A Robotic Dog’s Life: Why are we allergic to fostering a culture of excellence?

 NO, I THOUGHT TO myself, I would not start with Galgotias (without an apostrophe) University. The fiasco of fakery masquerading as innovation on which critics of India’s AI summit and national naysayers are feasting like gleeful maggots.

The message is loud and clear. Not only are we not great innovators, we are not all that good at cheating and lying and faking our competence either. But why even bother? Why invest `350 crore in innovation, as the Galgotias’ professor claimed and which is rather hard to believe, when you can buy amazing Chinese robodogs and Korean AI soccer balls for a few lakhs?

Who are we trying to kid? We do the grunge work for multinationals and export brain-ware and human beings. The latter export is now curtailed because much of the work can be done remotely.

Currently, 1,800 Global Capability Centres (GCCs), half of the global market, are located in India. Why? Because of cheaper labour and a massive market, not because India is a hub of invention or technological brilliance.

But sometimes you have to fake it to make it. What’s wrong with that? The AI Summit, despite the usual glitches, was a huge success. It was, like all things Indian, a mela, a carnival, a celebration rather than a showcase of talent.

And if there’s anything this government is good at, it’s event management. Why grudge them that? And why bother to take a well-meaning minister to the cleaners if someone in his office posted about the fake invention? After all, the culprits were booted out, even the power supply to the offending stall cut off.

That is why I had initially decided to start, not with Galgotias but with my beloved JNU. After all, I had taught at JNU for nearly 25 years, opted for premature retirement when its seniormost professor, even written a book— JNU: Nationalism and India’s Uncivil War(2022).

The university is currently on the boil not owing to AI fakery but to a caste conundrum, or should I say, cauldron. Vice-Chancellor Santishree Dhulipala Pandit’s Sunday Guardian podcast on February 16 has triggered a mass reaction.

“There is a permanent victimhood,” she said to her interviewer, Joyeeta Basu, “and you cannot progress by being permanently a victim or playing the victim card.” The point being made, even if she didn’t spell it out, is obvious. Only those who continuously struggle to learn and upskill themselves get ahead. Those who only rely on handouts fall by the wayside.

Pandit was discussing the University Grants Commission (UGC) Equity Regulations, 2026, which supposedly aimed to address caste-based discrimination, but have been stayed by the Supreme Court on January 29. These regulations include OBC among the oppressed categories with the burden of innocence placed solely on the so-called “General Category” of unreserved students, who are permanently cast as potential oppressors.

Protests against Pandit by the leftist JNU Students’ Union erupted in the university, with the agitators demanding her resignation or, at least, an apology for her “casteist” proclamations. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), part of the Sangh Parivar, and not (yet) in power in JNU, reportedly fought a pitched battle with the protesting leftist students.

I might be permitted to add here, since the issue is so caste clouded, that the honorable VC, whom I know personally, is not a Brahmin by birth. The “Pandit” in her surname has come from her husband. She has self-identified as an OBC.

But the problem, I realised, is much deeper. That is why I did start, after all, with Galgotias. Because it doesn’t matter which bad example you start with. Both point to the self-same rot in Indian higher education.

Right then, another thought struck me, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” I laughed out loud because however true, the quotation was “fake.” Widely attributed to George Orwell not only in social media, but in mainstream TV shows, I had heard it again in the binge-worthy Johnathan Nolan (yes, he is Christopher Nolan’s brother) serial Person of Interest on Amazon Prime. It sounded so like Orwell, the greatest critic of communism and totalitarianism of the 20th century. But he never said it.

Indeed, it is one of the ironies of literature and political thought that it was Antonio Gramsci, himself a communist imprisoned by fascists, who came close to saying it. “To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act,” he said in the Italian weekly newspaper,L’Ordine Nuovo, in 1919.

Being a lifelong student, teacher, reader, and writer, I had earned the right to speak my truth. But who is listening? In any case, truth itself can hardly be revolutionary given that the idea of revolution itself is so tainted and misused, as in JNU’s current caste agitation.

JNU and Galgotias, then, are two sides of the same problem, the Scylla and Charybdis of Indian higher education. With unfortunate students trapped in between. The all-devouring, state-sponsored caste monster on one side and the deadly whirlpool of private profiteering on the other. That in a nutshell is the crisis of Indian higher education.

Let me state the problem bluntly: the publicly funded universities have been turned into caste battlegrounds, while the private institutions, with a few exceptions, been handed over to private profiteering. Who is responsible? Though one aspect of the rot runs deep, going back to caste politics that originated over a 100 years ago, the second part, private profiteering, is much more recent. What is worse, the government of the day, I am afraid, cannot be absolved of its share of the blame for both sides of the problem.

JNU, which as a Marxist bastion, despite its vaunted anti-Brahminism, was somewhat an exception to extreme caste factionalism. But now it is caught up in caste or caste has caught up with it. As to Galgotias, the less said the better. Fake research, phony patents, plagiarism, and naked lies are so common in Indian higher education that it is not surprising that India is probably the home of the largest number of predatory journals that peddle falsehood.

So here’s the bottom line. Why are we allergic to fostering a culture of excellence and incentivising competence regardless of caste, community, language, or region? But if we can’t or don’t want to, let’s at least not try to fool ourselves—and the world.