Hi all
Since this magazine is paid one, I am pasting the long read for your
benefit. Find time to read and reflect.
https://caravanmagazine.in/law/how-national-law-universities-caste-discrimination-reservation-fail-india
“Since college shut down due to the pandemic, evenings on this terrace
are possibly the only thing that have held me together,” a student of
the National University of Juridical Sciences told me in the summer of
2020, sitting atop a concrete water tank on a terrace sandwiched
between two taller buildings in their home city. “People in college
seem to be living in a world apart—landing internships, acing their
exams. No matter how hard I work, it doesn’t seem to translate.”
The student, then in the middle of their law education, had been born
with a medical condition that left them with a serious disability.
Doctors confirmed early on that they would need special education. The
student was motivated to pursue law in the hope of improving their
family’s modest financial circumstances and due to a deep interest in
politics and society. At the age of 17, they cracked the highly
competitive Common Law Admission Test, the gateway to the country’s 23
National Law Universities. Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the
student joined NUJS, in Kolkata, as one of the small minority of
disabled students at the university. This is where, chatting away one
afternoon, we met each other as fellow students.
On the terrace of their home, the student turned to tell me they knew
what I might say: that this was not their fault, that the pandemic had
pushed millions of students like them into isolation and academic
stagnation. “But sometimes it’s difficult to tell yourself that this
isn’t your fault,” they said. “It’s not that simple.”
NUJS, like most NLUs, had no established system to cater to the
special needs of disabled students. After they joined, the student
took remedial classes and had access to some special academic
resources from the non-profit group Increasing Diversity by Increasing
Access, but they received limited help from the university. The
student is also a Bahujan—making them even more of an outsider in the
elite-dominated culture of the NLUs. “I knew I was never going to
belong,” they said. “I found myself in a crowd that was miles ahead of
me in terms of how much capital they could exploit.” This crowd, the
student added, “determined the college culture in many ways: they were
our parameters of success and also of leisure. It is their language
that becomes the language of law school.”
The student barely socialised in their first year. Things only got
worse during the pandemic, and I watched them struggle to survive
through subsequent academic years. Online assessments, part of NUJS’s
move to remote learning, greatly disadvantaged disabled students, but
teachers remained largely apathetic to their difficulties, and there
were no serious efforts to sensitise them. When I emailed NUJS’s vice
chancellor, NK Chakrabarti, to ask what measures the university takes
to help students with disabilities, he sent back a terse reply. “Let
me know who are your respondents?” Chakrabarti wrote. “Give me their
Names and Roll numbers. I will respond in front of those students with
evidence that your narratives are biased and fully misleading
information.”
When the NUJS campus reopened this year, the student returned to
Kolkata. But issues with accessibility in examinations and
administrative structures remained, and the psychological ghosts of
the pandemic stuck with them. The student kept going through their
five-year NLU education not because of the atmosphere they encountered
on campus but despite it. Theirs is one of many stories, spanning the
whole country, of students’ struggles at India’s premier law
universities, which have for years remained unrelenting to urgently
needed reform.
“DUE TO VARIOUS CONSIDERATIONS most students from NLUs end up in
corporate law firms,” NV Ramana, the chief justice of India, told
graduating students at the National Law University in Delhi, in
December 2021. “It is unfortunate that a comparable addition is not
being made to the ranks of lawyers practising in courts from the NLUs.
This is perhaps one of the reasons why NLUs are perceived as elitist
and detached from social realities.”
Ramana’s comments came as a surprise to many. The habit in high legal
circles—the judiciary and the bar council, state legislatures and
parliament—is to sing the praises of the NLUs, not offer frank
criticism. But to many others, including students like me, the CJI
barely scratched the surface of the institutions’ problems.
Ramana had a valid point: the NLUs are meant to be public
universities, yet their alumni increasingly serve the private good.
But graduates’ career choices are more a symptom than a cause of the
elitism endemic in these institutions. Its roots lie in unaffordable
fees, poor scholarship programmes and resistance to more reservations
for marginalised students. Ramana did not talk about these things
openly—almost nobody does—for to do so would reveal a far more
fundamental institutional crisis, one that leads back to him and other
judges in charge of the country’s highest courts, who hold
chancellorships and other high positions at the NLUs.
NV Ramana, India’s chief justice, at a convocation ceremony in NLU
Delhi, in December 2021. At the ceremony Ramana’s castigation of the
NLUs as elite institutions came as a shock to many, however, he barely
scratched the surface of the institutions’ many problems.. NV Ramana,
India’s chief justice, at a convocation ceremony in NLU Delhi, in
December 2021. At the ceremony Ramana’s castigation of the NLUs as
elite institutions came as a shock to many, however, he barely
scratched the surface of the institutions’ many problems..
NV Ramana, India’s chief justice, at a convocation ceremony in NLU
Delhi, in December 2021. At the ceremony Ramana’s castigation of the
NLUs as elite institutions came as a shock to many, however, he barely
scratched the surface of the institutions’ many problems.
Over the past thirty-five years, 23 NLUs have been established across
18 states. A second NLU in Uttar Pradesh is in the works, as are
proposed NLUs in Tripura, Uttarakhand and Sikkim. Seven of the top ten
law schools in the National Institutional Ranking Framework are NLUs,
and the National Law School of India University, in Bengaluru, was
ranked as one of Asia’s top law schools in 2020. These institutions,
despite small student populations—roughly two thousand six hundred
graduates a year from the NLUs against the more than ninety thousand
law graduates produced by other colleges—have produced one of the most
illustrious alumni bases in Indian education. Graduates pop up at the
United Nations, Magic Circle law firms in London, the New York State
Bar Association, leading media houses in India and abroad, as well as
the cream of India’s corporate legal practices. The top NLUs boast
staggering placement records, with graduates landing jobs in
national-level corporate firms averaging pay offers of over Rs 15 lakh
per year and those in foreign firms many times that.
These figures are comparable to those at the very best Indian
Institutes of Technology, the holy grail of aspirational education in
the IT age. At the same time, the NLUs have entered the middle-class
imagination as viable alternatives to the IITs. The Common Law
Admission Test is one of India’s toughest and most competitive
entrance exams. Only five percent of aspirants make it to the NLUs,
and a fraction of those to the coveted top five NLU campuses—in
Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Jodhpur and Gandhinagar.
But many of the same problems that plague other elite Indian
universities also hamper the NLUs, despite the comparatively noble
social goals of their founders. The NLU alumni and student bodies have
never been representative of the full diversity of Indian society and
have always skewed towards elite castes and classes. For instance,
numerous NLUs have no reserved seats at all for students from Other
Backward Classes. Others have some OBC seats, but none under the
all-India quota—a large pool of seats for students from outside each
NLU’s respective home state. Representation among NLU faculty is
equally deficient.
For Bahujans—Dalits, Adivasis and non-dominant OBCs, collectively the
majority of India’s population—the resulting campus environment
vacillates between unhelpful and openly hostile. Students from
marginalised communities at several NLUs told me about a culture of
exclusion that cuts them off from regular student life and debilitates
their academic performance. This is clearly evident at my university,
where Bahujan students are underrepresented in most moot-court
competitions, student societies and journals, and other activities and
experiences that often determine students’ future prospects. (As a
member of an oppressor caste, I am aware of my own privilege and
culpability in this environment. I have tried to present the
experiences of Bahujan students without opportunism or exploitation,
and I am grateful to those who have shared their experiences with me.)
