Deconstructing the Racist Campaign against SSMU President Darshan Daryanani
On April 11, 2022, President of the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) Darshan Daryanani was impeached at a Special General Assembly. This was the result of a sustained, year-long campaign to remove him from elected office, which included an unjustified five-month suspension and a public character assassination by SSMU Directors, Executives, Senators and Councillors. Using racist white feminist tropes, abusive procedures and blatant double-standards, SSMU representatives sought to smear Daryanani, without evidence, as an “unsafe” and “aggressive misogynist” unfit for office. The eventual removal of Daryanani, a strong supporter of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights McGill (SPHR), also overlapped with the SSMU Board of Directors’ ever-increasing repression of Palestine solidarity activism, including the Board’s recent suspension of SPHR McGill for 105 days.
So…what happened?
Shortly after Daryanani was elected in March 2021, Vice-President (External) Sacha Delouvrier unsuccessfully attempted to eliminate him through a “vote of no-confidence” dated May 14, 2021, before Daryanani had even taken office as SSMU President.
In June 2021, right after Daryanani promoted a public investigation into the blacklisting of pro-Palestine students by SSMU Board members, three white Board members filed retaliatory “harassment” complaints against Daryanani. On September 23, 2021, the three complainants convinced their fellow Board members to suspend Daryanani, “pending an investigation,” although the actual mandate of this investigation was not even specified. The Board then proceeded to systematically delay the investigation, and repeatedly extend Daryanani’s suspension for five months.
Only after Daryanani sent all Directors a formal “demand letter” protesting the violation of his employee rights, did the SSMU pay over $24,000 (an exorbitant amount financed through students’ tuition) to start an investigation. Once the investigation finally began, one complainant effectively withdrew their complaint. After the SSMU-mandated investigator met with the two remaining complainants in late November and early December, the investigation was converted into an “admissibility analysis.” The investigator declared that she did not even need to interview Daryanani to conclude that “none of these complaints are reasonably susceptible to lead to a conclusion of psychological harassment if they were respectively subject to an investigation. Indeed, even if all the alleged facts were proven as they were reported to us by the Complainants, they could not constitute a situation of harassment for either one of them.”
The Board was therefore obliged to fully reinstate Daryanani on February 14, 2022, yet SSMU Board members and councillors revived the campaign to permanently remove him less than a week later. Leveraging the same unfounded accusations, these efforts culminated in Daryanani’s expulsion from office on April 11, 2022.
The entire process, from Daryanani’s initial suspension to his impeachment, was devoid of procedural fairness. Board members who complained against Daryanani were directly involved in the decisions to suspend him for five months, in flagrant violation of the SSMU’s own Conflict of Interest Policy, without ever providing any evidence to justify such mistreatment. At the Special General Assembly where Daryanani was impeached, and where he was allowed barely five minutes to speak, SSMU representatives repeatedly failed to explain how the perception of an “angry” or “aggressive tone” warranted the impeachment of a democratically-elected president.
Racist tropes and white feminist narratives
At first glance, it may not seem relevant to bring up the ‘whiteness’ of the Board members who accused Daryanani of “harassment.” Yet the campaign against Daryanani deliberately played into racist colonial tropes, which have long portrayed Black and Brown men as inherent ‘threats’ to white women in particular. In fact, the complaints in question focused almost exclusively on Daryanani’s “tone.” The complainants alleged that he had used a “frustrated,” “aggressive,” or “angry tone,” and that he had “raised his voice,” or even “moved his hands” in a certain way. In other words: lacking any evidence of genuine “harassment,” the complainants resorted to scrutinising and policing Daryanani’s body language and voice, in order to frame him as “aggressive” and “sexist.”
