Prof. Nandini Sundar writes in the Wire-
While the involuntary resignation of Professor Pratap Bhanu Mehta from Ashoka University may appear different from the persecution of Dr Binayak Sen in Chhattisgarh, there are important similarities.
Binayak Sen did not voluntarily go to jail because he thought it behooved him to do so. He was arrested and incarcerated. The Supreme Court granted him bail after he appealed. This happened under the previous administration. But charges against him still stand.
Mehta resigned voluntarily saying “my association with the university may be considered a political liability”.
Sundar thinks there are similarities between these two cases. If that is so, Manmohan was as bad as Modi. In other words, nothing has changed. Sundar's quarrel is with India, or with Democracy, not any specific Indian administration.
It goes without saying that both these men, through their courageous critique, have threatened an authoritarian state
So, India has always been an authoritarian state- whether ruled by Congress or the BJP. Sen was arrested by the previous Administration because they thought he was part of an armed, terrorist, movement at war with the Indian State. He still faces those charges and may be sent to jail if found guilty.
Mehta may have harmed Manmohan, at the margin, but he helps Modi because Mehta and the wealthy entrepreneur class he represents comes across as deracinated and anti-Hindu- the guy says we shouldn't say 'Jai Shri Ram'!- and thus Mehta consolidates the Hindu vote for the BJP.
or else they would not have been targeted.
Sen was targeted- but so were Hindu Sadhus and Sadhvis- by the previous administration on allegations of terrorist activity. Mehta has not been targeted. He is simply silly.
And both cases reflect larger structural emergencies – the wholesale attack on academic freedom in the present case and the destruction of adivasi lives and resources in Chhattisgarh in the other.
Sundar thinks her own plight is comparable to that of adivasis in Chhattisgarh. Why does she stop there? Why not pose as the Indian Anne Frank being loaded onto a cattle truck on the way to Auschwitz?
According to the latest All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) report available (2018-19), India has 993 universities and almost 40,000 colleges. Of these, 385 universities and 78% of the colleges are privately managed. Some private universities like Ashoka may claim higher standards and offer better salaries, but by and large, tenure, pay, and academic freedom are scarce commodities in private colleges which are run as business institutions rather than as incubators of learning. Public universities and colleges have their own problems, such as direct state control and rigid bureaucracies. In public universities too, however, contractualisation is becoming an epidemic. What Indian academics need is a joint struggle across private and public universities for secure tenure and freedom from political interference in appointments.
Cool! Let them all go on strike so we don't have to pay them. The fact is there is 'political interference' in lots of different types of appointments. Wouldn't it be great if jobs went to those with the most merit, rather than those with most 'pull'? But why stop there? Why not admit that what would be even better is that if the best person for any given job were employed regardless of their credentials or age or caste or cadre status? Why should IAS officers get certain jobs even if they are crap at them? Why shouldn't people without academic qualifications be appointed to teach subjects they know better than anyone else? Why not remove all barriers to free contracting such that productivity can be optimized?
Consider what happens when you have vested interest based special pleading-
Academic freedom is normally defined as the freedom to teach and research as well as to speak one’s mind out as a citizen.
Aren't non academics free to teach and research and speak their mind? If not, why not? If I know more than Sundar, why shouldn't I do her job even though I don't have her worthless credentials?
Consider the following-
Appointment as well as removal of faculty should take place only on academic grounds assessed by peers; almost any other reason is a direct attack on academic freedom.
We can substitute 'employee' for 'faculty' and 'academic' with 'productive' so as to get- 'appointment as well as removal of employees should only take place on productivity grounds assessed by peers; almost any other reason is a direct attack on freedom to be productive.' This is quite a sensible rule- if employees are the best judge of productivity. However, employees are often stupider and more ignorant than entrepreneurs and academics, invariably, are stupider and more ignorant than those they taught just five or ten years ago.
Suppose this were not the case. Then those employees or academics could go their own way and set up an enterprise which would remunerate them just as well.
We also know that across the public-private divide in higher education, the dominant castes and classes are over-represented – already structuring what is said and researched, and what passes for universal knowledge.
We know that universal knowledge has nothing to do with 'dominant castes'. Sundar doesn't. Why? She studied shit and she teaches shit and has lots of shit inside her cranium.
