The following are excerpts from the chapter ‘Re-legitimising minority rights: The campaign for Aligarh Muslim University’s minority status’ of the book Between Nation and ‘Community’: Muslim Universities and Indian Politics after Partition, by Laurence Gautier, and published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. The outburst of violence at AMU in April 1965 was not an exception in India’s university landscape. Administrative authorities usually interpreted these protests in terms of indiscipline. Yet, in AMU’s case, [former education minister Mohammadali Carim] Chagla immediately projected the students’ agitation as a battle between communal and secular forces. In a letter to Syed Mahmud, he accused the ‘bigots and communalists’ on the campus of using the quota controversy as a ‘pretext’ to get rid of a vice-chancellor too ‘modern’ for their taste. Even though several politicians, including Humayun Kabir and Mahmud, argued that the attack against the vice-chancellor was an accident, Chagla demanded the closure of the university, the dissolution of the court and the adoption of an ordinance, which reinforced the control of the government over the institution and granted the vice-chancellor extended power. The purpose of these ‘drastic measures’, Chagla argued, was to ‘enable [him] to suspend or dismiss members of the staff whose loyalty is in doubt’ and to ‘arm’ the vice-chancellor and the executive ‘with full authority’ so that they may ‘weed out from the University that reactionary and anti-national element’.‘Between Nation and ‘Community’: Muslim Universities and Indian Politics after Partition,’ Laurence Gautier, Cambridge University Press, 2024.The ordinance, which later became the AMU (Amendment) Act (1965), completely transformed the nature of the court. The former ‘supreme governing body’ of the university became a simple advisory body, largely subordinated to the visitor, that is, the president of India. It made specific reference neither to Muslim institutions, such as the AIMEC, nor to representatives of ‘Muslim learning and culture’, as was the case earlier. These changes seriously hampered the notion that the court was supposed to stand for the Muslim community in charge of the university, an idea that went as far back as the campaign for the establishment of the university in the 1910s. At the time, the Muslim University Foundation Committee had insisted that the court should be composed of Muslim members alone, coming from all over the country, so that the body may claim to represent – that is, to make present and to speak for – the entire Muslim community exerting control over the institution. In 1951 already, the AMU (Amendment) Act had partly challenged this notion by opening the court to non-Muslim members. The 1951 Act had also made changes to the composition of the administrative body by increasing the number of teachers and reducing the number of donors. However, it still included members of the AIMEC as well as ‘representatives of Muslim culture and learning’.The 1965 Act made no such provision. It simply mentioned that the visitor would have the power to nominate ‘men of standing in public life’, who may possess ‘special knowledge or practical experience in education’. In so doing, it completely put aside the idea that the university should be primarily in the hands of the Muslim community, with a degree of autonomy from the central state apparatus.Far from settling the issue, these ‘drastic measures’ fuelled anger against the government and the vice-chancellor. The government deployed police forces on the campus and several students and members of the administrative bodies, said to have encouraged the agitation, were arrested. Other students and teachers, outraged by the arrests and by the presence of the police, demanded the abrogation of the ordinance. These protests embittered relations between the vice-chancellor and teachers who refused to condemn the student agitation. His relations with student protesters were no less fraught. The AMU Action Committee, initially formed to protest against changes in internal quotas, pleaded for the release of arrested students. [Vice-chancellor Ali Yavar] Jung, in turn, accused them of ‘fomenting agitation and promoting strike’ on the campus. The collector of Aligarh weighed in, accusing the president of the Action Committee, Basir Ahmad Khan, the former president of the Students’ Union (1963–1964), of ‘propagating hatred’ by circulating ‘diffamatory pamphlets [sic]’. In a confidential note, he warned Chagla that ‘communal elements’ had tried to set fire to the convocation pandal during a visit of the president on the campus. Just like Chagla, the city’s administrative authorities thus interpreted students’ protests as a law-and-order issue driven by communal forces on the campus.Also read: On Campus and Beyond, Aligarh Muslim University Is at Centre of UP BJP’s Communal PoliticsThese agitations revived earlier divisions between reformists, who supported the reorientation of the university, and the conservatives, keen to preserve AMU’s Muslim character. In a note to the education ministry, Biswanath Das, the governor of Uttar Pradesh, suggested that ‘communists’ and non-Muslims usually supported the vice-chancellor, while the so-called religious or conservative section opposed him. These political divisions often overlapped with pragmatic considerations and sectarian tensions. According to Das, a majority of the non-teaching staff stood against the vice-chancellor because they resented his attempts to reform the administration. Das suggests that Jung’s Shia identity added to the tensions. Indeed, sectarian tensions were rife on campus. Writing about his student’s days at AMU, Mushirul Hasan recalls that ‘oddly enough’, the ‘Shia–Sunni divide’ was ‘more apparent’ than the ‘Hindu–Muslim antagonism’. Likewise, Mujeeb Rizvi, another alumnus, remembers that the ‘conservative’ section of the university, largely Sunni, often regarded Shias as ‘outsiders’ and ‘communists’, to the extent that even Zakir Husain, who was neither Shia nor communist, but whom many regarded as an ‘outsider’, was sometimes considered to be part of the ‘Shia clique’.At the time of the 25 April 1965 incident, factional rivalries between Jung’s followers and those who supported AMU’s pro-vice-chancellor came to crystallise these multi-layered divisions between conservatives and reformists. For many, Yusuf Husain Khan, the pro-vice-chancellor (and Zakir Husain’s brother), represented the head of the conservative faction. In 1964, Khan had failed to become vice-chancellor after Tyabji opposed his candidacy for fear that he would promote the conservative section of the university. This created friction between Khan and the new vice-chancellor as well as between their supporters. According to the newspaper The Patriot, Khan’s supporters launched a campaign against Jung soon after his arrival, portraying him as an alcoholic and an atheist who would ‘destroy the Islamic character of AMU’. In turn, when the attack against the vice-chancellor took place, a section of AMU’s teachers demanded the immediate resignation of Khan, projected as the head of the ‘reactionary’ and ‘communal’ elements at AMU.Jung and Khan admittedly embodied different visions of AMU’s mission and identity. For Jung, on the one hand, the main objective was to improve educational standards in order to provide students with better opportunities, enabling them to contribute to the progress of the community and of the country. He justified the change in internal quotas in these terms, warning his colleagues against the ‘creation of citadels or pockets of communal exclusivism’. Khan, on the other hand, insisted that AMU was an autonomous minority institution, meant primarily for Muslims. As such, he argued, the university was free to fix its own admission rules in order to retain a majority of Muslim students. Khan laid great importance on the Muslim cultural and religious character of the institution. For him, AMU’s mission was to train Muslim students in accordance with ‘Islamic culture’ (Islami tahziib) and ‘traditions’ (Islami rivaayat). Non-Muslims could join the university if they so wished, but they would have to become familiar with Muslims’ culture and traditions (jo musulmaanon ki tahziib aur rivaayat se vaaqif hon), seen as separate. Khan added that these members would have to be ‘truly sympathetic’ (sacche hamdard) to the cause of the university. Just as in the 1950s, some university members feared that the growing influence of non- Muslims and leftists would erode AMU’s Muslim character, Khan worried that ‘unsympathetic’ non-Muslims could divert AMU from its main mission to preserve and promote a distinct Muslim culture. Laurence Gautier is a researcher at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi.