Hi all Since this magazine is paid one, I am pasting the long read for your benefit. Find time to read and reflect. https://caravanmagazine.in/law/how-national-law-universities-caste-discrimination-reservation-fail-india
“Since college shut down due to the pandemic, evenings on this terrace are possibly the only thing that have held me together,” a student of the National University of Juridical Sciences told me in the summer of 2020, sitting atop a concrete water tank on a terrace sandwiched between two taller buildings in their home city. “People in college seem to be living in a world apart—landing internships, acing their exams. No matter how hard I work, it doesn’t seem to translate.” The student, then in the middle of their law education, had been born with a medical condition that left them with a serious disability. Doctors confirmed early on that they would need special education. The student was motivated to pursue law in the hope of improving their family’s modest financial circumstances and due to a deep interest in politics and society. At the age of 17, they cracked the highly competitive Common Law Admission Test, the gateway to the country’s 23 National Law Universities. Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the student joined NUJS, in Kolkata, as one of the small minority of disabled students at the university. This is where, chatting away one afternoon, we met each other as fellow students. On the terrace of their home, the student turned to tell me they knew what I might say: that this was not their fault, that the pandemic had pushed millions of students like them into isolation and academic stagnation. “But sometimes it’s difficult to tell yourself that this isn’t your fault,” they said. “It’s not that simple.” NUJS, like most NLUs, had no established system to cater to the special needs of disabled students. After they joined, the student took remedial classes and had access to some special academic resources from the non-profit group Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access, but they received limited help from the university. The student is also a Bahujan—making them even more of an outsider in the elite-dominated culture of the NLUs. “I knew I was never going to belong,” they said. “I found myself in a crowd that was miles ahead of me in terms of how much capital they could exploit.” This crowd, the student added, “determined the college culture in many ways: they were our parameters of success and also of leisure. It is their language that becomes the language of law school.” The student barely socialised in their first year. Things only got worse during the pandemic, and I watched them struggle to survive through subsequent academic years. Online assessments, part of NUJS’s move to remote learning, greatly disadvantaged disabled students, but teachers remained largely apathetic to their difficulties, and there were no serious efforts to sensitise them. When I emailed NUJS’s vice chancellor, NK Chakrabarti, to ask what measures the university takes to help students with disabilities, he sent back a terse reply. “Let me know who are your respondents?” Chakrabarti wrote. “Give me their Names and Roll numbers. I will respond in front of those students with evidence that your narratives are biased and fully misleading information.” When the NUJS campus reopened this year, the student returned to Kolkata. But issues with accessibility in examinations and administrative structures remained, and the psychological ghosts of the pandemic stuck with them. The student kept going through their five-year NLU education not because of the atmosphere they encountered on campus but despite it. Theirs is one of many stories, spanning the whole country, of students’ struggles at India’s premier law universities, which have for years remained unrelenting to urgently needed reform. “DUE TO VARIOUS CONSIDERATIONS most students from NLUs end up in corporate law firms,” NV Ramana, the chief justice of India, told graduating students at the National Law University in Delhi, in December 2021. “It is unfortunate that a comparable addition is not being made to the ranks of lawyers practising in courts from the NLUs. This is perhaps one of the reasons why NLUs are perceived as elitist and detached from social realities.” Ramana’s comments came as a surprise to many. The habit in high legal circles—the judiciary and the bar council, state legislatures and parliament—is to sing the praises of the NLUs, not offer frank criticism. But to many others, including students like me, the CJI barely scratched the surface of the institutions’ problems. Ramana had a valid point: the NLUs are meant to be public universities, yet their alumni increasingly serve the private good. But graduates’ career choices are more a symptom than a cause of the elitism endemic in these institutions. Its roots lie in unaffordable fees, poor scholarship programmes and resistance to more reservations for marginalised students. Ramana did not talk about these things openly—almost nobody does—for to do so would reveal a far more fundamental institutional crisis, one that leads back to him and other judges in charge of the country’s highest courts, who hold chancellorships and other high positions at the NLUs. NV Ramana, India’s chief justice, at a convocation ceremony in NLU Delhi, in December 2021. At the ceremony Ramana’s castigation of the NLUs as elite institutions came as a shock to many, however, he barely scratched the surface of the institutions’ many problems.. NV Ramana, India’s chief justice, at a convocation ceremony in NLU Delhi, in December 2021. At the ceremony Ramana’s castigation of the NLUs as elite institutions came as a shock to many, however, he barely scratched the surface of the institutions’ many problems.. NV Ramana, India’s chief justice, at a convocation ceremony in NLU Delhi, in December 2021. At the ceremony Ramana’s castigation of the NLUs as elite institutions came as a shock to many, however, he barely scratched the surface of the institutions’ many problems. Over the past thirty-five years, 23 NLUs have been established across 18 states. A second NLU in Uttar Pradesh is in the works, as are proposed NLUs in Tripura, Uttarakhand and Sikkim. Seven of the top ten law schools in the National Institutional Ranking Framework are NLUs, and the National Law School of India University, in Bengaluru, was ranked as one of Asia’s top law schools in 2020. These institutions, despite small student populations—roughly two thousand six hundred graduates a year from the NLUs against the more than ninety thousand law graduates produced by other colleges—have produced one of the most illustrious alumni bases in Indian education. Graduates pop up at the United Nations, Magic Circle law firms in London, the New York State Bar Association, leading media houses in India and abroad, as well as the cream of India’s corporate legal practices. The top NLUs boast staggering placement records, with graduates landing jobs in national-level corporate firms averaging pay offers of over Rs 15 lakh per year and those in foreign firms many times that. These figures are comparable to those at the very best Indian Institutes of Technology, the holy grail of aspirational education in the IT age. At the same time, the NLUs have entered the middle-class imagination as viable alternatives to the IITs. The Common Law Admission Test is one of India’s toughest and most competitive entrance exams. Only five percent of aspirants make it to the NLUs, and a fraction of those to the coveted top five NLU campuses—in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Jodhpur and Gandhinagar. But many of the same problems that plague other elite Indian universities also hamper the NLUs, despite the comparatively noble social goals of their founders. The NLU alumni and student bodies have never been representative of the full diversity of Indian society and have always skewed towards elite castes and classes. For instance, numerous NLUs have no reserved seats at all for students from Other Backward Classes. Others have some OBC seats, but none under the all-India quota—a large pool of seats for students from outside each NLU’s respective home state. Representation among NLU faculty is equally deficient. For Bahujans—Dalits, Adivasis and non-dominant OBCs, collectively the majority of India’s population—the resulting campus environment vacillates between unhelpful and openly hostile. Students from marginalised communities at several NLUs told me about a culture of exclusion that cuts them off from regular student