NLSIU Should Not Have Cancelled Its Convocation

On 27 August, the National Law School of India University issued a notice. “Despite our collective best efforts, due to unavoidable circumstances, we are unable to hold the 34th Annual Convocation.” The ceremony had been set for 12 September. Degrees would instead be conferred in absentia. Graduates could have their certificates couriered, or come and collect them.¹

Nothing about those circumstances was unavoidable. A choice was made, and the notice does not say what it was.

What actually happened

Over seven hundred students and alumni had objected to two proposed guests at the ceremony: the Chief Justice of India, and the Chairman of the Bar Council of India. They also asked the Bar Council to apologise unconditionally to the students and faculty of NALSAR.²

The background is by now well known. In a hearing in May, the Chief Justice made an oral observation about “youngsters like cockroaches” who, lacking employment, become media figures, social media users or RTI activists and “start attacking everyone”. He later said the remark had been directed at persons using fraudulent credentials, that he had been misquoted, and that India's young people were the pillars of a developed India.³ And the Bar Council, weeks later, directed every State Bar Council not to enrol NALSAR's entire 2026 graduating batch after some of its students objected to the same Chief Justice attending their convocation. That was a direction it withdrew within a day, and one it had no power to issue in the first place.⁴

So the objection at NLSIU was not abstract. It concerned two specific people, one of whom had recently attempted to bar a graduating batch from the profession for doing what NLSIU's students were now doing.

The response did not match the request

Here is the difficulty, and it is a simple one.

Nobody asked for the convocation to be cancelled. The students asked for two names to be reconsidered. The range of available responses included inviting someone else, holding the ceremony without a chief guest, explaining to the students why the invitations would stand, or proceeding and accepting that some graduates would decline to attend. Any of those would have been a response to what was actually raised.

Cancelling the ceremony was not a response to the objection. It was a response to the existence of the objection. And its cost fell almost entirely on people who had no part in making the decision either way: a graduating batch of well over two hundred, and the families who had booked travel to watch them cross a stage.

A convocation is not an amenity. It is the one occasion on which a university performs in public the thing it exists to do. For a great many families it is the visible end of something they paid for over five years, sometimes at real cost. It happens once. A certificate arriving by courier is not the same event, and the university knows that, which is why it holds a ceremony at all.

“Unavoidable circumstances”

The second problem is the notice itself.

“Unavoidable circumstances” is the language of a flood, or a power failure, or a death. It describes something that happened to the institution. What happened here was a decision by the institution, taken after a controversy that everybody involved could name.

I do not think the drafting was careless. A phrase like that is chosen precisely because it forecloses discussion: there is nothing to argue with in an unavoidable circumstance. But a law school is not any institution. It spends five years teaching that reasons must be given, that “because” is the word every judgment turns on, and that a decision without a stated basis is not really a decision at all. It is an assertion of authority.

Then it sends its graduating class a notice that gives no reason.

The bind was real, and it was self-created

It would be unfair to pretend the university faced an easy choice.

Once the invitations had gone out, NLSIU was in a genuinely difficult position. Withdrawing an invitation to a sitting Chief Justice is a serious act with consequences for an institution that appears before courts, depends on goodwill, and has to place its graduates. Proceeding regardless risked a protest at the ceremony, and the images that would follow. Anyone who has run an institution will recognise the shape of that problem, and it is not solved by saying it should have been solved.

But two things follow. First, the bind was created by the invitation, at a moment when the Bar Council's action against NALSAR was live and the objections were entirely foreseeable. Second, and more importantly: when an institution finds itself trapped between two powerful parties, the one group it should not take the loss out of is the group with no power at all. The graduating batch had no say in who was invited, no say in the objection, and no say in the cancellation. They are simply the people it was cheapest to disappoint.

What it teaches

There is a version of this where nothing much has been lost. Degrees are conferred. Nobody is expelled. No one's enrolment is blocked, unlike at NALSAR. The graduates will be advocates regardless, and in ten years the ceremony will be a story they tell.

I think that reading misses what the sequence actually teaches, and law schools teach by what they do far more than by what they put in the syllabus.

Students at two national law universities raised an objection through entirely ordinary means: a letter, a signature, a request. At one, the regulator responded by attempting to bar the whole batch from the profession. At the other, the university responded by cancelling the whole batch's ceremony. In both cases the response was collective, fell on people who had not individually done anything, and was withdrawn from explanation: the Bar Council eventually just stopped, and NLSIU called it unavoidable.

The lesson a student can reasonably draw is that objecting is expensive, that the cost will be shared out among everyone standing near you, and that nobody will explain why. That is a lesson about how power behaves. It is a perfectly accurate lesson. It is simply not the one a law school should be teaching by example, at the ceremony where it certifies people to go and argue with power for a living.

What would have been better

Very little, and none of it heroic.

Hold the ceremony. Confer the degrees in front of the families who came. Invite whoever the university, having considered the representation, decides to invite. If that is the same two guests, say so and say why. If it is not, say that too. Let students who object decline to attend; that is what an objection is for, and a handful of empty chairs is not a crisis.

And if the ceremony genuinely could not proceed, then write a notice that says what happened. Not “unavoidable circumstances”. Two or three honest sentences, addressed to the people who lost something, from an institution that teaches for a living why reasons matter.

The graduates of 2026 will get their degrees. What they will not get is the afternoon, or the explanation. The first was probably beyond saving by the time the notice went out. The second was always available, and it was free.

Filed under The Legal Profession