>From their legal status to their institutional character, the NLUs are
facing severe examinations of their purpose and stature.
Much of the same elitism and exclusivity defines the whole Indian
legal fraternity. Bahujans are flagrantly underrepresented in senior
positions of the bar and on the bench. Of the 33 current judges of the
Supreme Court, only one, BR Gavai, hails from a Dalit community, and
the court’s last Dalit judge before him retired nine years before
Gavai’s appointment. In all its history, the Supreme Court has seen
just one judge from the Adivasi and tribal communities: HK Sema, a
member of a Naga tribe.
The question of how to change this looms large over India. Entry to
the two other pillars of the state relies on mechanisms, however
flawed they may be, designed to allow greater representation: through
the direct election of candidates to legislatures, which then elect
members of the executive. Eligibility for both depends only on basic
criteria of age and nationality. The third pillar, the judiciary, has
no such thing. The path to all high judicial positions is guarded by
the Supreme Court collegium, which includes the court’s five most
senior judges. Despite repeated attempts to democratise judicial
appointments through constitutional amendments, the Supreme Court has
stubbornly defended the collegium system.
Even disregarding all the other hurdles to a representative judiciary,
Indian legal education is failing to produce a representative corpus
of qualified legal minds that have any chance of breaking into the
courts. It is mainly through a representative bar, dominated in number
and leadership by those from marginalised communities, that influence
can be exerted on an unrepresentative judiciary. The NLUs, in light of
their ideals and prestige, should be leading the change but they are
not—and, in failing on this, they are failing India as a
representative democracy.
Much of this has been overlooked in the valorisation of the NLUs. The
focus, instead, has been on the NLU system’s greatest point of pride:
the quality of the educational experience they offer. In 2010, during
a consultation on reforms in legal education, the prime minister,
Manmohan Singh, famously described the NLUs as “islands of excellence
amidst a sea of institutionalised mediocrity.” Even this reputation
now seems at risk.
Student protests have broken out with disturbing regularity across
multiple NLU campuses in recent years. The protesters had numerous
common grievances: a lack of basic facilities, maladministration, even
large-scale misappropriation of funds. In Shimla, students demanded
clean food and water after several of their peers contracted food
poisoning. Bhopal saw protests over maladministration and sexist
behaviour by faculty. In Ranchi, students protested poor internet
connectivity and a lack of permanent professors. At Cuttack and
Jabalpur, students took issue with the absence of a decent law
library. Students at Jabalpur protested the lack of a sports field and
prohibitively high fees. First in Kolkata and then in Patna, protests
followed the vice-chancellor Ishwara Bhat, indicted by a university
review commission for maladministration. At Kolkata, the registrar was
found complicit in financial embezzlement under Bhat’s watch.
Numerous students I spoke to, as well as NLU faculty members, jurists
and legal theorists, saw a systemic issue underlying these
administrative problems. The NLUs continue to be “national in
character,” a term which they have commonly used in court, but, under
the unique statutes of their establishment, they are, in essence,
state universities. This is visible in the constant give and take
between the NLUs and their respective state governments. Every
concession from the state is part of an agreement that compels the
university to lose one or more of its privileges—for instance, higher
funding could perhaps mean giving the state government greater stake
in faculty appointments or implementing higher quotas for students
domiciled in the specific state. Elected student bodies at the NLUs
have, as a result, begun to push for the nationalisation of all NLUs,
though it is far from clear that this will solve the shortcomings of
autonomy and responsibility that currently undermine them.
>From their legal status to their institutional character, the NLUs are
facing severe examinations of their purpose and stature. How they
respond will have profound echoes for the Indian legal fraternity, and
for India itself.
{TWO}
ONCE UPON A TIME, law in India was largely a part-time course, taught
out of evening colleges by poorly salaried teachers who were
themselves novices serving apprenticeships at the bar. Unless an
Indian native could afford to pursue and return with a legal education
from Britain, law had practically no scope as a career. Social capital
and privilege regulated entry and survival in the field.
The early twentieth century saw the emergence of dominant political
figures armed with legal educations: Dadabhai Naoroji, Motilal Nehru,
Mohandas Gandhi, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Almost all of them came from
well-established families. The great outlier was BR Ambedkar, whose
legal education owed to exceptional circumstances rather than
exceptional privilege.
In The Radical in Ambedkar, the scholar Rohit De narrates how
Ambedkar’s lawyer-politician contemporaries relied on dominant-caste
and Ashrafi social networks to find a foothold in the legal
profession. “Jinnah’s first case was representing his uncle, a Khoja
merchant, in a commercial suit,” De writes. “Gandhi, despite his poor
oral advocacy skills, could draw upon family networks for work in
Bombay,” while “Motilal Nehru joined the flourishing legal practice
set up by his brother.” De adds that “Ambedkar was aware of his
disadvantage … and chose to join the Appellate Side of the Bombay
Bar”—as opposed to the Original Side, which required access to
dominant-caste networks.
A year after Independence, a committee under India’s second president,
S Radhakrishnan, provided the earliest set of recommendations to
reform law education in the new country. The legal scholar Dyutimoy
Mukherjee has argued that Radhakrishnan’s recommendations were
forward-looking but went largely ignored by successive governments. In
1964, the Gajendragadkar committee carried this conversation forward,
attempting to reform legal education within Delhi University under the
watch of its vice-chancellor, CD Deshmukh. It forwarded two central
propositions: first, that law be taught through a three-year LLB
course, with a bachelor’s degree required for eligibility; and second,
that some model “National Law Schools” be instituted with “more
freedom of action in trying newer and newer experiments.” The idea of
having national law schools remained abandoned until 1975, when the
celebrated legal scholar Upendra Baxi rekindled the notion in a report
on behalf of the University Grants Commission.
Jawaharlal Nehru, and his father Motilal Nehru at the Lahore session
of the Congress in 1929. Nehru and his peers found a foothold in the
legal profession based largely on leveraging their upper-caste and
Ashrafi social networks.. Wikimedia CommonsJawaharlal Nehru, and his
father Motilal Nehru at the Lahore session of the Congress in 1929.
Nehru and his peers found a foothold in the legal profession based
largely on leveraging their upper-caste and Ashrafi social networks..
Wikimedia Commons
Jawaharlal Nehru, and his father Motilal Nehru at the Lahore session
of the Congress in 1929. Nehru and his peers found a foothold in the
legal profession based largely on leveraging their upper-caste and
Ashrafi social networks. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Baxi—born into an influential Gujarati Brahmin family in Rajkot, and
the son of a finance secretary of the erstwhile state of
Saurashtra—had a brief tryst with English literature as a young man.
But, in the law library of Bombay’s Government Law College, stacked
with a massive collection borrowed from Ambedkar, he discovered a
passion for jurisprudence and the interoperation of law and society.
