Rejoinder to UGC Panel Audit

Laurence Gautier’s article, “Why Does theUGC Want to Drop the ‘M’ fromAMU?” (EPW, 6 January 2018), is a comprehensive account, and much needed intervention into a significant issue. However, certain other things seem to have been inadvertently left out and need to be added.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) audit remarked that Lucknow’s Ambedkar University was in a state of “complete and practically irreversible decline and collapse” (Hindustan Times, 25 November 2017). It further stated that the “teachers are substandard and the students are substandard,” and that the “final death knell of the University is the role of caste and the part it has played in completely polarising the institution into various groups, special interests, and political groupings.”