Kalpana Kannabiran is an elderly sociologist cum human rights lawyer. In other words, she neither understands society nor the fact that people are free to say what they like. She writes in Scroll
‘Ashoka is boring – thank god’: Co-founder’s post about protests contradicts university’s own vision
The fact that you gave money to a thing doesn't mean you can't say what you like about it. It is true that Ashoka- like other Universities- doesn't say 'we want to teach you boring shite. The fact is, being an adult and earning a living requires you to be habituated to doing boring shite. If you enrol with us, you will still have to do boring shite but it will be better paid boring shite. Also, people will think you are of a higher class or social status because you will have acquired a little polish and sophistication'.
Parents will pay good money for their kids to get used to studying and doing boring shite provided that boring shite becomes increasingly well paid.
Sanjeev Bikhchandani derided student protests after the controversy about the institution’s treatment of a professor.
No institution is obliged to endorse nonsense published by a member of staff who, in any case, wanted an excuse to resign and head off to greener, less rural, pastures.
Since early August, Ashoka University in Haryana’s Sonipat has been at the centre of a heated debate over academic freedom.
No. A few professors who had better offers elsewhere, chose to resign and to pretend they were pushed out by a Fascist Administration.
The university drew criticism after it issued a statement on August 1 distancing itself from the research paper published by Sabyasachi Das, an assistant professor of economics at the institution.
That paper was shit. Das doesn't seem to get that non-citizens are not entitled to vote. It may be that BJP ruled states are better at enforcing the law in this respect. This is not 'voter suppression'.
Das’s paper, published in July, had claimed that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party may have manipulated the 2019 Lok Sabha elections to sweep back to power.
If he had any evidence he could have taken it to the Election Commission.
Das resigned from Ashoka University in mid-August.
Rural Haryana is less attractive to young savants than the Gokhale Institute in Pune.
Academics and commentators criticised the university for not standing by him.
Only if they were anti-BJP. Sadly, academics and commentators are considered to be cretins who get paid a little money to make a nuisance of themselves.
Das’s resignation sparked a discussion on whether private universities can nurture a radical, percipient intelligentsia.
The answer is no. Smart peeps don't need to go to no fancy Collidge. You can't turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. Even if you get the son of the Seth to babble Marxist jargon, the guy will soon join Daddy's business and exploit the fuck out of his workers.
Ashoka is one of several private universities in India – each believing itself to be the best.
A claim is not necessarily a belief.
It is not the first university to have experienced the seismic waves of resistance to administrative autocracy in higher education nor will it be the last.
People who resign so as to get a better job aren't resisting autocracy. They are self-interested merely. The fact is, you can only be autocratic to people who have no choice but to work for you.
Ashoka University is also not the first to capitulate, though worrying signs have been evident for long.
Why the fuck would anybody worry about what happens at some post Collidge in rural Haryana?
This is not about the faculty at Ashoka University and their terms of employment or engagement. Each faculty member has made a conscious decision to be located in the institution, mindful of its structural limitations, its strengths and its possibilities.
But they quit if they get a better offer.
They will navigate these challenges from time to time, sometimes, like Das, finding themselves at a sharp disadvantage.
What disadvantage? He gained publicity and preferment by publishing a silly paper attacking the BJP.
This decision of where faculty members locate themselves vis-à-vis the institution of which they are part, several choosing silence – some in relative comfort, others with intense discomfort – is also one taken by teachers in other public and private universities that have witnessed trouble.
It is taken by everybody who has a job. Also many prostitutes and beggars feel relative comfort or discomfort with their lot in life.
To attribute the actions of Ashoka University faculty entirely to the management or source of funding would be simplistic.
Some actions of theirs can only be explained in that way. Ashoka offered higher salaries and more funding for research to some of them than they could get elsewhere, which is why they were prepared to work there. But, if they got a better offer, they quit.
From my own experience, I know it is possible to enforce conformity and compliance in a hundred different ways.
