Five years ago, the Indian Government announced it wouldn't give an automatic extension to Directors of IITs. Since they have a 5 term, it follows that all current Directors were chosen by the present administration. No doubt, a guy whose term is running out might feel a bit morose and complain that, if his contract is not renewed, it must be some sort of partisan politics at work- not the fact that he is a senile incompetent.
Ram Guha, who is as innocent as a child, does not understand this. In a naive manner, he tells readers of Scroll-
At a conference last month, I met the director of one of our prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. Himself a fine scientist and excellent administrator, he told me that no fewer than eight IITs were currently without directors.
On September 20, President Murmu approved the appointment of 8 directors. Guha does not mention this. Perhaps he is unaware of it. This soi disant historian does not know what is happening now, forget about what happened in the past.
In each case, the term of the previous incumbent had ended, and though a search committee had been constituted, in no case had the recommended candidate’s name been approved by the government of India. This was because the personal and intellectual trajectories of the eight chosen candidates were apparently being vetted by “Nagpur” before they could be cleared.
This is foolish. Guha can't even get his canards, let alone his facts, straight. The canard is that it is the PMO, not 'Nagpur', which is interfering.
That darkly meaningful word, “Nagpur”, was used by this IIT director in a spirit of sarcasm.
Or else, the fellow had a low opinion of Guha's IQ and was pandering to his prejudices.
However, underlying all that he said was a sense of sadness.
Because he was talking to a fucking cretin.
The scientist knew, from his vast experience in the public university system, that political meddling with higher education had not begun with the Narendra Modi government. Past regimes had also played favourites, with ministers of education often subtly (or not so subtly) directing search committees to pick this or that person as the vice-chancellor of one of the Central universities or as a senior official of the University Grants Commission.
I knew this when I was 14. Everybody who read the papers knew it. The fact is, Congress had done a deal with the Left. The latter were welcome to do 'a long march through the Institutions' into senility and irrelevance. Congress would concentrate on making money.
However, for the first time, such interference had now reached the portals of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology
The fool doesn't remember that this was the cry that went up 5 years ago. Why is he rehashing this now? How fucking out of touch is this cretin?
and of the Indian Institutes of Management as well. No longer were scientific expertise and administrative experience the sole criteria in choosing the directors of IITs and IIMs;
Guha just told us that they had never been the sole criteria. He can't keep his own story straight from sentence to sentence.
rather, ideological alignment with the sangh parivar was also sought for.
From whom? How come Raja Kumar was given an extension? The Sangh had targeted him 7 years ago. He fell because of favoritism in giving appointments to people from his own state and for inflicting draconian fines on students. On the other hand, his replacement did denounce JNU type agitations at IIT Madras. But this had to do with caste politics- Dalit students alleging that Brahmin Professors were discriminating against them. Guha, as a Tambram, should know that, in the nature of things, a lot of Professors eligible for Directorships are going to be of his own caste. Since the BJP is not a presence in the deep South, their only animus is against the Dalit activists on Campus who want to hold them accountable for the sins of their ancestors.
Anti-intellectual government
In an essay published in 2015, I had described the government headed by Narendra Modi as the “most anti-intellectual” this country had seen.
But Guha, Mehta, Sen etc. are not now considered intellectual at all. They are considered hysterical Huccha Venkat types. There is little point condemning someone as anti-intellectual if people think the word intellectual signifies raving nutter.
This judgment was impressionistic, based on statements made by leading Bharatiya Janata Party politicians (including the prime minister) in their first few months in office, yet it has been resoundingly confirmed
to a profoundly bigoted cretin
by the events of the subsequent seven years. What is being done with our IITs and IIMs is symptomatic of a much wider trend, whereby the state seeks systematically – and often ruthlessly – to control, manipulate and direct how students and professors in Indian universities act and think.
The Government is trying to get students and professors to act and think in a manner helpful to the country. Demanding the break up of the country, or STEM subject PhDs be handed out for finger painting, won't help India.
Free thought and open debate are discouraged and sometimes even prohibited.
Very true. I am not allowed to enter Guha's home and debate with him on the issue of why he eats dog turds.
Instead, conformity to the ideological and political agenda of the prime minister and the ruling party is asked for.
That ideology and agenda is 'do something useful to the country for the crying sake of fuck'. We need no more Kanhaiya Kumars or Guhas or Sens or P.B Mehtas.
The attacks on intellectual freedom in recent years by the Indian state as well as by political activists have been documented in a set of tables compiled by the faculty and students of the department of sociology in Delhi University.
But that department is useless. It can't document shit.
These scholars have tabulated their findings across six categories, as explained below.