life and debilitates their academic performance. This is clearly evident at my university, where Bahujan students are underrepresented in most moot-court competitions, student societies and journals, and other activities and experiences that often determine students’ future prospects. (As a member of an oppressor caste, I am aware of my own privilege and culpability in this environment. I have tried to present the experiences of Bahujan students without opportunism or exploitation, and I am grateful to those who have shared their experiences with me.) >From their legal status to their institutional character, the NLUs are facing severe examinations of their purpose and stature. Much of the same elitism and exclusivity defines the whole Indian legal fraternity. Bahujans are flagrantly underrepresented in senior positions of the bar and on the bench. Of the 33 current judges of the Supreme Court, only one, BR Gavai, hails from a Dalit community, and the court’s last Dalit judge before him retired nine years before Gavai’s appointment. In all its history, the Supreme Court has seen just one judge from the Adivasi and tribal communities: HK Sema, a member of a Naga tribe. The question of how to change this looms large over India. Entry to the two other pillars of the state relies on mechanisms, however flawed they may be, designed to allow greater representation: through the direct election of candidates to legislatures, which then elect members of the executive. Eligibility for both depends only on basic criteria of age and nationality. The third pillar, the judiciary, has no such thing. The path to all high judicial positions is guarded by the Supreme Court collegium, which includes the court’s five most senior judges. Despite repeated attempts to democratise judicial appointments through constitutional amendments, the Supreme Court has stubbornly defended the collegium system. Even disregarding all the other hurdles to a representative judiciary, Indian legal education is failing to produce a representative corpus of qualified legal minds that have any chance of breaking into the courts. It is mainly through a representative bar, dominated in number and leadership by those from marginalised communities, that influence can be exerted on an unrepresentative judiciary. The NLUs, in light of their ideals and prestige, should be leading the change but they are not—and, in failing on this, they are failing India as a representative democracy. Much of this has been overlooked in the valorisation of the NLUs. The focus, instead, has been on the NLU system’s greatest point of pride: the quality of the educational experience they offer. In 2010, during a consultation on reforms in legal education, the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, famously described the NLUs as “islands of excellence amidst a sea of institutionalised mediocrity.” Even this reputation now seems at risk. Student protests have broken out with disturbing regularity across multiple NLU campuses in recent years. The protesters had numerous common grievances: a lack of basic facilities, maladministration, even large-scale misappropriation of funds. In Shimla, students demanded clean food and water after several of their peers contracted food poisoning. Bhopal saw protests over maladministration and sexist behaviour by faculty. In Ranchi, students protested poor internet connectivity and a lack of permanent professors. At Cuttack and Jabalpur, students took issue with the absence of a decent law library. Students at Jabalpur protested the lack of a sports field and prohibitively high fees. First in Kolkata and then in Patna, protests followed the vice-chancellor Ishwara Bhat, indicted by a university review commission for maladministration. At Kolkata, the registrar was found complicit in financial embezzlement under Bhat’s watch. Numerous students I spoke to, as well as NLU faculty members, jurists and legal theorists, saw a systemic issue underlying these administrative problems. The NLUs continue to be “national in character,” a term which they have commonly used in court, but, under the unique statutes of their establishment, they are, in essence, state universities. This is visible in the constant give and take between the NLUs and their respective state governments. Every concession from the state is part of an agreement that compels the university to lose one or more of its privileges—for instance, higher funding could perhaps mean giving the state government greater stake in faculty appointments or implementing higher quotas for students domiciled in the specific state. Elected student bodies at the NLUs have, as a result, begun to push for the nationalisation of all NLUs, though it is far from clear that this will solve the shortcomings of autonomy and responsibility that currently undermine them. >From their legal status to their institutional character, the NLUs are facing severe examinations of their purpose and stature. How they respond will have profound echoes for the Indian legal fraternity, and for India itself. {TWO} ONCE UPON A TIME, law in India was largely a part-time course, taught out of evening colleges by poorly salaried teachers who were themselves novices serving apprenticeships at the bar. Unless an Indian native could afford to pursue and return with a legal education from Britain, law had practically no scope as a career. Social capital and privilege regulated entry and survival in the field. The early twentieth century saw the emergence of dominant political figures armed with legal educations: Dadabhai Naoroji, Motilal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Almost all of them came from well-established families. The great outlier was BR Ambedkar, whose legal education owed to exceptional circumstances rather than exceptional privilege. In The Radical in Ambedkar, the scholar Rohit De narrates how Ambedkar’s lawyer-politician contemporaries relied on dominant-caste and Ashrafi social networks to find a foothold in the legal profession. “Jinnah’s first case was representing his uncle, a Khoja merchant, in a commercial suit,” De writes. “Gandhi, despite his poor oral advocacy skills, could draw upon family networks for work in Bombay,” while “Motilal Nehru joined the flourishing legal practice set up by his brother.” De adds that “Ambedkar was aware of his disadvantage … and chose to join the Appellate Side of the Bombay Bar”—as opposed to the Original Side, which required access to dominant-caste networks. A year after Independence, a committee under India’s second president, S Radhakrishnan, provided the earliest set of recommendations to reform law education in the new country. The legal scholar Dyutimoy Mukherjee has argued that Radhakrishnan’s recommendations were forward-looking but went largely ignored by successive governments. In 1964, the Gajendragadkar committee carried this conversation forward, attempting to reform legal education within Delhi University under the watch of its vice-chancellor, CD Deshmukh. It forwarded two central propositions: first, that law be taught through a three-year LLB course, with a bachelor’s degree required for eligibility; and second, that some model “National Law Schools” be instituted with “more freedom of action in trying newer and newer experiments.” The idea of having national law schools remained abandoned until 1975, when the celebrated legal scholar Upendra Baxi rekindled the notion in a report on behalf of the University Grants Commission. Jawaharlal Nehru, and his father Motilal Nehru at the Lahore session of the Congress in 1929. Nehru and his peers found a foothold in the legal profession based largely on leveraging their upper-caste and Ashrafi social networks.. Wikimedia CommonsJawaharlal Nehru, and his father Motilal Nehru at the Lahore session of the Congress in 1929. Nehru and his peers found a foothold in the legal profession based largely on leveraging their upper-caste and Ashrafi social networks.. Wikimedia Commons Jawaharlal Nehru, and his father Motilal Nehru at the Lahore session of the Congress in 1929. Nehru and his peers found a foothold in the legal profession based largely on leveraging their upper-caste and Ashrafi social networks. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Baxi—born into an influential Gujarati Brahmin family in Rajkot, and the son of a finance secretary of the erstwhile state of Saurashtra—had a brief tryst with English literature as a young man. But, in the law library of Bombay’s Government Law College, stacked with a massive collection borrowed from Ambedkar, he discovered a passion for jurisprudence and the interoperation of law and society. In contrast to the socially aloof legal pedagogy of the day, Baxi imagined a means of connecting the law student with the country’s grassroots realities. “We have an insufficiently technocratic legal education,” he wrote. “So, if a sound technocratic legal education is socially relevant, let us first seek to provide it.” “The word ‘technocratic’ is a coat of many colours,” Baxi explained to me last year. “Generally, it signifies legal knowledge, competence and skills, or what one used to broadly call doctrinal law knowledge in the 1970s and 1980s. But knowledge does not necessarily bring in skills and competence, which are borne through the experience of courtcraft. What we needed was a total awareness of law as it was applied and developed by courts and judges.” The solution, in Baxi’s understanding, was socially relevant legal education and research—often acronymised as SRLER. “We, in India, must take a deeply contextual approach to law,” he said. “Contexts are broadly social, economic and political; they are broadly repressive or emancipatory.” One way of describing and moving towards socially relevant legal education, he said, is to ask, “How may legal-education and research institutions perform the task of delineating and differentiating these, and engaging juristic contexts among these, to achieve individual and social justice?” Baxi’s UGC report proposed a multidisciplinary legal education. This would include subjects such as psychology, sociology and politics, and would take the shape of the five-year integrated BA and LLB course that is now offered in the NLUs. The institutions outlined in the report, however, took another decade to materialise. In the early 1980s, NR Madhava Menon, a retired civil servant who taught law at Delhi University, received a curious request from the chairman of the Bar Council of India, Ram Jethmalani, to kickstart an experiment in reforming legal education. Menon readily accepted and began foraging for a state government willing to take up the experiment. In 1983, Ramakrishna Hegde, the chief minister of Karnataka, agreed to set up the National Law School in Bangalore. It functioned out of a convertible bicycle shed for the first three years and produced fifty graduates from its first batch. As these graduates emerged, Menon was tasked with replicating the success in Kolkata, which led to the creation of my alma mater. To Menon, law was “a matter for social engineering, a policy instrument for governance—to be studied in relation to history, philosophy, public administration.” Throughout his career, in his writing and speeches, he emphasised his vision of the NLUs as factories for producing “social engineers.” In New Vision for Legal Education in the Emerging Global Scenario, published by the National Law School of India University in 2001, the authors note that the project of social engineering and SRLER “was heavily influenced by the welfare state/socialist agendas that were politically dominant at that time. This phase—whose dominant theme was ‘social relevance’—reflected increasing concern about the mounting problems of poverty, inequality and political conflict in the country.” “Whether we talk about SRLER or social engineers, it all arose from a faith in the possibility of re-engineering society, and the potential of law to be an instrument of top-down reform,” G Mohan Gopal, a former director of the NLSIU and the National Judicial Academy, told me. “In many ways, it was colonial imagination repackaged. The colonial enterprise, which was also the enterprise of dominant communities in India, was to construct societies as they wanted to construct it. This was the driving vision behind the NLUs, at least to begin with.” The NLUs have proven adept at creating well-trained lawyers largely from dominant communities, achieving on Indian soil what was once the prerogative of a foreign legal education. As for changing the face and conscience of Indian law, they seem a far cry from the founts of social idealism that Baxi and Menon envisioned. If anything, going by the experiences of the students who spoke to me and what I have seen myself, they seem to only accentuate the deep cleavages of caste and class within the legal profession in India. Rather than finding inspiration to reshape society, most NLU students are left to grapple with far more mundane problems in their pursuit of a legal education. IT IS A SAD REFLECTION on the NLUs that students have increasingly felt compelled to protest in defence not just of their own well-being, but also the well-being of their universities. At NUJS, the elected student body—the Student Juridical Association—found out in 2014 that the university’s registrar, Surajit C Mukhopadhyay, was complicit in financial embezzlement amounting to several crore rupees. This fact emerged via an inquiry report prepared under the retired high-court justice NN Mathur. A campaign to oust Mukhopadhyay succeeded that same year, but discontent escalated after students saw the institutional protection he enjoyed during the effort. In November 2016, the SJA asked the chief justice of India, who also serves as the chancellor of NUJS, to establish a long overdue review commission to investigate administrative malpractice. The commission’s report, in 2017, was an indictment of massive proportions. “There was an entire chapter titled ‘Administrative Failures,’” Arindum Nayak, an associate at the firm Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas and a former president of the SJA, told me. “When we read the report for the first time, we knew that it was over. The chief justice of the country had literally stated that the VC had failed in his administrative duties.” After protests, the vice-chancellor, P Ishwara Bhat—whose tenure had seen a faculty exodus and a dramatic fall in NUJS’s rankings—was forced into a shameful resignation. Risibly, Bhat was then appointed the vice-chancellor of Chanakya National Law University, in Patna. Students there also protested until Bhat was replaced. In 2018, students at National Law Institute University, in Bhopal, held a month-long protest against sexist behaviour by the faculty, joined by peers from several other NLUs. At NLU Odisha, in Cuttack, students exasperated with unaffordable fees and the lack of a decent law library organised an around-the-clock dharna. A July 2019 protest at NLU Odisha. Protests have become an endemic annual affair in most NLUs, often demanding the most basic needs such as clean drinking water, hygienic food in the mess or a functional library. A pattern of maladministration, and even large scale misappropriation of funds, is visible in the few inquiries conducted on the institutions.. A July 2019 protest at NLU Odisha. Protests have become an endemic annual affair in most NLUs, often demanding the most basic needs such as clean drinking water, hygienic food in the mess or a functional library. A pattern of maladministration, and even large scale misappropriation of funds, is visible in the few inquiries conducted on the institutions.. A July 2019 protest at NLU Odisha. Protests have become an endemic annual affair in most NLUs, often demanding the most basic needs such as clean drinking water, hygienic food in the mess or a functional library. A pattern of maladministration, and even large scale misappropriation of funds, is visible in the few inquiries conducted on the institutions. In March 2019, six students at Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, in Patiala, were wrongfully suspended for complaining about unhygienic food in their hostel mess. The protests that followed broadened to demand action against systemic maladministration. The same year, at the scenic hillside campus of Himachal Pradesh National Law University, in Shimla, there were protests demanding clean drinking water and other bare necessities after several students contracted food poisoning from mess food. In February 2021, amid the pandemic, discontent spilled over at Dharmashastra National Law University, in Jabalpur. Since its inception, in 2018, the university has been operating out of a campus rented from and shared with the telecom provider Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited. The high rent demanded by BSNL is the primary reason for the university’s exorbitant annual fees of Rs 2.5 lakh—compared to roughly Rs 2 lakh in other NLUs. “We have demanded that college authorities reduce fees multiple times, including during the pandemic, but to no avail,” a student from DNLU’s inaugural batch told