Every morning I wake up, and my eyes open with disappointment for the place where I am trying to complete my degree of five long years. My roommate and I, along with my whole batch of 138 students, still await our results for the last semester, while our end-semester examination for this semester looms just days away. And it is not just about the law faculty; it is about the whole university. Moreover, it is not just about the results; it is about an entrenched fear of detention, which the administration has thought of cementing upon their students so adamantly that their philosophy of ‘my children’ falls apart right in front of the very children they claim to cherish.
What has unfolded following the declaration of Semester IX results on April 18, 2026, is not an isolated administrative lapse. It is a sustained pattern of institutional failure marked by opacity, abuse of authority, and a complete collapse of lawful academic governance. Over eighty final-year law students, out of a batch of just 124, have been denied their Semester IX marksheets on the alleged grounds of attendance shortage. At the core of this crisis lies a disturbing reality: professors and administrative authorities have assumed the role of judge, jury, and executioner. No transparent standard exists, no verifiable mechanism, and no meaningful avenue of redress. The academic fate of students is being decided unilaterally without notice, without accountability, and without adherence to even the most basic principles of fairness.
The detention is based entirely on an alleged shortage of attendance. It is fundamentally untenable because no transparent, reliable, or verifiable attendance system was ever maintained during the academic session 2025–26. Mandatory periodic disclosures were never made, and students were never informed of their attendance status at any stage. There was no weekly or monthly publication, nor any timely intimation that could have enabled students to track their attendance and take corrective measures. The eventual declaration of shortage and that too, after the conduct of exams, thus operates as a retrospective penalty imposed without notice, undermining basic principles of fairness and due process. And crucially, students have argued that the alleged attendance shortage is, in part, attributable to faculty absenteeism, with classes not being conducted on multiple occasions, making strict enforcement of attendance norms inherently unfair, as students are effectively penalized for institutional lapses beyond their control.
The sequence of events makes the arbitrariness even starker. Students were permitted to complete their ninth-semester examinations. Results were declared only on April 18, 2026, coinciding with the final stages of the tenth semester. It was only thereafter that more than eighty students were detained. Were students ever informed in advance that they were ineligible to sit for examinations? If not, on what basis are they now being detained? Under what authority can a university invalidate academic participation after issuing hall tickets, after taking fees, after letting students write exams, and only then deliver the blow?
There is also a binding legal framework that the administration appears to have quietly disregarded. On November 3, 2025, the Delhi High Court, in Court on Its Own Motion in Re: Suicide Committed by Sushant Rohilla, Law Student of IP University, addressed the consequences of rigid and punitive attendance enforcement in legal education. The court categorically held that no student shall be detained from taking examinations or prevented from academic progression on the grounds of attendance shortage. It further mandated weekly disclosure of attendance, monthly communication with guardians, remedial classes, alternative assignments, and practical engagement through legal aid clinics. The case arose from a tragedy, a student who took his own life after being made to repeat a year for attendance shortage. This precedent exists, and the Faculty of Law’s choice to act in apparent defiance of it is not just troubling; it raises the question of how such an action could emanate from a Faculty of Law. If the faculty were aware of the judgment, the action reflects a conscious disregard of binding law. If it was unaware, it raises troubling questions about professional competence.
But beyond the legal violation lies a deeper question that I have been sitting with now: should universities even have mandatory attendance requirements of 75%, or 40%, or any fixed threshold that functions as a disciplinary weapon?
I think no.
India’s universities pack enormous, diverse classes into a one-size-fits-all mold with no customized learning, just lectures that feel taxing and often deliberately dull. Some ‘subject trainers’ drone on in dictator-style, suffocating discussion; others stage debates that reward the loudest voices and quietly sideline those who think more than they speak. With very few notable exceptions, teaching standards have been deeply unsatisfactory, lectures often delivered from outdated notes, disconnected from contemporary legal developments, reflecting both neglect and a resistance to academic renewal. Many of us, perhaps close to half the student body, shaped as we were by the pandemic years, have built disciplined habits of self-study. We can, and do, ace courses without daily attendance. For some of us, the classroom is not a site of learning; it is a site of managed stress.
If classes were genuinely engaging, students would come without compulsion. They would run toward their professors, not away from them. Mandatory attendance quotas let teachers escape accountability entirely. They need not push for excellence, because the bodies are already in the seats, whether they earn them or not. If we remove the quotas, the onus will suddenly shift; faculty would have to justify their classroom time with the quality of what they offer. For a true knowledge-seeker who would cross rivers and climb mountains, a fifty-minute class is no hardship. What a hardship it is sitting through fifty minutes that offer nothing.
The quality of teaching was such that many students felt little academic incentive to attend classes. Is the solution to force those students in? Or to fix the teaching? The administration has, for years, chosen the former and called it discipline.
Zeeshan Ahmad in theleaflet writes that the protest has not merely been about attendance. It brings into sharp focus a deeper structural malaise afflicting the institution. The AMU law faculty’s story is one of institutional amnesia. Professor N.R. Madhava Menon, the founder-director of the National Law School in Bengaluru, the man who essentially founded the project of establishing National Law Universities in India, was an illustrious alumnus of AMU. When he sought to find his memoir, Turning Point (2015), in the departmental and central libraries of the university, nothing turned up. Had the institution forgotten one of its own? When a university forgets its own giants, it forgets why it exists.
In terms of research, despite several experienced faculty members, there is a conspicuous absence of substantive contributions to contemporary legal discourse. India has witnessed major legal debates on instant triple talaq, gender justice in inheritance rights, anti-conversion laws, and the prolonged question of AMU’s own minority status, a question that goes to the very identity of the institution. Yet, even as this issue was actively debated in the Supreme Court, academia, and the public sphere, there was little visible intellectual engagement from the faculty. A law school that cannot speak on its own university’s existential legal question is a law school that has stopped thinking.
As a centrally funded university, AMU is not subject to the same market pressures as private institutions. Ideally, this should allow it to pursue academic excellence without constraint. Instead, this autonomy appears to have fostered a culture of complacency, where mediocrity persists without consequence. And when students dare to call that mediocrity by its name, the administration does not reflect; it retaliates.
Which brings me to what happened after the protests.
Six students, diligent, vocal, and deeply invested in the future of this institution, have been handed suspension letters. The administration has justified the suspensions by alleging unruly conduct, including use of abusive language, damage to property, wrongful confinement of faculty members, and disruption of a B.Tech entrance exam scheduled on April 19, 2026. These allegations, serious as they are on paper, must be read against the backdrop of what provoked the protests in the first place. Even if one were to momentarily set aside the contested factual narrative surrounding the protests, the foundational administrative action that triggered the unrest, the detention of students on grounds of attendance, raises far graver concerns.
Six students who raised their voices have been suspended. What does the administration want from us? Silence? Compliance? The quiet surrender of 138 young people and four other batches and the whole university? Who have given three, four, and five years of their lives to this institution and now stand at the threshold of their futures with their marksheets withheld, their exams approaching, and their futures suspended in administrative limbo?
Protest is an indispensable feature of any vibrant academic institution. The suspension of students for protesting an unjust detention is intimidation. It is the administration choosing the easiest available weapon over the hardest available question: why don’t students trust us?
The philosophy of ‘my children’ was always hollow if it only applied to students who never spoke up. Children who are truly cared for are heard when they cry out and not punished for making noise.
We are waiting for a fair conclusion. But the swords keep multiplying: first over results, then over detention, and now over suspension. At some point, the administration must ask itself whether it wishes to remain conformist, to let students stand in this dilemma about their futures while it hides behind procedures it never actually followed, or whether it will finally belatedly choose accountability.
A university that silences its students and holds them down does not produce people who’d give back to anyone. It produces survivors.
