabulary that further narrows the horizon of what is thinkable and teachable, in a space where indeed the horizon should be the widest. The likely result is not order, but impoverished thoughts. A Vice-Chancellor of a public university has an important task of ensuring and encouraging an enriching intellectual climate. When he meets criticism with categories that imply criminal intent, he also licenses others to treat students and teachers as targets.
The damage is already visible. Across campuses, students and faculty members who work with marginalised communities documenting their everyday struggles, or question administrative decisions that tend to undermine the concerns of access and quality in higher education are singled out, maligned, and hauled into inquiries.
As teachers, we deem it our responsibility to train students into asking questions that challenge unjust and unequal status quo. Students must be facilitated to ask questions rooted in curiosity and experience, which are then strengthened through training in disciplines, engagement with academic literature and equipping them with rigorous methodological tools. Students must be supported as they learn to critically reflect, evaluate differing perspectives, and in this process arrive at their own informed convictions. This journey of intellectual development is the very core of academic inquiry. To view such an inquiry through the prism of suspicion is to threaten the pedagogic task itself.
In any engaged classroom, disagreement appears because methodological inquiry exposes several tensions, such as between safety and freedom, tradition and reform, or access and exclusion. The point of teaching is not to manufacture dissent or to secure obedience, rather it is to facilitate thinking without fear. Teaching students to debate, question, and revise their understanding prepares them for democratic citizenship and social engagement. When women students challenge unequal hostel timings, when students from historically marginalised contexts question exclusionary practices, when colleagues research the everyday effects of discrimination or communal polarisation, they are not breaking the nation, rather they are challenging the faultiness whose recognition and transformation is in the service of the nation.
Teachers and students have an obligation to ask difficult questions about social inequality, gender justice, and discrimination. Doing so is not a threat to the nation but a powerful contribution to its democratic vitality. Suppressing these voices serves neither education nor citizenship. It is important that we realise that those who work for gender and social justice within campuses do not threaten academic freedom, they embody it. They are co-creators of a university that is equal, inclusive, and democratic, and through this, co-builders of a republic that honours its constitutional commitments.
Gupta is Associate Professor, University of Delhi and Nambiar, Assistant Professor, University of Delhi