Certain categories of citizens have little academic voice.
But those who have a lot of academic voice are as stupid and reviled as Sundar.
According to AISHE 2018-19, Scheduled Tribes have a gross enrolment ratio (GER) of 17.2% as compared with the national GER of 26.3%. Muslims constitute only 5.2% of the college and university student population, compared with their overall percentage of about 14.2% in the population. A recent petition in the Supreme Court has alleged that 23 IITs are flouting their reservation obligations in recruitment and research degree admission. In the new private universities, there is no reservation at all. Addressing these inequalities is a long term issue on which the academic community must unite, not just because universities are an important site of social mobility for individuals, but because knowledge benefits from diversity.
Sadly, tackling these problems will cause India to fall yet farther behind its rivals in the region. Thankfully, the money to do so will run out almost immediately. So people can go back to doing sensible things.
Since 2014, however, academics and students have been facing an immediate, sharp and existential threat, as shown also by India’s precipitous decline on a global academic freedom index. A companion piece to be published in The Wire provides a detailed catalogue of this.
But nothing published in the Wire aint shite.
The government seems to be engaged in a form of counterinsurgency on universities, which is remarkably similar to the one it has waged in places like Chhattisgarh.
Yes, yes. Sundar herself is currently being loaded onto a cattle truck headed for Auschwitz.
Indeed, the book on the Delhi riots by advocate Monika Arora and others, which the Delhi Police appears to have adopted as its ‘intellectual’ guide in filing criminal charges against students and faculty, makes the parallels clear.
to a paranoid drama queen
It describes Delhi’s leading universities as hubs of a gigantic foreign funded criminal conspiracy run by a network of urban-naxal-jihadis, using the constitution as a decoy, to engineer violence.
Thankfully, Delhi's leading universities are shit. Thus, they failed immediately to work any great mischief. The 'long march through the Instituions' was a long descent down a sewer.
It calls on the “vice chancellors of DU, JMI, JNU and all other universities to take an audit of the use of their campuses to engineer wider disturbances in the city in the eight weeks leading up to the riots.” The message is clear – critical students and faculty are ‘hostiles’ who must be ‘neutralised’.
Defunded. Let them get proper jobs. Their stupidity neutralized, or neutered, them long ago.
The government’s real higher education policy also appears modelled on five standard counterinsurgency tactics:
to a cretin who probably thinks she is being pushed onto an Auschwitz bound cattle truck
erasure, demonisation and delegitimisation, capture, surveillance and eventually, depoliticisation.
This stupid cretin has been demonizing and delegitimizing all sorts of shit for decades. It has done her cause no good whatsoever.
Just as the citizenship of the inhabitants of Chhattisgarh or Kashmir is erased to paint a picture of ‘militant -infested’ war zones in which anything goes, the real work of teaching and doing research in colleges and universities is erased when students and faculty are demonised and attacked.
Sundar & Co may very dearly want to erase the Hindus who run India but they are shit out of luck.
And just as the government has located paramilitary camps across Bastar, the government has embarked on a plan of police surveillance and control of campuses.
Furthermore, Sundar herself is currently being loaded onto an Auschwitz bound cattle-truck. Wake up sheeple! You could be next!
The desired end result is a populace which is too scared or tired to resist.
Sundar's students are too bored to resist her witless tirades.
1. Erasure: The rise of ‘WhatsApp University’
Which secretly loads Sundars onto cattle trucks so as to get rid of the competition
Universities and their knowledge production are being rendered irrelevant by the organised spread of pseudo ’factual ‘historical’ and ‘social’ information on social media, designed to promote a Hindutva worldview.
Many Hindus have already been brainwashed into thinking their names are things like Atul, rather than Arif, or Mohan instead of Muhammad. Sundar herself is actually named Nancy, not Nandini. Wake up sheeple! Everyone knows the RSS invented Hinduism after bumping off the Mahatma.
It is not uncommon for university scholars to be dismissed as biased or plain wrong when they try to correct these narratives.
Because they are biased, plain wrong and as stupid as shit.
I have had people on trains tell me that Nehru had Gandhi shot or that Gandhi had little role in India’s freedom struggle.
