Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi
The land of Aligarh Muslim University is not merely real estate. Much of the material foundation upon which the University arose represents the accumulated generosity of generations of people who contributed money, property, buildings and land to create and sustain an educational institution. To understand the recurring disputes over AMU’s property, including the latest action by the Aligarh Nagar Nigam on 20 August 2026, one must therefore begin not with contemporary revenue records but with the origins of the University itself.
The Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, established by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan in the nineteenth century, was essentially a public enterprise. Its buildings, hostels, educational facilities and endowments were created through subscriptions and donations collected from across India. Princes contributed, but so did zamindars, merchants, professionals and ordinary supporters of the Aligarh Movement. The history of the institution is consequently inseparable from philanthropy. AMU’s own records provide numerous examples: Begum Sultan Jahan of Bhopal and her family contributed Rs 50,000 towards the College building fund, and when the campaign for a Muslim university gathered momentum she donated another Rs 100,000, while other rulers, landlords and benefactors supported buildings, hostels and educational activities.
The Riding Club itself grew from precisely this culture of benefaction. Horse riding began at the MAO College in 1889 after Sir Syed persuaded local landlords to send horses and grooms so that students could learn horsemanship. Nawab Mohammad Ismail Khan Sherwani presented four horses, while the Nawab of Chhatari, Nawab Faiyyaz Ali Khan of Pahasu and the Bhikampur estate were among those who contributed horses or assistance. When the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College became Aligarh Muslim University in 1920, the legal position of the accumulated property was explicitly addressed by Parliament. Section 4 of the Aligarh Muslim University Act, 1920 dissolved the MAO College and Muslim University Association and transferred to the new University all their movable and immovable property, rights, powers and privileges, together with those of the Muslim University Foundation Committee. They became vested in AMU for the objects for which the University had been incorporated.
The process of benefaction did not end in 1920. A Government of India reply placed before the Rajya Sabha on 27 November 2024 provides a remarkable catalogue of later gifts and waqfs made to AMU. Among them were 7 acres and 18 dismil in Bahraich donated by Chaudhary Santram; 4.59 acres at Jawan Sikandarpur donated by the Land Management Committee and used for AMU’s Rural Health Training Centre; 1.970 hectares donated in long lease by Amar Pratap Singh, part of which accommodates the Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh AMU City School; and numerous waqf properties endowed by Bibi Fatima, Musharraf Ali Khan, Noor Jahan, Professor Moinuddin, Amir Mustafa Khan, Mohammad Habib-Ullah Khan, Dr Wali Mohammad, Abdur Rehman Khan and Sheikh Abdullah. Today these properties accommodate institutions ranging from the Faculty of Theology and Nadeem Tarin Hall to the AMU Picture Gallery, NSS office and Abdullah Nursery School. This history matters because AMU’s estate is not simply an accumulation of vacant plots around a modern university campus but a historical trust assembled over generations.
The Riding Club and a History of Vulnerable Land
Among the most contested areas has been the land associated with the Muslim University Riding Club and Riding Field. The University’s connection with horse riding goes back to the MAO College period, but the present dispute concerns land in the Bhamola Maafi-Nagla Patwari area which AMU says was lawfully acquired and has remained in University possession and use for many decades. For those who lived through the University of the 1990s, however, disputes surrounding the Riding Club land carry darker memories. When Mahmood-ur-Rahman became Vice-Chancellor in 1995, one of the issues confronting him was encroachment upon University property. At the welcome function organised for him by the Aligarh Muslim University Teachers’ Association, he publicly expressed his determination to have University lands freed from illegal possession. At that meeting, Dr Rajiv Sharma of the Department of History, who was then President of the Muslim University Riding Club, responded to the Vice-Chancellor’s declaration and assured him that he would hand over documents relating to the Riding Club lands which demonstrated the University’s claim over the property. Within about a week, Rajiv Sharma was murdered.
It is essential to state precisely what can and cannot be inferred from this sequence. No investigation or court ever established that Rajiv Sharma was murdered because of the Riding Club land, and it would therefore be historically irresponsible to present such a connection as established fact. Yet historical writing must also record contemporary perceptions when they themselves become part of the history of an institution. At the time, the proximity between Sharma’s undertaking regarding the property papers and his murder created widespread suspicion within sections of the University community that his death might somehow have been connected with disputes over valuable University land. The needle of suspicion in contemporary University discussions also pointed towards an advocate who was widely perceived at the time as being associated with controversial land transactions and alleged land-grabbing activities, including disputes concerning AMU property. That suspicion, too, must be described as contemporary perception rather than proven criminal responsibility, for I have found no judicial determination establishing that individual as responsible for Sharma’s murder.