In contrast to the socially aloof legal pedagogy of the day, Baxi
imagined a means of connecting the law student with the country’s
grassroots realities. “We have an insufficiently technocratic legal
education,” he wrote. “So, if a sound technocratic legal education is
socially relevant, let us first seek to provide it.”
“The word ‘technocratic’ is a coat of many colours,” Baxi explained to
me last year. “Generally, it signifies legal knowledge, competence and
skills, or what one used to broadly call doctrinal law knowledge in
the 1970s and 1980s. But knowledge does not necessarily bring in
skills and competence, which are borne through the experience of
courtcraft. What we needed was a total awareness of law as it was
applied and developed by courts and judges.”
The solution, in Baxi’s understanding, was socially relevant legal
education and research—often acronymised as SRLER. “We, in India, must
take a deeply contextual approach to law,” he said. “Contexts are
broadly social, economic and political; they are broadly repressive or
emancipatory.” One way of describing and moving towards socially
relevant legal education, he said, is to ask, “How may legal-education
and research institutions perform the task of delineating and
differentiating these, and engaging juristic contexts among these, to
achieve individual and social justice?”
Baxi’s UGC report proposed a multidisciplinary legal education. This
would include subjects such as psychology, sociology and politics, and
would take the shape of the five-year integrated BA and LLB course
that is now offered in the NLUs. The institutions outlined in the
report, however, took another decade to materialise.
In the early 1980s, NR Madhava Menon, a retired civil servant who
taught law at Delhi University, received a curious request from the
chairman of the Bar Council of India, Ram Jethmalani, to kickstart an
experiment in reforming legal education. Menon readily accepted and
began foraging for a state government willing to take up the
experiment. In 1983, Ramakrishna Hegde, the chief minister of
Karnataka, agreed to set up the National Law School in Bangalore. It
functioned out of a convertible bicycle shed for the first three years
and produced fifty graduates from its first batch. As these graduates
emerged, Menon was tasked with replicating the success in Kolkata,
which led to the creation of my alma mater.
To Menon, law was “a matter for social engineering, a policy
instrument for governance—to be studied in relation to history,
philosophy, public administration.” Throughout his career, in his
writing and speeches, he emphasised his vision of the NLUs as
factories for producing “social engineers.”
In New Vision for Legal Education in the Emerging Global Scenario,
published by the National Law School of India University in 2001, the
authors note that the project of social engineering and SRLER “was
heavily influenced by the welfare state/socialist agendas that were
politically dominant at that time. This phase—whose dominant theme was
‘social relevance’—reflected increasing concern about the mounting
problems of poverty, inequality and political conflict in the
country.”
“Whether we talk about SRLER or social engineers, it all arose from a
faith in the possibility of re-engineering society, and the potential
of law to be an instrument of top-down reform,” G Mohan Gopal, a
former director of the NLSIU and the National Judicial Academy, told
me. “In many ways, it was colonial imagination repackaged. The
colonial enterprise, which was also the enterprise of dominant
communities in India, was to construct societies as they wanted to
construct it. This was the driving vision behind the NLUs, at least to
begin with.”
The NLUs have proven adept at creating well-trained lawyers largely
from dominant communities, achieving on Indian soil what was once the
prerogative of a foreign legal education. As for changing the face and
conscience of Indian law, they seem a far cry from the founts of
social idealism that Baxi and Menon envisioned. If anything, going by
the experiences of the students who spoke to me and what I have seen
myself, they seem to only accentuate the deep cleavages of caste and
class within the legal profession in India. Rather than finding
inspiration to reshape society, most NLU students are left to grapple
with far more mundane problems in their pursuit of a legal education.
IT IS A SAD REFLECTION on the NLUs that students have increasingly
felt compelled to protest in defence not just of their own well-being,
but also the well-being of their universities. At NUJS, the elected
student body—the Student Juridical Association—found out in 2014 that
the university’s registrar, Surajit C Mukhopadhyay, was complicit in
financial embezzlement amounting to several crore rupees. This fact
emerged via an inquiry report prepared under the retired high-court
justice NN Mathur. A campaign to oust Mukhopadhyay succeeded that same
year, but discontent escalated after students saw the institutional
protection he enjoyed during the effort. In November 2016, the SJA
asked the chief justice of India, who also serves as the chancellor of
NUJS, to establish a long overdue review commission to investigate
administrative malpractice. The commission’s report, in 2017, was an
indictment of massive proportions.
“There was an entire chapter titled ‘Administrative Failures,’”
Arindum Nayak, an associate at the firm Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas and
a former president of the SJA, told me. “When we read the report for
the first time, we knew that it was over. The chief justice of the
country had literally stated that the VC had failed in his
administrative duties.” After protests, the vice-chancellor, P Ishwara
Bhat—whose tenure had seen a faculty exodus and a dramatic fall in
NUJS’s rankings—was forced into a shameful resignation. Risibly, Bhat
was then appointed the vice-chancellor of Chanakya National Law
University, in Patna. Students there also protested until Bhat was
replaced.
In 2018, students at National Law Institute University, in Bhopal,
held a month-long protest against sexist behaviour by the faculty,
joined by peers from several other NLUs. At NLU Odisha, in Cuttack,
students exasperated with unaffordable fees and the lack of a decent
law library organised an around-the-clock dharna.
A July 2019 protest at NLU Odisha. Protests have become an endemic
annual affair in most NLUs, often demanding the most basic needs such
as clean drinking water, hygienic food in the mess or a functional
library. A pattern of maladministration, and even large scale
misappropriation of funds, is visible in the few inquiries conducted
on the institutions.. A July 2019 protest at NLU Odisha. Protests have
become an endemic annual affair in most NLUs, often demanding the most
basic needs such as clean drinking water, hygienic food in the mess or
a functional library. A pattern of maladministration, and even large
scale misappropriation of funds, is visible in the few inquiries
conducted on the institutions..
A July 2019 protest at NLU Odisha. Protests have become an endemic
annual affair in most NLUs, often demanding the most basic needs such
as clean drinking water, hygienic food in the mess or a functional
library. A pattern of maladministration, and even large scale
misappropriation of funds, is visible in the few inquiries conducted
on the institutions.
In March 2019, six students at Rajiv Gandhi National University of
Law, in Patiala, were wrongfully suspended for complaining about
unhygienic food in their hostel mess. The protests that followed
broadened to demand action against systemic maladministration. The
same year, at the scenic hillside campus of Himachal Pradesh National
Law University, in Shimla, there were protests demanding clean
drinking water and other bare necessities after several students
contracted food poisoning from mess food.
In February 2021, amid the pandemic, discontent spilled over at
Dharmashastra National Law University, in Jabalpur. Since its
inception, in 2018, the university has been operating out of a campus
rented from and shared with the telecom provider Bharat Sanchar Nigam
Limited. The high rent demanded by BSNL is the primary reason for the
university’s exorbitant annual fees of Rs 2.5 lakh—compared to roughly
Rs 2 lakh in other NLUs. “We have demanded that college authorities
reduce fees multiple times, including during the pandemic, but to no
avail,” a student from DNLU’s inaugural batch told me. DNLU’s library
remains abysmal, and students do not have a recreation ground for
themselves. In early 2021, the student and some of his batchmates were
staying in their hostels as they interned at Jabalpur. One day, while
the students were using a BSNL recreation ground, a scuffle broke out
between them and some BSNL officials.
