Censorship

A central university has forced an informal body of Dalit faculty members to stop their weekly readings and discussions of Bhimrao Ambedkar’s works on the campus, show-caused seven of the teachers, and taken punitive action against four of them. The Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya suggested the Ambedkar readings, which had started two years earlier, could endanger the “safety and health of (participating) students and reputation of the university”.

A group of Dalit faculty members started the Ambedkar Study Circle India on the campus in February 2022. It met after 6pm every Thursday in front of the Ambedkar statue at the university and read from his collected works, published by the central and Maharashtra governments, and discussed them. Some sixty-one sessions had been held in two years when the registrar-in-charge, Dharvesh Katheriya, ordered the practice stopped in January this year.