The Humiliation Was the Point: Inside the Fight to Save Azam Khan's University

On a scorching week in Rampur, western Uttar Pradesh, a campus that took a decade of donated bricks, cement and labour to raise now sits under a demolition order. The Rampur Development Authority has told Mohammad Ali Jauhar University, founded by the veteran Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan, that 38 of its 40 buildings are unauthorised construction. The notice gives the university fifteen days to tear the buildings down itself; if it does not, the authority says it will demolish them anyway and bill the institution for the cost of its own destruction.

Speaking at Azam Khan's Rampur residence, his wife Dr. Tazeen Fatma — a former Rajya Sabha member and MLA who has herself spent roughly eighteen months in jail across two separate terms, and who is now 77 — laid out what she believes lies behind both the notice and the run of prosecutions that have kept her husband and son cycling in and out of custody for years. The demolition threat, she argues, cannot be separated from an arrest four years ago that she says was designed less to secure a conviction than to humiliate a man the state could not otherwise diminish.

A Trust Built on Donations, Not the Treasury

Fatma says her first reaction to the fifteen-day notice was disbelief, not because the threat seemed implausible but because she could not accept that something built, in her words, with complete honesty could be erased. That conviction, she says, rests on faith as much as on paperwork: the university and its 3,000-plus students had no reason to fear demolition because nothing about its construction was concealed.

She rejects the suggestion, aired by critics, that the university was effectively built with state money after a change in legislation gave it minority status. The institution, she says, is open to everyone, not reserved for Muslims or for the Khan family, and no relative of Azam Khan draws a salary from it. Funding came from donations — chanda — collected door to door, including, she stresses, from Hindu and Sikh residents of Rampur alongside Muslim ones. "These children gave their own blood and sweat too," Fatma said of the students who, she recalls, laid bricks and mixed cement themselves under a blazing sun during construction, a form of volunteer labour she describes as kar seva.

She extends the same argument to a linked controversy: Rampur Public School, a set of CBSE-affiliated schools the trust ran in restored government buildings under an earlier cabinet order. Those schools, she says, charged the children of daily-wage and beedi workers a nominal fee — twenty rupees a month — and were later reclaimed by the state after the cabinet decision that had allowed the trust to use the buildings was simply reversed, displacing students in the process.

"An Intent to Humiliate Him"

When Azam Khan was first jailed, he told supporters he had not gone to a jail but to a sudhar grih — a reform home. Fatma declines to interpret the remark for him. But asked directly what she believes his 2019 arrest was meant to achieve, beyond a prosecution, she is unambiguous. "There was also, in a way, an intent to humiliate him," she said.

She points to what happened on the day of that first arrest as evidence. His belongings were left outside the jail because officials would not allow a suitcase inside; supporters, including a man named Farhan, were told the bags would have to be tied in a cloth bundle or a sack instead. Azam Khan, she says, refused food and water inside until his own luggage was let in on his terms — a small standoff, in her telling, over dignity rather than possessions.

Sleeping on the Floor

Fatma pushes back hard against an assumption she says circulates widely: that a politician of Azam Khan's stature receives quiet privileges in custody — good food, a cooler, air conditioning, a proper bed. None of that, she says, describes the reality. He sleeps on the floor because there is no bed. Mosquitoes are a constant torment. Even sitting has become physically difficult given his age. The cell had no Western-style toilet seat when he arrived; one was eventually installed at his own expense. In the middle of a brutal Rampur summer, she says flatly, there is no cooler and no arrangement for the heat at all — "no arrangement, none at all," she repeated.

Access to him is tightly limited. Family visits are capped at four a month, with no more than three visitors at a time, and Fatma says she herself goes rarely, leaving those slots to people managing his ongoing court cases who can brief him on developments. She sent the demolition notice in for him to read but had not discussed it with him further by the time of this interview — roughly ten days since her last visit.

Bulldozers as a National Pattern

Fatma situates the university's notice inside what she calls a broader bulldozer politics that has swept Uttar Pradesh since the Yogi Adityanath government took office — mosques a century old and ordinary homes demolished, she says, on the state's own unilateral say-so. She calls it an attempt to reshape the structure of the country and to crush the constitution rather than uphold it, invoking recent images of students beaten with batons and bloodied at protests near Delhi's Jantar Mantar. "This is not democracy," she said of a government she accuses of turning force against its own citizens.

She also addresses a theory circulating locally: that the target is not the buildings but the name. The university honours Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar, a freedom fighter who once said he would not want to be buried in a still-colonised India. If the demolition is in fact aimed at erasing that name, Fatma says, it is more shameful still — an attack on a freedom fighter's memory carried out under the pretext of a planning dispute.

A Party That Isn't Showing Up

Pressed repeatedly on the Samajwadi Party's senior leadership, Fatma's frustration surfaces despite her initial reluctance to voice it. She notes that Akhilesh Yadav and Dimple Yadav have been highly visible on other causes, in Delhi and in Parliament, while remaining largely absent from Rampur through years of her husband's and son's imprisonment and now through the university crisis. Asked whether she resents this, she first deflects — "those are questions for the party's MPs and MLAs" — before conceding that she has felt the same absence before, on other occasions.

She declines to comment specifically on Rampur's own Samajwadi Party MP, who was reportedly turned back by police at the university gate and left without pressing further, tying her silence back to her husband's own reticence about the phrase sudhar grih. She notes that other party MPs and MLAs are expected to join a sit-in the following day, and that Akhilesh Yadav himself is expected to visit — eventually. The delay, set against his swift appearances elsewhere, draws a pointed, half-sardonic aside from Fatma: perhaps, she suggests, his ambitions now lie beyond the Uttar Pradesh chief ministership, toward national politics. She is careful, though, to separate the leadership's visibility problem from the party's rank and file, who she says have largely stood by the family even if that support does not always show.

What Comes Next

Fatma's closing note returns to the register she opened with: faith that a project built honestly will not, in the end, be torn down, and to the resolve of the students themselves, who she says have vowed to fight until the last moment for a campus many of them helped build with their own hands. Asked whether her only remaining wish is a quiet family reunion — her husband and son home, and life returning to normal — she says no. Once free, she does not expect Azam Khan to rest. She expects him to return immediately to defending the university's future, the project to which she says he has given his entire life.