India

Academe, Jul/Aug 1999 by Bhargava, Rajeev

No formal censorship exists. But religious groups, ultranationalists, and other outside forces threaten a fractured, but perhaps irrelevant, academic community.

ACADEMIC FREEdom is widely understood to be the freedom of scholars to conduct research and the freedom of teachers and students to exchange and deliberate collectively on scholarly ideas without fear of sanction, censure, or illegitimate interference. It is distinct from the more general freedom of thought and expression of citizens in a democratic society, because it is attached to social roles embedded in particular practices. Internal to these practices are the intangible "goods," such as explanation, understanding, and insight, produced in the pursuit of academic excellence. Furthermore, since academic practices are sustained within institutions, academic freedom must also imply the autonomy of institutions within which teaching and scholarly research are conducted.

The freedom of scholars and autonomy of academic institutions are threatened in three distinct ways: (a) directly by state action, when the coercive apparatus of the state suppresses them; (b) by conservative and authoritarian communities or unbridled market forces within civil society; and (c) by distortions and motivational impediments that can creep into academic institutions and fetter the mind of academics. Such internal threats develop when academic freedom is lost in the amorphous generality of other freedoms or when academics lose sight of the goods and standards internal to academic practice.

What is the status of academic freedom in India, and how is it threatened? To understand this issue, it helps to place Indian universities in quasi-historical perspective. In India, universities have undergone three distinct phases. In the first, preindependence phase, Indian universities developed an autonomy from society without altogether losing links with it. Since society itself was suffused with ideals of freedom, equality, and self-determination, the university became the natural site where these ideals were articulated, tested, and perfected. The dominant threat to academic freedom came from outside, from the British colonial state.

The value of the university, to use literary scholar Wendy Steiner's felicitous phrase, lies in its "simultaneous relevance and irrelevance to society." Such a position requires maintaining a principled distance-neither amalgamation and capitulation nor detachment and arrogant aloofness. Autonomy must never be confused with insulation. The consolidation of the university's autonomy and eventually its insulation from the rest of society are the main features of the second phase in the history of Indian universities. By developing interests and ideals in abstraction from society, by cultivating an unacknowledged indifference to the rest of society, the campus became a world of its own. In this phase of autonomy-cum-insulation, the main threat to academic freedom was internal.

In the third phase, Indian universities began once again to blend with society, but by this time, the ideals typical of the first historical phase had vanished from society. In this phase, in which the university is neither autonomous nor insulated from society, academic freedom is gravely endangered by external social forces.

These points need elaboration. Save for a brief period of political emergency between 1975 and 1977, academic freedom in postindependence India has never been actively threatened by the state. I cannot remember a single instance of the monitoring of seminars, the banning of an academic book, or the imprisoning of an academic for his or her views. Nor has state interference stymied academic research. However, subtle and not-sosubtle pressures on academic institutions by democratically elected governments are commonplace. Perhaps the most unabashed attempt at government interference occurred recently when the coalition government led by the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) interfered with the prestigious Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla. The institute's governing body was packed with hand-picked supporters of the BJP, who systematically tried to subvert every previous decision taken by the institute's director. Ratification of fellows selected before the time of the new governing body was delayed, an ideological monitoring of research proposals was set in motion, senior fellows such as the eminent writer Krishna Sobti faced humiliation, and a politician was arbitrarily selected to deliver the Radhakrishnan memorial lecture. Plainly, nonacademic considerations had short-circuited the autonomy of the institute.

The persistent bit-by-bit aggression by illiberal communities is by far the most serious danger to academic freedom in India today. A case in point is the fate of historian Mushirul Hasan, who was punished for a rather innocuous remark against the ban on Salman Rushdie's novel Satanic Verses. All hell broke loose in his own university after his interview appeared in a magazine. A systematic campaign of intimidation was launched against him, which resulted in a virtual ban on his entry into his campus. When he returned several months later, he was mercilessly beaten up.