They were paying you back in your own paranoid coin.
This is not just the anti-intellectualism of those who haven’t been to university (since college education still has a practical employment-generating attraction) but comes from an active denigration of established academic and political consensus, which is common to authoritarian right-wing governments the world over.
Sundar thinks she is an intellectual. She isn't. She is a third rate pedant with a paranoid cast of mind.
The RSS has now acquired a cohort of articulate, even foreign educated spokespersons, and even some who write history books using language like ‘subalternity’. However, the overall contempt for the social prestige that book-reading confers is evident from the denunciation of the “Khan market gang”, or the references to JNU students as the ‘tukde-tukde’ gang.
What social prestige has 'book reading' conferred on this cretin? Does she not understand that the ruling party only mentions Khan Market or JNU because voters have learned from bitter experience that both breed shitheads who harm the country?
The RSS
but also Lizard People from Planet X
has also waged a silent, if unnoticed attack on traditional scholarship in India’s multiple languages, which is being subsumed in false nationalist pride. There is no room, for example, for the history of satirical narratives in Sanskrit, or the fact that many Sanskrit texts have been popularised through Persian translations.
Room for both must be urgently provided by the rectums of Wire's editorial staff.
This comes against the larger backdrop of universities as producers of critical knowledge being
shit
overtaken by global consultancies which generate policy knowledge for hire at one end, and India’s vast coaching network for nationwide standardised competitive exams at the other end.
Shit gets disintermediated. Up your game or get used to being flushed down the sewer.
2. Demonisation and delegitimisation
Over the past few years we have seen how campus seminars critical of government policies have been cancelled or not allowed in the first place. In fact, the incidence of such cancellations has gone down, because nobody is even trying to hold discussions on contemporary politics any more or a conscious attempt is made to obscure the real topics of discussion (eg. a debate on the end of Article 370 at a premier Central educational institution was re-branded as a debate on the ‘relevance of federalism’ in order to get past the thought policing).
What we had already seen was that Campus Seminars were shit. The Left was welcome to believe differently because it misdirected its energies and thus went extinct.
Students and teachers have been physically attacked
for many decades. By the Seventies, the assumption was that a 'Student leader' had at least a couple of homicides and a dozen rapes under his belt. But this was also true of a lot of lecturers and even Vee Cees.
and in at least one serious incident (MM Kalburgi), killed for their views and scholarly research.
Kalburgi was not an academic at the time. There may have been a religious motive for his killing but it had nothing to do with 'academic freedom'.
Since the anti-CAA protests began (and now with the farmers’ protests), university faculty and students in Delhi, Aligarh, UP and Assam have been subject to repeated interrogation as if protesting was a crime;
the crime they are accused of is instigating violence
and several student activists who have spoken of the constitution and democracy, have been arrested on the grounds that they are ‘anti-national’, ‘seditious’ or ‘terrorists’.
Terrorists and Seditionists have always been arrested on those charges whether or not they were students.
On the other hand, the ABVP activists who attacked JNU in January 2020 have gone scot free.
Why has there been no private prosecution of them? Is it because evidence is lacking?
The worst affected, of course, have been Kashmiri scholars, whose high speed internet use was curtailed for a whole year and more.
But this happened to everybody- not just scholaras.
Kashmiri students and faculty have been arrested within Kashmir;
as have other Kashmiris
and outside Kashmir, they face attacks from ABVP vigilantes.
as well as other students without such affiliations
3. Capture and militarisation
While delegitimising existing scholarship, the RSS is also in the process of capturing both academic positions and research funds for its own members and projects.
In the same manner as the Left did.
Since 2014, a large number of heads of research institutions or universities have been appointed with no qualification, other than loyalty to the RSS. Take for example, Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) chair, Y. Sudershan Rao (2014-17), whose primary qualification was that he was a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana, the RSS’s History Wing. He had no peer reviewed publications. Another example was chairman of the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR), Braj Bihari Kumar, (2017- 2019), who was a founding Member of another RSS front, Astha Bharati. Faculty in central universities both long for existing vacancies to be filled and live in dread of fresh appointments for fear that unqualified pro-RSS people will be appointed, as has happened in JNU. Once a bad appointment is made, universities are poisoned for several generations as the new appointees in turn select their successors.
