This is a statement sent by scholars at five universities in the U.S

We, the undersigned at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, Smith College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, and Amherst College wish to express our solidarity with the students, faculty, staff and wider community of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India’s premier academic institution. We demand that all charges against all students being targeted as ‘anti-national,’ including JNU Student Union president Kanhaiya Kumar, be dropped immediately. We understand the arrest of Mr. Kumar, and the intention to arrest or interrogate another 50 students on some unspecified list of the Delhi Police, to be associated with a wider campaign to quell dissent in India’s universities, a campaign which includes the harassment faced by Hyderabad Central University student Rohit Vemula, resulting in Mr. Vemula’s suicide. We are concerned about the well-being of the students who continue to be debarred from all academic activities at JNU, without any due process or proof of wrong doing, and we condemn the scapegoating and media trial of Umar Khalid, based largely upon his identity as a minority. We demand that the Delhi police should withdraw from the JNU campus. We believe that the ultimate responsibility for the campaign of harassment against universities throughout the country lies with the present Indian Government and we demand that the government desist.

We are aware and are in agreement with the fact that the case against Mr. Kumar is false in every way. We are also in agreement with eminent economist Professor Prabhat Patnaik, that the government’s actions are nothing less than the beginning of a campaign to undermine the Indian Constitution itself. The events in Hyderabad, JNU, and most recently, Jadavpur University, all point to a pattern of harassment, wherein the central government has deployed campus-based student groups to silence dissent. We take the use of the state’s machinery to physically attack vocal and articulate students speaking against the government extremely seriously. We are particularly concerned by this government’s tacit approval of the violence exhibited by lawyers at Patiala house this week. As scholars and students based in the US, we have already witnessed efforts by representatives of the Hindu right to undermine academic debate and scholarship in the context of South Asian Studies in the US and in India. We collectively represent years of scholarly and activist experience in addressing threats to academic freedom, and see that these threats are part of a larger project to undermine democracy and to rationalize a fundamentally unequal society. Continue reading 5 Colleges Faculty and Student Statement in Solidarity with JNU →