These Walls Have Ears

• AMU’s V-C faces a President’s probe on charges of gross financial misconduct
• In the guise of depoliticising campus, student elections have been prohibited
• Campus violence continues, two AMU students murdered in last three years

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The 64-year-old reader was fired last month and forced to vacate his campus residence after he was caught in a homosexual embrace with a local rickshaw-puller at his home. Four unidentified people—rumoured to be local journalists—hid in his house and filmed him in the act. They confronted Siras on the spot and later complained to the administration. “The suspension is illegal and I will fight it in the court. What the university should instead do is find out who these people were who intruded on my privacy,” says Siras. While the university’s formal chargesheet against him is still awaited, the campus is already swirling with rumours of an insider hand.

A faculty member at AMU, who did not wish to be named, told Outlook that he spoke to a local TV journalist whose team was present in Siras’s house. “This journalist told me that the university administration, specifically the local intelligence unit, was in the know and that they were present nearby during the exercise,” he says. The AMU pro Rahat Abrar refused to give the names of those involved but the university’s vice-chancellor P.K. Abdul Azis promised stern action if an insider role is established. Many have interpreted the incident as a diversionary tactic to deflect attention from the rot that has set in, more so because Siras has been a “practising homosexual” ever since he joined the university 22 years back (he was set for retirement in September this year). But it’s not just homosexuality that gets AMU’s goat but apparently also heterosexuality. Irfan Khan, secretary of the AMU students’ struggle committee and a research scholar, was suspended in January on grounds of “immorality, intimidation and assault” after he and his girlfriend married against their family’s wish. “The charges are simply not true,” he says.

Azis, vice-chancellor since June ’07, is himself at the centre of some turmoil. He is now the subject of an inquiry set up by the President of India after instances of financial bungling were reported by members of the university’s executive council. She appointed a second panel last month after the first committee’s members resigned last year reportedly due to lack of cooperation in the probe.

The list of charges is long: claiming travelling allowance against university rules, paying his income tax from the varsity fund, bringing in furniture worth several lakhs from Kerala (Azis’s home state) and paying another Rs 12 lakh for its transport, spending close to Rs 2 crore to refurbish the V-C’s residence (including installation of jacuzzis in the bathrooms), buying a Honda Civic despite the availability of two cars, and adopting improper tendering practices, causing losses of millions to the varsity. The principal auditor general of UP has established several of these charges and in a despatch in November ’09 says: “There’s  a complete collapse of financial management and the VC and registrar, instead of stopping this frequent financial irregularity, themselves became part of it.” 

Even the UGC openly stated that it has withheld Rs 8.38 crore because of financial irregularities by the university administration during 2008-09. But Azis welcomes a probe. “The truth will come out and hopefully I’ll be vindicated,” he says.

However, it is not just financial bungling that plagues the university. Crime and academics have always been uncomfortable bedfellows at AMU. There was a murder of a student on campus in ’07 and another outside it in ’09. On both occasions, the university had to be shut down for several weeks. In 2007, right after the murder, the V-C’s residence was attacked and burnt down by agitated students. “The university is not a political institution. Politics should be outside the campus and students should only learn politics in the department of political science,” says Azis.

To clamp down on student’s violence, the present V-C banned student elections, prompting an outcry from many. “For sure, if any student were to act like a hoodlum, every faculty member would back action against him or her...but banning elections is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” says Tariq Islam, a reader of philosophy at AMU. “Ever since I joined in 1987, there’s been a gradual decline in the tolerance of dissent,” he adds. Attempts by a few students to bring out an independent newspaper also failed to get any university clearance. “Freedom of expression and democratic representation among students is totally denied here,” says Mohammed Adil Hossain, a mass communications student. But Azis counters, “Why would you need a newspaper in the campus? This is all a hidden agenda to destabilise the varsity”. A grievance redressal cell—the ersatz stand-in for the students union— “met just once last year,” says Adil Siddiqui, an ex-student member of the cell.

Meanwhile, infrastructure, despite attempts at improvement, remains inadequate. “The V-C spends a crore on revamping his house but we don’t get money for basic things like tables and chairs,” says Mukhtar Ahmad, president of the AMU teachers’ association. There are close to 250 vacant teaching posts. “Many fill in on an ad-hoc basis...being paid just Rs 10,000. So you can imagine their standard,” he adds. In another blow, the Medical Council of India last month threatened to derecognise the university’s medical college because of lack of quality infrastructure and faculty.

The real problem, points out Islam, is that AMU over the years has become very “VC-centric”, giving him unwarranted influence. “We teachers are to be blamed because we are the ones who are supposed to run the university. But we tend to run to the V-C for every little problem,” he says. That a recent report ranked AMU among India’s eight best research institutions is a commentary on the competition. For, the university’s founder Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s dreams of this being an Oxbridge-like institution are far from being achieved.