Guest post by S. M.  FAIZAN AHMED

The resignation of Professor Nandini Sundar from the convenorship of the seminar colloquium at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, has left an emptiness that language struggles to fill and words can barely cover. The seminar she was to host, titled Land, Property and Democratic Rights, was to be delivered by Dr. Namita Wahi, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and one of India’s most thoughtful legal scholars on land rights.

The event formed part of the department’s long-standing Friday Colloquium series—among the oldest and most cherished intellectual traditions in Indian academia. Over the decades, nearly every major figure in the social sciences has presented a paper here at least once. More than a seminar, it has been a ritual of conversation—one that has weathered political shifts, personal rifts, intellectual disagreements, and institutional flux, sustaining across generations a living legacy of thought, dialogue, and learning.

That its convenor should now resign in protest, declaring that she could no longer guarantee the intellectual integrity of a space where even routine academic dialogue can be unilaterally stifled, is both shocking and deeply saddening. The colloquium was cancelled abruptly by the Delhi University administration—without notice, explanation, or even the pretence of deliberation. The instruction came not as an official memorandum but as a WhatsApp message from the university registrar, Vikas Gupta, to the Head of the Department:

“Good Morning Ma’am. Due to administrative reasons, please cancel the lecture programme scheduled for Friday the 31st October 2025. A compliance report may also be submitted immediately. Thanks… Regards… Vikas.”

That was all it took—a few typed words on a phone—to silence what might have been a meaningful academic dialogue on a subject of deep and urgent relevance to every citizen.

From the Dominion of Thought to the Colony of Clerks

At first glance, this might appear to be a routine administrative lapse—a scheduling error, an overreach. But listen closely, and the silence surrounding the cancellation grows deafening. In the absence of explanation, speculation fills the void. What was so threatening about a discussion on land, property, and democratic rights? A discussion on this theme would have opened for students and scholars fresh meanings and insights into the many interwoven dimensions—economic, moral, political, and historical—through which the question of property unfolds. It is a question deeply entangled with caste and class, faith and authority, and the state’s sovereign claim over both land and life. From the slow violence and unhealed wounds of tribal dispossession to the ruthless churn of urban redevelopment, from the fraught inheritances of lineage and law to the sacred claims of religious endowment, property marks the ground where justice and domination, memory and survival, continue to wrestle. To stifle such a conversation is not merely to cancel a seminar; it is to suspend the very questions that keep democracy alive.

The irony is unmistakable. A seminar on property and democracy was itself fenced off—an act that mirrors the logic of enclosure it sought to interrogate. Knowledge today is increasingly treated as administrative property—to be granted, withheld, or fenced off by those in authority. This is more than an isolated incident; it signals the quiet transformation of the university—from part of the public sphere to an administered space, from a fellowship of minds to a managed workforce. It is symptomatic of an increasingly managerial and punitive form of governance, where accountability moves upward to authority rather than outward to the community of scholars and students. The university, once the dominion of thought, risks becoming the colony of clerks—where obedience replaces curiosity and silence passes for order.

When Bureaucracy Becomes the Arbiter of Thought

When did the internal life of a department become the plaything of bureaucratic fiat? When did administrators of a public university—meant to serve as custodians of procedure—begin to imagine themselves as arbiters of what can and cannot be said? And since when have scholarly events been annulled not through institutional process but by informal digital commands? Those familiar with the structure of the Delhi School of Economics know that it enjoys an autonomous standing within the university. To breach that autonomy—and to do so with such casual disregard, conscious malice, and deliberate provocation—is to trample upon one of the most delicate covenants that sustains intellectual life: the trust that ideas shall not be policed.

This episode raises a deeper question of hierarchy and meaning. What moral or intellectual authority does a registrar—whose duties are administrative—hold over professors who constitute the very core of academic life? The late Professor J. P. S. Uberoi often reminded us that in the hierarchy of the university, the professor is not subordinate to bureaucracy but the custodian of knowledge. The registrar may record a decision; the professor bears the responsibility of judgment—of inscribing meaning into the era. The difference between them is one of vocation. To be a professor is to remain accountable not to power, but to truth.

A Memory of Defiance

I recall, from my own student years (1999-2001) at the department, another moment that tested that balance. After the first year of our M.A., some students’ results were withheld, including mine, because of delays in verifying graduation degrees from their previous universities. We were permitted to attend second-year classes but were not officially promoted. Our classmate, Dr. Lavanya Murali—now an anthropologist based in the United States—whose result had not been withheld, took the lead and rallied the students with quiet conviction. The entire batch rose in solidarity and decided to protest—first within the D-School campus, and then, as frustration mounted, we marched to the Vice-Chancellor’s office.

