Bulldozers at the Gate: The Fight to Save a University Built for Rampur's Poor

A 15-day ultimatum

The Rampur Development Authority has told Mohammad Ali Jauhar University that 38 of its 40 buildings, spread across some 250 to 300 acres, are illegal construction. The notice gives the university 15 days to demolish the structures itself. If it does not, the authority says it will send in bulldozers and bill the university for the cost. For an institution that has spent two decades building classrooms, hostels and a hospital out of a stretch of open land near Rampur, the notice landed less like a zoning dispute and more like an eviction order.

Students, teachers, parents and the university's own Vice-Chancellor describe the same fear in different registers: that the paperwork is a pretext, and the real target is the man who built the campus.

A Vice-Chancellor's legal rebuttal

Vice-Chancellor Zaheer, who describes himself as a retired law professor and a former Dean and Vice-Chancellor at Aligarh Muslim University, argues that the notice does not hold up on its own terms. The university's land, he says, sits in a village called Singhan Kheda that was only brought under the Rampur Development Authority's jurisdiction in 2024. Applying the authority's building rules to structures raised years before that, he argues, amounts to giving the law a retrospective effect it was never meant to have — a law, he notes, only takes force from the day it is published in the official gazette, not before.

"Why is the honourable DM giving this a retrospective effect?" he asks in the interview, adding that he doubts any educational institution in the country could satisfy every building regulation on its books. He also points to a practical absurdity: a student partway through a law degree cannot simply transfer to another university mid-course if this one is shuttered, and no one, he says, has offered a remedy for the students who would be stranded.

A founder behind bars, and a name under fire

The university's chancellor, Samajwadi Party leader Mohammad Azam Khan, built it out of what he wanted to be an academic institution for the poor of Rampur, Moradabad and Bareilly. Both Azam Khan and his son are currently in jail, and the Vice-Chancellor says a string of cases has been filed against the chancellor since 2019 — cases he calls fabricated, and part of a pattern meant to "mentally torture" a man whose survival, in a sense, depends on the university he built.

Some of the notice's defenders, he says, argue the demolition has nothing to do with Azam Khan and everything to do with old grievances about his conduct in office. Others in Rampur have floated a different theory: that pressure to rename the university, which honours the freedom fighter Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar, is bound up with the demolition drive itself. If a university named for a man who once said he would refuse even to be buried in an "enslaved Hindustan" is being targeted over its name, the Vice-Chancellor says, that is a matter of shame for the country, not for the institution.

Asked why Samajwadi Party leaders such as Akhilesh Yadav and Dimple Yadav, who Azam Khan has long been aligned with, have not visited Rampur over the notice while remaining visible in Delhi, the Vice-Chancellor declines to say he has a personal grievance. But he adds that he has "felt this before, on other occasions too" — the sense that a show of solidarity that should have arrived for an institution educating more than 3,000 students simply has not.

What the campus means to Rampur

For many students, the university is less a campus than the only door that was open to them. Several interviewed say Rampur has no other university, so for local families the choice was never between institutions but between this one and none. One student, who completed his BA LLB there and is now an advocate pursuing an LLM, says his second-year fees run to roughly 24,000 rupees. A physically disabled student on the same course describes a free rickshaw service the university runs to carry him between the gate and his faculty building, at no charge.

Fee waivers are built into the model: students who have lost one parent get a 50 percent reduction, and those who have lost both study for free. One alumna, now a gynaecologist at a hospital in the region, says she could not have afforded her medical education anywhere else and doubts she would have succeeded at all without it; her sister went on to pharmacy and is now completing an MBBS, and her brother works as an engineer-scientist in Norway. The university, several point out, is not a Muslim-only institution — students of every religion study there and say they are treated equally.

Dr. Tazeen Fatma, an alumna who now teaches sociology, describes a more personal unease. While the demolition notice hung over the campus, she says, she found herself still going to work each day to teach revolutions and social change to a new set of students in a different school — unable to reconcile the subject with her own college's fate. "What will I teach them — that revolutions simply carried on like this?" she asks. For her, she says, the university was never simply a structure of brick and mortar; it is bound up with emotion built over years.

"We will not move"

Both students and the Vice-Chancellor frame their response in the same terms: if the buildings come down, classes will simply move outdoors. "If they want to tear the building down, let them tear it down — we will teach under a tree, we will teach on the streets," Zaheer says, adding that a university cannot be erased by demolishing its walls. Several students echo the line almost verbatim, saying they would rather sit for class with their books than abandon the campus, even under the shadow of a bulldozer.

Most of those interviewed say they still trust the constitution and the courts to intervene before any demolition takes place, and several add that they trust God to spare the institution regardless. But the note of defiance persists alongside the note of faith. If the government has already decided to go ahead, more than one student and faculty member says, then the bulldozer will have to pass over their bodies before it reaches the walls.