New Delhi — Universities in the western Indian state of Gujarat said they would treat students accused of having links to terrorist groups as guilty until proved innocent, a top state university official told The Indian Express.

The official did not specify whether that meant accused students would be suspended or expelled.

“The fact that they have been arrested means there is a 50-50 chance that they indeed are terrorists,” said Kamlesh Joshipura, head of a committee of deans of all Gujarat’s universities and dean of Saurashtra University, a state institution.

The committee also criticized the head of Jamia Millia Islamia, a university in Delhi, for stating that he would arrange legal counsel for Muslim students arrested as suspects in the serial bomb explosions last month in Delhi.

Gujarat’s universities are following the lead of Narendra Modi, head of the state government, who criticized India’s federal government for being soft on terrorism following the attacks in Delhi. For several years, Mr. Modi — who belongs to a right-wing Hindu nationalist party — has been pushing the state’s universities and schools to promote the party’s fundamentalist ideology.

Earlier this year the Gujarat government filed criminal charges against Ashis Nandy, a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, for an article in which he said the state’s middle class was “mired in its inane versions” of religious sectarianism.

Last year activists in a group closely associated with Mr. Modi’s party stormed the fine-arts faculty at Gujarat’s Maharaja Sayajirao University, vandalized a student’s paintings, and beat him up for allegedly offending Hindu sentiments through his artworks. The arts faculty at the university is still in a shambles. —Shailaja Neelakantan