me. DNLU’s library remains abysmal, and students do not have a recreation ground for themselves. In early 2021, the student and some of his batchmates were staying in their hostels as they interned at Jabalpur. One day, while the students were using a BSNL recreation ground, a scuffle broke out between them and some BSNL officials. “On two or three previous occasions, they had told us that we needed to pay the club fees to use the ground,” the DNLU student recalled. “We didn’t understand why that was needed since we were already paying such high fees and had permission from the college. One of the BSNL employees began hurling casteist slurs. There were some students from marginalised communities among us, so we considered filing a complaint under the Prevention of Atrocities Act.” But they did not, he said, because they felt an overall lack of support from the university. The DNLU student told me the incident prompted the students to realise just how vulnerable they were at DNLU and to understand the need for a dedicated new campus. After they filed right-to-information requests, the students discovered that a hundred and twenty acres of land had already been allocated to the university, but funds had not been released to begin construction of a campus. They filed representations for the release of funds before the chief justice of the Madhya Pradesh High Court, the state advocate general and other authorities. Some students even met with the state’s finance minister, Jagdish Devda, who assured them he would look into the matter. In March 2021, the state government transferred funds into the university’s account and released tenders for the construction. DNLU’s vice chancellor informed students, in March 2022, that the construction of hostel buildings had begun on the allocated land, but none of the students I spoke to could confirm this. DNLU did not respond to any questions emailed to them. Meanwhile, DNLU students have also had to fight another battle. Even as the university shifted to online classes and moved students off campus during the pandemic, it had continued to charge its full fees. In August 2021, the National Human Rights Commission registered a complaint against DNLU for “Harassment of Students and Parents.” In response, the university reduced its fees by just Rs 10,000. The DNLU student told me the students were not satisfied with this reduction but felt they did not have many options left to push back. “I often wonder,” he said, “why do they open these universities and then simply forget us?” “STATE GOVERNMENTS that just want to have the reputation of hosting a prestigious law school, paste the tag of NLU upon it,” Nayak told me. “There is no incentive for them to be accountable.” Each NLU is founded under a special law passed by its respective state legislature. However, the NLUs’ administration is hybrid, with representation from the judiciary, bar councils as well as the state and union governments. Tensions between the universities and their respective state governments are an endemic feature of the NLU system. State governments exercise great power over the running of the universities—a power that many feel is not always used to the benefit of the institutions. This contrasts strongly with the model of high functional autonomy applied to the Indian Institutes of Management decades ago, and which the IITs have productively lobbied for more recently. In 2020, the Karnataka government slashed 75 percent of its funding to NLSIU. In March 2020, the Karnataka legislative assembly had passed an amendment, without any debate or discussion, reserving a quarter of seats at the university for students from within the state—something the university administration had been resisting. After these moves, students told me, the university briefly had to cut down on important support systems such as scholarships. “I often wonder why do they open these universities and then simply forget us?” Dramatically, in September that year, the Karnataka High Court stepped in to slash the state quota, observing that NLSIU was “a unique national institution and cannot be construed to be a state university.” The court relied heavily on the optics of NLSIU as an institution of national prominence and on its sustenance by alternative sources of funding beyond the state government’s coffers—particularly via the national and state bar councils. NLSIU’s court victory, though, is an exceptional story. All other NLUs have substantial state reservations attached. In September, Rajasthan’s minister of higher education assured his state assembly that NLU Jodhpur would become the final university to join the trend. Not every NLU has the national profile or the alternative funding to fight back. “If we want to reduce the fees and increase accessibility to these institutions, improve diversity, we need funding,” Nayak told me. “If we need funding, there’s a compromise that we’re reaching with these governments. IITs and IIMs do not have to constantly calculate the risks and compromises when they demand funding. But NLUs must always ask, what are they losing next?” In April 2017, news of protests at NUSRL Ranchi demanding permanent professors, internet facilities, improved infrastructure and transparency in the utilisations of funds floated across the state boundary to Kolkata. Arjun Agarwal, the president of NUJS’s student bar association at the time and no stranger to stories of maladministration, wrote a Facebook post about why NLUs should be granted Institute of National Importance status just like the IITs and IIMs. “The then president at NLSIU and I had both been thinking along the same lines,” Agarwal told me. He argued that nationalisation could be an umbrella solution to many of the bigger problems plaguing the NLUs. “Firstly, we believed there would be more accountability, since the central government would become the overarching body” in control of the universities, he said. “We knew that it would bring a much-needed boost to the university’s resources. The last big outcome would be that our funding, our fees, and our quotas would get standardised.” Agarwal’s post was soon published by the online outlet Legally India, and he found himself showered with calls of support. Agarwal soon met Debadatta Bose, a contemporary from Damodaram Sanjivayya National Law University, in Vishakhapatnam, who had already drafted legislation for the nationalisation of the NLUs. The bill, first placed in the Lok Sabha by Sugata Bose, a member of parliament from the Trinamool Congress, had already been introduced in the house a month earlier. Soon, representatives from Hyderabad’s National Academy of Legal Studies and Research were on board, and a joint statement was put out in April 2017 decrying the ambiguous position of the NLUs. “The two central aspects of the bill were standardisation and transparency,” Debadatta, currently a research scholar at Amsterdam Law School, explained to me. “I was personally very invested in the provisions that sought greater transparency in the NLUs, through proposals such as auditing by the Comptroller and Auditor General. The bill also talked about a national council—a central body to standardise policies across all NLUs. You find that no other similar institutes—be it the IITs, IIMs, NITs, the Schools of Planning and Architecture or NIFTs—have such loosely defined associations as the CLAT Consortium. That was a huge problem.” The CLAT Consortium comprises all existing NLUs, which coordinate to conduct the annual Common Law Admission Test. “The chances of any private member’s bill actually succeeding are always low,” Debadatta said. “After my bill got introduced, the bigger challenge was to get the bill to a committee or have the bill at least mentioned on the floor of the house—to not let it die.” Despite the two students canvassing alumni who might know legislators, the bill lapsed. A year later, the two student unions decided a more organised approach was likelier to succeed. In 2018, following more protests at NLIU in Bhopal, student bodies from various NLUs came together to form the NLU Student Consortium. On Constitution Day that year, students at NUJS were photographed arranged in an SOS pattern, symbolising their cry for consideration. Legislative efforts over the next two years continued to be sluggish. Two years after Debadatta’s bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha, the law minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, responded to a query in parliament by saying that there were “no proposal[s] before the government to nationalise NLUs.” Prasad later