Students should not indulge in wrong activities: Allahabad High Court dismisses pleas relating to CAA protest at AMU
Court said that it is the students' responsibility to not fall into the traps of unscrupulous persons operating outside the University to disturb its peace.
A division bench of Chief Justice Rajesh Bindal and Justice JJ Munir of Allahabad High Court recently said that "students take admissions in Universities or any educational Institution for the purpose of education and not indulge in these kinds of activities, which brings bad name to the great educational Institutions".
The bench made the observation while it was hearing a bunch of pleas pertaining to incidents that took place at Aligarh Muslim University in December 2019 when protests were held there against the Citizenship Amendment Act.
On January 7, 2020, court ordered the National Human Rights Commission to hold an inquiry into the alleged incidents and submit a report. The NHRC submitted the inquiry report which was handed over to the counsel for the State government to seek State's response to the recommendations made in the report.
The State government filed a counter affidavit on September 7, 2022 wherein it submitted that the recommendations in paragraphs 'a', 'b', 'd' and 'e' of the NHRC's report had been complied with by the State, whereas, the recommendations in paragraphs 'c' and 'f' concerned the Union of India and Aligarh Muslim University, respectively.
To this, court noted that the recommendations in paragraph 'c' pertained to a direction to the Director General, CRPF for RAF to show utmost professionalism in dealing with situations such as in question.
Regarding this, the court said, "We have no doubt that our paramilitary forces are well equipped to deal with such situations and are being regularly updated."
Furthermore, regarding the direction in paragraph 'f' which was to the Aligarh Muslim University to establish a mechanism for better communication with the students' fraternity so that they are not influenced by outsiders, the court stated,
"Communication channels should always remain open. But equal responsibility is also of the students that they do not fall in the trap of unscrupulous persons operating outside the University to disturb peace there."
"Educational institutions have to maintain discipline," the court observed.
Conclusively, noting that nothing survived in the petitions, court dismissed them.
Case Title: Mohd. Aman Khan v. Union of India and others