The principle of seniority in appointments – whether it be of chief justices, army chiefs or heads of a university department – is not some quaint relic of a colonial bureaucracy that can be dispensed with at the pleasure of the current ruler. It is an indispensable mechanism to ensure institutional autonomy and the long-term survival of any institution. Once the seniority principle is violated, it becomes a free for all – with allegiance to the ruling ideology or personal favouritism overtaking merit and duty in all spheres of activity. Members of an institution become more concerned with whether their speech and actions please those in power, than with what their duties and obligations actually are.
It is not surprising that the supersession of Justice A.N. Ray over three senior judges in 1973 and of Justice M.H. Beg in 1977 over the claims of Justice H.R. Khanna are still remembered as egregious Emergency-era transgressions. It is another matter that currently there are several high court judges who have been elevated to the Supreme Court over the heads of other senior colleagues. At least in those cases the Collegium is trying to justify its choice on the basis of regional representation.
The appointment of Lieutenant General Bipin Rawat as Army Chief in 2017 over Lt Gen. Praveen Bakshi and Lt Gen. P.M. Hariz was also controversial. The only precedent for this violation of seniority rules since independence was in 1983 when Arun Vaidya was appointed Army Chief over Lt Gen. S.K. Sinha, who promptly resigned in protest. Most recently, the Supreme Court upheld the importance of seniority in the armed forces in a case involving a dispute over seniority which led to murder.
The supersession of Apoorvanand Jha as head of the department of Hindi at the University of Delhi by Sudha Singh, will, in similar fashion, become a memorable blot on the university’s record. It will be an emblematic example of how, in recent years, the university has bent convention in the service of the government’s ideological agenda.
Apoorvanand is a well-established scholar, who has published books and articles on literary criticism and been instrumental in framing curriculum at the Mahatmas Gandhi International Hindi University Wardha, his own department in Delhi University, as well as at the NCERT in 2005. His most recent book, Kavita mein jantantra, was published by Rajkamal in 2025. But above all, Apoorvanand is known for his fearless defence of the constitution and his bilingual writings in the media and speeches in public forums on issues of communalism and academic freedom. Every time someone is unjustly suspended, arrested or otherwise threatened for their bonafide intellectual work, Apoorvanand has stood in their defence. It is ironic, but perhaps unsurprising, that it is now his turn to be the object of arbitrary university action.
Also read: University Authorities Need to Protect Collegiality: Apoorvanand to DU VC Yogesh Singh
The importance of university autonomy
The 1966 Kothari Committee on Higher Education noted (pages 326-7) three levels at which it was important to exercise university autonomy: autonomy within a university (autonomy of individual departments), autonomy of a university with relation to the university system as a whole (UGC), autonomy of the university system as a whole (including UGC) in relationship to the state and centre, i.e. the funding agencies. The last principle should apply to private funders too – a good university keeps an arm-length distance from its funders in terms of deciding recruitments, syllabi etc.
The second principle of university autonomy has long been abandoned, with UGC dictating every minute action, and changing those decisions year by year in a carnivalesque thumbing of their nose to actual scholarship. At one time, only journals on the UGC care list will be accepted, another year its back to individual departments to determine quality, in some years only journal articles will be accepted (leading to great glee amongst predatory publishers), the following year, books will count too. Young scholars hoping to get teaching jobs in public universities (increasingly scarce for the ideologically non-aligned) are like headless chickens – because as every scholar knows (but few administrators seem to do) both journals and books take time to publish and cannot be produced on demand to meet the whims of the day.
By earlier convention, Delhi University departments would send up a panel of experts in their field to serve on selection committees, thus ensuring some quality control. In the last decade, however, the Vice-Chancellors have totally abandoned this principle, selecting experts who can be counted on to deliver appointments close to the Rashtriya Swayansevak Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party. Where the appointments have been fair, it has been due to the fight put up by principals, teachers-in-charge in colleges or heads of departments.
Departments would select their own students through various mechanisms, but that too has given way to a centralised MCQ testing by a compromised National Testing Agency.
Syllabi are still prepared by departments and put up through faculty meetings, though of late online and emailed choruses of approval have replaced any substantive discussion. However, the university – in the form of discussions in the academic council by teachers from other disciplines who claim universal knowledge – has increasingly interfered in the social science and humanities courses.
The one arena where Delhi University thus far successfully scored over JNU – where the administrative war on faculty has been much more intense – was that it maintained a modicum of routine functioning with faculty. In JNU, faculty have been vindictively denied promotion, denied leave and sabbaticals, bypassed in seniority in the appointment of deans. They have had to appeal in court to get the basic rights that every academic deserves.
In Delhi University, as in most functioning universities, both heads and deans of faculty are appointed in terms of seniority. According to Ordinance XXIII, “The Head of the Department shall be appointed by the Vice-Chancellor by observing, as far as possible, the principle of rotation…The Principle of rotation will apply from the person who is next in order of seniority to the person who has already served or is serving as Head of the Department.”
There may be some dispute over the interpretation of seniority as in an earlier instance in Political Science where the next-in-line was superseded on the grounds that the HOD was appointed by direct appointment over appointment by promotion, but at least some justification was offered. In the case of the Hindi department, as also of the psychology department, which has also seen a deviation from the norms this time, no such justification has been offered. In the case of Apoorvanand, the university’s reasoning is so obvious that they dare not state it, and it has nothing to do with academic norms and everything to do with ideological differences.
The post of director of the Delhi School of Economics, an artificial conglomerate of the departments of Economics, Sociology and Geography, was also conventionally rotated among the senior-most faculty of the three departments. But again, over the last decade, the post has gone only to the Economics department, reinforcing an already inflated sense that economics is the only discipline that matters.
There are different types of heads – those who enjoy administration and look upon it as a challenge, to those who treat it as a chance to exercise petty tyrannies over their colleagues, to those who suffer it as an obligation which must be carried out and breathe a sigh of relief when its over. But whatever one’s individual preference, it is at least a mantle that falls on all equally, regardless of their ideological stances. Once the position is reduced to a favour that can be doled out at the whims of the administration, no head will be able to function with even a slight modicum of autonomy.
What distinguishes a university from a coaching college? Both perform the same functions of teaching, both train the young for future employment, and both are avenues of social mobility. However, a university is also supposed to provide a critical perspective on society’s concerns, and on issues which societies themselves don’t recognize as a problem. University academics are supposed to think ahead, beyond the immediate future, and to think back to the past to analyze how we got to the present. Neither of these are required from a coaching college, which must constantly test itself only against the next exam cycle.
Universities, even more than other institutions, depend not on bricks and mortar, or even on rankings which they can game, but on individuals and their ideas. Academics require freedom to think. This is why the supersession of Apoorvanand Jha is about much more than just who will be the head of the Hindi department in one university in one city – it is about the fate of Indian higher education as a whole.
Nandini Sundar has been professor of Sociology at the University of Delhi since 2005.