“On two or three previous occasions, they had told us that we needed
to pay the club fees to use the ground,” the DNLU student recalled.
“We didn’t understand why that was needed since we were already paying
such high fees and had permission from the college. One of the BSNL
employees began hurling casteist slurs. There were some students from
marginalised communities among us, so we considered filing a complaint
under the Prevention of Atrocities Act.” But they did not, he said,
because they felt an overall lack of support from the university.
The DNLU student told me the incident prompted the students to realise
just how vulnerable they were at DNLU and to understand the need for a
dedicated new campus. After they filed right-to-information requests,
the students discovered that a hundred and twenty acres of land had
already been allocated to the university, but funds had not been
released to begin construction of a campus. They filed representations
for the release of funds before the chief justice of the Madhya
Pradesh High Court, the state advocate general and other authorities.
Some students even met with the state’s finance minister, Jagdish
Devda, who assured them he would look into the matter. In March 2021,
the state government transferred funds into the university’s account
and released tenders for the construction.
DNLU’s vice chancellor informed students, in March 2022, that the
construction of hostel buildings had begun on the allocated land, but
none of the students I spoke to could confirm this. DNLU did not
respond to any questions emailed to them. Meanwhile, DNLU students
have also had to fight another battle. Even as the university shifted
to online classes and moved students off campus during the pandemic,
it had continued to charge its full fees. In August 2021, the National
Human Rights Commission registered a complaint against DNLU for
“Harassment of Students and Parents.” In response, the university
reduced its fees by just Rs 10,000.
The DNLU student told me the students were not satisfied with this
reduction but felt they did not have many options left to push back.
“I often wonder,” he said, “why do they open these universities and
then simply forget us?”
“STATE GOVERNMENTS that just want to have the reputation of hosting a
prestigious law school, paste the tag of NLU upon it,” Nayak told me.
“There is no incentive for them to be accountable.”
Each NLU is founded under a special law passed by its respective state
legislature. However, the NLUs’ administration is hybrid, with
representation from the judiciary, bar councils as well as the state
and union governments. Tensions between the universities and their
respective state governments are an endemic feature of the NLU system.
State governments exercise great power over the running of the
universities—a power that many feel is not always used to the benefit
of the institutions. This contrasts strongly with the model of high
functional autonomy applied to the Indian Institutes of Management
decades ago, and which the IITs have productively lobbied for more
recently.
In 2020, the Karnataka government slashed 75 percent of its funding to
NLSIU. In March 2020, the Karnataka legislative assembly had passed an
amendment, without any debate or discussion, reserving a quarter of
seats at the university for students from within the state—something
the university administration had been resisting. After these moves,
students told me, the university briefly had to cut down on important
support systems such as scholarships.
“I often wonder why do they open these universities and then simply forget us?”
Dramatically, in September that year, the Karnataka High Court stepped
in to slash the state quota, observing that NLSIU was “a unique
national institution and cannot be construed to be a state
university.” The court relied heavily on the optics of NLSIU as an
institution of national prominence and on its sustenance by
alternative sources of funding beyond the state government’s
coffers—particularly via the national and state bar councils.
NLSIU’s court victory, though, is an exceptional story. All other NLUs
have substantial state reservations attached. In September,
Rajasthan’s minister of higher education assured his state assembly
that NLU Jodhpur would become the final university to join the trend.
Not every NLU has the national profile or the alternative funding to
fight back.
“If we want to reduce the fees and increase accessibility to these
institutions, improve diversity, we need funding,” Nayak told me. “If
we need funding, there’s a compromise that we’re reaching with these
governments. IITs and IIMs do not have to constantly calculate the
risks and compromises when they demand funding. But NLUs must always
ask, what are they losing next?”
In April 2017, news of protests at NUSRL Ranchi demanding permanent
professors, internet facilities, improved infrastructure and
transparency in the utilisations of funds floated across the state
boundary to Kolkata. Arjun Agarwal, the president of NUJS’s student
bar association at the time and no stranger to stories of
maladministration, wrote a Facebook post about why NLUs should be
granted Institute of National Importance status just like the IITs and
IIMs.
“The then president at NLSIU and I had both been thinking along the
same lines,” Agarwal told me. He argued that nationalisation could be
an umbrella solution to many of the bigger problems plaguing the NLUs.
“Firstly, we believed there would be more accountability, since the
central government would become the overarching body” in control of
the universities, he said. “We knew that it would bring a much-needed
boost to the university’s resources. The last big outcome would be
that our funding, our fees, and our quotas would get standardised.”
Agarwal’s post was soon published by the online outlet Legally India,
and he found himself showered with calls of support.
Agarwal soon met Debadatta Bose, a contemporary from Damodaram
Sanjivayya National Law University, in Vishakhapatnam, who had already
drafted legislation for the nationalisation of the NLUs. The bill,
first placed in the Lok Sabha by Sugata Bose, a member of parliament
from the Trinamool Congress, had already been introduced in the house
a month earlier. Soon, representatives from Hyderabad’s National
Academy of Legal Studies and Research were on board, and a joint
statement was put out in April 2017 decrying the ambiguous position of
the NLUs.
“The two central aspects of the bill were standardisation and
transparency,” Debadatta, currently a research scholar at Amsterdam
Law School, explained to me. “I was personally very invested in the
provisions that sought greater transparency in the NLUs, through
proposals such as auditing by the Comptroller and Auditor General. The
bill also talked about a national council—a central body to
standardise policies across all NLUs. You find that no other similar
institutes—be it the IITs, IIMs, NITs, the Schools of Planning and
Architecture or NIFTs—have such loosely defined associations as the
CLAT Consortium. That was a huge problem.” The CLAT Consortium
comprises all existing NLUs, which coordinate to conduct the annual
Common Law Admission Test.
“The chances of any private member’s bill actually succeeding are
always low,” Debadatta said. “After my bill got introduced, the bigger
challenge was to get the bill to a committee or have the bill at least
mentioned on the floor of the house—to not let it die.” Despite the
two students canvassing alumni who might know legislators, the bill
lapsed.
A year later, the two student unions decided a more organised approach
was likelier to succeed. In 2018, following more protests at NLIU in
Bhopal, student bodies from various NLUs came together to form the NLU
Student Consortium. On Constitution Day that year, students at NUJS
were photographed arranged in an SOS pattern, symbolising their cry
for consideration.
Legislative efforts over the next two years continued to be sluggish.
Two years after Debadatta’s bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha, the
law minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, responded to a query in parliament
by saying that there were “no proposal[s] before the government to
nationalise NLUs.” Prasad later gave a similar reply to further
parliamentary questions, adding that there were no proposals to confer
Institute of National Importance status on the NLUs either.
On constitution day 2018, students at NUJS Kolkata gathered themselves
in an SOS pattern following several NLU student unions coming together
to demand a nationalisation of India's premiere law colleges.. On
constitution day 2018, students at NUJS Kolkata gathered themselves in
an SOS pattern following several NLU student unions coming together to
demand a nationalisation of India's premiere law colleges..
