Mohammad Ali Jauhar University: A 15-Day Notice and a Fight Over 38 Buildings

A 15-Day Notice for 38 of 40 Buildings

Mohammad Ali Jauhar University sits on 250 to 300 acres in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, built by the Samajwadi Party leader Mohammad Azam Khan and named for the Khilafat-era freedom fighter Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar. In late 2025, the Rampur Development Authority issued the university a notice declaring 38 of its roughly 40 buildings illegal and giving it 15 days to demolish them itself — failing which, the authority said, it would carry out the demolition and bill the university for the cost. The notice landed at a moment when Azam Khan, the university's founder and chancellor, and his son Abdullah Azam were both already in jail, facing what students and faculty describe as a string of cases filed against them since 2019.

Students Whose Careers Are on the Line

On campus, the reaction from students was less about politics than about arithmetic. "If they tear this university down, what happens to our careers? So many students — what happens to theirs?" one student said. Many described fee structures built around need: a student who has lost one parent gets a 50 percent fee reduction, and a student who has lost both parents studies for free. One student, who identified himself as belonging to a physical-disability category, said his entire LLM was costing him ₹24,000 — a fraction of what comparable private institutions in the area charge — and that the university provided free rickshaw transport from the gate to class and back. Several students stressed that the university enrols people of every religion, not only Muslims, and that they had chosen it not out of loyalty to Azam Khan personally but because Rampur simply has no other university: "We can't go outside," one said.

"This Isn't a Building, It's an Emotion"

A recurring theme among those interviewed was that the university had been built, quite literally, by the people now facing its loss. Students described working through the summer heat years earlier, mixing cement and laying brick as volunteers — a kind of kar seva for the campus itself — which is part of why, several said, the demolition notice felt like an attack on something more than property. "This university is not a structure made of brick and mortar," one former student put it. "For us, it is an emotion." A woman who said she was a sociology teacher and an alumna of the university described being unable to sleep for days after the notice, torn between teaching students about past movements for justice and living through what she saw as an act of injustice against her own institution. The university's vice-chancellor, addressed in the interview as Zaheer Sahab and identified as a former law professor and former vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, grew visibly emotional discussing it, at one point saying that if the buildings were torn down, "we will teach under a tree, we will teach on the streets — you cannot erase a university."

A Disputed Notice and an Unlikely Silence

The vice-chancellor argued the demolition notice was legally unsound on more than one ground. He said the village of Singhankheda, where the university stands, was only brought under the Rampur Development Authority's jurisdiction in a notification years after most of the campus was already built, and that applying today's rules retroactively to older construction had no legal basis — a point he made by invoking his own background as a law professor and academic administrator. He also pointed to a broader practical problem: almost no educational institution in the country, he argued, fully complies with every building regulation on paper, and demolishing one over such violations would strand thousands of students mid-degree, with no clear remedy for where they could transfer. Several people interviewed also noted, pointedly, that Samajwadi Party leaders such as Akhilesh Yadav and Dimple Yadav — figures otherwise highly visible in Delhi politics — had not been publicly active on the university's behalf, with one interviewee suggesting that Akhilesh Yadav's ambitions were now focused less on Uttar Pradesh than on the national stage.

"The Bulldozer Will Have to Pass Over Our Bodies"

Asked what would happen in the worst case, one student said that if the government insisted on going ahead, "they will have to pass over our corpses." The vice-chancellor was blunter still, saying the demolition felt less like an attack on 38 buildings than on the community's homes. Faculty, students and parents interviewed on campus all struck a similar note: fear that the university could genuinely be taken from them, mixed with an insistence that they still trusted India's constitution and courts to stop it. But if that trust proved misplaced, more than one person interviewed offered the same image — that any bulldozer sent to flatten Mohammad Ali Jauhar University would have to go through the people who built it first.