Najeeb Jung, Shut Up!

I refuse to take lectures on democracy, Muslims, or constitutional values from Najeeb Jung. I refuse not out of ideological disagreement alone, but because I remember. I remember not through hindsight or commentary, but through lived experience. Through the tightening of the chest. Through the goosebumps that still rise when certain sentences return, years later, without warning.

I was suspended from Jamia Millia Islamia for leading a students’ protest. That is not rhetoric. It is my life. And while suspensions are often wrapped in administrative language, what followed stripped away any pretence of neutrality. I was told, plainly and without hesitation, that people coming from middle-class backgrounds like mine did not have the right to protest.

That sentence has never left me.

It was not merely insulting. It revealed how power understood class and democracy under Najeeb Jung. Protest, in his worldview, was not a right. It was a privilege. And privilege, as he saw it, did not belong to students like us.

As if that was not enough, a letter was sent to my parents. Not to me, but to them. It accused their son of being involved in “anti-academic activities”. The intent was unmistakable. If the student could be suspended, the family could be intimidated. Political dissent was to be reframed as misconduct. A democratic act was to be turned into a source of shame inside a middle-class household.

That letter still stays with me. It was not about academics. It was about power entering the home. About reminding families that education, futures, and reputations were conditional. Every time I remember those words and that letter, I still get goosebumps. Not only because of the fear they produced, but because of how nakedly authority revealed itself.

At Jamia, dissent under Najeeb Jung was not engaged with. It was delegitimised and suppressed. Students and teachers asking for democratic functioning were publicly branded a “mafia”. The word mattered. It criminalised protest and prepared the ground for coercion. Once dissenters are labelled criminals, anything done to them can be justified as order.

This was accompanied by the creation of a rigid hierarchy on campus. Certain departments were elevated and insulated, others were treated as expendable. Access to the Vice-Chancellor, administrative sympathy, and institutional protection were unevenly distributed. One senior faculty member told me quietly, “There were first-class departments and second-class departments. Students knew which side they belonged to.”

Spaces that connected Jamia to its surrounding community were deliberately dismantled. Talimi Mela, a platform where local residents participated alongside students, was stopped. The explanation was administrative. The subtext was unmistakable. The presence of locals, especially from Jamia Nagar, made the university uncomfortable for those who wanted it sanitised, controlled, and cut off from its social roots.

Jamia Nagar itself was spoken of with contempt. Many on campus still recall Jung referring to the area in terms that reduced it to “filth”, as something to be managed rather than respected. The university, in his imagination, had to be rescued from its own neighbourhood, from its Muslim and lower-middle-class surroundings. Elitism was not incidental to his administration. It structured it.

Surveillance became normalised. Students spoke of meetings being watched, movements tracked, faces remembered. One former student activist put it bluntly: “You always felt you were being seen. Even when nothing was happening.” Security arrangements increasingly resembled policing, not protection.

Police entry into campus, once considered unthinkable except in extreme circumstances, became easier to justify. Protests were met not with dialogue but with force. Lathi charges against students were defended in the language of discipline and order. A teacher remarked at the time, anonymously, “The administration had stopped seeing students as students. They were seeing them as law-and-order problems.”

This language soon translated into formal action. FIRs were filed. Cases were pursued against activist voices such as Hamid-ur-Rahman in ways that were widely seen on campus as punitive and excessive. The objective did not appear to be justice. It appeared to be deterrence. Fear became an administrative tool.

His hostility was especially pronounced when it came to Muslim and Left organisations. Student groups, collectives, and civil bodies associated with Muslim assertion or Left politics were treated as inherently suspect. Their meetings were monitored, their protests delegitimised, their demands dismissed as agitation rather than engagement. Muslim and Left organisations were rarely seen as legitimate stakeholders. They were seen as disruptions to be contained.

What united his hostility towards both was not ideology alone, but a deep discomfort with collective politics from below. Muslims and Left groups were acceptable only when silent, fragmented, and grateful. Organisation, solidarity, and political articulation were treated as threats to order.

Perhaps the most honest insight into his worldview came from his own statements. Najeeb Jung repeatedly said he did not believe in democracy in Jamia. He was not being careless. He was being clear. For him, a university was not a democratic space. It was a command structure. Participation was disorder. Debate was insubordination.

This logic followed him beyond campus. As Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, he repeatedly obstructed the functioning of an elected Aam Aadmi Party government, aligning himself with the interests of the BJP and weakening democratic institutions through bureaucratic overreach.

Equally revealing was his role as a mediator of sorts between Muslims and the RSS, where he advised Muslims to compromise with Hindutva forces. This was not reconciliation. It was an appeal for submission, delivered from the safety of elite power. Asking a marginalised community to adjust to an ideology that questions its equal citizenship is not statesmanship. It is abdication.

All of this coexisted with his proximity to corporate power. His advocacy of policies favourable to large corporations, including Reliance, was widely criticised as anti-people. Democracy, for him, was less about participation and more about management, efficiency, and corporate comfort.

Now, after retirement, Najeeb Jung speaks of Muslims and democracy as though he were a lifelong custodian of these values. Those who invite him today to speak on these subjects appear to have little idea of what transpired at Jamia, or in this country, before 2014. They do not seem to know, or choose not to remember, the fear on campus, the suspensions, the letters sent to parents, the surveillance, the police entry, the lathi charges, the criminalisation of Muslim and Left organisations, and the open disdain for democratic functioning.

Memory, however, does not disappear because institutions forget.

I remember being suspended.I remember being told my class disqualified me from protest.I remember a letter sent to my parents.I remember the surveillance.I remember the FIRs.I remember the hostility towards Muslim and Left organisations.I remember the contempt for democracy.

So when Najeeb Jung lectures Muslims today on democracy or constitutional values, the response is not engagement.

It is refusal.

Shut up. Not because dissent is unwelcome, but because hypocrisy is unbearable, and history has witnesses.