New Delhi: Delhi University’s associate professor Hany Babu M.T. – incarcerated over what the NIA has claimed is his connection with the Elgar Parishad case – will be awarded an honorary doctorate by the Ghent University of Belgium.
The professor’s wife, scholar Jenny Rowena who is an assistant professor at Miranda House in Delhi, in a press release announced that the university’s faculty of Arts and Philosophy nominated his name and “justified its nomination by pointing at his efforts to safeguard the importance of academic freedom and his commitment to language rights and equal access to education for minorities.”
The University website’s brief note has this to say on Babu:
Professor Hany is a linguist from India who, in addition to his academic research in syntax and semantics, works on issues of language ideology, language policy and language politics. His focus is on equal opportunities and fair access to education for the speakers of marginalised languages.
The degree will be handed over to a representative on March 24, Friday. In the ceremony, six other scholars of various countries will be awarded honorary degrees.
Dr Anne Breitbarth, who is associate professor of historical linguistics at the German division of the linguistics department at Ghent will collect the degree for Babu on his behalf.
Hany Babu is the 12th person to have been arrested in the Elgar Parishad case, which is yet to go to trial. He has been in jail for close to two years.
In late 2022, Babu moved Bombay high court seeking temporary bail on health grounds so that he could get a cataract surgery and treatment for upper abdominal pain and osteoarthritis at the private Breach Candy hospital in Mumbai. His bail pleas had earlier been turned down.
Babu claimed that he has lost vision to a significant degree due to cataract and also suffers from acute and unrelenting pain in the stomach and knees.
Sixteen prisoners were held in the Elgar Parishad case which relates to speeches delivered at the Elgar Parishad conclave held at Shaniwarwada in Pune on December 31, 2017, which the Pune police claimed triggered violence the next day near the Koregaon Bhima war memorial.
All of them are activists and scholars.
Several of them suffer from serious ailments, treatment for which they have been routinely denied, according to their families. One of them, Jharkhand activist Father Stan Swamy, passed away after having tested positive for COVID-19 while in prison.
