When white mediocrity calls the IITs a "junk house": what the trolls reveal about the long afterlife of empire
When white mediocrity calls the IITs a "junk house": what the trolls reveal about the long afterlife of empire
By Mohan J. Dutta, Dean's Chair Professor of Communication, Massey University; Director, Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE)
Over the past several months I have been the target of a coordinated online harassment campaign in Aotearoa New Zealand. The campaign has many themes, but a small and revealing strand keeps surfacing in the comment threads: jabs at my education. "World renowned, I think not, he has an Indian degree." "Must have graduated from one of those fake degree factories." "What even is IIT, some Indian junkhouse." "Never heard of it."
These comments are not, in any meaningful sense, claims about the Indian Institutes of Technology. They are claims about who is permitted to be taken seriously in a Western public sphere, and whose credentials are presumed to be counterfeit until a white interlocutor decides otherwise. They are claims, in other words, about the long afterlife of empire in everyday speech.
The trolls would benefit, as we all do, from a few facts.
The institution they have never heard of
The Indian Institute of Technology system was founded in 1951, in the rusting shell of the Hijli Detention Camp in West Bengal, where the British had once jailed Indian freedom fighters for the crime of imagining a country of their own. The first IIT, IIT Kharagpur, opened with two hundred and twenty-four students and forty-two teachers. Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, called it a monument to India's urges and India's future in the making. Within a decade, four more IITs followed. The system today comprises twenty-three institutions and admits its undergraduates through what is widely recognised as the most competitive engineering entrance examination on the planet.
The numbers from 2025 are worth sitting with. Roughly 1.48 million students sat the JEE Main, the qualifying round. Of those, 180,422 advanced to the JEE Advanced, the IIT-specific examination. Approximately 18,188 seats were available across all twenty-three IITs combined. That is an effective acceptance rate of about one point two percent, measured from the JEE Main applicant pool to a seat at any IIT.
For comparison, Stanford accepts roughly four percent of its undergraduate applicants. Harvard accepts roughly three. MIT accepts roughly four. The Ivies the trolls would recognise as legitimate are, by the basic measure they keep invoking, three to four times easier to get into than the institution they call a junk house.
IIT Kharagpur is ranked sixth overall and fifth in engineering in India's NIRF 2025 rankings. It is ranked 222nd globally in the QS World University Rankings 2025 and 52nd globally in engineering and technology. It was designated an Institute of Eminence by the Government of India in 2019. It sits on a two-thousand-one-hundred-acre campus that houses some twenty-two thousand residents, with its own railway station and its own post office. A township unto itself.
A 2007 Duke University study by Vivek Wadhwa and colleagues found that roughly a quarter of all immigrant-founded technology and engineering startups in the United States in the preceding decade had an Indian co-founder, with IIT alumni heavily over-represented in that cohort. IIT graduates today run some of the world's most consequential platforms. They sit as endowed chairs at Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, Princeton, and Cambridge. They are fellows of the National Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society, IEEE, ACM, AAAS. They have governed central banks and run multinationals.
This is the institution the trolls do not recognise. This is the degree they call fake.
What the trolls are actually saying
It would be easy to read these comments as ignorance, and ignorance is certainly part of the picture. But ignorance alone does not explain the structure of the claim. The structure of the claim is this: a brown person presenting a credential from the global South must be presumed fraudulent until a white voice grants him legitimacy. The credential itself is incidental. It could be an IIT degree. It could be a Cambridge doctorate. The function of the dismissal is to perform the speaker's authority to dismiss.
This is the everyday grammar of what we might call white mediocrity. It is the unearned confidence to make pronouncements without data, without evidence, without curiosity, because for two centuries the architecture of empire ensured that this kind of confidence was never required to defend itself. When a white commenter declares an IIT to be a junk house from a desk in suburban Aotearoa, he is not reasoning. He is exercising a reflex installed by an imperial culture that taught its inheritors that knowledge produced outside the metropole was, by definition, of lesser value. The reflex outlives the empire. It outlives the formal end of colonial rule. It surfaces in the comment sections of news stories about brown academics in 2026.
