The Question of Academic Freedom
Niraja Gopal Jayal | 13 November 2023 | The India Forum
Over the last decade or so, academic freedom has been in the news across the world, as have a few other hot button topics such as democracy, autocracy, populism. I would like to suggest that these are not unrelated.
Let me begin with a reference to two sets of data that have an international coverage. The first is from the Swedish think-tank V-Dem, which estimates that close to 80 per cent of the world’s population today lives in countries where academic freedom is not well-protected, at least not in practice. 1 The Annual Democracy report from the same think-tank estimates that 72 per cent of the world’s population today lives in autocracies. 2 This is a striking parallel but perhaps not a surprising one, suggesting that as democracy declines, academic freedom too tends to decline.
India is no exception to this rule. From a once decent record of academic freedom, it is currently placed in the bottom 20-30% of countries on the Academic Freedom Index. The fact that this parallels its downgrading on the Democracy Index, from a liberal-democracy to an electoral autocracy, is arguably not a coincidence.