Does she beat her husband? That's what my wife used to do get me to conform with the stereotype of the husband being the bread-winner of the family.
Sponsors – government and private, philanthropic and corporate investors – are equipped with several tools to harass and choke the most minimal possibility of autonomy.
If you get paid to work for somebody else, you aren't autonomous. You are heteronomous- at least during office hours.
Holding ground, more often than not, means standing alone, isolated, facing a blowback from the collegial environment that one took for granted, even nurtured and built.
But this is also true of people and many animals denied employment as Professors. I used to lecture at King's College. The police forced me to move on. I now have to lecture outside the McDonalds on North End Road. The police tried to move me on but I said I was Rishi Sunak's Uncle.
It is not an easy place to be. But who ever imagined that ethical resistance was easy?
It is easier than actually resisting anything.
The road is difficult but holds promise – deciding to walk that path is a conscious decision, not a default setting.
On the other hand, deciding to swim that path tends to happen only when you are very drunk. Sadly, this is my default setting.
The protest by students, despite a lack of support, is what makes protest – howsoever mild – crucial.
Why is it crucial to do stupid and futile things?
The one steady aspect of these institutional storms is the tenacity with which students have fought to preserve autonomy and dignity against all odds.
But students stop being students when the money to pay their fees disappears. Also, some of them decide they want to be proper grown-ups and earn their own money.
They have risked incarceration and even death to assert ethical disagreement and the right to dialogue and peaceful protest.
I risk incarceration and even death when I try to swim across the road. The police may arrest me for drunkenness or a bus may run over me.
Ashoka University is not an exception to this.
Nor is McDonalds.
There is always a diversity of views, contentious debate and serious disagreements – all of which is as it should be.
Why? What great diversity of views is possible in STEM subjects? Maybe, the top mathematicians have disagreements. But you won't find them on a campus in rural Haryana.
However, there are a few broad caveats: the right to speech or expression, welded to the question of dignity, includes the duty to listen to the speech of others.
This is nonsense. Kalpana has no duty to listen to my rantings and ravings.
It also includes the refusal to engage with violent speech and hate speech.
What about stupid or annoying or useless speech? The fact is, there is no duty to listen to anybody or get engaged to anybody- as the dog pointed out to me when I suggested we should fly to Las Vegas and get hitched. It was a St. Bernard's dog and had a cask of brandy around its neck. I met it while trying to swim down the road to the pub. Then a police officer arrested me and it vanished. Sad.
Finally, censure is antithetical to free speech.
Nope. Anybody can censure anybody. I frequently chide the Pope for not making me a Cardinal.
This is a core aspect of fraternity, or maithri, that is found in the Preamble to the Indian Constitution.
Nonsense! You are not required to listen to the drunken ravings of your brother or your cousin, forget about some stranger in a distant town.
Homogeneity and a one-size-fits-all approach makes for a drab world.
No it doesn't. Drab people, however heterogeneous, make for a drab world. A world where everybody is a fashion model cum designer would not be drab at all.
It narrows the mind into a world where reactions to baits and the baits themselves follow a set course.
Which grown-up bothers with 'baits' or 'reactions to baits'? Kalpana seems to have spent her life in the playground of a primary school.
This often spirals into violence to enforce conformity or distort speech into calls for genocide.
No it doesn't. Violence, among grown-ups, is motivated by the desire to have more money and the power to keep that money safe from those who want to grab it.
Worryingly, genocidal speech has become commonplace.
Kalpana's pals are constantly demanding the extermination of vast races of people. She should consider giving up her current occupation and moving to somewhere populated by sensible grown-ups.
A fair share of this has also been seen at universities and institutions of higher education in the recent past.
Which is a good reason for getting the fuck away from such places and doing something useful with your time.
Even while many condemn student politics, foot soldiers of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad, have been given a free hand by the authorities to unleash violence against students exercising their associational freedoms – as seen in the University of Hyderabad and more recently at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
But those guys were unleashing plenty of violence. What is sauce for the goose...
