Ashoka’s Woes

ASHOKA UNIVERSITY IS in the news yet again, and for all the wrong reasons. A member of the faculty wrote a paper claiming that the 2019 General Election was manipulated; else the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) couldn’t have won. The paper has already been shredded for circular logic and deeply flawed methodology. However, the real hurt came when Ashoka University, in a terse statement, distanced itself from the paper, referring to it as social media activism while pointing out that it had not been peer-reviewed or published. What the university did not do was sack the writer. The faculty member in question nevertheless put in his papers. Some activist elements in the faculty then decided to start a campaign to hire him back, accusing Ashoka of sacking him—something the faculty member himself denies. This has yet again raised the bogey of declining academic freedom in India. This isn’t the first time that “academic freedom has been irreparably harmed”. Every time a faculty member at Ashoka leaves, members of the faculty threaten to quit. But they never seem to carry through with their threats.

Subramanian Swamy knows better than most people what a joke ‘academic freedom’ is. When he was at Harvard, he was invited back by Amartya Sen to take up a Chinese Studies chair at the Delhi School of Economics in the 1970s. His inconvenient views on socialism led to his appointment being cancelled at the last minute. He then got a job as professor of Mathematical Economics at IIT Delhi, and yet again, thanks to his poor opinion of socialism and Indira Gandhi, was kicked out. Decades later, his course at Harvard was axed because of his “views on Muslims” that had nothing to do with his course. Many of the same people howling about the erosion of academic freedom at Ashoka today were the ones calling for Swamy to be fired from Harvard. What does this prove? First, India never had academic freedom. Second, even in the West, ‘academic freedom’ has been illusory. This begs the question: What principle is being defended in the latest brouhaha at Ashoka University?

To answer this question, we have to look at three parallel tracks—the history of academic freedom in the US; the history of academic freedom in the Soviet Union; and, Indira Gandhi and Emergency in the 1970s, specifically her education minister at the time, Saiyid Nurul Hasan, the éminence grise that every Indian interested in education should know about.

Higher education in the US was never apolitical. Indeed, much effort was put into keeping it deeply political throughout the Cold War. The US routinely carried out witch-hunts against communists in academia and public life. Known as the “McCarthy witch-hunts” after Senator Joseph McCarthy, we know McCarthy was just the convenient face of a deep, whole-of-government approach to tackling a leftist dominance of academia through the 1950s. McCarthy’s overplaying of his hand led to his downfall, but the apparatus that propped him up carried on in the shadows. The big change came with the Vietnam War and the campus protests that accompanied the draft in the 1970s. This wasn’t some idealised protest against the war by well-intentioned student heroes. None of them wanted to go fight in Vietnam. Contrary to what romanticised movies tell us, the protests or Woodstock had zero impact on the public mood. Richard Nixon’s popularity was sky high till it all came crashing down in the Watergate scandal. Republican planners, however, were not taking the protests lightly. By the time Ronald Reagan brought Republicans back to power, they had a plan—they would end student subsidies. That one decision did two things. Over the span of a generation, it ended social mobility in the US; a full-price education being expensive, you had to either come from a very rich family or focus on your studies to justify your student loans. What it also did was enforce academic accountability. The government also retained control over universities through research and development grants and similar devices.

The Soviet Union, unlike the US, wasn’t so careful or image conscious about creating the illusion of academic freedom. Stalin had thousands of academics tortured, executed and put in labour camps for thought crimes. Unlike the US, the Soviet Union had learnt early on that humanities are key to controlling a population. As Lenin put it, “every idea is worth 1,000 pages of theory”. And so it was that the Left went on to dominate the humanities. This wasn’t because they were particularly intelligent. Their dominance was because they saturated the humanities with their jargon to such an extent that there is a 99 per cent chance that any book you picked up in the humanities would either be by a leftist or would have accepted leftist dogma without any critical examination. As Stalin presciently said, “Quantity has a quality all of its own.”

This wasn’t the faculty’s first offence. In the past, they have conflated their personal politics with their academic work. They have called for an end to the ‘Indian occupation’ of Kashmir, asked for armed rebellion against the democratically elected government, fabricated caste statistics and claimed accidental misclassification

Share this on

In the 1970s, the Bangladesh War made Indira Gandhi dependent on the Soviet Union. She needed the Soviets to keep the emerging US-China axis off her back while she dealt with Pakistan. Her dependence on Moscow only grew with the 10 million refugees, the oil price shocks, the massive war expenditure, and the political destabilisation that resulted—leading up to Emergency. Enter Nurul Hasan, a superb manipulator and committed leftist ideologue with family pedigree. Nurul Hasan was responsible for enforcing Indira Gandhi’s political proximity to the Soviet Union in the Indian academic sphere. It wasn’t just politicisation; it was the wholesale cartelisation of education in India. The multi-decade-long saturation of the humanities and the oppressive political climate helped him immensely while the right and non-Congress parties were then as they are today—clueless about the power of the humanities. You could not be published, get an academic job, indeed anything at all, unless you towed the official line. The leftist cartelisation of education in India outlasted not just Nurul Hasan but also the era of Congress’ brute majorities. The main reason was how a whole cabal of academics of questionable merit, funded by a government gravy train, created an academic and social validation mechanism.

Unlike BJP, which harbours touchingly naïve notions on the factuality and nobility of education, the Left sees it for what it is—a way of moulding the country, shaping its future decision-makers, the path to power and wealth without accountability. This brings us to where Ashoka University finds itself today. New universities need validation. Who provides this academic acceptance? The intellectual heirs to Nurul Hasan’s ‘cartel’. Ashoka essentially made a Faustian bargain—to hire from the cartel, and to allow the cartel to self-perpetuate through hiring policies based on ideology. Scrutinise the faculty and you will see patterns of similar writing themes, publishing in the same newspaper, coming in from the same organisation. This is a one-stop solution for new universities. They will teach the kids; they will use their buddies to validate their teachings; they will also validate each other’s publications.

How is this system to function if another cartel moves in? Essentially, a gang war. The Ashoka lot was cosy. What they never expected was to get called out by an emerging set of academics who aren’t Nurul Hasan’s heirs. What’s worse, in the past, people calling them out would be dismissed as ‘fringe’ and banished to academic Siberia. But here we have people in responsible positions of power calling them out. To point out what the offending faculty did was question the integrity of India’s elections. But this wasn’t the faculty’s first offence. In the past, they have conflated their personal politics with their academic work. Ashoka faculty have called for an end to the “Indian occupation” of Kashmir, asked for armed rebellion against the democratically elected government, fabricated caste statistics and claimed accidental misclassification. To Ashoka’s credit though, they seem to have stuck to their guns; and to the eternal shame of the cartel, none but one has resigned, while Nurul Hasan’s expansive network of nepotism that allowed their grandstanding displays of ‘courage’ slowly crumbles around them. What has them so upset isn’t this mythical ‘academic freedom’ that never existed in India and existed only in name elsewhere. Their real anger is at their own irrelevance. Hell hath no fury greater than academic quackery exposed.

About The Author

Abhijit Iyer-Mitra

Abhijit Iyer-Mitra is a senior fellow at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi

•