gave a similar reply to further parliamentary questions, adding that there were no proposals to confer Institute of National Importance status on the NLUs either. On constitution day 2018, students at NUJS Kolkata gathered themselves in an SOS pattern following several NLU student unions coming together to demand a nationalisation of India's premiere law colleges.. On constitution day 2018, students at NUJS Kolkata gathered themselves in an SOS pattern following several NLU student unions coming together to demand a nationalisation of India's premiere law colleges.. On constitution day 2018, students at NUJS Kolkata gathered themselves in an SOS pattern following several NLU student unions coming together to demand a nationalisation of India's premiere law colleges. In late 2019, Legally India reported that the Bharatiya Janata Party MP Meenakshi Lekhi was to introduce a new bill to nationalise the NLUs. This bill was placed in the lower house, but it never actually got introduced. Since then, any agenda for nationalisation has been pushed to the very back of the shelf. “NLUs are just not an important thing for the government—let’s just put it that way,” Debadatta said. Nayak said a cloud of disillusionment now hung over most of the students who had hoped for nationalisation. “I’m not sure how we could propel the NLU nationalisation discourse to that level again,” he told me. “How far can the students carry this forward?” He felt the time had come for the Bar Council of India and the law ministry “to realistically start thinking about this. And, before that, the advocates, the entire legal community, must start thinking. This needs to expand beyond our sufferings. To nationalise or to not nationalise is a debate that could determine where law and legal education in India is headed.” In the absence of central funding, “NLSIU has become dependent upon alternative sources of funding to a degree that could be slightly concerning,” Kanishka Singh, a former vice-president of the university’s student union, told me. “Private capital is seeping in.” This could be a sign of things to come across the NLU system, and, given the abysmal state of equity and representation in the private sector, could end up translating to more pressure against reservation policies. According to Baxi, this is in line with larger trends across the country. “Today, there exist about 1,500 law colleges in India. Out of these, about 780 colleges are private, 270 are government and 80 are private-public,” he said. “What inferences may be derived from these is that preeminent is the privatisation of legal education with a distinctly neoliberal character favouring the several Ds of hyper-globalisation: De-regulation, de-nationalisation, dis-investment, de-juridification, de-politicisation, and de-democratisation.” A natural consequence of this, Singh remarked, “will be an eventual loss of their public character and its adverse effect will be felt most by marginalised communities.” {THREE} AROUND 8 PM on 4 April 2022, a second-year student sitting in her room at NLU Odisha heard loud banging in the corridor. She found the assistant warden and a crowd of students outside Room 324, the room of Surabhi Panchpal. Panchpal, also a second-year student, had been brought up in a village in Uttarakhand and then in Haryana, and was from a Scheduled Tribe community. “The assistant warden told me that Surabhi was not picking up her calls, that the parents had been calling her continuously, and had asked the warden to go and check,” the student told me. The banging had been going on for twenty minutes. After weighing all options, a guard was called in to break open the door. Meanwhile, the second-year student was telling another girl to run and fetch the warden, whose accommodation is in a neighbouring building. The senior warden never came, the student and other witnesses told me, and was not picking up calls to her phone. “When I turned around after speaking, I saw that they broke the door open and I heard the most horrific scream,” the student recalled. Dozens ran away from the room, screaming, crying and panicking. One of them stopped by the second-year student and said, “She has hung herself.” The university’s ambulance arrived after a delay, two students told me. Panchpal was taken to the SCB Medical College and Hospital in Cuttack, where she was declared dead upon arrival. In an email response to my questions, NLUO’s vice-chancellor, Ved Kumari, told me that the warden had reached Panchpal’s room soon after her death. However, multiple students I spoke to disagreed with this account. Panchpal’s parents arrived in the morning and quietly left with the body, without visiting the campus. Accounts of the interaction between the parents and the NLUO administration at the hospital remain murky. For Bahujans—Dalits, Adivasis and non-dominant OBCs, collectively the majority of India’s population—the resulting campus environment vacillates between unhelpful and openly hostile. On the campus, after Panchpal was taken away, senior students scrambled to arrange support for other students undergoing anxiety attacks. Several students told me that no person from the administration extended any help. The registrar, Yogesh Pratap Singh, denied this in an interview with Live Law the following day, saying that faculty members and hostel wardens were adequately helpful. “It is not like they asked for help and we did not offer,” Singh said. When I read out the registrar’s response to a student, he became visibly angry. “We felt abandoned, we felt there was nobody there to look after us except our seniors,” he told me. Like other students I spoke to, he asked for anonymity to avoid any potential trouble with university officials. “There was no one from the administration. That was very clear from the beginning.” Finally, at 1.30 am, Kumari called a meeting in front of the campus academic block. As students gathered, waiting for the first communication from an administration official, Kumari prompted them to do breathing exercises. “Since we’re all Hindus here, let us pray for her departed soul,” she told the gathering, several students I spoke to recalled. She also talked about the afterlife. Then, students remembered, Kumari said, “I am not a very good singer, is there anyone who can sing here?” Hearing no response, with hundreds of students sitting in shock, she began singing a Lata Mangeshkar song. Traumatised, angered and exhausted, the crowd began to disperse. Kumari denied saying “We are all Hindus.” However, she told me, “With my experience of meditation and how deep breathing helps in soothing nerves, I asked them to do deep breathing hoping that it may help soothe their nerves but failed miserably to reach them. They responded with anger and rejection.” She said that the bhajan she sang that evening, “has no Hindu overtones to it and it is a secular bhajan leading us to follow the righteous path.” In her response, Kumari told me, “Immediately after the incident, NLUO arranged physical presence of counsellors on the campus, organized mental health awareness and wellbeing programmes, training and workshops. The incident caused acute mental trauma to those who witnessed the ordeal following the suicide and triggered anxiety issues in many others who heard about it. These programmes helped all those students immensely.” Formerly the dean of the campus law centre at Delhi University, Kumari was appointed the vice-chancellor of NLUO in the wake of the 2018 protests on the campus against high fees and the lack of a good library. Her tenure has been marked by administrative apathy. For several months before Panchpal’s death, the administration had withheld the test results of almost seven hundred students, alleging the use of “unfair means” in online exams. Kumari planned to “punish” the students herself, a senior student told me, and they had complained to her that her reaction was too harsh. Kumari had apparently replied, “I don’t care even if you lose placements, lose scholarships or commit suicide. You are all cheaters.” Kumari denied this. An email addressed to the student body by the student council, sent out on 29 March, also quotes her saying the same thing. On the night following Panchpal’s death, students blockaded both gates of the campus, unwilling to let Kumari leave until they got an explanation about the university’s poor response. “We were peacefully asking her to please step out and have a conversation with us, give us some answers,” a student told me. Kumari ignored them as she sat inside her car. In an emailed response Kumari said