A further iteration of it can be seen in the case of Ashoka University.
No. There are no gangsters on that campus. This is because parents are paying a lot of money to ensure their kids don't spend their time hitting each other with hockey sticks.
Sanjeev Bikhchandani,
who owns the jobs portal 'Naukri.com'. He has an interest in raising the productivity of entrants to the job market and he has put his money where his mouth is. Kalpana hasn't.
one of the founders of the university, on September 5 tweeted a long post differentiating between “liberal values and liberal arts” and the true essence of Ashoka.
The guy did an MBA and became a successful entrepreneur. He is saying 'your kids at Ashoka are being prepared for good careers in business. It isn't a JNU like jhollawallah ghetto.'
A university student party pointed out to Bikhchandani that the university’s courses teach students to think critically and some chose to apply their learning practically through political activism.
But political activism at a posh campus in rural Haryana is utterly farcical. No doubt, what the kids meant was 'we are making connections with Leftist nutters on Ivy League campuses because that is where we are heading. We are too stupid and lazy to become billionaires like you. Thus, you should let us pretend we are Maoists so that we can emigrate and spend the rest of our lives shitting on India.' To be fair, this has already happened. The Ashoka alumni can pretend that he was beaten and tortured by the RSS for daring to suggest that Modi might actually have a penis which is totes triggering.
Bikhchandani responded with another long post on “the problem of title inflation”, drawing parallels with how the corporate sector enhances roles with designation changes but no increase in pay.
The big problem with Higher Education in India is that only the utterly illiterate and unemployable stay on at Uni to get PhDs. A few of them may get tenure but their students will have to be even more illiterate and unemployable.
As a major investor in the institution and facing no rebuttal of his views from the university management (in contrast to Das’s paper), Bikhchandani has to be taken at his word.
No. We can ignore him or attribute his remarks to his desire to get more parents to send their kids to Ashoka.
Still, a University is welcome to disassociate itself from remarks made by a donor. The question here is whether Bhickchandani actually said anything hateful or defamatory. The answer is- no. He says 'Ashoka is boring'. Parents know that kids must prepare themselves for a life of doing tedious, dispiriting, things. They won't be storming the Bastille or beheading landlords in rural Bihar.
Students have been trying bravely to call him out,
For what? Being a Capitalist? No. The man has a penis. Recent research by skilled econometricians have shown penises cause RAPE! Ban them immediately!
but it is clear what the costs of that might be.
Are students being beaten and sodomized for daring to speak out against the existence of penises? I suppose so. It is the reason I myself dropped out of Collidge. Well, I didn't really drop out. I just didn't attend any lectures or classes. To be fair, this was because I was off my head on drink between the ages of 17 and 19. After that, I worked in Accountancy, where being an alcoholic is a work skill.
The ability and willingness to take that risk to speak truth to power, in whatever limited ways available, must be cherished, not belittled, dismissed or disregarded.
But why stop at students? Why not extend it to random nutjobs who want to come up to Kalpana and tell her that she is ugly and stupid? Should this type of parrhesia not be cherished? Why not call up Kalpana and tell her more such home truths? She will be delighted or, if not delighted, nevertheless feel it her duty to give you a patient hearing.
There is, in Bikhchandani’s post, a disrespect of students that erodes their right to dignity and autonomy.
Why respect students? They must be ignorant or stupid in some respect otherwise they wouldn't be wasting their time and their parent's money sitting in a lecture hall.
“While I admire Bhagat Singh, as a parent do I want my son to go to the gallows at the age of 22?” he wrote. “I think most Ashoka parents will be relieved with this assessment of the University. Ashoka is boring – thank God.”
Bhagat Singh was not a student. He was a professional revolutionary. Sadly, his own family would lose their land because it was on the wrong side of the border. Pax Brittanica did have its advantages.
Bikhchandani reminds students that “parents don’t pay the fees they do for you to do aandolans”, or protest campaigns.
Does Kalpana believe otherwise?
