 "JNU committee recommends penalising Khaled, Anirban, but rustication not the same as expulsion")
JNU is back in the news again, this time for the reported rustication of as many as five students for their role in an Afzal Guru event on campus at which anti-India slogans were allegedly raised.
Late Monday night, reports said a high-level JNU committee has recommended the rustication of JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiyya Kumar, along with Umar Khaled, Anirban Bhattacharya and two other students. However, The Hindu newspaper reported that only Khaled and Bhattacharya have been named for rustication, while the others, including Kumar, may merely face a fine.
Quoting sources, The Hindu reported that a high-level 5-member inquiry committee recommended rustication of Anirban Bhattacharya and Umar Khalid for a certain period for “violating university rules.”
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Now, while ‘rustication’ sounds highly punitive, it is not really as serious as it is being made out to be in the media. In popular perception, the word is often confused with expulsion, a far more serious matter in which a JNU student is expelled permanently.
Rustication, however, is a less extreme disciplinary action, and not all that uncommon on the campus, a JNU professor (who prefers to remain unnamed) tells this writer. They are typically enforced for short periods of time, sometimes a month or even a semester. While the student cannot participate in any academics in that period, s/he is free to return at the end of that period. A student may be rusticated for a number of reasons as part of a disciplinary measure, even for a procedural lapse or contributing to public disorder.
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Given JNU’s semester model for the academic year, an end-of-semester suspension would effectively mean that an undergraduate or post-graduate student will lose the entire semester as s/he will not be able to take their exams. However, for MPhil and PhD scholars, such action is less impactful since they don’t have the same semester-end examination schedule.
Expulsion, on the other hand, is a far more serious matter. Students who chronically underperform academically, for example, are then not allowed to re-register for the next semester, and effectively cease to be students. For this to happen, a student’s CGPA must drop below a mandated score, which differs from programme to programme.
Incidentally, the 5-member committee was initially set up as a 3-member committee to investigate the incident. After an outcry from students and teachers that a 3-member committee was not sufficiently representative, it was expanded to include two more professors.The committee is comprised entirely of teachers, with no ex-officio members.
The 3-member committee, incidentally, had suspended eight students, a decision that was a few days ago overturned by the larger 5-member body.
While the details of the rustication order are still contested, it is important to note that this is a non-binding recommendation. The committee’s report will now go to Vice-Chancellor M Jagadesh Kumar and Chief Proctor A Dimri for a final decision.
Khaled and Bhattacharya, though, are still in jail for allegedly organising a campus event on February 9 at which some activists are said to have raised slogans calling on India to leave Kashmir as well as for the breakup of the country. The event was initially proposed as a cultural event, for which the JNU administration cancelled permission after it found the event would commemorate the ‘martyrdom’ of terror convict Afzal Guru and Maqbool Bhat. However, the organisers went ahead with the event, at which some persons allegedly also raised slogans of ‘Pakistan Zindabad’.
Subsequently, Kumar was arrested on charges of sedition, a move by Delhi Police that escalated the issue from an internal JNU matter to a national row. He was attacked on the premises of the Patiala House Court by a group of lawyers, provoking further outrage; the lawyers later were caught in a sting boasting about how they even beat him up in police custody. Kumar was subsequently released on interim bail.
JNU students and teachers are scheduled to take out a march from Jantar Mantar to Parliament at 2 p.m. today to protest the arrests of Khaled and Bhattacharya, as well as to demand the dropping of sedition charges against the students. Imprisonment, after all, is a far graver punishment than a few months of exile.