A later account of Mahmood-ur-Rahman’s vice-chancellorship nevertheless confirms the wider background. It describes his campaign against encroachments as one of the major initiatives of his administration and states that prime land adjoining the Riding Club faced serious threats from land-grabbers. According to this account, encroachments were removed and a substantial area of University land was protected. The same narrative places Rajiv Sharma’s murder within this fraught atmosphere surrounding the Riding Club area. The murder remained one of the unresolved traumas remembered at AMU, and as late as 2007, an account of violence at the University grouped the murders of history teachers Rajiv Sharma and I. G. Khan among killings which had generated a profound sense within the University that justice had not been secured.
I. G. Khan: Another Riding Club President is Murdered
The later murder of Dr I. G. Khan of the Department of History inevitably revived these memories. I. G. Khan, too, had been closely associated with the Riding Club and had served as its President. He was also remembered within the University as someone concerned with protecting University property and resisting illegal encroachments. On 14 February 2003 he was murdered, and contemporary reporting records that he was shot near Jhunjhunupur/Jujharpur in the Akrabad area outside Aligarh and that his car was taken away. How did he reach there, is spite of his allegedly returning home from JNMC, a route quite different from where he was found murdered. Once again, suspicion circulated within sections of the University community that the murder might have had something to do with his activities and the conflicts surrounding property. The coincidence appeared especially sinister because another former President of the Riding Club, Rajiv Sharma, as noted above, had already been murdered.
Here the subsequent judicial record requires an important qualification. Unlike the Rajiv Sharma case, the investigation into I. G. Khan’s murder was transferred to the CBI. Arrests followed, and in January 2016 a Special CBI Court convicted three accused while acquitting two others for lack of evidence. The prosecution case accepted by the court treated the killing as connected with robbery of Khan’s car and other belongings. However the judgment left many un-answered questions and since then no follow up happened. It would therefore be incorrect today to describe the I. G. Khan murder as legally unsolved or to assert that a land dispute was judicially established as its motive. Yet the official verdict has done little to dispel the lingering sense within the University community that there was more to the killing than simple robbery. The circumstances of the murder, combined with the earlier killing of Rajiv Sharma and the intense local conflicts over AMU’s valuable land, continue to generate unease and speculation, even in the absence of legal proof connecting the two events. What remains historically significant is something different: at the time of the killings, sections of the University community perceived a relationship between violence, local vested interests, encroachment and the protection of University property, and that perception formed part of the atmosphere in which subsequent disputes over the Riding Club land were understood.
The Land Question Returns
The issue did not disappear. The origins of the present phase of the dispute can be traced at least to 2023, when the district administration was identifying government land and construction was underway for the flyover between Nagla Patwari and Purani Chungi. According to subsequent reporting, officials initially approached AMU for permission to erect a flyover pillar on land in University possession. AMU maintained that the property belonged to it, but revenue officials then examined the records and concluded that AMU’s name did not appear in the relevant khatauni and that the property was recorded as municipal or government land. That discovery became the basis of the Nagar Nigam’s case. AMU’s case was entirely different: it maintained that the land had been lawfully acquired under the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, and that the University possessed acquisition papers, archival records and other documentary evidence establishing its title. Thus emerged the fundamental contradiction which remains unresolved: the Nagar Nigam relies principally upon present revenue entries, while AMU relies upon historical acquisition proceedings and long possession.
The First Major Nagar Nigam Action: April 2025
On 30 April 2025, the conflict became physical. The Aligarh Nagar Nigam, accompanied by district officials, entered approximately 41,050 square metres, or about 41 bighas, of land in the Nagla Patwari-Bhamola area that had been in AMU’s possession for roughly eighty years and had been used for Riding Club activities. Municipal boards declaring the property to belong to the Nagar Nigam were installed, and the land was valued in contemporary reports at more than Rs 100 crore. Municipal officials said that revenue records showed the land as government or municipal property and claimed that AMU had been given opportunities to establish its ownership but had failed to produce satisfactory documents. AMU categorically disputed this version, stating that the Riding Field rightfully belonged to the University, that it had been obtained under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, and that it had remained in uninterrupted University possession for nearly eighty years. The University further alleged that it had received no formal notice before the municipal action and therefore no proper opportunity to place its documentary evidence before the authority taking possession.
This was not a minor disagreement over a boundary. Reports published immediately afterwards indicated that the Nagar Nigam was examining another approximately 50 bighas in the same Nagla Patwari area which it also claimed as municipal property and which remained in AMU’s possession, with municipal officials making clear that verification of further plots was continuing and that additional land would be recovered wherever the Corporation concluded that it belonged to the Nagar Nigam. Thus the 2025 operation was not presented by the Nagar Nigam itself as an isolated action but formed part of a wider programme of identifying and taking possession of lands recorded in municipal revenue records. From the University’s perspective, however, this amounted to a continuing threat to an estate that AMU claimed on the basis of historical acquisition and possession.