No parent wants their child to go to the gallows. Why does Bikhchandani admire a radical socialist freedom fighter such as Bhagat Singh?
Because he was a patriot. He did not shit on India. He considered it a glorious nation.
Or does he simply lack the courage to say he does not?
It is Kalpana who lacks that courage. Did you know Bhagat Singh had a penis? Penises cause RAPE! Ban them immediately- though an exception can be made for sodomites.
It is not the parents of Ashoka University’s students who are studying at the institution.
Kalpana occasionally says something which is true. Parents seldom attend the kindergarten, or school, or college, where their kids are studying.
Can students survive a “boring place”?
Yes. It is good training for being a grown-up- more particularly one with little kids. Believe me, they can be very very boring especially on the subject of pocket money.
Is that what they want from their best years and the cutting-edge faculty Ashoka offers?
Your best years are your peak earning years. Being a student means being poor and having to listen to boring lectures and having to pass difficult exams.
Of course, in India, in Government Colleges, you can choose instead to join a political party and spend your time beating people. 'Student leader' means 'psychotic thug'. My mother published a book of my poems. The blurb described me as a 'Student leader'. My relatives would prominently display this volume on their coffee tables. If they had a dispute with somebody, they would pass them this book of mine and say 'my nephew is 'Student Leader'. This is a book of his poems. You are wanting to meet him? It can be arranged'. This terrified their interlocutor. An ordinary 'Student Leader' may be content to break your legs. One who writes poetry is bound to gouge out your eyes and copulate with your empty eye sockets while reciting Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
What is it that makes a place interesting and challenging?
Sex, drugs & Rock & Roll.
It is the world of ideas, knowledge and debate and the relationship they bear to the universe and to lived experience.
In STEM subjects, for very smart people, this may be true. It isn't true of anything you have to study to become a lawyer or an accountant or a business executive.
When the environment outside becomes toxic,
Which it already has in many Indian cities thanks to a stupid type of judicial activism.
speaking out against injustice and acting on one’s convictions is the only course.
Very true! If the people of Bhopal, in 1984, had spoken out against injustices- e.g. the fact that penises have not been banned though penises cause RAPE!- they would have suffered no ill effect from the toxic gas leak.
This impulse need not be Left, Right or centre.
It may be up its own arse for any difference it can make.
It can simply be values that bring together a shared, convivial humanity.
If you want conviviality, serve a decent brand of Champagne.
It is a dream that the Constitution gifts all Indians and affirms.
Yet Constitution is not banning penises though penises cause RAPE! How can there be true fraternity if some people have dicks and others don't?
The second point is Bikhchandani’s deployment of the political bait that caricatured conscientious protestors as participants in “andolans” when, in fact lives, pasts and futures were at stake due to discriminatory laws that had to be resisted.
Very true. India should not let non-Muslims gain citizenship simply on the grounds that Muslims in Pakistan or Bangladesh keep killing them. Future lives of non-Muslims in Muslim countries should not matter at all. Nehru and the Constituent Assembly made a grievous error in 1948.
Dissent, Bikhchandani must learn, is the hallmark of this democracy that he takes as a given.
This lady doesn't like the fact that this dude dissents from her crazy view. Yet she is silent on the great threat posed to Fraternity by the existence of penises.
In December 2019, several university campuses witnessed student protests over the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act
which merely re-affirmed the settled position since 1948
and the proposed National Register of Citizens.
Which was implemented in Assam by the Bench which arrogates to itself the exclusive right to interpret the Constitution. The Bench also opened detention centres. This was before Modi became PM.
These “andolans” were the best expressions of non-violent non-cooperation in our times, that must be celebrated and remembered.
They were completely useless. Congress and the Left were wiped out in Delhi.
Bikhchandani adds: “Ashoka does not boast of Left liberal values. Some individuals at Ashoka might be. And they might want to paint all of Ashoka in that fashion because that is what they believe. Ashoka is merely a liberal arts and sciences university. It values openness and a spirit of inquiry. It must guard against becoming an ideological ghetto and therefore not very open. Left liberal values and studying subjects that constitute liberal arts are very different. You can be right of centre and still study liberal arts.” (Emphasis added.)
