In clampdown on Delhi University students, a failure of leadership

The word university comes from the Latin word universitas, meaning “the whole”. It is a reminder that higher education is meant to be capacious enough to hold friction, dissent and discomfort. Unfortunately, this understanding of the university’s space and role seems to be conspicuous by its absence in the administration of Delhi University. On Tuesday, it barred gatherings, protests and rallies on campus for a month, citing law-and-order concerns in the aftermath of clashes linked to the UGC Regulations against discrimination. The blunt instrument of a ban, the impulse to prohibit, speaks of a failure of leadership in one of the country’s premier institutions — according to the 2025 National Institutional Ranking Framework, DU ranks fifth among Indian universities.

The ban follows a larger pattern of administrative paternalism that has come to characterise institutions of higher education in the country. It assumes that debate and dissent are aberrations rather than animating principles of university life, that a sharp and tidy line separates scholarship from student politics. The bogey of the “anti-national” student in public-funded universities reached its crescendo in 2016 with sedition charges against protesting students for raising allegedly “anti-national” slogans in Jawaharlal Nehru University, but it has had a long afterlife. The university’s approach, more punitive and less compassionate, continues. At the TISS in Mumbai, student union elections have been reformatted to expand participation but also, as student bodies rightly point out, to dilute the powers of students’ representatives.

From the Emergency to the Mandal agitation, student politics has often been central to the republic’s story. Many student leaders have gone on to play crucial roles in national politics, including in the current government. Universities have functioned as apprenticeships in democratic practices — messy, argumentative, imperfect, but vital. As classrooms become more socially, economically and linguistically diverse, conversations around equity and inclusion will only grow more urgent — not as distractions but as an integral part of the educational journey. DU should be a model for how these difficult conversations are conducted, not for how they are shut down. For that to happen, however, it must find a way to embrace the idea of the university in its entirety.