The Allahabad High Court Did Not Decide Ownership
The 2025 action was challenged before the Allahabad High Court by a group of AMU students. Their PIL asked the Court to prevent the Municipal Commissioner from interfering with AMU’s possession of the Riding Club land and to require removal of the municipal ownership board. The Court dismissed the petition on 21 May 2025, but the meaning of that dismissal is important. It did not hold that the land belonged to the Nagar Nigam. The Court observed that AMU was itself a juristic person possessing the resources and legal capacity to defend its property rights, and it also found that the student petition had not adequately identified the disputed land. Crucially, however, the Bench expressly clarified that dismissal of the PIL should not be treated as an expression of any opinion regarding the title of either the Nagar Nigam or Aligarh Muslim University, and if the title question arose in properly constituted proceedings, it was to be decided independently. This distinction is fundamental: the 2025 High Court order cannot legitimately be cited as judicial confirmation of Nagar Nigam ownership, for the High Court expressly left the title question open.
The State Government Orders an SIT Inquiry
The controversy did not end there. AMU took its case to the authorities, and in February 2026 the Uttar Pradesh Government ordered an SIT investigation into the 41-bigha episode. The Principal Secretary sought an investigation and the Aligarh divisional authorities asked the district administration to prepare a detailed report. Contemporary reports described the inquiry as examining the circumstances in which the land, which had remained in AMU’s possession since approximately 1945, came to be taken over by the Nagar Nigam. The ordering of an SIT inquiry itself demonstrated that the matter was not administratively closed. Meanwhile, the vulnerability of AMU’s larger estate was demonstrated from the opposite direction when in April 2026 the University itself acted against private encroachments on approximately 18 bighas of AMU land behind Nagla Qila, using machinery to remove illegal structures and announcing that fencing would be erected to protect the property. The problem, therefore, is wider than a single confrontation with the Nagar Nigam: AMU possesses a large and historically complicated estate surrounded by an expanding city in which land values have risen enormously, and such property inevitably attracts competing claims.
20 August 2026: The Nagar Nigam Moves Again
On 20 August 2026, the Nagar Nigam, district administration and police once again entered land associated with the Riding Field in the Bhamola Maafi-Nagla Patwari area. This time the authorities measured approximately 3.863 hectares, fenced the land with wire and erected boards identifying it as Nagar Nigam property. Municipal authorities described the land as government banjar and usar land and said that it had been freed from AMU’s possession, with its reported market value now being placed at approximately Rs 500 crore. Municipal Commissioner Prem Prakash Meena stated that the land would be used for public purposes, with possibilities including a police station, school, intermediate college, hospital and sports complex. AMU immediately rejected the action, and this time the University has put forward considerably more precise historical dates. According to the statement issued by AMU after the 20 August operation, the land is lawfully owned by the University, and the University possesses the documentary and legal evidence supporting that claim. Most importantly, the University states that the property was brought under acquisition proceedings under the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, from 13 June 1925, and that on 19 November 1940 the Governor of the United Provinces acquired the land for Aligarh Muslim University.
These are not insignificant assertions. If AMU possesses the original acquisition notification, award, possession memorandum and associated government records corresponding to these dates, those documents require legal examination alongside the revenue entries relied upon by the Nagar Nigam. A contemporary khatauni entry cannot by itself settle a complicated historical question of title where an opposing public institution produces earlier statutory acquisition records. Conversely, AMU must place the complete chain of documents in the appropriate legal proceedings and explain any discrepancy between those acquisition records and the later revenue entries. That is precisely what adjudication is for.
A Pattern of Repeated Attempts
Viewed historically, the events of April 2025 and August 2026 cannot easily be treated as unrelated episodes. In April 2025 the Nagar Nigam entered land used by AMU for approximately eighty years, put up its ownership boards and claimed approximately 41 bighas, simultaneously announcing that further land in AMU’s possession was under scrutiny. AMU protested, asserted documentary title and pursued the matter before the authorities. Students approached the High Court, and the High Court specifically refused to decide title against AMU. The dispute subsequently became serious enough for the Uttar Pradesh Government to order an SIT investigation in February 2026. Yet on 20 August 2026, while the fundamental dispute over ownership remained unresolved, the municipal and district authorities again physically measured, fenced and asserted possession over another substantial tract associated with the Riding Field. It is this recurrence that should concern the University community. The question is no longer merely whether one particular plot measures 41 bighas, 4.105 hectares or 3.863 hectares: it concerns a continuing conflict between historical title claimed through acquisition and long institutional possession on one side, and contemporary municipal revenue entries on the other. Physical possession by an administrative authority cannot substitute for adjudication of that conflict.
