Two Rajya Sabha MPs, John Brittas and Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya, have appealed to the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) Vice-Chancellor to take back the two-year suspension handed out to Dalit scholar Ramadas Prini Sivanandan.
TISS had suspended the doctoral student last week for “engaging in unlawful activities during protests” and “disobeying the institute’s rules”. These include participating in a march to Parliament in January, screening a banned BBC documentary as well as the National Award-winning documentary Ram Ke Naam, and unlawfully overstaying on campus, among other charges.
In a letter to Vice-Chancellor Manoj Kumar Tiwari, Dr. Brittas has called the suspension as “unjust” and an attempt to “indirectly stifle dissent”; Mr. Bhattacharyya, in his letter, has termed it “a very undemocratic stand” on the institute’s part.
Supporting his presence in the Parliament march organised by United Students of India — a body of 16 student organisations — both the CPI(M) MPs stated that the scholar was well within his rights to participate in order to air their grievances pertaining to the National Education Policy 2020.
They pointed out that Anand Patwardhan’s Ram Ke Naam has been screened multiple times at TISS in the past. The institute had deemed the January 26 screening as a “mark of dishonour and protest against the Ram Mandir inauguration in Ayodhya”.
Dr. Brittas described Mr. Sivanandan as a top performing student and a recipient of the Union Ministry of Social Justice’s National Fellowship for Scheduled Castes. “The lack of a cogent justification for his suspension is alarming and signifies a troubling suppression of academic freedom and democratic principles within the university campus,” he wrote.