On constitution day 2018, students at NUJS Kolkata gathered themselves
in an SOS pattern following several NLU student unions coming together
to demand a nationalisation of India's premiere law colleges.
In late 2019, Legally India reported that the Bharatiya Janata Party
MP Meenakshi Lekhi was to introduce a new bill to nationalise the
NLUs. This bill was placed in the lower house, but it never actually
got introduced. Since then, any agenda for nationalisation has been
pushed to the very back of the shelf. “NLUs are just not an important
thing for the government—let’s just put it that way,” Debadatta said.
Nayak said a cloud of disillusionment now hung over most of the
students who had hoped for nationalisation. “I’m not sure how we could
propel the NLU nationalisation discourse to that level again,” he told
me. “How far can the students carry this forward?” He felt the time
had come for the Bar Council of India and the law ministry “to
realistically start thinking about this. And, before that, the
advocates, the entire legal community, must start thinking. This needs
to expand beyond our sufferings. To nationalise or to not nationalise
is a debate that could determine where law and legal education in
India is headed.”
In the absence of central funding, “NLSIU has become dependent upon
alternative sources of funding to a degree that could be slightly
concerning,” Kanishka Singh, a former vice-president of the
university’s student union, told me. “Private capital is seeping in.”
This could be a sign of things to come across the NLU system, and,
given the abysmal state of equity and representation in the private
sector, could end up translating to more pressure against reservation
policies.
According to Baxi, this is in line with larger trends across the
country. “Today, there exist about 1,500 law colleges in India. Out of
these, about 780 colleges are private, 270 are government and 80 are
private-public,” he said. “What inferences may be derived from these
is that preeminent is the privatisation of legal education with a
distinctly neoliberal character favouring the several Ds of
hyper-globalisation: De-regulation, de-nationalisation,
dis-investment, de-juridification, de-politicisation, and
de-democratisation.” A natural consequence of this, Singh remarked,
“will be an eventual loss of their public character and its adverse
effect will be felt most by marginalised communities.”
{THREE}
AROUND 8 PM on 4 April 2022, a second-year student sitting in her room
at NLU Odisha heard loud banging in the corridor. She found the
assistant warden and a crowd of students outside Room 324, the room of
Surabhi Panchpal. Panchpal, also a second-year student, had been
brought up in a village in Uttarakhand and then in Haryana, and was
from a Scheduled Tribe community. “The assistant warden told me that
Surabhi was not picking up her calls, that the parents had been
calling her continuously, and had asked the warden to go and check,”
the student told me. The banging had been going on for twenty minutes.
After weighing all options, a guard was called in to break open the
door. Meanwhile, the second-year student was telling another girl to
run and fetch the warden, whose accommodation is in a neighbouring
building. The senior warden never came, the student and other
witnesses told me, and was not picking up calls to her phone.
“When I turned around after speaking, I saw that they broke the door
open and I heard the most horrific scream,” the student recalled.
Dozens ran away from the room, screaming, crying and panicking. One of
them stopped by the second-year student and said, “She has hung
herself.” The university’s ambulance arrived after a delay, two
students told me. Panchpal was taken to the SCB Medical College and
Hospital in Cuttack, where she was declared dead upon arrival.
In an email response to my questions, NLUO’s vice-chancellor, Ved
Kumari, told me that the warden had reached Panchpal’s room soon after
her death. However, multiple students I spoke to disagreed with this
account.
Panchpal’s parents arrived in the morning and quietly left with the
body, without visiting the campus. Accounts of the interaction between
the parents and the NLUO administration at the hospital remain murky.
For Bahujans—Dalits, Adivasis and non-dominant OBCs, collectively the
majority of India’s population—the resulting campus environment
vacillates between unhelpful and openly hostile.
On the campus, after Panchpal was taken away, senior students
scrambled to arrange support for other students undergoing anxiety
attacks. Several students told me that no person from the
administration extended any help. The registrar, Yogesh Pratap Singh,
denied this in an interview with Live Law the following day, saying
that faculty members and hostel wardens were adequately helpful. “It
is not like they asked for help and we did not offer,” Singh said.
When I read out the registrar’s response to a student, he became
visibly angry. “We felt abandoned, we felt there was nobody there to
look after us except our seniors,” he told me. Like other students I
spoke to, he asked for anonymity to avoid any potential trouble with
university officials. “There was no one from the administration. That
was very clear from the beginning.”
Finally, at 1.30 am, Kumari called a meeting in front of the campus
academic block. As students gathered, waiting for the first
communication from an administration official, Kumari prompted them to
do breathing exercises. “Since we’re all Hindus here, let us pray for
her departed soul,” she told the gathering, several students I spoke
to recalled. She also talked about the afterlife. Then, students
remembered, Kumari said, “I am not a very good singer, is there anyone
who can sing here?” Hearing no response, with hundreds of students
sitting in shock, she began singing a Lata Mangeshkar song.
Traumatised, angered and exhausted, the crowd began to disperse.
Kumari denied saying “We are all Hindus.” However, she told me, “With
my experience of meditation and how deep breathing helps in soothing
nerves, I asked them to do deep breathing hoping that it may help
soothe their nerves but failed miserably to reach them. They responded
with anger and rejection.” She said that the bhajan she sang that
evening, “has no Hindu overtones to it and it is a secular bhajan
leading us to follow the righteous path.”
In her response, Kumari told me, “Immediately after the incident, NLUO
arranged physical presence of counsellors on the campus, organized
mental health awareness and wellbeing programmes, training and
workshops. The incident caused acute mental trauma to those who
witnessed the ordeal following the suicide and triggered anxiety
issues in many others who heard about it. These programmes helped all
those students immensely.”
Formerly the dean of the campus law centre at Delhi University, Kumari
was appointed the vice-chancellor of NLUO in the wake of the 2018
protests on the campus against high fees and the lack of a good
library. Her tenure has been marked by administrative apathy. For
several months before Panchpal’s death, the administration had
withheld the test results of almost seven hundred students, alleging
the use of “unfair means” in online exams. Kumari planned to “punish”
the students herself, a senior student told me, and they had
complained to her that her reaction was too harsh. Kumari had
apparently replied, “I don’t care even if you lose placements, lose
scholarships or commit suicide. You are all cheaters.” Kumari denied
this. An email addressed to the student body by the student council,
sent out on 29 March, also quotes her saying the same thing.
On the night following Panchpal’s death, students blockaded both gates
of the campus, unwilling to let Kumari leave until they got an
explanation about the university’s poor response. “We were peacefully
asking her to please step out and have a conversation with us, give us
some answers,” a student told me. Kumari ignored them as she sat
inside her car. In an emailed response Kumari said that students had
surrounded her car, shouted slogans and had not permitted her to step
out of her car. A cordon of police officers soon arrived with lathis.
There was no violent confrontation with the police, and Kumari soon
left the campus in her car. Most students went back to their rooms,
but many could not sleep.
Kumari denied that she had called the police. In the Live Law
interview, the registrar said the police had been sent by S
Muralidhar, the chief justice of the Orissa High Court and the
chancellor of NLUO. A student told me that Kumari “has pointed out to
us before that she is basically untouchable because Muralidhar is on
her side.” Kumari denied saying this, however she added that
Muralidhar is routinely informed if something happens on campus, and
that he was informed both about the cheating as well as the suicide.
The administration claimed that Panchpal left behind a note, which
revealed that the university was in no way responsible for her death.
I was told the registrar read out the note to student council members
inside a closed room. No Bahujan student ever saw it. In her email to
me, Kumari claimed that the note was handed directly to the police,
and that neither she nor the members of the student council read it.
In the week after her death, NLUO students placed a list of 14 demands
before the administration, mostly to do with getting better medical
infrastructure and mechanisms of redressal for discrimination.
Meanwhile, Panchpal’s community identity became a node of
divisiveness. “When I learnt that she was an ST student, it felt like
a personal loss to me,” Risha Saka, a fourth-year student, told me.
When the student council drafted a press release regarding the death,
Saka wanted Panchpal’s ST identity to be explicitly mentioned. Two
students told me that the council vehemently opposed this. “The
council is completely upper-caste dominated,” Saka said. “The release
was being drafted by a group of upper-caste men and one upper-caste
woman.”
Even if Panchpal’s death was not because of explicit caste
discrimination, another student told me, her identity played a
fundamental role in her experiences at NLUO. “This identity, of her
coming through ST reservations, is labelled on her the moment she
walked in,” he told me. “Then, you try to invisibilise that, saying
that caste does not exist, but the institutional culture continues to
provide a hostile environment for her because of that identity. And,
now that she has passed away, you refuse to acknowledge that
identity?”
Panchpal’s ST identity was not mentioned in the final press release.
Many dominant-caste students allegedly threatened to withdraw from the
protests that followed her death if caste were factored in,
anticipating greater media scrutiny and possible turmoil in the
oncoming recruitment season. Some senior students demanded Kumari’s
resignation and asked the student council to take up this demand. The
council refused again and threatened to withdraw from the protests if
the resignation demand became part of them. The NLOU student council
did not respond to an emailed questionnaire. Eventually, the
administration issued an apology for its lack of preparedness but
continued to deny all responsibility for the death.
Panchpal left behind a bare-bones Twitter account, created last year
and showing just two re-tweeted posts. One, from March 2021, reads,
“Exorbitant amount of fee is being charged by National Law University,
Odisha. Even after promising their students that if next semester goes
online reduction will be done.”
A room prepared to host a moot court competition. Brahmins and other
dominant-caste students have overwhelming representation in student
societies while Dalit and Adivasi students comprise the lowest
proportions of participants in moot courts. A culture of exclusion
pervades the NLUs cutting Bahujan students off from regular student
life and debilitating their academic performance.. Aditya
Kumar/Wikimedia CommonsA room prepared to host a moot court
competition. Brahmins and other dominant-caste students have
overwhelming representation in student societies while Dalit and
Adivasi students comprise the lowest proportions of participants in
moot courts. A culture of exclusion pervades the NLUs cutting Bahujan
students off from regular student life and debilitating their academic
performance.. Aditya Kumar/Wikimedia Commons
A room prepared to host a moot court competition. Brahmins and other
dominant-caste students have overwhelming representation in student
societies while Dalit and Adivasi students comprise the lowest
proportions of participants in moot courts. A culture of exclusion
pervades the NLUs cutting Bahujan students off from regular student
life and debilitating their academic performance. ADITYA
KUMAR/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
A THIRD-YEAR student at Kochi’s National University of Advanced Legal
Studies, did not find many good things to say about cultural relations
at her university. NUALS has reservations for candidates from the
Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Socially and Educationally
Backward Classes as part of its seats for students from within Kerala.
The rest of the seats, in the all-India category, are unreserved.
“People coming from outside Kerala are automatically upper-caste,” the
student told me. “They instinctively start associating with other
north Indians, or people from their regions. Savarnas tend to befriend
other savarnas. This results in a sort of segregation, which, while
not explicitly rooted in caste, is distinctly on the lines of caste.”
Networks founded on indicators of privilege—class, urbaneness and
caste—dictate not only the social but also the academic experiences of
Bahujan students. “You won’t find many marginalised students
participating in moot-court competitions because they never receive
enough guidance, despite the generational disadvantages,” Hamsadhwini
Alagarsamy, a Bahujan student at NUALS, explained. “And that, in turn,
is because of how caste networks operate.”
In 2019, a study assessed diversity at NUJS, Kolkata. Its findings
were predictably discomforting. Brahmins and other dominant-caste
students had overwhelming representation in student societies. Dalit
and Adivasi students comprised the lowest proportions of participants
in moot courts. Less than fifteen percent of SC, ST and OBC students
had participated in international moots, and SC students rarely
participated in debate competitions.
Kanishka Singh, now in his fourth year, told me, “In our first year,
we all had ‘positive interaction’ sessions with our seniors”—a
euphemism for ragging. “Sometimes, during these sessions, upper-caste
seniors persistently enquire about your CLAT ranks. As a fresher and a
first-generation law student from a marginalised background, who might
be struggling to come to terms with generational trauma, this can
often be a shattering experience.”
“Everything boils down to demographics,” Alagarsamy told me. “If we
allow more Bahujan students to enter these law schools, we have more
qualitative representation—in student societies, journals, moot court
achievements. Then we have collective social capital, we have a
framework to agitate.”
The skewed representation at NUJS is partly the fault of the lacking
institutional support for marginalised students. A bigger factor,
however, are peculiar reservation mechanisms that contrive to
disadvantage them. The hybrid nature of the administration of the NLUs
has left them with a convoluted and ever-changing reservation
structure.
NUJS reserves 18 seats in every batch for non-resident Indians,
translating to nearly sixteen percent of the entire student body. If
not enough NRI students apply—as is regularly the case—these are
converted into NRI Sponsorship seats, reserved for students who may be
residents of India but have NRI relatives able to pay
disproportionately high fees. In effect, this means mandated
representation for ultra-elite students from dominant-caste
communities. The NUJS diversity study showed that NRI Sponsorship
students had among the highest levels of representation as
office-bearers in college societies—positions in which marginalised
students were badly underrepresented. NRI Sponsorship quotas exist at
many NLUs, albeit in different configurations.
In 2005, the Calcutta High Court noted that such quotas are “patently
ultra vires and violative of Article 14 of the Constitution,” which
enshrines equality. That same year, however, a seven-judge bench of
the Supreme Court observed that these quotas are essential since they
“brought in money required by these institutions to strengthen their
educational activities.” This tone-deaf observation remains legally
current.
The clearest lacuna when it comes to representation at the NLUs is the
near-complete lack of OBC reservations. NUJS reserves seven seats for
OBC candidates from within West Bengal, but not a single one in its
all-India quota. Most other NLUs also have no all-India OBC seats.
Some, including the NLUs at Jodhpur, Patiala and Cuttack, do not
reserve a single seat for OBC students in either the all-India or
in-state quotas. Both NLSIU and NALSAR in Hyderabad were a part of
this latter collective until the current academic year. The only real
exception is Tamil Nadu National Law University, in Tiruchirappalli,
which recently announced an expansion of its existing reservations
regime to guarantee 69 percent of seats for students from SCs, STs,
Backward Classes and OBCs across both the in-state and all-India
quotas. This is in line with Tamil Nadu’s markedly progressive
representation policies.
