A group of students, faculty, alumni and well-wishers of the Jamia Millia Islamia University Delhi has started an online petition to protest against the university’s decision to felicitate the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a degree of Doctor of Letters (Honoris Causa) during the course of his upcoming state visit to India.
Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) had recently announced that it will confer the degree in a special convocation on May 1. University had reportedly said that the Turkish President’s visit will strengthen the academic ties between Turkey and India, especially with Jamia.
JMI is the only university in the country offering diploma and a three years undergraduate course in the Turkish language.
The online petition states, “We, students, alumni, faculty and well wishers of Jamia Millia Islamia University Delhi are deeply disturbed at reports that the Jamia University is planning to felicitate the Turkish president Racep Tayyip Erdogan with a degree of Doctor of Letters (Honoris Causa) during the course of his upcoming state visit to India. We condemn this move, if it is true, and urge you and the university authorities to cancel this decision before it is too late.”
Further the group in the petition claims, “We say to cancel this decision because Erdogan, who has won a flawed and fraudulent plebiscite in order to crown himself the unchallenged dictator of Turkey, is a toxic influence in Turkish public life, in West Asia and in the world at large. He has stifled dissent, cracked down on the rights of working people,women and minorities in Turkey and is conducting a brutal war on the peoples of Kurdistan.”
The group also lashes out at PM Narendra Modi in the petition and says, “Erdogan is destroying universities and intellectual life, and poisoning them with Islamist politics in ways that mirror, and indeed currently surpass the venality of the Modi regime’s Hindutva inspired assault on universities and institutions of higher learning and research in India. It is not surprising that tyrants like Modi and Erdogan should affirm each other, but there is no reason for a university like Jamia Millia Islamia which has traditions, though much weakened with time, of democratic and open intellectual life, to endorse a brutal and cynical politician with dictatorial ambitions.”
“Turkish society is vibrant, open, secular, and in the end will, we are sure, defeat the designs of Erdogan and his cronies. If Jamia Millia Islamia University is to live up to its responsibilities of being a friend of the Turkish people (with whom it has historic ties) it should refuse to endorse and affirm the Erdogan regime,” it added.
The group has urged vice-chancellor Prof Talat Ahmad to reverse the decision. “If you do not, then, because of our solidarity with the people of Turkey, we will never forgive you and we will have no option but to publicly shame you for the dishonor you will have brought to Jamia Millia Islamia University” the group said.