The next morning, The Indian Express carried the front-page headline: “Eleven Students Denied Admission After One Year at D-School.” The Vice-Chancellor called our Head of Department, Professor Virginius Xaxa, and instructed him to “control” the students. Xaxa, with quiet authority, refused, saying, “I am responsible for my students inside the classroom; what they do outside is none of my business. They are adult citizens.” That refusal was not an act of defiance but of faith—faith in the principle that a university is a republic of thought, not a colony of fear, nor an administrative fiefdom of clerks and petty bureaucrats.

The Loss of Courage

Perhaps that is what pains me most today. I am not surprised by the administrative diktat—that is now an old, familiar story—but by the absence of creative and strategic resistance to it. What if the department had held its ground, refusing to cancel the seminar? What if it had demanded a written explanation, insisted on a reasoned dialogue? The worst that could have followed—a disciplinary notice, an inquiry, even a court case—would have been an opportunity to affirm principle, not capitulate to power. By cancelling the event pre-emptively, the department conceded ground that was perhaps not yet lost.

The Department of Sociology at DSE, like its counterparts within sociology and the wider social sciences across the country, has produced generations of scholars who interrogated power while remaining faithful to the discipline’s ethical core. The current crisis tests that inheritance. Will the department, and the wider university community, reclaim its autonomy as a public institution of learning—or will it concede to the quiet normalization of arbitrary authority? Professor Xaxa’s act stands as a reminder that he not only allowed students to attend classes even when their results were withheld, but also preserved the dignity of the department and his office, laying bare in the process the bureaucratic failings of the university administration.

The Pedagogical Loss

The larger tragedy is pedagogical. When a department known for its critical legacy succumbs to pressure, students learn a different kind of sociology—one in which discretion replaces dissent, and silence masquerades as maturity. They learn that it is safer to comply than to question, safer to survive than to stand. What a travesty this is—of those who enter the discipline to understand social realities, not to uncritically reproduce them. The sociological imagination, after all, is not a luxury of the comfortable; it is a responsibility toward truth, however inconvenient.

What should have followed instead was a collective gesture of courage—a meeting of faculty, students, and alumni to ask simple questions in public: On what basis was the colloquium cancelled? What procedure was followed? Why was no explanation offered? The university community could have responded not with protest alone but with principle: an open letter, a reaffirmation of the department’s autonomy, a reinstatement of the colloquium as an act of defiance through dialogue.

The University as a Republic of Thought

The public university remains one of India’s most precious experiments—a space where knowledge, democracy, and imagination converge. To protect it is to defend the moral and intellectual condition of democracy itself. For democracy, like education, cannot survive on consensus; it survives on conversation. Everything may seem dark now, with no hint of dawn, for this is not an isolated act of silencing. The country has endured such episodes for over a decade, and scarcely any university in India can still lay claim to genuine academic freedom. What we witness, perhaps, is the long shadow cast by these years of hardship—yet thought itself has not ceased to breathe, even as fear seeps quietly through its corridors.

When a seminar on land, property, and democratic rights is cancelled without reason, the silence that follows is itself a lecture—on the new grammar of power, on the slow erasure of spaces once meant for inquiry. Yet, somewhere within that silence, the university still breathes, waiting to be reclaimed. The question for all of us who once learned to think within its walls is not whether the voice has been stifled, but whether we are still listening.

When Thought Is Made to Kneel, Our Duty Is to Disobey

University rules and procedural transparency are meant to enable the academic spirit, not to disable it; university administration must be held accountable for nurturing, not suffocating, the conditions of thought; and departments must assert their right to host academic events without any ideological clearance or administrative approval – for what best serves a department’s intellectual life can only be decided by the department itself. Students, too, must see themselves not as passive recipients but as participants in the making of a democratic university.

It is time academics in Indian universities learn to defy administrative diktats that intrude as obstructions into intellectual life and pedagogic affairs. Seeking permissions, awaiting clearances, or bowing to cancellations as acts of compliance betray the university’s very calling as a harbinger of ideas and innovation. Hence, compliance with instructions from the university administration must be limited strictly to administrative matters that do not impinge upon academic freedom.

If such assurances cannot be restored, the academic community will be within its rights to imagine—and to launch—a collective, nationwide non-cooperation movement against arbitrary bureaucratic interference in academic life. For when learning is policed and thought is made to kneel, the silence that follows is civilizational. As Avicenna warned nearly a thousand years ago, “Science and art leave societies in which they are not respected.” And when they depart, they take with them the light that no decree—nor any bureaucratic order—can ever command to return, leaving behind only the echo of what might have been thought.

S. M. Faizan Ahmed is a sociologist and political observer.