Table 1 contains cases of books which have been withdrawn from university syllabi or even from public distribution because of perceived insults to the dogmas and prejudices of a particular religious group. The authors thus officially “cancelled” include the great American Indologist, Wendy Doniger,
who says that South Indian Brahmin women decapitate their partners in coitus. Sadly, Guha's lady wife did not take this hint.
and the acclaimed Bengali novelist, Mahasweta Devi.
who wasn't cancelled at all. She turned against the Left Front and started praising Mamta and even Modi who, shrewdly, showered encomiums on her. What happened was that a crap English translation of a crap Bengali story of hers was dropped from the syllabus.
Table 2 lists cases where seminars organised by students or faculty members have either been cancelled by the authorities or disrupted by political agitators, these usually from the Hindu Right. This table has as many as 69 incidents of this kind. They include, among others, the screening of a film by the award-winning documentary film-maker, Anand Patwardhan, in Pune in December 2014;
Hindutva types beat the kids at a screening the previous year. But Congress was in power then, so Guha can't bring the matter up. The Pure screening was cancelled because of 'threats' which students said were a 'miscommunication'.
a talk by the sociologist, Professor MN Panini, at the Central University in Jharkhand in February 2016 (cancelled on the grounds that the professor, though himself scrupulously non-political, had once taught at the Jawaharlal Nehru University);
the Professor who invited him was suspended. That's what Guha should have focused on. Panini was a retired Professor, not a leftist by any means and had nothing to do with the 'tukde tukde gang' as he'd left JNU in 2009. Guha misses a trick by not mentioning Governor Murmu's role. Still, one can read between the lines. The security services in Jharkhand wanted to send a strong signal to the campus radicals. If you come here to wag your tail we will kill you. Our people want to rise up, not turn into canon fodder for your Naxal dreams.
a talk in Chandigarh in January 2018 on Gandhi and communal harmony by Professor Apoorvanand of Delhi University (disrupted by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad);
they asked Apoorvanand why he considered Umar Khalid his son. He suggested that they should kill him if they felt murderous enough. They didn't. Aaj ke nau jawan bilkul bakvaas hain. Of course, when I say this, I mean Apoorvanand whom I regard as a young fellow whose masculinity has been destroyed by wearing tight trousers.
a Women’s Day event in Delhi University in March 2021, also disrupted by the ABVP, which is a serial (and almost always unpunished) offender in cases such as these.
Some silly Leftists turned up with placards saying 'Indian Army rape women' just when girl were receiving self-defense instruction from police and military personnel. The Lefties alleged that the police beat St.Stephens' Maths Prof Nandita Narayan. She may not have noticed.
Table 3 lists cases of criminal charges being brought against faculty and students of public universities for statements they made which the State considered defamatory or even “anti-national”.
But if these cases are brought by private persons, not organs of the State, then it is merely a case of the Law of the land applying to all regardless of whether or not they are pedagogues or the victims of pedagogues.
The thirty-seven instances here cover the usual issues about which the current regime is particularly paranoid: Kashmir, images of Hindu gods, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and so on.
Even Guha is bored by this stupid shite.
Table 4 documents 39 separate instances of physical attacks against faculty and students of Indian universities. They include the death of a professor in Ujjain as a result of injuries suffered after being assaulted by right-wing students;
Prof Sabharwal, who had just had by-pass surgery, died after being 'manhandled' because he and other Professors were cancelling the Union poll because of irregularities.
the murder of the widely respected scholar, Professor MM Kalburgi, in Dharwad in 2015;
He had retired long ago. There may have been a sectarian angle to the murder.
the boycott and forced transfer of a Sanskrit teacher in the Banaras Hindu University because he was a Muslim and so on.
A Muslim was appointed to teach Hindu priest-craft- a subject he had no knowledge of. Moreover, had he actually performed Hindu rituals- which was what he was paid to do- he would have violated a fundamental rule of the Islamic religion. This young Muslim did not want to teach Hindu priest-craft. He did not know how to do so. He did want to teach Sanskrit literature and that is what he is now doing once the University stopped being silly.
Pressure on professors
Table 5 lists cases where professors have not been allowed to take up teaching jobs to which they had been appointed as well as cases where scholars had to forcibly resign because of political pressure. (Full disclosure: among the two dozen instances in this category is one involving the present writer, who was unable to take up a position at Ahmedabad University because of pressure put on the governing body by the BJP and the ABVP).
Guha feared he'd be beaten and didn't take a particular job. But this has to do with Guha's cowardice. If all the other cases are similar then we must conclude that no scholars have been forced to resign from anything.
Table 6, the final one in this series, enumerates instances of foreign scholars stopped from entering India or speaking at academic conferences in India. The compilers comment that “this list is the least comprehensive since foreign academics are reluctant to speak about their visa problems for fear of being denied a visa in future. There have also been several incidents of racism against African students which we have not listed here. Overall, the current atmosphere is not welcoming for foreign scholars.”
Again, Guha supplies no details. The truth is, useful 'foreign scholars' are welcomed. Useless ones aren't.