that students had surrounded her car, shouted slogans and had not permitted her to step out of her car. A cordon of police officers soon arrived with lathis. There was no violent confrontation with the police, and Kumari soon left the campus in her car. Most students went back to their rooms, but many could not sleep. Kumari denied that she had called the police. In the Live Law interview, the registrar said the police had been sent by S Muralidhar, the chief justice of the Orissa High Court and the chancellor of NLUO. A student told me that Kumari “has pointed out to us before that she is basically untouchable because Muralidhar is on her side.” Kumari denied saying this, however she added that Muralidhar is routinely informed if something happens on campus, and that he was informed both about the cheating as well as the suicide. The administration claimed that Panchpal left behind a note, which revealed that the university was in no way responsible for her death. I was told the registrar read out the note to student council members inside a closed room. No Bahujan student ever saw it. In her email to me, Kumari claimed that the note was handed directly to the police, and that neither she nor the members of the student council read it. In the week after her death, NLUO students placed a list of 14 demands before the administration, mostly to do with getting better medical infrastructure and mechanisms of redressal for discrimination. Meanwhile, Panchpal’s community identity became a node of divisiveness. “When I learnt that she was an ST student, it felt like a personal loss to me,” Risha Saka, a fourth-year student, told me. When the student council drafted a press release regarding the death, Saka wanted Panchpal’s ST identity to be explicitly mentioned. Two students told me that the council vehemently opposed this. “The council is completely upper-caste dominated,” Saka said. “The release was being drafted by a group of upper-caste men and one upper-caste woman.” Even if Panchpal’s death was not because of explicit caste discrimination, another student told me, her identity played a fundamental role in her experiences at NLUO. “This identity, of her coming through ST reservations, is labelled on her the moment she walked in,” he told me. “Then, you try to invisibilise that, saying that caste does not exist, but the institutional culture continues to provide a hostile environment for her because of that identity. And, now that she has passed away, you refuse to acknowledge that identity?” Panchpal’s ST identity was not mentioned in the final press release. Many dominant-caste students allegedly threatened to withdraw from the protests that followed her death if caste were factored in, anticipating greater media scrutiny and possible turmoil in the oncoming recruitment season. Some senior students demanded Kumari’s resignation and asked the student council to take up this demand. The council refused again and threatened to withdraw from the protests if the resignation demand became part of them. The NLOU student council did not respond to an emailed questionnaire. Eventually, the administration issued an apology for its lack of preparedness but continued to deny all responsibility for the death. Panchpal left behind a bare-bones Twitter account, created last year and showing just two re-tweeted posts. One, from March 2021, reads, “Exorbitant amount of fee is being charged by National Law University, Odisha. Even after promising their students that if next semester goes online reduction will be done.” A room prepared to host a moot court competition. Brahmins and other dominant-caste students have overwhelming representation in student societies while Dalit and Adivasi students comprise the lowest proportions of participants in moot courts. A culture of exclusion pervades the NLUs cutting Bahujan students off from regular student life and debilitating their academic performance.. Aditya Kumar/Wikimedia CommonsA room prepared to host a moot court competition. Brahmins and other dominant-caste students have overwhelming representation in student societies while Dalit and Adivasi students comprise the lowest proportions of participants in moot courts. A culture of exclusion pervades the NLUs cutting Bahujan students off from regular student life and debilitating their academic performance.. Aditya Kumar/Wikimedia Commons A room prepared to host a moot court competition. Brahmins and other dominant-caste students have overwhelming representation in student societies while Dalit and Adivasi students comprise the lowest proportions of participants in moot courts. A culture of exclusion pervades the NLUs cutting Bahujan students off from regular student life and debilitating their academic performance. ADITYA KUMAR/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS A THIRD-YEAR student at Kochi’s National University of Advanced Legal Studies, did not find many good things to say about cultural relations at her university. NUALS has reservations for candidates from the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Socially and Educationally Backward Classes as part of its seats for students from within Kerala. The rest of the seats, in the all-India category, are unreserved. “People coming from outside Kerala are automatically upper-caste,” the student told me. “They instinctively start associating with other north Indians, or people from their regions. Savarnas tend to befriend other savarnas. This results in a sort of segregation, which, while not explicitly rooted in caste, is distinctly on the lines of caste.” Networks founded on indicators of privilege—class, urbaneness and caste—dictate not only the social but also the academic experiences of Bahujan students. “You won’t find many marginalised students participating in moot-court competitions because they never receive enough guidance, despite the generational disadvantages,” Hamsadhwini Alagarsamy, a Bahujan student at NUALS, explained. “And that, in turn, is because of how caste networks operate.” In 2019, a study assessed diversity at NUJS, Kolkata. Its findings were predictably discomforting. Brahmins and other dominant-caste students had overwhelming representation in student societies. Dalit and Adivasi students comprised the lowest proportions of participants in moot courts. Less than fifteen percent of SC, ST and OBC students had participated in international moots, and SC students rarely participated in debate competitions. Kanishka Singh, now in his fourth year, told me, “In our first year, we all had ‘positive interaction’ sessions with our seniors”—a euphemism for ragging. “Sometimes, during these sessions, upper-caste seniors persistently enquire about your CLAT ranks. As a fresher and a first-generation law student from a marginalised background, who might be struggling to come to terms with generational trauma, this can often be a shattering experience.” “Everything boils down to demographics,” Alagarsamy told me. “If we allow more Bahujan students to enter these law schools, we have more qualitative representation—in student societies, journals, moot court achievements. Then we have collective social capital, we have a framework to agitate.” The skewed representation at NUJS is partly the fault of the lacking institutional support for marginalised students. A bigger factor, however, are peculiar reservation mechanisms that contrive to disadvantage them. The hybrid nature of the administration of the NLUs has left them with a convoluted and ever-changing reservation structure. NUJS reserves 18 seats in every batch for non-resident Indians, translating to nearly sixteen percent of the entire student body. If not enough NRI students apply—as is regularly the case—these are converted into NRI Sponsorship seats, reserved for students who may be residents of India but have NRI relatives able to pay disproportionately high fees. In effect, this means mandated representation for ultra-elite students from dominant-caste communities. The NUJS diversity study showed that NRI Sponsorship students had among the highest levels of representation as office-bearers in college societies—positions in which marginalised students were badly underrepresented. NRI Sponsorship quotas exist at many NLUs, albeit in different configurations. In 2005, the Calcutta High Court noted that such quotas are “patently ultra vires and violative of Article 14 of the Constitution,” which enshrines equality. That same year, however, a seven-judge bench of the Supreme Court observed that these quotas are essential since they “brought in money required by