Bury Us in the Classrooms: Inside Jauhar University's Fight to Survive

Fifteen Days to Bulldoze a University

The Rampur Development Authority has declared 38 of the 40 buildings on the roughly 250-to-300-acre campus of Mohammad Ali Jauhar University illegal, ordering the institution to demolish them within fifteen days or have the authority do it and bill the university for the cost. Nous visited the campus in Rampur — founded and built by the jailed Samajwadi Party leader Mohammad Azam Khan — to hear from the students, faculty and administration living through the threat.

'All We Can See Is Our Career'

Student after student told Nous their overriding fear was simply for years already invested: some two or three years into a degree, others freshly graduated and now unsure their qualification will mean anything if the campus is torn down. One student, who said he studies under the physically-handicapped category, said his entire LL.M. degree costs him twenty-four thousand rupees, and that the university additionally provides him a free rickshaw between the gate and his faculty building each day. A woman completing her law degree argued that most students never chose Jauhar University because of its association with Azam Khan — for many in and around Rampur, she said, it is simply the only university within reach, since the city has no other.

Teaching Revolutions While Facing One

A sociology teacher and alumna described the discomfort of teaching her students about historical revolutions while her own college faced demolition orders, saying the disconnect had left her unable to sit with her usual lesson plans. A doctor and alumna, now practising as a gynaecologist at a hospital in the region, said she could not have completed her medical training without the university's low fees, and that two of her siblings had gone on to become a pharmacist and a doctor respectively, with a brother now working as an engineer and researcher in Norway — evidence, she said, of what the institution has made possible for families like hers.

Built by More Than One Community

Students repeatedly pushed back on the idea that the university serves only Muslims. It waives fees entirely for students who have lost both parents and grants a fifty percent concession to those raised by a single parent, they said, and its student body has never been exclusively Muslim; Hindu and Sikh donors and neighbours contributed to building it alongside Muslim ones, and one student told Nous the university treats every religion equally rather than favouring any one of them.

The Vice-Chancellor's Case

The university's vice-chancellor — addressed throughout the visit as Zaheer Sahab, and a former dean, department chairman and vice-chancellor at Aligarh Muslim University before joining Jauhar University, as well as a law professor — argued the demolition notice is legally void. The land in question, in the village of Singhankheda, was only brought under the Rampur Development Authority's jurisdiction in 2024, he said, meaning the notice applies the authority's rules retroactively to buildings constructed years earlier — a basic violation, in his account, of the principle that a law takes effect only from the date of its official publication, not before it. He asked pointedly what recourse the government could offer the thousands of students partway through a degree if the campus were demolished, comparing it to a student mid-way through an LL.B. being unable to transfer years of credit to another university.

Zaheer framed the demolition threat as retaliation against Azam Khan for his opposition politics, compounded, he suggested, by discomfort with the university's name — it honours Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar, a freedom fighter who once said he would rather not die in an enslaved India than compromise his principles. Targeting an institution over that name, Zaheer said, would be a matter of shame for whoever was doing it. He connected the notice explicitly to the fact that Azam Khan and his son Abdullah Azam are both currently jailed on what he described as a string of fabricated cases dating back to 2019, describing the university's targeting as intended to further pressure and mentally torment a man who built the institution, in his words, for the poorest families of Rampur, Moradabad and Bareilly — families who sometimes cannot be certain of a second meal in a day.

'We Will Teach Under the Trees'

Zaheer told Nous that if the buildings are torn down, students and faculty will hold classes under trees or on the roads rather than stop teaching, insisting a university is not something that can simply be erased. Across the visit, the emotional register was consistent: faculty and students in tears, parents anxious about their children's futures yet voicing faith in the constitution, the courts and God that the demolition will not ultimately proceed. But more than one voice on campus repeated a warning in the same breath — that if government bulldozers do arrive at Mohammad Ali Jauhar University, they will have to pass over their bodies first.