Faculty in fetters: Academic freedom is not absolute

The recent resignation of two professors — Sabyasachi Das and Pulapre Balakrishnan – from the Department of Economics of Ashoka University has triggered a debate. The detractors of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government have since been weaponising the resignations and are quoting the so-called ‘global sentinels’ of democracy to make India look like a slaughterhouse of academic freedom.

Credit: DH Illustration

While I find myself inadequate to comment on the merits of the Ashoka University case, I have absolutely no faith in the self-proclaimed policemen of global morality and ethics and their methodologies and findings. Their credentials are suspect. In 2022, the V-Dem Institute's Academic Index Freedom graph showed India below Pakistan and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, along with Hong Kong and China. The institute had given Nepal the highest score in Asia in its Academic Freedom Index in 2021.

The V-Dem Institute's funders include the ‘Open Society Foundation’, headed by US billionaire George Soros, who in 2019 had publicly announced his intentions to reconfigure Indian politics to suit his ideological perceptions and worldview.

In October 2022, India was ranked 107th out of 121 countries in the Global Hunger Index. The anti-India bias is clear. Neighbouring countries – Pakistan (99), Bangladesh (84), Nepal (81) and Sri Lanka (64) – all fared 'better' than India, according to the Global Hunger Index, which is released by an Irish and a German NGO, both inspired by the Church.

India has had, and still has, a reasonably good record of pluralism and intellectual freedom. Jesus Christ was put on a cross over two millennia back, for preaching something, not to the liking of powers that be. But five centuries before the crucifixion of Christ, Lord Buddha too had a fresh message for humanity, rejecting several of the contemporary popular beliefs. Buddha was first called Mahatma and later Bhagwan by his fellow Indians.

However, India’s pluralistic ethos suffered a major setback in 1193, when an Islamic zealot, Bakhtiyar Khilji invaded Nalanda University, and moved on to destroy other universities as well. Later on, Odantapuri, Sompur, Ratnagiri, Pushpagiri, and Vallabhi were pulverised by other Muslim invaders.

The West, which was in the Church stranglehold till about 200 years back, had no tradition of intellectual freedom. In the US, in the 1980s and ’90s, many universities adopted regulations aimed at proscribing speech and writing that were deemed to be against the prevailing value system. Surely, such regulations impinged on academic freedom.

In India, both Congress and the Left have frequently used state powers to suppress whatever they found to be ideologically inconvenient. The first book banned in independent India was Nikos Kazantzakis’s historical novel ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ (1960). ‘Nehru: A Political Biography’ by Michael Edwards, (1975) was banned too, as it purportedly contained grievous factual errors.

M O Mathai, the private secretary of Jawaharlal Nehru from 1947 to 1959, wrote a book on the first prime minister of India in 1978. The book – ‘Reminiscences of Nehru Age’ – had 49 chapters, but it remained banned till a chapter inconvenient to the Nehru family was dropped. ‘The Heart of India’ (1958) by Alexander Campbell was the other book banned during the rule of the Congress because it was considered hideous.

‘The Red Sari’ (2010), authored by Javier Moro, a Spaniard, was a novel allegedly based on Sonia Gandhi’s life. It was banned and released five years later.

Subramanian Swamy had joined the IIT Delhi as a Professor of Economics in 1969 but he was terminated without notice in 1972 and so was his wife, Roxna Swamy, who taught mathematics at the institute. Swamy’s crime was that he was a critic of the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, and a supporter of Jan Sangh. The defiant couple was evicted from their quarters abruptly.

Works of noted authors such as Taslima Nasreen (1993) and Salman Rushdie (1988) were banned in India, even before anyone in India had even read them.

In July 2010, the hand of Kerala professor T J Joseph was cut off by members of the now-banned Popular Front of India (PFI) after he was accused of insulting Islam.

Ambikesh Mahapatra, a chemistry professor at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, was arrested in 2012 for forwarding an allegedly derogatory cartoon about West Bengal’s chief minister Mamata Banerjee. He was recently acquitted by the court.

Nowhere in the world, academic freedom is absolute – it is calibrated by the contemporary socio-political value system. In 1951, the Nehru administration made a provision limiting Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution against "abuse of freedom of speech and expression". “Every freedom in the world is limited,” an impassioned Nehru said in Parliament on May 29, 1951, debating why the press needed to be leashed.

(The writer is a former Member of Parliament and a columnist)