Revenue Records Are Not the Whole History of Ownership
There is another lesson here. Universities often possess property whose history extends across different legal regimes. AMU’s estate includes land inherited from the MAO College, property vested in it by the 1920 Act, land acquired under colonial land-acquisition legislation, gifts, purchases and waqfs. Records relating to such properties may therefore be dispersed among University files, Collectorate records, acquisition proceedings, old revenue maps, government notifications, mutation registers, waqf deeds and court records. That makes accurate record-keeping essential. AMU cannot simply rely upon the argument that everyone has always known a particular field to belong to the University, for long possession is important evidence but valuable property requires an unbroken documentary chain. The University administration consequently has an obligation to undertake a comprehensive audit of every parcel of AMU property: its gata number, area, mode of acquisition, original deed or notification, mutation history, present revenue entry, physical possession, encroachments and litigation status. Every nineteenth- and twentieth-century acquisition document should be digitised, certified copies should be obtained from government archives, and revenue entries inconsistent with title documents should be challenged and corrected before another crisis develops. The 2025 controversy itself demonstrated the consequences of allowing discrepancies between historical ownership documents and current revenue records to persist.
But administrative deficiencies, if they exist, do not transfer ownership. If the Nagar Nigam believes that land occupied by AMU belongs to it, it is entitled to establish that claim through law. AMU is equally entitled to have its acquisition records and other evidence adjudicated before being dispossessed. Neither side should determine title merely by arriving with officials, police, fencing material and an ownership board.
From Rajiv Sharma to 2026
That is what gives the present dispute its extraordinary historical resonance. More than thirty years ago, a newly appointed Vice-Chancellor, Mahmood-ur-Rahman, stood before the AMU Teachers’ Association and announced his determination to recover University land from illegal possession. Rajiv Sharma, President of the Riding Club, responded that he would give the Vice-Chancellor the documents concerning the Riding Club property, and within days he was dead. No court established that his murder resulted from the land dispute, and it should never be presented as though one had. But the suspicion that surrounded the killing became embedded in the University’s institutional memory because it occurred amid conflicts over valuable land and because Sharma had so recently undertaken to produce the documents. Years later another history teacher and another former Riding Club President, I. G. Khan, was murdered. Contemporary suspicion again generated speculation about property disputes, although the subsequent CBI prosecution produced convictions on a robbery case and did not establish land as the motive. Yet the official verdict has not entirely dispelled the unease within the University community, where the circumstances of the two killings continue to invite reflection on the powerful local interests that surround AMU’s valuable land. The lesson is therefore not that the murders prove some continuing conspiracy, for they do not, but that disputes over AMU’s land have a long and troubled history and have repeatedly become entangled, in University memory, with questions of local influence, encroachment, administrative weakness, enormously valuable real estate and the ability of the institution to defend its property.
A Public Trust Must Be Defended
There is finally a larger principle involved. The people who gave land and property to the MAO College and later to Aligarh Muslim University did not donate it so that future generations could treat it casually. Nor did they give it to be absorbed, through administrative neglect or competing claims, into the expanding real-estate economy of Aligarh. They gave it for education. The AMU Act of 1920 recognised that continuity when it vested the accumulated movable and immovable property of the MAO College, Muslim University Association and Foundation Committee in the University. Generations after 1920 continued the tradition through gifts and waqfs, and the Government of India’s own statement before Parliament in 2024 confirms the remarkable extent of this continuing benefaction. AMU therefore carries a fiduciary as well as an administrative responsibility towards its estate. It must defend every acre that legally belongs to it, identify and remove private encroachments, correct defective revenue entries, preserve and digitise its title documents, and where another public authority claims ownership, pursue the matter relentlessly through the appropriate judicial and administrative forums.
The Nagar Nigam, for its part, is entitled to protect genuine municipal property. But where AMU produces acquisition records dating to 1925 and 1940, where University possession extends across generations, where the High Court has expressly not decided title in favour of the Nagar Nigam, and where the State Government itself has considered the earlier action sufficiently contentious to warrant an SIT investigation, the proper course is transparent legal adjudication, not repeated assertions of possession on the ground. The events of 20 August 2026 therefore raise a question larger than the fate of 3.863 hectares of Riding Field: who protects the historical property of a public university, and by what process may that property be taken from it? For Aligarh Muslim University the answer should be clear. The land entrusted to the institution by benefactors, acquired for it under law and inherited from the movement that created it belongs not to any particular Vice-Chancellor or administration. It constitutes an institutional inheritance held for generations yet to come. Its protection is therefore not simply a dispute over land: it is the protection of a public trust. AMU administration should therefore be more pro-active than they have been in the past.
ASHA: Blast From The Past 