This statement is shocking.
Kalpana is shocked that some people aren't Leftists. She will clutch her pearls and faint away if she discover that some of those people also have penises.
The opening page of the Ashoka University website says something completely contrary to this view, emphasising the institution’s commitment to “critical thinking”, “asking the right questions instead of accepting obvious answers” and more.
This lady doesn't get that Friedman and Hayek and Shenoy and Bhagwati were not just critical of India's stupid Leftist policies, they were right when they suggested that the country would rise up rapidly by scrapping 'licence permit' Raj.
I suppose this stupid woman has some hazy notion that 'Critical Theory' was invented by the Frankfurt School.
“Most importantly, the Ashoka University education teaches students how to learn, preparing them for a future in which both knowledge and work evolve continuously,” it says.
This is sensible. Most professions now accept the need for 'Lifelong learning' and periodic Professional Skills update training. This may be 'management jargon' but it is the sort of thing you should say at the interview when asked why you want to join a particular Company. You gas on about how everybody knows they are the market leaders in 'Lifelong learning' and though the interviewers understand that you are 'brown nosing', still, sycophancy is a valuable work-skill.
On the other hand, saying 'I want to join this Company so as to cause it to go bankrupt thus helping bring about Capitalism's final Crisis' won't go down to well with the Interview Panel- unless, obviously, your Uncle is a Minister or your dad is the IT Commissioner.
“The academic programmes offered by Ashoka University in a dialogic classroom prepare students to excel in research and higher education as well as in the application of their knowledge to tackle real-world problems as future leaders who can drive change.”
Kalpana doesn't get that big Companies have HR departments who talk this sort of bollocks. You have to flatter them a little- unless your dad is the IT Commissioner.
So what is the truth? That parents send their children to Ashoka, despite the stupendous fees (not all of them can be assumed to be affluent corporate employees or entrepreneurs)
some get financial assistance. Presumably, these are the brighter kids who will help raise standards. Also they will complete the assignments of the rich but thick in return for a nice wad of cash.
so that they get an education that inculcates the spirit of radical empathy?
Plain empathy isn't good enough for Kalpana. It must be radical and committed to the abolition of penises.
The university’s own vision suggests that students will develop the capacity – hopefully – of interrogating the basis of disprivilege and injustice around them.
But that's not what they are saying. The plain fact is any starving beggar can interrogate the basis of the injustice done to them by the fact that penises have not been banned even though there is irrefutable econometric evidence that penises cause RAPE! Admittedly, this is Granger Causality- still we must ban penises immediately so as to fulfil the constitutional dream of Fraternity. Ask Dr. Ambedkar if you don't believe me. He was constantly telling Nehru to chop off his own dick. Did Nehru listen? Sadly, no.
Or do parents send them to be churned out mindlesslessly in the manner Bikhchandani suggests?
Few Indians would pass up the opportunity to turn their kids into Bikhchandani type billionaires even if this involves mindless indoctrination in IT and FinTech and Operations Research.
Why be a mindless Marxist drone? Professors of useless shit aren't paid very much. Also they have to teach utter cretins.
If it is the first, the management must rebut Bikhchandani’s views. If it is the second, the university’s vision statement must change so parents are not under the mistaken view that this is a liberal arts institution of the kind the statement suggests.
Wow! Kalpana really doesn't understand that Indians like Ashoka or Aziz Premji University because the guys who founded them were billionaires. They want their kids to become rich and to generate lots of jobs. Doing philanthropy is a great reputation builder and a way to network and gain political support.
Bikhchandani’s fine distinctions between liberal values and liberal arts is best left for another time,
Liberal Arts or 'ars liberalis' is the opposite of 'fine arts'. It refers to the type of training given to lawyers and future administrators as well as to the scions of the Squirearchy. It has nothing to do with Liberalism as a political philosophy.
