The Hindu : National : Fact-finding committee indicts AMU for “illegal actions”

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Mar 13, 2010
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

National

National

Fact-finding committee indicts AMU for “illegal actions”

Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI: An independent fact-finding committee probing the events surrounding the recent suspension of a homosexual professor at Aligarh Muslim University has indicted the university administration for complicity in “various illegal actions”.

Titled ‘Policing Morality at AMU', the report has been issued by a group of independent legal scholars and activists following “seemingly blatant violation of the fundamental rights of privacy and dignity” at AMU, where the head of the department of Modern Indian Languages, Professor S. R. Siras, was suspended on February 9 following an “operation” where media personnel and university authorities entered Prof. Siras' house and filmed him having consensual sex with a male friend.

The report suggests that the AMU authorities facilitated the intrusion through “intelligence as well as monitoring of Dr. Siras” by the Local Intelligence Unit, a unit of the AMU Proctor's office that is supposed to “take preventive measures in maintaining law and order” on campus. Further support for this theory has been drawn from an interview with one of the media persons involved, who reportedly stated that “he did it because he knew that the University would approve of this action”.

The report says the intention of the AMU authorities was two-fold: first, to deflect attention from the inquiry that the President of India had set up into widespread financial mismanagement at AMU; and second, to perpetuate the “moral policing” that has ostensibly become a part of the university. Attention has been drawn not just to the charge-sheet that the administration has filed against Dr. Siras, which mentions how he has “undermined pious image of the teacher community and as a whole tarnished image of the University”, but also the suspension in January of a research scholar who married a woman without the consent of her parents.

The report further documents the difficulties that Dr. Siras has faced in filing criminal charges against the persons, including AMU authorities, who had illegally entered his house. Both the SSP and the SP of Aligarh have apparently refused to register the FIR stating that “Dr. Siras has named some very prominent figures in AMU” and, later, that “there is pressure from ‘the top' not to register this FIR”, the report says.

The authors of the report include Arvind Narrain of the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, and Ghazala Rizvi and Avantika Srivastava of the Association for Advocacy and Legal Initiatives, Lucknow.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National