“In these premier law universities, the next generation of prominent
lawyers, judges and the gears of the Supreme Court are being
produced,” G Karunanidhy, the general secretary of the All India OBC
Federation, told me. “OBC representation is crucial then. Our students
must have a place in this future.”
In 2019, the National Commission for Backward Classes summoned Faizan
Mustafa, the vice-chancellor of NALSAR, which did not reserve any
seats for OBC students at the time. Ramesh Babu Vishwanathula, a
senior advocate and legal consultant to the NCBC, recalled the excuses
Mustafa offered. “Among other reasons, we were told that, if NALSAR
were to implement the OBC reservations, their quality of education
would be compromised,” he told me.
The next year, the NCBC directed the UGC to pursue the NLUs over their
gatekeeping practices. The NCBC subsequently held three hearings with
representatives of all 23 NLUs, but no substantive changes resulted.
After the NCBC summoned the chief secretary of Telangana over poor
representation at NALSAR, in 2021, the secretary appealed to the
Telangana High Court. The court ruled in favour of the NCBC,
confirming its jurisdiction over the issue.
The NCBC kept up the pressure on the NALSAR vice-chancellor and some
of his peers at other universities. In October 2021, Telangana amended
the NALSAR Act, 1998, to reserve 26 seats in the all-India and state
quotas for OBC students. A few other NLUs, including NLSIU, have also
recently established or expanded reservations for Backward Classes.
But the matter is far from resolved. Earlier this year, the All India
OBC Students’ Association wrote to the prime minister demanding that
27 percent of all-India seats at the NLUs be reserved for OBCs. “I
don’t understand why some of the powerful student bodies across the
country, either left or right, have not engaged with this serious
crisis,” Kiran Kumar Goud, the association’s president, told me. “We
are willing to work with more student groups and take this matter
forward.”
Upendra Baxi, a celebrated legal scholar, speaking to an audience in
Delhi, in May 2018. A report authored by Baxi for the UGC laid the
groundwork for the goals of the NLUs, basing his idea of legal
education as a means of connecting the law student with the broader
grassroots realities of the nation.. Anushree Fadnavis/ Hindustan
TimesUpendra Baxi, a celebrated legal scholar, speaking to an audience
in Delhi, in May 2018. A report authored by Baxi for the UGC laid the
groundwork for the goals of the NLUs, basing his idea of legal
education as a means of connecting the law student with the broader
grassroots realities of the nation.. Anushree Fadnavis/ Hindustan
Times
Upendra Baxi, a celebrated legal scholar, speaking to an audience in
Delhi, in May 2018. A report authored by Baxi for the UGC laid the
groundwork for the goals of the NLUs, basing his idea of legal
education as a means of connecting the law student with the broader
grassroots realities of the nation. ANUSHREE FADNAVIS/ HINDUSTAN TIMES
A FIFTH-YEAR STUDENT at Maharashtra National Law University, Nagpur
told me that many professors harbour at least an implicit hostility to
reservations—and, correspondingly, to Bahujan students. He recalled
overhearing a professor at his university say, while watching
first-year students walk by, “Yaar, ye first-years ka to theek hai,
par ye reserved category wale dimag kharab kar dete hain”—The
first-years are fine, but these reserved-category students drive me
mad. “This man hadn’t even started teaching the fresh batch yet, and
the poison was already running through his veins,” the student said.
“I feel that many teachers in NLUs, who are overwhelmingly
upper-caste, place these invisible glass ceilings upon Dalit and
Adivasi students in terms of expectations and interactions. This is
not the same for privileged-caste students.”
I could not find any empirical study on representation and inclusivity
among faculty in the NLUs. Testimonies from both students and
professors, however, point to a dismal state of affairs. “I can tell
you that, in NLSIU, there are very few SC, ST and OBC professors
teaching,” Preethi Lolaksha Nagaveni, a doctoral scholar at Lancaster
University who has been both a student and a teacher at NLSIU, told
me. “When students from marginalised communities come to these places,
they don’t know how to go about navigating life in these elite law
schools. If they face any kind of discrimination or harassment because
of their caste, there are no SC or ST faculty members. So, who are
they going to approach?” The NUJS diversity study found that ST
respondents and students with disabilities found the faculty most
unapproachable. Many OBC students also shared similar concerns.
“The NLUs are institutions of the state, established under statutes
enacted by the state assemblies,” Nagaveni told me. “In their faculty
recruitment, they have an obligation to implement Article 16(4)”—a
constitutional provision enabling reservations for backward classes.
“The current state of representation exists because, clearly, the
Constitution is not being followed. NLUs are neither following the
centre nor the states’ reservation guidelines.”
“Legislations dealing with untouchables become untouchable in these
law schools.”
An alumna of Lucknow’s Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University told
me about the day she decided to become a teacher of law. “I remember
that once my teacher facilitated an anti-reservation discussion in
class—it was one of my worst experiences,” she recalled. “I wanted to
say something but I was so scared to say. Finally, I mustered the
courage to raise my hand, but then they said that the discussion was
over.” In college, she said, “I understood how discrimination
operates, how representation is only there in spirit and not in form,
and, even if there were Bahujan teachers, there were none who were
radicalised. As a teacher, I want to change that.”
After completing her LLM and a PhD, she has struggled to find
employment as an assistant professor. “After my LLM, I had considered
applying for a faculty position at Jindal Global Law School”—a private
university near the national capital—“but I found in their ad that
they explicitly wanted people with foreign degrees.” This, she said,
is also “a culture which is seeping into NLUs nowadays.” She
remembered seeing an advertisement for a vacancy at NLSIU, which
mentioned “that they wanted people from diverse backgrounds. When I
saw the people who had gotten picked, they were all upper-caste women
who had degrees from abroad.”
Vijay Kishore Tiwari, an assistant professor at NUJS with a
disability, said the devaluation of Indian postgraduate degrees in
faculty recruitment, is very exclusionary. “If I am an underprivileged
student, firstly it is difficult for me to enter NLUs because of high
CLAT fees,” he explained. “Once I am inside, there is little in the
way of support structures. If I want to become a teacher, I can’t
afford an Ivy League education, and if I do an LLM from India, my
degree is not put on the same pedestal as an LLM from a foreign
university. I ask the UGC, why are the LLM and PhD programmes not
being improved?”
“This upper-caste professor at one point began speaking against
reservations,” an MNLU student told me. “At that moment, I realised
the atmosphere in the class, filled disproportionately by upper-caste
students, suddenly changed. There was an air of excitement, of
comfort, of having been unburdened of something. For a Bahujan
student, this is a hostile space. They are debating my existence in
this class, my lived experience, my history.”
Besides robbing Bahujan students of support, the absence of Bahujan
faculty also influences the pedagogy at the NLUs and the kind of
lawyers they produce. “Because there is hegemonisation of some
particular communities in the NLUs, we were never taught the
Prevention of Atrocities Act, for instance,” Nagaveni told me.
