The long walk to academic freedom in India
Saikat Majumdar | 28 September 2023 | The Scroll
Narinder Nanu / AFP
Early in 2016, when I teaching at a US university, traumatic events on the campus of major public universities in India – the suicide of Rohith Vemula in January, and the arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar in February – augured a terrifying crisis in the future of liberal education across the country. Among a range of bleak likelihoods, I was forced to think about the freedom of thought, expression, and protest on the campus of the new private universities, emergent at that time, posed to change the prevailing Nehruvian socialism of Indian post-secondary studies by introducing alternatives to state-sponsored education.
The critical question, at that time, felt something like this: would such institutions turn into exclusive bastions of wealth, power and privilege, as that had already happened with Indian secondary education, where private schools have essentially replaced the failed public system for anyone in the middle class and above? What would, then, be the possibility of dissent on such campuses? Would their financial independence assure greater academic freedom? Writing in May, I had little idea that the university of which I was going to be a part beginning that autumn would get caught in a bitter controversy later that very summer, over an online petition against military activities in Kashmir, leading to the resignation of a faculty member and two members of the staff.