The Jawaharlal Nehru University administration has “rusticated” the top four students’ union leaders and a former president for a year for vandalising the facial recognition system installed in the central library last November.
The identical notices from chief proctor N. Janardhana Raju to the union leaders — all from the Left — say they have been “found guilty of destroying the Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) based Access Gates installed at the cost of about ₹20 lakh in
the Dr B.R. Ambedkar Central Library. JNU on 21/11/2025.... Two female security guards were injured, leading to blood loss”.
Those rusticated include JNUSU president Aditi Mishra (CPIML-Liberation-backed Aisa), vice-president K. Gopika Babu (CPM-backed SFI), general secretary Sunil Yadav (Democratic Students’ Federation), joint secretary Danish Ali (Aisa), and former president Nitish Kumar (Aisa). They have also been fined ₹20,000 each and barred from entering the campus. If they fail to pay the fine, they would not be allowed to return after a year.
The JNUSU said in a statement: “It is a well-known fact that JNU students have been protesting against the magnetic gates and face-recognition cameras in the B.R. Ambedkar Central Library of JNU. The administration, on multiple occasions, had offered verbal assurances that they would not install these surveillance arrangements after the previous JNUSU had staged a long sit-in in front of the library gate. However, surreptitiously, this administration reinstalled them once again, right in the middle of the JNUSU elections in November 2025, violating their commitments. Therefore, it is the JNU administration alone that is solely responsible for this stalemate.
“In the disciplinary order, the administration has alleged that the student representatives damaged public property. This is a complete lie. There are numerous examples where ABVP has not been punished for committing wanton violence and damaging public property in JNU, causing life-threatening situations for students, teachers and officials, on the other hand, students and JNUSU office-bearers are being punished for resisting surveillance.”
The union cited examples of mild or no punishments for vandalism by the RSS-backed ABVP in the past.
The JNU Teachers’ Association said in a statement titled “JNU must be out of bounds for the VC, not the JNUSU office-bearers”: “This is not an action against a few individual students but a direct assault on the collective democratic rights of the university’s student body. It is part of a continuing process of criminalising protests, which themselves are a response to an autocratic and lawless mode of functioning that has increasingly come to characterise the JNU administration under the leadership of vice-chancellor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit....”