“Legislations dealing with untouchables become untouchable in these
law schools. And, the way legal history is taught, does it acknowledge
the contributions of India’s vibrant anti-caste movement and
anti-caste literature, which has shaped many of these legislations?”
{FOUR}
“WHEN ROHITH VEMULA passed away, the Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi
population in NLSIU was very diffused,” Kanishka Singh, the former
vice-president of the NLSIU student union, told me. Vemula, a Dalit
student pursuing a PhD at the University of Hyderabad, took his own
life in 2016, following run-ins with right-wing student activists and
the university administration. His death sparked massive protests
against caste-based discrimination on campuses across the country.
“After what happened with Vemula, I think this wave of fear and
non-belongingness took over everyone.”
At NLSIU, the need for a secure space for Bahujan interaction and
assertion meant the emergence of the Savitri Phule Ambedkar
Caravan—perhaps the first student collective in the institution’s
almost forty-year history to be deeply bound to the anti-caste
struggle. The SPAC was originally a space for Dalit, Bahujan and
Adivasi students “to come together, to talk and grow as people,” Singh
explained. “The idea has always been to get together as a reading
circle and read a bit of Babasaheb, Mahatma Phule, Periyar and other
anti-caste figures.” The SPAC has since emerged as one of the most
active student societies at NLSIU and regularly holds events to mark
significant anniversaries such as Ambedkar Jayanti. Singh said that
joining the SPAC in his second year gave him the opportunity to come
to terms with his own identity. In his third year, he became the
collective’s convener.
The SPAC’s emergence seemingly opened the way for Ambedkarite
collectives across NLUs. The Ambedkar Study Circle at NUALS, Kochi
followed in 2017. The group frequently presents the concerns of
Bahujan students to the university administration and resists any
unfair treatment of them. When an anonymous student wrote an email
demanding some empathy from the administration in academic
assessments, the circle stepped in, forwarding a list of demands to
university authorities. It also created a portal for students to
anonymously reach out with any grievances. “We are very openly
anti-caste, socialist and anti-patriarchal. We don’t hide it at all,”
Alagarsamy said. “And people know that there exists this subaltern
voice on campus, which is very assertive.”
The BR Ambedkar Study Circle at the Kalamaserry campus of NUALS and
the Savitri Phule Ambedkar Caravan at NLSIU are attempts to assert
space for Bahujan students in campuses made hostile to them by the
teaching staff and the larger student body. It is only through
non-discriminatory law schools that India can have a representative
bar, and exert influence on an upper-caste dominated judiciary.. The
BR Ambedkar Study Circle at the Kalamaserry campus of NUALS and the
Savitri Phule Ambedkar Caravan at NLSIU are attempts to assert space
for Bahujan students in campuses made hostile to them by the teaching
staff and the larger student body. It is only through
non-discriminatory law schools that India can have a representative
bar, and exert influence on an upper-caste dominated judiciary..
The BR Ambedkar Study Circle at the Kalamaserry campus of NUALS and
the Savitri Phule Ambedkar Caravan at NLSIU are attempts to assert
space for Bahujan students in campuses made hostile to them by the
teaching staff and the larger student body. It is only through
non-discriminatory law schools that India can have a representative
bar, and exert influence on an upper-caste dominated judiciary.
Ambedkarite groups have emerged as a counter to the rapid growth of
Hindu activism in the NLUs. At NLUO, for example, Hindu nationalist
groups have been present for roughly half a decade. When I visited, in
April 2022, there was a large Nazi swastika drawn on a wall of the
boys’ hostel. In March, when the fundamentalist Hindu monk Adityanath
won a second term in charge of Uttar Pradesh, the boys’ hostel mess
hosted a celebratory dinner, complete with sweets and firecrackers.
In 2019, Ambedkar Jayanti coincided with Hanuman Jayanti. At NLUO, the
Ambedkar Study Circle’s posters for a commemorative lecture clashed
with saffron flags planted across the campus by Hindutva groups. At
least one of the Ambedkar Study Circle’s posters was vandalised.
The group’s resolve continues to grow. “We organise the annual
memorial lectures,” Jeevan Justin, a fourth-year student and ASC
member, told me. “We also organise reading circles, quite a few
discussions and movie screenings. Recently, we received 24
applications, so people are enthusiastic about the circle. But, when I
tell my hostel friends that I’m doing any work for the ASC, their
response always seems to be derisive. It is as if our celebration of
Ambedkar is a kind of politics which has no place in the NLUs.”
Ambedkarite students have also begun building larger networks across
law colleges. Dipankar Kamble, an MNLU student, wrote for Round Table
India in 2018 about the need in India for an organisation like the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—a historic
fountainhead of legal activism in the African-American struggle for
equality in the United States. Kamble told me he spent sleepless
nights thinking of ways to manifest this goal. “If we successfully
created a network of students from marginalised backgrounds, it would
be become immensely important for the upcoming times.”
Kamble got in touch with Dalit and Adivasi students at various law
schools in an effort at creating a pan-India network of Ambedkarite
law students. These students were assigned mentors—academicians from
marginalised communities who, as Kamble explained, were “honest to the
ideology and the movement.” Now, he added, “all of us know each other
from across law schools. There’s always somebody there for us, and
that is a unique feeling for many of us.”
LONG BEFORE BAXI and the NLUs, BR Ambedkar had laid out his own vision
for equitable and socially responsible legal education. In a 1935
essay, written during his stint as the principal of Bombay’s
Government Law College, he explained that the guiding principle behind
any sincere reform of legal education in India must be to expand
access for the oppressed masses. This was a reflection of what he
viewed the responsibility of law itself to be.
“NLUs cater to a very specific need and demand,” G Mohan Gopal, a
former director of NLSIU, told me. “They shifted away from their
social-engineering goals a long while ago. They are, today, the
exclusive domains of the bureaucrats, the middle-class dominant-caste
interest and the corporate law firms which are tethered to this
exclusive domain. The moment you try to shift away from this, their
success model will be in shambles.”
I asked him if there was a realistic way out of this crisis. “Social
engineering’s top-down framework is flawed in itself,” he said. “The
masses must re-engineer the elite—not the other way around—and, for
that, a systemic restructuring of legal education is needed. It cannot
happen within the NLU framework. I have tried for twenty-two years,
but there is simply no interest. NLUs, in a sense, are irreparable.”
Dipankar Kamble is hopeful, not necessarily that the NLUs can be
restructured, but that students from marginalised communities can
rewrite engraved narratives of exclusion. “The emergence of an
Ambedkarite conscience, the promise that is there for future
generations from my community, raises immense hope in me,” he said.
“Of course, to hope is sometimes to be impractical, but if it means
anything for the movement, I will hold on to this hope.”
SUSHOVAN PATNAIK is a former editorial intern with The Caravan and law
student at the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. He
is interested in the intersection of law and journalism.
--
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अविनाश शाही/ Avinash Shahi
सहायक/ Assistant
मानव संसाधन प्रबंध विभाग/ Human Resource Management Department
भारतीय रिजर्व बैंक/ Reserve Bank of India
लखनऊ क्षेत्रीय कार्यालय/Lucknow RO
विस्तार/ Extension: 2232
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