these institutions to strengthen their educational activities.” This tone-deaf observation remains legally current. The clearest lacuna when it comes to representation at the NLUs is the near-complete lack of OBC reservations. NUJS reserves seven seats for OBC candidates from within West Bengal, but not a single one in its all-India quota. Most other NLUs also have no all-India OBC seats. Some, including the NLUs at Jodhpur, Patiala and Cuttack, do not reserve a single seat for OBC students in either the all-India or in-state quotas. Both NLSIU and NALSAR in Hyderabad were a part of this latter collective until the current academic year. The only real exception is Tamil Nadu National Law University, in Tiruchirappalli, which recently announced an expansion of its existing reservations regime to guarantee 69 percent of seats for students from SCs, STs, Backward Classes and OBCs across both the in-state and all-India quotas. This is in line with Tamil Nadu’s markedly progressive representation policies. “In these premier law universities, the next generation of prominent lawyers, judges and the gears of the Supreme Court are being produced,” G Karunanidhy, the general secretary of the All India OBC Federation, told me. “OBC representation is crucial then. Our students must have a place in this future.” In 2019, the National Commission for Backward Classes summoned Faizan Mustafa, the vice-chancellor of NALSAR, which did not reserve any seats for OBC students at the time. Ramesh Babu Vishwanathula, a senior advocate and legal consultant to the NCBC, recalled the excuses Mustafa offered. “Among other reasons, we were told that, if NALSAR were to implement the OBC reservations, their quality of education would be compromised,” he told me. The next year, the NCBC directed the UGC to pursue the NLUs over their gatekeeping practices. The NCBC subsequently held three hearings with representatives of all 23 NLUs, but no substantive changes resulted. After the NCBC summoned the chief secretary of Telangana over poor representation at NALSAR, in 2021, the secretary appealed to the Telangana High Court. The court ruled in favour of the NCBC, confirming its jurisdiction over the issue. The NCBC kept up the pressure on the NALSAR vice-chancellor and some of his peers at other universities. In October 2021, Telangana amended the NALSAR Act, 1998, to reserve 26 seats in the all-India and state quotas for OBC students. A few other NLUs, including NLSIU, have also recently established or expanded reservations for Backward Classes. But the matter is far from resolved. Earlier this year, the All India OBC Students’ Association wrote to the prime minister demanding that 27 percent of all-India seats at the NLUs be reserved for OBCs. “I don’t understand why some of the powerful student bodies across the country, either left or right, have not engaged with this serious crisis,” Kiran Kumar Goud, the association’s president, told me. “We are willing to work with more student groups and take this matter forward.” Upendra Baxi, a celebrated legal scholar, speaking to an audience in Delhi, in May 2018. A report authored by Baxi for the UGC laid the groundwork for the goals of the NLUs, basing his idea of legal education as a means of connecting the law student with the broader grassroots realities of the nation.. Anushree Fadnavis/ Hindustan TimesUpendra Baxi, a celebrated legal scholar, speaking to an audience in Delhi, in May 2018. A report authored by Baxi for the UGC laid the groundwork for the goals of the NLUs, basing his idea of legal education as a means of connecting the law student with the broader grassroots realities of the nation.. Anushree Fadnavis/ Hindustan Times Upendra Baxi, a celebrated legal scholar, speaking to an audience in Delhi, in May 2018. A report authored by Baxi for the UGC laid the groundwork for the goals of the NLUs, basing his idea of legal education as a means of connecting the law student with the broader grassroots realities of the nation. ANUSHREE FADNAVIS/ HINDUSTAN TIMES A FIFTH-YEAR STUDENT at Maharashtra National Law University, Nagpur told me that many professors harbour at least an implicit hostility to reservations—and, correspondingly, to Bahujan students. He recalled overhearing a professor at his university say, while watching first-year students walk by, “Yaar, ye first-years ka to theek hai, par ye reserved category wale dimag kharab kar dete hain”—The first-years are fine, but these reserved-category students drive me mad. “This man hadn’t even started teaching the fresh batch yet, and the poison was already running through his veins,” the student said. “I feel that many teachers in NLUs, who are overwhelmingly upper-caste, place these invisible glass ceilings upon Dalit and Adivasi students in terms of expectations and interactions. This is not the same for privileged-caste students.” I could not find any empirical study on representation and inclusivity among faculty in the NLUs. Testimonies from both students and professors, however, point to a dismal state of affairs. “I can tell you that, in NLSIU, there are very few SC, ST and OBC professors teaching,” Preethi Lolaksha Nagaveni, a doctoral scholar at Lancaster University who has been both a student and a teacher at NLSIU, told me. “When students from marginalised communities come to these places, they don’t know how to go about navigating life in these elite law schools. If they face any kind of discrimination or harassment because of their caste, there are no SC or ST faculty members. So, who are they going to approach?” The NUJS diversity study found that ST respondents and students with disabilities found the faculty most unapproachable. Many OBC students also shared similar concerns. “The NLUs are institutions of the state, established under statutes enacted by the state assemblies,” Nagaveni told me. “In their faculty recruitment, they have an obligation to implement Article 16(4)”—a constitutional provision enabling reservations for backward classes. “The current state of representation exists because, clearly, the Constitution is not being followed. NLUs are neither following the centre nor the states’ reservation guidelines.” “Legislations dealing with untouchables become untouchable in these law schools.” An alumna of Lucknow’s Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University told me about the day she decided to become a teacher of law. “I remember that once my teacher facilitated an anti-reservation discussion in class—it was one of my worst experiences,” she recalled. “I wanted to say something but I was so scared to say. Finally, I mustered the courage to raise my hand, but then they said that the discussion was over.” In college, she said, “I understood how discrimination operates, how representation is only there in spirit and not in form, and, even if there were Bahujan teachers, there were none who were radicalised. As a teacher, I want to change that.” After completing her LLM and a PhD, she has struggled to find employment as an assistant professor. “After my LLM, I had considered applying for a faculty position at Jindal Global Law School”—a private university near the national capital—“but I found in their ad that they explicitly wanted people with foreign degrees.” This, she said, is also “a culture which is seeping into NLUs nowadays.” She remembered seeing an advertisement for a vacancy at NLSIU, which mentioned “that they wanted people from diverse backgrounds. When I saw the people who had gotten picked, they were all upper-caste women who had degrees from abroad.” Vijay Kishore Tiwari, an assistant professor at NUJS with a disability, said the devaluation of Indian postgraduate degrees in faculty recruitment, is very exclusionary. “If I am an underprivileged student, firstly it is difficult for me to enter NLUs because of high CLAT fees,” he explained. “Once I am inside, there is little in the way of support structures. If I want to become a teacher, I can’t afford an Ivy League education, and if I do an LLM from India, my degree is not put on the same pedestal as an LLM from a foreign university. I ask the UGC, why are the LLM and PhD programmes not being improved?” “This upper-caste professor at one point began speaking against reservations,” an MNLU student told me. “At that moment, I realised the atmosphere in the class, filled disproportionately by upper-caste students, suddenly changed. There was an air of excitement, of comfort, of having been unburdened of something. For a Bahujan student, this is a hostile space. They are debating my existence in this class, my