The Khasi Students’ Union (KSU) has written to the Advocate General of Meghalaya, A Kumar, to escalate its complaint against appointments of teaching staff at the National Law University (NLU) Meghalaya.
The KSU is of the opinion that the NLU Meghalaya Vice-Chancellor, Prof Indrajit Dube, has been resorting to nepotism and favouritism in the appointment of staff without following due process of law and the university’s statutes.
One such appointment is that of Deputy Registrar, which was made a contractual post, the KSU alleges, so that it would fall outside of the state’s job reservation policy. When the pressure group met Dube over this and other appointments on February 14, the KSU claimed that the VC was not open to discussion, “has a superiority complex against the indigenous tribals of Meghalaya” and blamed Khasi staff for leaking information to the union.
In other cases, students of IIT Kharagpur or those belonging to a particular community appear to have been favoured for jobs at NLU Meghalaya, the KSU alleged. These include one assistant professor who was a PhD student of Dube’s wife at IIT Kharagpur.
The KSU also said that, for most of these posts, the vacancies were never advertised in the first place. The pressure group told the Advocate General that Dube’s response to this was to quote the university statutes where he is given the power to make appointments as he sees fit. The KSU said that it cannot verify this as the statutes are not in the public domain and, even if what Dube said is correct, then there is a concentration of unacceptable authoritarian power in his hands.
