Summary: MLA Executive Council Statement on Violence against Students and Teachers in India
January 2020
The MLA Executive Council condemns the government-sanctioned use of violence in India against student protestors, teachers, members of the press, and all those who exercise their rights to assembly and dissent in opposition to the national Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and more recently to new farming laws.
- The CAA amends the 64-year-old Indian Citizenship law, which currently prohibits unauthorized migrants from becoming Indian citizens. The CAA will now provide citizenship on the basis of religion to non-Muslims fleeing religious persecution from three nearby countries: Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan.
- The bill represents an escalation of Hindu nationalism while legitimizing discrimination against other denominations. Opponents of the bill say it is exclusionary and violates the secular principles enshrined in India’s constitution.
- The Indian government has responded to protests against the act with unprecedented violence on campuses and in the public sphere and routinely criminalizes the assembly of five or more people in order to sanction its brutality in suppressing the protests.
- Education, academic freedom, freedom of expression, and democracy more generally are threatened by these government actions.
- The MLA urges India, a signatory and drafting member of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, to consider the declaration's basic tenets, which the passing and implementation of the CAA appear to violate.
- We condemn, unequivocally, and call for the immediate cessation of sanctioned violence on campuses in India and the assault on the democratic principles of equality, freedom, and the right to express all viewpoints without fear of reprisal.
- We urge the government to give ownership of, and jurisdiction over, university curricula, research, and institutional positions to the faculty and to safeguard the basic rights of students and faculty members to pursue their educational goals without suffering violence, poverty, and the loss of life.