lived experience, my history.” Besides robbing Bahujan students of support, the absence of Bahujan faculty also influences the pedagogy at the NLUs and the kind of lawyers they produce. “Because there is hegemonisation of some particular communities in the NLUs, we were never taught the Prevention of Atrocities Act, for instance,” Nagaveni told me. “Legislations dealing with untouchables become untouchable in these law schools. And, the way legal history is taught, does it acknowledge the contributions of India’s vibrant anti-caste movement and anti-caste literature, which has shaped many of these legislations?” {FOUR} “WHEN ROHITH VEMULA passed away, the Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi population in NLSIU was very diffused,” Kanishka Singh, the former vice-president of the NLSIU student union, told me. Vemula, a Dalit student pursuing a PhD at the University of Hyderabad, took his own life in 2016, following run-ins with right-wing student activists and the university administration. His death sparked massive protests against caste-based discrimination on campuses across the country. “After what happened with Vemula, I think this wave of fear and non-belongingness took over everyone.” At NLSIU, the need for a secure space for Bahujan interaction and assertion meant the emergence of the Savitri Phule Ambedkar Caravan—perhaps the first student collective in the institution’s almost forty-year history to be deeply bound to the anti-caste struggle. The SPAC was originally a space for Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi students “to come together, to talk and grow as people,” Singh explained. “The idea has always been to get together as a reading circle and read a bit of Babasaheb, Mahatma Phule, Periyar and other anti-caste figures.” The SPAC has since emerged as one of the most active student societies at NLSIU and regularly holds events to mark significant anniversaries such as Ambedkar Jayanti. Singh said that joining the SPAC in his second year gave him the opportunity to come to terms with his own identity. In his third year, he became the collective’s convener. The SPAC’s emergence seemingly opened the way for Ambedkarite collectives across NLUs. The Ambedkar Study Circle at NUALS, Kochi followed in 2017. The group frequently presents the concerns of Bahujan students to the university administration and resists any unfair treatment of them. When an anonymous student wrote an email demanding some empathy from the administration in academic assessments, the circle stepped in, forwarding a list of demands to university authorities. It also created a portal for students to anonymously reach out with any grievances. “We are very openly anti-caste, socialist and anti-patriarchal. We don’t hide it at all,” Alagarsamy said. “And people know that there exists this subaltern voice on campus, which is very assertive.” The BR Ambedkar Study Circle at the Kalamaserry campus of NUALS and the Savitri Phule Ambedkar Caravan at NLSIU are attempts to assert space for Bahujan students in campuses made hostile to them by the teaching staff and the larger student body. It is only through non-discriminatory law schools that India can have a representative bar, and exert influence on an upper-caste dominated judiciary.. The BR Ambedkar Study Circle at the Kalamaserry campus of NUALS and the Savitri Phule Ambedkar Caravan at NLSIU are attempts to assert space for Bahujan students in campuses made hostile to them by the teaching staff and the larger student body. It is only through non-discriminatory law schools that India can have a representative bar, and exert influence on an upper-caste dominated judiciary.. The BR Ambedkar Study Circle at the Kalamaserry campus of NUALS and the Savitri Phule Ambedkar Caravan at NLSIU are attempts to assert space for Bahujan students in campuses made hostile to them by the teaching staff and the larger student body. It is only through non-discriminatory law schools that India can have a representative bar, and exert influence on an upper-caste dominated judiciary. Ambedkarite groups have emerged as a counter to the rapid growth of Hindu activism in the NLUs. At NLUO, for example, Hindu nationalist groups have been present for roughly half a decade. When I visited, in April 2022, there was a large Nazi swastika drawn on a wall of the boys’ hostel. In March, when the fundamentalist Hindu monk Adityanath won a second term in charge of Uttar Pradesh, the boys’ hostel mess hosted a celebratory dinner, complete with sweets and firecrackers. In 2019, Ambedkar Jayanti coincided with Hanuman Jayanti. At NLUO, the Ambedkar Study Circle’s posters for a commemorative lecture clashed with saffron flags planted across the campus by Hindutva groups. At least one of the Ambedkar Study Circle’s posters was vandalised. The group’s resolve continues to grow. “We organise the annual memorial lectures,” Jeevan Justin, a fourth-year student and ASC member, told me. “We also organise reading circles, quite a few discussions and movie screenings. Recently, we received 24 applications, so people are enthusiastic about the circle. But, when I tell my hostel friends that I’m doing any work for the ASC, their response always seems to be derisive. It is as if our celebration of Ambedkar is a kind of politics which has no place in the NLUs.” Ambedkarite students have also begun building larger networks across law colleges. Dipankar Kamble, an MNLU student, wrote for Round Table India in 2018 about the need in India for an organisation like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—a historic fountainhead of legal activism in the African-American struggle for equality in the United States. Kamble told me he spent sleepless nights thinking of ways to manifest this goal. “If we successfully created a network of students from marginalised backgrounds, it would be become immensely important for the upcoming times.” Kamble got in touch with Dalit and Adivasi students at various law schools in an effort at creating a pan-India network of Ambedkarite law students. These students were assigned mentors—academicians from marginalised communities who, as Kamble explained, were “honest to the ideology and the movement.” Now, he added, “all of us know each other from across law schools. There’s always somebody there for us, and that is a unique feeling for many of us.” LONG BEFORE BAXI and the NLUs, BR Ambedkar had laid out his own vision for equitable and socially responsible legal education. In a 1935 essay, written during his stint as the principal of Bombay’s Government Law College, he explained that the guiding principle behind any sincere reform of legal education in India must be to expand access for the oppressed masses. This was a reflection of what he viewed the responsibility of law itself to be. “NLUs cater to a very specific need and demand,” G Mohan Gopal, a former director of NLSIU, told me. “They shifted away from their social-engineering goals a long while ago. They are, today, the exclusive domains of the bureaucrats, the middle-class dominant-caste interest and the corporate law firms which are tethered to this exclusive domain. The moment you try to shift away from this, their success model will be in shambles.” I asked him if there was a realistic way out of this crisis. “Social engineering’s top-down framework is flawed in itself,” he said. “The masses must re-engineer the elite—not the other way around—and, for that, a systemic restructuring of legal education is needed. It cannot happen within the NLU framework. I have tried for twenty-two years, but there is simply no interest. NLUs, in a sense, are irreparable.” Dipankar Kamble is hopeful, not necessarily that the NLUs can be restructured, but that students from marginalised communities can rewrite engraved narratives of exclusion. “The emergence of an Ambedkarite conscience, the promise that is there for future generations from my community, raises immense hope in me,” he said. “Of course, to hope is sometimes to be impractical, but if it means anything for the movement, I will hold on to this hope.” SUSHOVAN PATNAIK is a former editorial intern with The Caravan and law student at the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. He is interested in the intersection of law and journalism. -- सादर/ Regards अविनाश शाही/ Avinash Shahi सहायक/ Assistant मानव संसाधन प्रबंध विभाग/ Human Resource Management Department भारतीय रिजर्व बैंक/ Reserve Bank of India लखनऊ क्षेत्रीय कार्यालय/Lucknow RO विस्तार/ Extension: 2232 -- Disclaimer: 1. 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