Red Fort blast: How one Haryana campus landed in the crosshairs

Chandigarh: When a hatchback packed with explosives blew up near Delhi’s Red Fort on November 10, killing 15 people, the trail of the alleged suicide bomber in a white coat led investigators down the Gurgaon–Faridabad road, into the stony Aravalli belt at Dhauj, and straight to Al-Falah University. The private minority institution runs a medical college and a sizeable teaching hospital on the Haryana side of the border.

Doctors employed on the campus are now at the heart of what agencies describe as a multi-state terror module. What began as a counter-terror operation has widened into a sweeping examination of how this university was created, how its land bank grew, how it acquired accreditation, and why official complaints and local objections were allowed to gather dust for years.

Campus under a cloud

Among those linked to the module is Dr Umar Nabi, a doctor at Al-Falah’s medical college who is believed to have been behind the wheel of the blast-hit car. Also under arrest is junior doctor Dr Muzammil Ganaie. Two other medics, widely referred to as Dr Shaheen and Dr Shine, along with HR staffer Jameel, have been rounded up for questioning, while another faculty member, Dr Nisar, remains untraceable.

The university’s vice-chancellor has attempted to distance the institution from the individuals in custody, insisting that any alleged wrongdoing is personal and that search teams did not find explosive material in laboratories or stores. But with each new arrest, the demarcation between the “individual” and the “institution” has become harder to maintain.

A medical powerhouse

Al-Falah did not begin as a medical institution. The Al-Falah Charitable Trust, set up in the mid-1990s in Delhi’s Okhla area, first launched an engineering college on roughly 30 acres in Dhauj in 1997. Over the next decade and a half, it added courses and infrastructure and secured an ‘A’ grade from the national accreditation agency for its engineering programmes.

The turning point came in 2014, when the then-Haryana government conferred private university status. Recognition from national higher-education regulators followed, opening the door to other professional courses, including medicine.

By 2019, a full-fledged medical college and hospital had been set up, and the first MBBS batch was admitted. In January 2025, a new super-speciality block was inaugurated, taking the hospital’s capacity to more than 800 beds.

Today, the Faridabad campus lists about 200 MBBS seats and several dozen postgraduate seats. Course fees place it firmly in the high-end private bracket. The university advertises a substantial quota for minority students and draws large numbers from neighbouring Mewat, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jammu & Kashmir.

How did 30 acres become nearly 80?

Once the blast case broke, scrutiny quickly shifted from the hospital corridors to the land beneath the campus. Records with the district administration show that while the original engineering college sat on about 30 acres, the current footprint is in the 70–75-acre range.

Revenue officials, panchayat representatives and residents allege that the college fenced off the traditional village paths used by farmers and herders, forcing landowners to sell.

Questions have been raised about the new multi-storey hostels, hospital blocks, staff quarters, and a mosque inside the campus.

In mid-November, a team of officials from the revenue and planning departments landed on campus with measuring chains and maps, verifying revenue entries and collecting sale deeds. Their report will decide which parts of the campus qualify as legal and which are unauthorised constructions.

Within the government, there are talks of sending in excavators if encroachments are found, a politically loaded image in a state where the “bulldozer” has become a symbol of tough action.

Marks, morality and missing complaints

While officials pore over maps, a clutch of former and current students has been speaking about life inside the walls. Some Hindu women students allege that they were encouraged to fast during Ramzan and to adopt the hijab, with the assurance that such “participation” would earn them extra internal marks. Those who declined, they say, risked being sidelined in class or clinical postings. Others describe a general climate in which religious conservatism was strong and questioning it was frowned upon.

Another thread in these accounts concerns the university’s relationship with local law enforcement. Officers at the nearest police station have told reporters that, for nearly three years, they received almost no complaints from the campus – not even about routine fights or harassment that are part of the landscape at most large institutions. Even injured patients brought in after accidents seldom translated into police cases unless the matter was severe.

Licences, logos and the fraud cases

Separate from the terror and land questions is a third line of inquiry: Whether Al-Falah misrepresented its status to students and regulators.

The higher-education watchdog and the accreditation agency have flagged what they describe as serious inconsistencies between the university’s claims on its website and official records of accreditation and eligibility for central grants. Their complaints to the Delhi Police led to two FIRs for cheating and forgery, centred on allegations that the university projected itself as enjoying approvals and statuses it did not, in fact, hold at the time.

If these charges are eventually proved, degrees issued during disputed periods could be challenged, putting the future of hundreds of graduates and current students in limbo.

Politics over affiliation

All of this has fed into a sharp political confrontation in Haryana. Opposition leaders stress that it was the Congress-led government that piloted the law granting Al-Falah the university status in 2014, opening the gates for professional courses. Ruling-party leaders counter that successive governments, including their rivals, looked the other way as the campus expanded.

The state health establishment has tried to distance itself, pointing out that approvals for private medical universities largely flow from national bodies and the higher education department, not solely from the health ministry. Health Minister Aarti Rao has underlined that her department did not grant affiliation to Al-Falah and that any scrutiny of how university status and medical permissions were given lies primarily with higher education and central regulators.

A campus at a crossroads

For the students and young doctors who came to Dhauj hoping for a ticket to a medical career, the immediate worry is less about politics and more about the value of their degrees. Some already anticipate awkward questions during interviews; others fear being tarred by association with allegations they had no role in.

Meanwhile, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) carried out a raid at Al-Falah University in Faridabad. Twenty-five locations linked to the university’s trustees and associated persons are under the scanner.

At the same time, a video of suicide bomber Dr Umar, recorded before the blast, has surfaced. In it, he says, “People do not properly understand suicide attacks. These attacks on democracy cannot be justified in any good society. The biggest problem with suicide attacks is that the attacker believes his death is certain. Because of this, he becomes extremely dangerous. He feels that death is his final destination. Thinking like this is wrong. It is against life, society and the law.”