For those who wish to consult these tables in their entirety, they are available online here.
Also valuable in this regard is a status report on academic freedom in the country, written by Professor Nandini Sundar and published in the excellent website, The India Forum.
But nobody now believes a word that comes out of Sundar's mouth.
In their documentation of threats to academic freedom, the sociologists of Delhi University have tried to be as comprehensive as possible.
What they have highlighted is that India has zero problem of the sort they suggest. Instead, it has a hysterical bunch of ninnies who think Muslims should teach Hindu priest-craft.
As well as non-partisan. The cases they document have sometimes involved non-BJP regimes (as when Mamata Banerjee’s government in West Bengal disgraced itself by harassing a Jadavpur University faculty for publishing a cartoon of the chief minister).
West Bengal is a different story. It has a long tradition of beating professors. Indeed, Shantiniketan showed the way when Sudhin Ghosh was thrashed and chased away back in the Fifties.
However, governments run by the BJP, in the states as well as the Centre, bear a disproportionate share of the blame for not assuring academic freedom,
i.e. Leftist nutters running riot
whether acting on their own or in concert with the angry and abusive young men of the ABVP.
as opposed to angry and abusive goons affiliated with other parties.
Obviously, these guys aren't going to mention Islamist violence- Professors whose hands were hacked off etc- but we understand why. They themselves may not want portions of their anatomy to be sliced off.
This year marks the centenary of my alma mater, the University of Delhi. I owe to that university my own interest in critical thinking and the exchange of ideas.
Guha has zero interest in either.
After five years in Delhi University, I went on to do a PhD in an institute funded by the Central government in Calcutta. In later years, I worked in four different public institutions in Bangalore, Calcutta, and New Delhi. As someone whose life and career have been so substantially shaped by the Indian university system, I view these intensifying attacks on academic freedom with anguish and dismay.
The problem here is that Guha has shit for brains. India should not be subsidizing an utterly useless type of education.
While public universities have borne the brunt of this assault,
Guha's backside has not been spared either.
private universities have not been immune either. Fearful of retribution from ruling party politicians, they too have sought to curb the intellectual freedom of their faculty.
No. They have sought to make money while supplying shite. Who gives a fuck about intellectual freedom? India subsidized public sector higher education in worthless shite because political parties needed to recruit thugs and crooks and rapists. Private Universities are about making money by swindling students.
One private university monitors and censors the social media postings of its staff.
It is trying to pretend they aint all cretins.
The vice-chancellor of another cultivates close ties with the leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Maybe, because the guy is a RSS veteran
These attempts to buy peace take one down a slippery slope, which leads ultimately to capitulation.
But Indian Higher education slipped down the slope of being utterly crap a long, long, time ago. At first there was the dream of everybody getting a clerical berth. Then there was the dream of everybody getting a nice subsidized PhD while queuing up to get a clerical berth. Then there was the dream of everybody becoming a Professor to give PhDs to those queuing up to get a clerical berth. Then, suddenly, there were no clerical berths and the entire Ponzi scheme collapsed. People who literally hate whatever subject they were forced to specialize in are forced to pretend to teach it to drooling cretins.
I have now known the Indian university for close to 50 years
only because you were too fucking stupid to get a proper job with your Econ degree
– as, successively, a student, researcher, teacher and observer.
you are shit and you teach shit to shit.
I have never known it to be as fragile, as burdened by threats internal and external, as it is now.
Because you have gone mad. You are the hysterical Huccha Venkat of Indian historiography.
The atmosphere is far less conducive to independent thinking,
It didn't take a lot of 'independent thought' to realize that India is as poor as shit. It can't afford to pretend otherwise for the purpose of academic pearl-clutching. What good does it do to say 'even after seventy five years of Independence, India doesn't have what America has'? India isn't America. It is very poor. England forces undergrads to pay full price even in public universities. India must do so too. Otherwise it will continue to have only half the number of Income tax payers as Britain despite having a population over 20 times the size.
to the pursuit of teaching and original research, than at any time since the Emergency. In accounting for this state of affairs, one cannot lay all the blame on the State, or even on Indian politicians and their thuggish ways.
One can lay all the blame on cretins like Guha who refused to lift a finger to do anything beneficial for the country. Non-STEM Academia in India is a wholly parasitic affair.
Also culpable are the administrators of the universities themselves, those vice-chancellors and directors who have succumbed too easily to threats from the state and, even more distressingly, from goons. The renewal of the Indian university, therefore, critically depends on a stiffening of the spines of those mandated to run it.
In other words, Indian universities won't be renewed. Specialist Institutes in STEM subjects will do okay. Colleges where hefty fines are imposed for any infraction will do okay. Vee Cees who ensure proper, pro-active, beating of nutters, may increasingly prevail. But the primary problem is that India rationed jobs through worthless educational credentials. That has to end. Paideia is about productivity not Guha-type stupidity.
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