The recent termination of Professor Snehashish Bhattacharya from the South Asian University (SAU) is not an isolated administrative decision. Rather, it exemplifies how the university’s unique legal status as an “international organisation” is strategically used to evade domestic legal accountability and shield administrative decisions from scrutiny. This incident illustrates how SAU’s sovereign immunity is leveraged to suppress dissent and curtail academic freedom, transforming it into a de facto sovereign enclave immune to Indian legal norms.AdvertisementIn 2022, SAU reduced the students’ stipend — while students were demanding an increase — because of which protests broke out on campus. The SAU authorities took disciplinary action against many of the protestors — suspending and even expelling some students. University authorities also allowed the Delhi Police inside its campus in October 2022.These events pushed several faculty members, including Bhattacharya, to intervene. These professors authored letters, signed by as many as 15 faculty members, urging the SAU administration to engage in a sincere dialogue with the students and denounce the “arbitrary actions” being taken without due process. The faculty’s actions, which from a conventional academic standpoint would be seen as a responsible exercise of their role as educators and guardians of a university’s ethos, were construed by the SAU administration as “misconduct” and “inciting students against the interest of the university”.These letters led to the suspension of four faculty members in June 2023. Professor Bhattacharya’s eventual termination was based on 52 charges, many of which stemmed from the emails he co-signed expressing his concerns. He maintained that he had “not acted against the university” but had only exercised his right to raise concerns as a faculty member.AdvertisementIn January 2024, some of the assistant professors who were issued show cause notice and later suspended from the university on their prima facie involvement in a student-led protest on the premises approached the Delhi High Court under Article 226 of the Constitution for quashing of the show cause and suspension notices.The HC ruled that a writ petition filed by the suspended faculty members against the university was not maintainable as it cannot be considered “state” under Article 12 of the Indian Constitution. Since SAU derives its powers from an intergovernmental agreement, it is an international organisation. The Government of India does not hold any control over its functioning, administration and finances despite it being situated in India.This judgment effectively creates a legal vacuum where faculty and students of an institution have no recourse to the Indian legal system for the protection of their fundamental rights against the arbitrary actions of an institution situated on Indian soil. The existence of a mechanism for redressal of the dispute between the employees and the university can never be effective to address the concerns of the “dissenting” professors and students.Also Read | Gaza should haunt usThe “privileges and immunities” granted to international organisations are intended to protect them from political interference by the host state. (These immunities exempt such organisations from some local laws and regulations.) However, they are not meant to provide unrestricted power for the administration to act arbitrarily against its own members. This legal shield transforms the university into an opaque and unaccountable institution.In the charge that Professor Bhattacharya was “inciting students against the interest of the university” lies the central irony: While SAU claims immunity from the Indian Constitution, it deploys a distorted version of a concept — incitement — that is rigorously defined and limited by that very same Constitution.Had this occurred in a domestic university, the charge would have been tested against the robust protections of Article 19(1)(a), which guarantees freedom of speech and expression. Indian jurisprudence sets a high threshold for what constitutes incitement. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that speech can only be restricted as “incitement to an offence” if it has a direct and proximate nexus to imminent lawless action; it must be a “spark in a powder keg”.Bhattacharya’s actions fall squarely within the realm of protected speech. His expression was aimed at de-escalation and peaceful resolution, the very antithesis of incitement. He was advocating for established university norms, not for the commission of a crime.most readSAU’s administration, however, operates in a constitutional void of its own making. It replaces the precise legal standard of “incitement to an offence” with the vague, dangerously subjective, and self-serving standard of acting “against the interest of the university”. This allows the administration to define its own interests as absolute and to frame any dissenting speech as a seditious act. Because of its immunity, SAU can level a charge that carries the gravitas of a legal transgression without ever having to satisfy the stringent legal test that the Indian Constitution would demand. It borrows the language of law while discarding the protections of justice.With the legal challenge of “incitement” thus disarmed, the rest of the administration’s actions follow a well-trodden path of repression. The reframing of student protests over stipends as “indiscipline”, the decision to call Delhi Police onto campus, and the requirement that new students sign undertakings not to protest are all tactics seen in the securitisation of university campuses across India. The script is national, even if the actor claims to be international.Bhattacharya’s case reveals how the legal architecture of internationalism can be exploited to create spaces exempt from national legal oversight, yet which replicate the most illiberal tendencies of the host state. By evading the jurisdiction of Indian courts, SAU has not elevated itself to a higher standard of governance; it has merely insulated a common standard of intolerance from legal challenge. The university, envisioned as a transnational hub of excellence, is instead functioning as a sovereign enclave practising a familiar form of localised repression, leaving its community silenced in a space where their fundamental rights are rendered unenforceable.The writer is an advocate