As Palestine solidarity organisers who regularly face racist surveillance and doxing, we are all too familiar with how the vocabulary of “un-safety” and “violence” is co-opted and weaponized against racialized individuals, as a way to undermine, dehumanise and disqualify them from holding positions of political power. In order to justify the removal of Daryanani to the student body, SSMU Directors, Executives, Senators, and Councillors publicly smeared Daryanani, the student union’s only visibly racialized Executive, in precisely this way. Through SSMU meetings and anonymous statements in McGill Daily articles, SSMU officials aggressively promoted a narrative about Daryanani’s supposed “impropriety,” “sexism,” or even “gendered violence” without ever providing evidence other than his perceived “tone.”
Once this narrative had formed, the actual result of the admissibility analysis hardly mattered to those who voted for impeachment. In the ‘court of SSMU opinion,’ Daryanani could only be treated as guilty, despite having been proven innocent. Even his attempts to contest the narrative were treated as evidence of his inherent “aggressivity.” At the Special General Assembly where his impeachment was debated, SSMU Director Charlotte Gurung advocated for Daryanani’s removal based on the assertion that in the previous General Assembly, “Daryanani’s behaviour was aggressive and his tone threatening.” One student attendee mused: “Has anyone considered that Darshan’s tone was ‘angry’ because he had just been suspended for four months for no reason?” In this example, Daryanani was vilified for having spoken up at the Winter 2022 General Assembly, after several SSMU Directors and Councillors had taken turns branding him as a “sexist” whose very existence on campus was characterised as “unsafe to women and gender minorities.” For SSMU Directors and Councillors, it was not enough to paint Daryanani as a dangerous, uncivilised misogynist “unfit for office.” It was not enough to suspend him for five months. He also had to be punished for defending himself.
The rhetoric deployed against Daryanani is indicative of how racism is normalised within our student union. In this case, racism was made acceptable through the deployment of a white feminist narrative: three white women on the SSMU Board merely had to state that they felt “uncomfortable” with Daryanani’s “tone” or “hand gestures,” in order to secure his lengthy suspension and impeachment. As soon as white Board members levelled these accusations against a racialized man, other SSMU representatives and students, including people of colour, fell into line, decrying Daryanani as “sexist,” “harmful,” and “unfit” for elected office. Instead of critically evaluating the genuine merits of the accusations against Daryanani, the McGill Daily swiftly endorsed the smear campaign initiated by Board members, thus legitimising the racist narrative of the “sexist,” “unsafe” Daryanani.
Double-standards and the impunity of whiteness
Meanwhile, other (white) Executives were quickly forgiven for documented acts of racism, sexism, and harassment. Following his failed “vote of no-confidence” in May 2021, Vice-President (External) Sacha Delouvrier attempted to prevent the reinstatement of Daryanani in February 2022, by accusing him of “traits of the individual that cause an unsafe environment for those around him.” However, it was Delouvrier who received at least six separate complaints from both employees and co-workers, regarding repeated racist, sexist and otherwise abusive behaviour.
Whereas none of the allegations against Daryanani were found to even merit an investigation, Delouvrier was found guilty of incompetence, “creating an unsafe environment,” and “harassment” against at least three SSMU employees. Yet Daryanani was suspended for five months and then impeached, while the Board only suspended Delouvrier for a total of six days. Ironically, Director and Vice-President (University Affairs) Claire Downie, who had advocated for Daryanani’s lengthy suspension, argued against a similar suspension for Delouvrier, stating that “lengthy suspensions would be detrimental to the functioning of the SSMU.” Although SSMU Speaker Alexandre Ashkir received formal requests for impeachment proceedings against both Daryanani and Delouvrier, Ashkir only called a Special General Assembly to impeach Daryanani. When Delouvrier was finally compelled to resign following the leak of his suspension report, SSMU Executives sought to salvage his reputation by sending out a mass email “thanking” him for his “hard work.”
