By Nazir Ahmad,
To,
Mrs. Sonia Gandhi
President, Indian National Congress
On 16 February 2013 you are going to preside over the annual convocation in AMU, Aligarh. Should we expect you to take this as an opportunity to reflect upon streamlining the higher education in India’s growing concern with and crucial stakes in knowledge economy. The higher education in general and the AMU in particular are afflicted with lot of troubles. The VCs of the Central universities have been given tremendous, unstinted, plenipotentiary powers; which go directly into their heads. They are the biggest autocrats in ever- deepening democracy of India. They invoke emergency powers to aggrandize more power, to ‘play favourites’ (which you spoke against in the Jaipur Chintan Shivir).
Unfortunately, there are no substantive rules to penalize the erring VCs who often indulge in statutory violations. Your abrasive and much garrulous [former] minister of HRD shouted to bring in several legislations including special tribunal to look into the academic irregularities including the erring VCs. That is coming to the deep troubles AMU has been facing since long. During 2007-12, AMU’s power-elites, in possible connivance with the Congressmen in the government brought a highly tainted academician as VC. His tenure plundered AMU’s finances quite recklessly with the aid and help of unscrupulous insiders. Loudest possible kind of protests could hardly yield any result as the UPA-2 refused to send the highest functionaries on leave during the enquiries.
Only with the judicial intervention, the CBI belatedly filed FIR against them more than a year after they completed their tenure in the office (some of them still continue in the office). This willful inaction aggrieved the common Aligs and your minister was disallowed to enter the campus in October 2011; subsequently your son Rahul Gandhi, supposedly the heartthrob of the youth of India, had to skip Aligarh as his itinerary during the UP Assembly campaigns 2011-12 due to apprehensions of hostile protests by AMU community.
Things haven’t changed much in AMU since then. The new functionaries are not seen as serious about launching a crackdown against corruption. It is running with the help of highly discredited, unscrupulous coterie with disgusting features of sub-regional chauvinism. They have un-academic priorities. Civil constructions and recruitment [mostly ad hoc] on non-teaching positions are their top priorities. More than 400 teaching positions are vacant but the incumbent administration is interested in scheduling of selection committees only for the coterie/relatives etc. AMU, because of historical reasons, recruits more of Muslims on its staff, and keeping these many positions vacant is a great disservice to the nation in general and the community in particular. Large number of eligible and meritorious Ph.D. degree-holders, mostly Muslim youths, is eitherunemployed or under-employed as Guest Faculty.
Discontentment is rising to reach the breaking point. In order to silence the critics, lumpens are reported to be getting easy access to certain functionaries. Common teachers hardly get appointment with the high functionaries. When the grievances are communicated electronically they choose not only to ignore it but they intimidate and even threaten to victimize the whistle-blowers.
The quality of food in the student-mess is so bad, more because of rampant corruption of the teachers-clerks looking after the affairs; it often sparks violent student upsurges. The Off-Campus Centres of AMU have not been sanctioned any teaching and non-teaching positions. Consequently long-standing vacant positions are being illegally transferred there. This horrible practice is disastrous for the AMU while the Off-Campus Centres suffer from congenital disorders; still the Congress expects to get votes. That is too dangerous a tendency. The UPA government must pay serious attention to it.
Centres as full-fledged Central universities with AMU as the mentor. This is the way new IITs have been developed. Your mere concern might initiate big positive changes, only if you really choose to look into all these murky and frustrating affairs of AMU with certain degree of sensitivity. The common Aligarians, spread across the globe, are looking upon you with the fond hope that you are alive to the deep-rooted malice (you talked of it in Jaipur Chintan Shivir) that perpetually afflicts AMU. Would you really like to look into the genuine grievances and legitimate aspirations of the AMU? If not then, needless to say, the calculated indifference, apathy, and studied reticence on the more than evident decay of AMU may have its impact upon the Congress-Muslim relations in the days to come. They may have to turn towards the non-saffron regional political formations, which are already on It may think of developing the Off-Campus ascendance in the provinces which send most of the students to AMU. In 1948, Jawaharlal Nehru delivered Convocation address at AMU to assure its forward march and build a better Congress-Muslim relation. Hope, you are not kept unaware of it in 2013.
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Nazir Ahmad is an alumnus of AMU, and an engineer by profession.