Bikhchandani is right. Kalpana is wrong. But then, the former is rich and is doing stuff useful for India. Kalpana is merely a nuisance.
or perhaps Political Theory 101 should be made mandatory for all the founders so they understand the basics of why they are there.
There speaks the Stalinist! Why not say that all Hindus should be interned and 're-educated' till they realize that penises must be banned because penises cause RAPE!?
It may also help to learn that funding a university does not make one an expert in academic matters.
Which is why these guys hired such experts to run the place. This does not mean they lost the right to say 'this is a good College. Send your kids here and they will have good careers. They won't turn into Marxist nutjobs.'
It only means that one has agreed to invest in an institution that will have the guarantee of autonomy
But autonomy means being allowed to say 'this Institution does not endorse the views of such and such employee or such and such student or such and such rabid dog which strayed onto the campus'.
and find its course on the basis of the academic expertise it gathers for the purpose.
Which academic expert has endorsed Das's stupid paper? None at all.
“The Student Government at Ashoka seems to be labouring under the impression that their mandate is to govern the University,” Bikhchandani writes. “It isn’t. Their mandate is to work on student activities and student life.”
Since students are stupid and ignorant, it may be worth pointing this out to them. Otherwise they might think it their duty to ban penises.
The fact is Bikchandani is a role-model for many young people. He is saying 'set up an IT club or improve your elocution by joining the Drama Society. Don't be fooled into thinking your job is to protest the fact that some people have penises.'
To reduce the effort of students to mobilise themselves against what they see as a wrong to an illusion that they are “governing” the institution infringes on their right to dignity in exercising associational freedoms.
No it isn't. It is merely fair comment. On the other hand, it is true that I feel my right to dignity is infringed by your denying that I iz the fackin' Pope, mate and can fackin' excommunicate you. Also, have you seen the 'Da Vinci Code'? That albino assassin works for me so you just pour me a beer and put it on my slate.'
One may call it a union or a student government or a student political party or an association or by any other name – whether Bikhchandani subjects it to “title inflation” or not, it is a collective effort of a student body to speak together and speak up.
Nonsense! Most students don't give a fuck about Student Politics. On the other hand, you might join some such mob in the hope of getting laid. I myself only joined the 'ban penises now' demo in that forlorn hope.
No investor can set the agenda for them nor dare to define what their politics should be.
But anybody at all can say that they are doing stupid shit.
More importantly, it is not an illusion that they have the right to question the course the institution takes.
Everybody has the right to raise questions about anything at all. Why have penises not been banned? Is it because of Neo-Liberalism?
They have the biggest stakes – lives, futures, freedoms – in the institution, and have a right to call it to account.
They also have the right to call the Andromeda Galaxy to account for its blatant discrimination against the Lesser Maggelanic Cloud.
The management has a duty of care, the terms of which must be collectively decided from time to time and debated.
No. The duty of care is established by law. No collective decision is superior to that duty.
The university is located within the territory of India, that is Bharat, is it not?
As is Bikhchandani. He has the right to say what he likes. Kalpana is welcome to sue him. She will lose. She is a shit lawyer.
The rights enshrined in the Constitution are not suspended for the Ashoka community.
Her complaint is not against a member of that community. She is condemning a rich dude who gave money to the place and helped set it up.
There is an active, full citizenry there, that cannot be obstructed from exercising their citizenship rights – scale does not matter, the exercise of rights does.
There has been no such obstruction which is why nobody has gone to Court seeking the redressal of a rights' violation.
In any case, citizenship is irrelevant when it comes to constitutional rights. Some students and professors are not Indian citizens. They have the same rights and judicial remedies as anybody else.
Kalpana has displayed a startling ignorance of the Law in this article. She has been employed for many years by publicly funded Universities. That was money wasted. Worse, a great nuisance has been permitted to flourish. It has destroyed the life-chances of hundreds of millions of Indians. Écrasez l'infâme!
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