Academic freedom in India is not just in danger, it’s in a state of siege
Supriya Chaudhuri (FOR)
Shortly before Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s widely publicised resignation from Ashoka University made academic freedom the subject of national debate, another event received less attention. This was the refusal of Errol D’Souza, director of IIM Ahmedabad, to allow the Ministry of Education (MoE) to review a PhD thesis approved by his institute.
A Rajya Sabha MP had objected to the thesis’s description of the BJP. The MoE demanded a copy of the thesis last year, but D’Souza replied that a thesis passed by a duly-constituted academic board could not be judged by the ministry. The incident was flagged by the MoE to claim greater say in the governance of IIMs; the Law ministry dismissed the claim as inconsistent with the provisions of the IIM Act.
We may hear more on this, given the recent, forced departure of the director of IIM Calcutta. Mehta’s resignation and D’Souza’s refusal, outwardly dissimilar events, both illustrate the dangers to academic freedom in India. They are not warning signals: they indicate that we are already in over our heads, ‘not waving but drowning.’
Mehta was a public intellectual at a private university, voicing a fearless critique of the government in national media, but impelled to step down to save his institution from the government’s displeasure. D’Souza, director of a public institution, took a stand on academic first principles, arguing that the institute itself, and the judgment of peers, are the sole arbiters of academic merit in their domain.
Mehta’s resignation, despite subsequent obfuscation and back-tracking, drew attention to the vulnerability of even a privileged, private university to the vindictiveness of a regime intolerant of criticism. D’Souza’s refusal, supported by provisions of the IIM Act, claimed university autonomy, but in the face of government harassment and interference.
The incidents involve two kinds of academic freedom: engagement in the public sphere on issues of politics and society, and researching such matters within the university. They do not demonstrate Ashoka’s failure or IIM-A’s resolution, but bracket a whole host of assaults upon academic freedom by government machinery, overt or covert, in a new India.
Universities and their constituents — teachers, students, and support staff — have long been at the receiving end of the government’s clamping down, directly or indirectly, upon dissent, public critique, and espousal of human rights. Long before Mehta, Rajendran Narayanan and two others who signed a petition on Kashmir had to resign from Ashoka University. Faculty and students are targeted for unpopular intellectual opinions, campuses attacked by intruders backed by the regime, meetings subjected to police surveillance, homes raided, books and papers seized.
Activists like Shoma Sen of Nagpur University, Sudha Bharadwaj of the National Law University of Delhi, M T Hany Babu of Delhi University, Anand Teltumbde of the Goa Institute of Management, and JNU students Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita, Umar Khalid, and Sharjeel Imam are detained under UAPA as ‘urban naxals’ conspiring to overthrow the government by fomenting inter-caste or inter-community violence. Sharjeel Imam stands accused of being ‘radicalised’ by books he read for his MPhil thesis on Partition violence.
Every regime, leftist, liberal, or rightwing, tries to influence the nation’s belief-world. Nevertheless, the freedom to question and argue, to examine the empirical grounds of knowledge, and to investigate scientific, social and philosophical assumptions, are key to intellectual life and academic value.
The current assault is on the institution of higher education itself, seeking to destroy its structures and limit its powers of enquiry. I have myself witnessed government-appointed nominees to research committees shutting down (by official mandate) work on caste, minorities, or social inequalities. Syllabi are revised, like the new UGC-drafted history course; research on the Gayatri mantra as a Covid-cure is funded, while existing projects under RUSA are defunded. Appointments are manipulated, as to the JNU Physics Department.
More jobs are contractual, increasing staff precarity. New service rules cancel the right to free speech, treating public universities as government departments, and private universities as business ventures. Government proposals to bring Delhi University under the Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA, enabling arrests without warrant for ‘violations’), and to impose Central Civil Services (CCS) Conduct Rules on JNU were ostensibly shelved in 2018. The following year, 48 teachers of JNU were charge-sheeted for participating in a peaceful campus protest.
At Visva-Bharati, another Central university, CCS gag orders are in place to prevent faculty from publicising administrative persecution, with more than 100 staff show-caused, charge-sheeted or suspended. Forget Kashmir — in 2018, the Manipur University showdown led to a five-day internet ban. At lesser-known colleges and universities, exploitation and abuse are rampant.
The relatively free and open space of debate, enquiry and knowledge-acquisition that we call the university is already lost, with academics and intellectuals in India subjected to intimidation, persecution and loss of rights in a climate of fear and repression.
Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor Emerita, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
A bunch of culture-controllers cannot bully us into thinking we are unfree
Makarand B Paranjpe (AGAINST)
Resisting the bully pulpit is also a way of exercising academic freedom. Therefore, the question is not whether academic freedom is under attack. It always is, in some way or other. The question is what are we doing about it? Blaming the other side, the one whose ideology we dislike, only shows our own intellectual chicanery.
Let me offer my own experience of over twenty years as Professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University. I was constantly subjected to various forms of direct or indirect pressure because my views were unpalatable to the dominant ‘LeLi’ (Left-liberal) groups that ran the campus.
If I were to use more trendy terminology, I would call it the five-B toolkit of tyranny: branding, browbeating, bullying, boycott — or of none if these work, bull**it.
The first step is to brand someone or stick a pejorative label on them. Sanghi, bhakt, fascist are the standard terms of abuse in the LeLi lexicon. Usually, that alone is enough to stamp out unwelcome views.
You can add any number of whiplash expletives to excoriate those you don’t like — Brahminical, patriarchal, misogynist, Hindu nationalist, Hindutva-vadi, Chaiwala,Yogi, and so on. They serve the same purpose. As a whistle to bring out the “running dogs,” not of capitalism as used to be the phrase in the heyday of the Comintern, but of cancel-culture bullies and other crusaders of political correctness who police global academia. Not surprisingly, these campaigners and champions of so-called liberal values hunt in packs and are themselves an illiberal lot. They do not tolerate other people’s right to disagree with them.
Think of how evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins was cancelled after being invited to speak in one of the most politically active and radical of US campuses, the University of California at Berkeley in 2017. The reason? His alleged Islamophobia. A charge he has vehemently denied. Dawkins is critical of all religions, including Christianity.
Here’s another example closer home, from India’s supposedly most cultured city, Kolkata. In May 2016, Vivek Agnihotri’s screening of Buddha in a Traffic Jam at Jadavpur University’s Triguna Dev auditorium was cancelled at the last minute. He was heckled and attacked at Gate No 8 of the university. His hand was pulled out of the window by a student who called him “the murderer of Rohith Vemula.” When Agnihotri responded, “Rohith wasn’t murdered. He had committed suicide,” the student screamed, “You f***ing liar! He was murdered.”
When Pratap Bhanu Mehta resigns from Ashoka University, there are 150 academics from all over the world yelling that it’s an attack on academic freedom. But how many of them wrote letters to the vice-chancellors, directors, or deans of institutions where Agnihotri’s film was debarred or when he was attacked and heckled?
Mehta and Agnihotri — apples and oranges? Perhaps. But if one were to respond to one metaphor with another, what’s sauce for goose is — or should be — sauce for the gander. Unfortunately, it isn’t. And that’s what’s wrong with those who decry the end of academic freedom.
Rashmi Samant, the first Indian woman to be elected President of the Oxford Student Union last month, was forced to resign even though she had got 1,996 votes, (more than all her opponents combined), because of her social media posts from the past. Accused of anti-Semitism, racism, and transphobism, her posts were considered sufficient practically to crucify her.
No one said that she had the “academic freedom” to voice them. On the other hand, an Oxford post-doctoral researcher who attacked her, Abhijit Sarkar, posted an abusive diatribe on Instagram on February 17, with an image of Samant’s parents, calling her home state, Karnataka, a “bastion of Islamophobic forces.”
He reportedly added: Far right desi forces … want to reinstate sanatan Hindutva culture. Oxford students are still not ready for ‘Sanatani’ president.”
So what’s different? Only this. Now there’s a push-back. Sarkar is himself being investigated for hate-speech and Hinduphobia. The so-called Sanghis, chaddis, Hindutva-wadis, and what not, are not willing to take it lying down. They will react, even retaliate.
Of course, an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind, as Mahatma Gandhi famously put it. Did I say “Mahatma”? Sorry. Bapu has been cancelled too. Wasn’t he a racist, imperialist-collaborator, and child-abuser? If Gandhi can so easily be cancelled, what of lesser mortals like the rest of us?
That is why the question needs to be framed differently. Academic freedom inheres in not being forced to say yes or no to complex questions such as these, especially to entertain those who may or may not really care.
Our times demand that voices of sanity, reason, and conversation are not drowned out by the violent cacophony of hatred, polemics, and political posturing. We must not let these forces bully us into compliance or silence us in the name of freedom.
A small group of culture-controllers cannot bully us into believing that we are un-free. Instead of trying to score cheap points by a fruitless blame-game, let’s stand up to bullies from all sides.
Makarand B Paranjpe is director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Views are personal
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