In the scholarship on coloniality, this is a familiar move. Aníbal Quijano named it the coloniality of knowledge: the way Eurocentric epistemic standards continue to organise what counts as legitimate intellectual authority long after political independence. Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called the corresponding silence "epistemicide," the active erasure of knowledges produced beyond the Western canon. What the trolls are practising in the comment threads is, at its core, a vernacular epistemicide. They do not need to know what an IIT is. They need only to know that something Indian cannot be world-class, because their inherited cognitive map does not have a place for that claim.
The colonial accounting
It is worth pausing on the broader frame, because the casual contempt directed at the IITs makes more sense once you put it next to the historical record of what Britain did to India.
The economist Utsa Patnaik has estimated that Britain extracted roughly 45 trillion US dollars from India between 1765 and 1938, calculated in present-day terms. That extraction was not a side effect of colonial rule. It was the engine of it. India was de-industrialised so that British mills could supply the textiles Indian weavers had been making for centuries. Bengal famines killed millions while grain was exported. The railway network so often cited as a colonial gift was built to move resources out of the country and troops in. The end of formal empire in 1947 did not return any of this. India inherited a hollowed-out economy, a partitioned subcontinent, mass illiteracy engineered by colonial policy, and an industrial base designed to serve British rather than Indian needs.
In that context, the founding of the IITs four years after independence is one of the more remarkable acts of postcolonial state-building in modern history. The first IIT was deliberately sited at Hijli, on the grounds of a prison camp that had held Indian revolutionaries, as a way of writing the new India directly over the old wound. The conscious symbolism was that the same ground that had been used by the empire to contain Indian aspiration would now be the ground from which Indian engineering ambition would rise. The MIT-led international consortium that helped establish IIT Kharagpur included thirteen universities from around the world, but the institution was Indian in conception, in governance, and in mission.
The trolls who declare the IIT to be a junk house are, without realising it, completing the colonial project. They are saying that even an institution explicitly built to refute the colonial verdict on Indian capacity must still be subject to the colonial verdict on Indian capacity. The empire's last and most resilient asset is the assumption it left in the minds of its former masters.
The Aotearoa specificity
There is a particular Aotearoa New Zealand dimension to this that bears noting. The Free Speech Union and adjacent organisations have, over the past several years, built an infrastructure for amplifying this kind of casual racism by recoding it as principled defence of open debate. When a council member of the Free Speech Union posts a piece attacking a brown academic, the comment threads predictably fill with the credential-doubting reflex I have described. The institutional cover that the FSU lends to these threads is precisely what allows the reflex to circulate as legitimate critique rather than the everyday racism it is. This is the same infrastructure that has been mobilised against Māori scholars, against Pasifika scholars, against Muslim community members in this country, with the same predictable consequence.
Aotearoa is a settler-colonial state founded on the breach of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and the FSU's project has a precise function in that landscape: it makes the maintenance of the settler racial order sound like a defence of liberty. When the same actors who minimise the structural violence of settler-colonialism turn around and declare the IITs a fake, they are not contradicting themselves. They are running the same operating system in two different windows. The contempt for the postcolonial achievement and the contempt for Indigenous sovereignty are the same contempt.
What the IITs actually represent
So what should be said, plainly, in the conversation the trolls have started? Two things.
The first is empirical. The IITs are among the most selective and most consequential engineering institutions in the world, by every measurable standard the West uses to measure such things. The graduates they have placed at the helm of global technology, academia, finance, and public policy constitute one of the most striking knowledge-transfer stories of the twentieth century. The trolls' ignorance of this is a fact about the trolls. It is not a fact about the institutions.
The second is structural. The IITs exist because a newly independent nation, in the first years of its freedom, made a deliberate decision to build the intellectual infrastructure that the colonial state had refused to build. They exist as relics of a promise — the promise that the postcolony would, in its own time and on its own terms, produce knowledge that the world would have to reckon with. That the world has had to reckon with it, and that the descendants of the colonisers are still struggling to admit as much, is not a failure of the IITs. It is a measure of how durable the imperial reflex really is.
When a commenter in Aotearoa declares that he has never heard of IIT, the honest response is that this is exactly the point. He has never had to. The infrastructure of his ignorance was built, brick by brick, by the same empire that built the prison camp at Hijli. The IITs are what was built on top of that prison camp. The contempt is what is left of the empire.
I will keep writing. The record is on the page.
Mohan J. Dutta is Dean's Chair Professor of Communication at Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the founding Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE). His scholarly work develops the Culture-Centered Approach across community partnerships in seventeen countries.