How retraints were imposed on academic freedom on the IIM-Ahmedabad campus
Sandeep Pandey | 12 February 2024 | Counterview
This is the seventh consecutive academic year when I would have gone as a visiting faculty member to the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad to teach an Elective course on Transformational Social Movements to the second year of Post Graduate Programme students. But the invitation has not come so far and it looks like it is the end of my teaching stint at IIM, at least, so long as the Bhartiya Janata Party remains in power at the centre.
I had got an inkling of things to come even during my month long last stay on campus during June-July, 2023. For the first time, guests, including a retired High Court Judge, were not allowed to enter the campus to meet me. A Harvard scholar was told that he could enter the campus only on the condition that he would not see me. I had to take a film making team which had arrived from Mumbai, after they waited at the main gate for more than a couple of hours on a rainy day, to conduct an interview on the practice of prostitution by a community in a village in my work area as an activist in Hardoi district of Uttar Pradesh, to Ahmedabad Management Association campus across the road from IIM old campus….