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US President Donald Trump’s aggressive clampdown on academia over the past few weeks has brought back not-so-fond memories. His bullying tactics instilled renewed relevance to my own experiences in the last decade of the Indian right-wing’s explicit bias towards its academic critics, the West’s implicit bias towards non-white scholars – and the universal indifference of many academics on the left amid the singling out of critical scholarship.
In the early 2000s, writing about the Hindu-Muslim violence of 2002 in Gujarat, first as a journalist and later as an academic, I gained a deeper understanding of violent conflict that went beyond communal riots. With rigorous training from Oxford, I was able to teach and publish extensively on the topic.
Yet, as expected, my academic research on Gujarat found little favour with the Bharatiya Janata Party because it systematically demonstrated the party’s central role in orchestrating attacks on Muslims in 2002. (The research of several other scholars faced the same hostility.)
The rise of majoritarianism brought out the worst in Indian academics who endorsed the ideology of the Sangh Parivar. Many of them began to voice it explicitly. The faculty at various universities, including the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management, either smugly advised me to change the topic of my research because it would “incite students” or berated me for “unnecessarily blaming” the BJP for the attacks on Muslims in 2002.
The fact that the findings of my research were replicable and, therefore, could be critiqued academically, did not help.
These sneaky put-downs of critical scholarship were being dealt out before the BJP (and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) had attained its stranglehold over Indian politics; the BJP merely emboldened latent biases.
Come 2014 and signs of academic decline became more apparent. Attacks on Indian academics who did not abide by government policy were abundant. Even Nobel laureate Amartya Sen was not spared. A controversial, politically dystopic model of governance took root. Educational institutions began to fail intellectually, as political ideology became a vital criterion for appointing faculty and vice-chancellors.
That was also the time, after my PhD, that I began to scour the academic job market in India. Fifteen-odd universities later it became apparent that academics in both public and private universities in India were divided: one side feared the government, the other that endorsed it. (There were a few exceptions, but not enough.)
A well-meaning professor in Hyderabad warned me that I stood no chance of finding a job “since we have just been compelled by the BJP to recruit two unqualified political scientists because they will toe the RSS line”.
Once my book on the Gujarat violence was released in 2019, things took a turn for the worse. After a prominent social science institute in Surat scheduled a discussion about it, the Gujarat government threatened to withdraw the centre’s research funds and create trouble for the faculty. The institute cancelled the event, like it had been told to. This created a domino effect: talks at other academic venues were scrapped too.
The fear of retaliation is understandable in India where universities have struggled for autonomy for years. Public universities are funded by the government and the selection committees for faculty recruitment are government ideologues.
Except for the odd maverick, no one wants to upset the government fearing vindictive witch-hunts and vitriol on social media. Private universities appear intellectually secure but aren’t always so: once Ashoka University’s Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Arvind Subramanian resigned in protest of deteriorating academic freedom, the true nature of the populist hold on controversial academics became clear.
Quite like Trump and Narendra Modi, the Japanese government in 2015 issued a notice that seemed to suggest abolishing the social sciences and the humanities entirely.
In 2020, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga shunned the nominations of six qualified scholars from these disciplines to the prestigious Science Council of Japan because of their criticism of Japan’s 2015 military legislation and laws violating human rights.
Though the move to abolish the social sciences never went through fully, Japanese academics expect drastic funding cuts to be made in the near future, given the increased silencing of critical scholars from these disciplines.
Amid this madness, a tiny section of academics in India and elsewhere took to activism. It was a need of the time for sure, but the collective strength of such dissent remains weak and ineffective. Low-risk activism such as signing online petitions is not enough and often futile.
Trump’s recent list of demands to Harvard, instructing the university how to govern, hire and teach, did not go down well because the administration refused to cower. But, as some argue, that is only because Harvard, with a $53.2bn endowment – a figure that is larger than the GDP of some small countries – can weather the storm. There is no ideological resistance. Columbia University also caved in to Trump’s bullying.
The United States is a country that has embodied democracy for centuries. If it has become hard to fight an autocrat there, imagine the fate of countries like India where academic freedom never truly existed – even in the days of the Congress government, books were banned and lectures cancelled.
Even Japan’s string of protests against Suga’s decision have not been productive so far.
The futility of retaliation is perhaps more likely to be apparent in countries like India and Japan, where rigid hierarchies and few opportunities mean that well-settled academics would rather not rock their career boats – unless they are willing to bear the consequences.
As a well-meaning professor at an IIT cautioned me before a job talk: “Do not say that you work on Hindu-Muslim riots. It will jeopardise your chances and put us in trouble.” The chapter closed before it had opened.
It is in this context that the United Kingdom appeared like a true benefactor for helping me escape political censorship and apathy in India for a couple of years. However, once the tragic war on Ukraine began, it became clear that the West had found the true recipient of its empathy. As Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban emphasised, “These people [Ukrainian refugees] are Europeans…These people are intelligent, they are educated people…This is not the refugee wave we have been used to…”
An Afghan physicist working in the Netherlands shared his struggle with me by email, “I try my best to prove that my work is credible, but I must accept the fact that my work will never be taken seriously.” This was a double-edged sword. In our home countries, we were malicious liberal academics, in the West, extraneous scholars.
In contrast to Afghanistan, the subject of invasions and occupations by other powers, India has only itself to blame for its current political madness. Academics in India are being systematically targeted by their own government, creating a modern-day colonisation of scholarship – a large chunk of academics who can still study subjects perceived by India as controversial are not Indian.
It is true that a few western academics were deported for what the BJP considered controversial research, but that simply meant moving back to the safe confines of their university abroad. It is creditable that members of academia are continuing to produce knowledge on authoritarian governments, but solely “etic”, or outsider perspectives, produce limited knowledge.
To be fair, I have worked as an academic in quite a few countries in the West. As a woman and thinking individual, I found the experience very liberating despite occasional racism, whether explicit (being refused housing for being Indian) or implicit (given the sense of adding brownie points to the diversity committees of academic departments).
Implicit discrimination is more insidious because it is difficult to identify. It’s simply a nagging sense of having been put down, politely.
Hindutva suppin India today makes no bones about its intentions for destroying critical thinking in education, but the decline of academic freedom in India has been a slow burn – it has slowly been weaved into education over decades, making it less tangible than, say, hate speech. This is, perhaps, why it is so hard to resist.
Yet, if history could once boast of figures like reformer Jyotiba Phule or East German dissident Gerd Poppe, who risked their lives, families and careers to resist autocracy, why not repeat that history? Academic Ashok Swain’s words for the academic left are portentous, “Silence is not an option.” Any university that wants to survive must find ways not to fight alone.
With inputs from Seiko Okayama.
Raheel Dhattiwala is an independent sociologist, formerly a tutor and postdoctoral researcher at Oxford University. She is the author of Keeping the Peace: Spatial Differences in Hindu-Muslim Violence in Gujarat in 2002 (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Seiko Okayama is a postdoctoral researcher at the Graduate School of Asian African Area Studies, Kyoto University, Japan.
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