Indian Universities and other such institutions turned to shit because Sundar's pals were put in charge.
Institutional resources and sanction are being provided to pet projects of the BJP. For instance, in 2020, an inter-Ministerial funding program on developing products from indigenous cows (SUTRA-PIC India) was announced;
which is actually a little less useless than Sundar's own shite
while AIIMs Rishikesh has been asked to undertake clinical trials on the efficacy of the Gayatri Mantra in treating COVID.
American researchers have previously done similar trials to see if religious beliefs or practices of various types alter medical outcomes. Atheists may well want to perform such trials so as to debunk Religion.
A national exam on the virtues of Indian cows in comparison to their Jersey counterparts was postponed, but there are plenty of other similar RSS projects for which university staff and students are mobilised.
An agricultural country should make comparisons of this sort.
‘Refresher courses’ which all faculty who want promotions must take, are used as occasions for RSS propaganda.
This sort of thing has always been part of the Left's playbook. Like it or not, the RSS enjoys popularity at least partly because Sundar & Co shat the bed.
Not only are campuses being militarized (Manipur University already had an army camp) with proposals for tanks and towering flags and police bands playing frequently, but now army generals are considered experts on historical topics.
While Romila Thapar & Co are known to be shit in these areas.
Why, even the Delhi police thinks that they can decide what PhD students must read. Among their various charges against Sharjeel Imam, a JNU PhD student, is that he read the wrong kind of books for his MPhil thesis on pre-partition attacks on Muslims in Bihar. Citing the noted American political scientist Paul Brass’s book, Forms of Collective Violence: Riots, Pogroms and Genocide in Modern India, the Delhi police says: “By reading only such literature and not researching alternative sources, the accused (Imam) became highly radicalised and religiously bigoted.”
Sundar is lying. The Police aren't saying 'read this, don't read that'. They are saying Sharjeel Imam had a particular ideology which led him to commit a crime. The evidence of the ideology is the books he read as opposed to those he neglected.
The thing may be tenuous, but it goes to establish motive.
4. Surveillance
Surveillance is growing with CCTV cameras and biometric attendance being set up across campuses. In 2020, the police have been tasked with keeping a watch on campuses, infiltrating student WhatsApp groups and ‘organising frequent visits of students to police stations.’
Indian voters don't want to subsidize thugs on campus any more.
Many of the government’s surveillance orders are foolish and unimplementable. Take for example the order, now fortunately withdrawn after protest by science associations, that all foreign participation in on-line seminars relating to India’s internal matters would have to be referred to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) for prior approval. Even if the MEA deployed all its staff for just this purpose alone, it would not have the person-power to deal with requests from academic institutions across the country. The same governance issue affects the renewed order that OCI scholars will have to seek prior permission for research. There is no clarity on how the government expects to deal with the hundreds of requests it will undoubtedly get. However, the purpose of all these is evidently to create a chilling effect.
A nuisance will be curbed. Sundar still does not get that Indian research of this type is known to be shit. It hasn't helped India any. Its potential for harm is obvious.
5. Depoliticisation
The government plan is evidently to depoliticize universities through repression, by closing down avenues for independent thought, by increasing the contractualisation of jobs thus rendering faculty ever more precarious, reducing studentships and hiking fees, prioritizing global rankings and emphasizing job creation as the primary function of universities rather than the creation of knowledge.
Why? Because Indian universities are shit. They create Sundar type paranoid nutjobs or andolanjeevis. Only a gangster regime will support Universities- but only because their thugs rule the campuses.
However, given the resistance by the young – starting from FTII protests in 2015 to, most recently, the students of Ashoka university protesting the ‘resignation’ by Pratap Bhanu Mehta – this is where the government’s vision may face its most serious roadblock. As always, where there is darkness, there is also light.
Sundar knows full well that FTII did not join the anti-CAA protests precisely because it is now tightly policed. Since its alumni can get good jobs, the students are not wagging their tails. As fees rise, students will give up any type of activism. What is the point of cutting off your nose to spite your own face? It is only when Universities were subsidized and utterly shite that it made sense to abandon the classroom for the barricades.
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