Any conversation on academic freedom needs to be anchored in a commitment to critiquing the workings of power that constitute the strategies of silencing built into hegemonic structures.
In the humanities and social sciences, academic freedom is often under threat by powerful forces of state control and private interests.
Often, in situations where academic freedom is threatened, authoritarian state practices work alongside private interests to hold up the networks of power.
Private donors, trustees, and funders are some of the most frequent sources of threats to academic freedom. As public universities have faced the twin forces of government control and devolution of state funding, private interests have stepped in to exert greater and greater influence. This influence is often felt in opaque ways. Calls made surreptitiously to university managers by trustees. Threats given by donors to withdraw funding. These are the typical strategies deployed by private forces to control the university amidst accelerated neoliberal reforms.
Ashoka University, a private university in western India, sold as the frontiers of liberal education in India, epitomizes the power of privatization amidst neoliberal transformation. The University has recently been the subject of conversations on neoliberal media and liberal academic spaces, highlighting a high profile resignation as an instance of the threat to academic freedom in India ruled by the neo-fascist Hindutva regime governed by the strongman Narendra Modi.
The political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta resigned from the university on March 16. This generated furor in the liberal academic circuits, with a letter writing campaign that decried the end of academic freedom in India. The letter was picked up by the liberal media, revealing the threat to academic freedom in India. This was followed by the resignation of another academic Arvind Subramaniam from Ashoka University, who cited the threat to academic freedom as the reason for his resignation.
It is worth noting that up until recently, Arvind Subramaniam not only sang praises of the Modi regime, but also served as a part of its neo-fascist infrastructure. As a member of the Niti Ayog, the governing body that oversees the nation's economic policies, Subramaniam was a key member of the authoritarian infrastructure that implemented the demonetization strategy that dispossessed vast numbers of India's poor already struggling to make a living.
Mehta, the academic being peddled by the neoliberal media as the face of resistance to Modi, up until 2014, was witnessed selling Modi to the English speaking public through his facile columns. We read Mehta write about the institutional checks and balances in place that would steer Modi toward delivering efficient governance and growth. Mehta cajoled and coaxed the English speaking public to see the neoliberal promise delivered by Modi, and un-see simultaneously the pogrom and riots that had been orchestrated by his hate politics. Mehta's columns were both empirically and theoretically weak.
Yet, such is the power of the neoliberal public sphere, liberals looked the other way as he re-invented himself into a critical voice.
Earlier at Ashoka, Mehta sat silently as a Professor and as a member of the governing council as an assistant professor of Mathematics, Rajendran Narayanan, had to resign because of the backlash from the university administration to his protests on Kashmir.
Writes the activist and media practitioner Shuddhabrata Sengupta:
"How many of the liberal intellectuals and academics in India and the Indian diaspora currently losing their sleep over two resignations at one private university in Haryana remember, or know, the name of Rajendran Narayanan?
Oh. I am sorry for even having the temerity to ask this question. Mea Culpa. Mea Maxima Culpa. It’s just that Prof. Rajendran Narayanan taught, (in that same Haryanvi university) and still teaches, Mathematics, elsewhere.
Prof. Narayanan felt compelled to resign, five years ago, in 2016, from the said Haryanvi university after the treatment he (and two non academic colleagues, who also resigned) received for signing a statement on events in Kashmir. Kashmir? Now where on earth could that be, dear Indian liberals? It’s kind of to the north of Haryana. You can find it, if you look for it, even though all maps of Kashmir printed in India are, shall we say, not known for their accuracy."
In the wake of the critical media coverage of Ashoka, as soon as the public conversations started placing pressure on the University, Mehta and Subramaniam joined the University administration in issuing a letter extolling the virtues of Ashoka. The letter sang glories of Mehta and Subramaniam, replete with the language of eminence, premiership, and stature.
The letter notes, "Pratap and Arvind would like to emphasize that Ashoka University is one of the most important projects in Indian Higher Education." Much like Mehta's earlier hagiographies of Modi, Ashoka is held up as a gift of the higher order. In the typical Mehta style. Bereft of evidence and in spite of the serious questions raised about the lack of academic freedom in Ashoka.
Consider here the irony of the letter, being signed by those that have resigned from the university citing academic freedom, turning the public attention into narratives of personal glorification, joining the ranks of the administrators that are crafting the letter as a crisis response. This is the power of crisis response in neoliberal India, bringing about the absurd.
The academics who are seemingly the victims of an oppressive university response join the university powers in safeguarding the image of the university.
Mehta's manufacturing of himself as the victim of a repressive regime targeting academic freedom simultaneously erases the ongoing attacks on academic freedom that have been launched by the Modi regime since its inception. Even as Mehta was singing praises of Modi, academics were being targeted for their critical voices. A number of leading academics who have been critical of the fascist regime have been rotting in jail. Anant Teltumbde. Hany Babu. Shoma Sen. These are the real instances of ongoing attacks on academic freedom in India. These attacks have been ongoing since 2014, not to appear on the scene in 2021. These attacks have academics imprisoned for their critical voices, not resigning a fancy job at a fancy private university.
The Mehta fiasco renders visible the collaborationist class politics and opportunism of liberal academics that seek avenues for profiteering from the markets opened up by accelerated neoliberal reforms across India. Here, academic freedom too becomes a commodity. The elite whining and the self-aggrandizing after-take also point to the many cognitive summersaults liberals will perform to cozy up to structures while taking up every opportunity to occupy the mantle of the martyr. Because the martyr is as much a part of the machine of profiteering.
In the series of events that unfolded, Mehta made himself a victim, gained global attention, and then turned himself into the rescuer of the private liberal brand.
The kind of performative politics performed by the likes of Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Arvind Subramaniam hurts the actual struggles of academic freedom in India amidst a neo-fascist regime committed to turning academia into the breeding ground of Hindutva.