This phenomenon, whereby the oppressive behaviour of SSMU insiders is tolerated and rewarded, makes a mockery of the Board’s assertion that Daryanani’s removal had anything to do with “harmful behaviour.” As SPHR discovered, after we ourselves were suspended for 105 days over a satirical statement, the SSMU Board routinely uses its “harassment” policies to suppress critical voices and eliminate political opponents. It has no interest in applying these policies to protect constituents, because most McGill students are not members of the elitist clique which pretends to represent us. It appears that Daryanani, a visible outsider who spoke with a distinctive South Asian accent, was never part of that clique either.
The ever-relevant question of Palestine
Throughout Daryanani’s suspension and impeachment, no McGill newspaper sought to confront the racist tropes deployed against him, or to question the political dimension of his removal. In March 2021, Daryanani was the only SSMU Executive elected with the endorsement of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) McGill. Following his reinstatement in February 2022, Daryanani was the only SSMU Executive to publicly defend the democratically-approved Palestine Solidarity Policy. His public support for the Policy, through online statements and speeches at SPHR rallies, prompted a formal “warning” from SSMU Directors. It also prompted Danielle Fuchs, the President of Hillel Montreal, a prominent Zionist organization, to urge students to impeach “this misogynist.”
Had any campus media properly investigated Daryanani’s loudest opponents within SSMU, they might have also noticed that Nathaniel Saad, who launched the removal campaign, is currently President of the staunchly Zionist Conservative Students’ Association of McGill. Andrés Pérez Tiniacos, who presented the final impeachment motion, has himself embraced Zionist causes: in 2019, he advocated in favour of Hillel Montreal’s offer of free propaganda trips to SSMU representatives, funded by pro-Trump billionaire Sheldon Adelson.
While Daryanani’s removal should not be solely reduced to his support for Palestine, there is no doubt that anti-Palestinian motives played a key role in the impeachment of the most openly pro-Palestine SSMU President in recent memory. Only three days after Daryanani’s impeachment, Vice-President (Finance) Eric Sader and Vice-President (Student Life) Karla Heisele Cubilla stated that the Palestine Solidarity Policy’s approval by referendum “was in no way binding,” contrary to Daryanani’s previous declarations. A few days later, the Board overturned the Policy, in collusion with the McGill administration.
“Harassment” means whatever the Board doesn’t like
The campus media’s failure to question the racially-coded rhetoric and political motives of Board members and Zionist SSMU Councillors served to embolden personal attacks against Daryanani. Through misinformation and gossip, vague claims of “sexism” and “impropriety” quickly morphed into outrageous assertions about “sexual and gendered violence” against “survivors”, which nobody had ever alleged in the first place. These attacks were never denounced by any SSMU Board members, who sought to remove Daryanani by any means necessary, and who did not believe that Daryanani’s personal health or dignity were worthy of protection. Ironically, the same Board issued a statement denouncing “personal attacks” in response to SPHR’s parody article, because we had used terms such as “backbones made of jelly” and “dictator” to describe their anti-democratic actions. In the eyes of the SSMU ‘Board of Dictators,’ “harassment” means anything that offends its own members, exclusively. The rest of us are expected to shut up, or be punished.
A duty to speak out
As a student group committed to combating colonialism, racism, discrimination, misinformation, and misrepresentation, we have a duty to denounce the hypocritical and racist campaign to remove SSMU President Darshan Daryanani. Fueled by cynical office politics, white supremacy, and the Board’s appetite for abusing its power, the suspension and removal of Daryanani, much like the suspension of SPHR, make a mockery of any principle of fairness, integrity, honesty, or justice.
We therefore call on the Students’ Society of McGill University to hold itself accountable to its own Constitution, mission, and values. The SSMU has the obligation to publicly apologize to Daryanani for the misconduct of its representatives throughout the past year, including the five-month suspension, the smear campaign, the impeachment, and other clear instances of discrimination against Daryanani. More importantly, we call on all organisations and individuals in the McGill community to strongly denounce the shameful way in which the language of ‘social justice’ was co-opted to justify the racist persecution of a student.