Introduction
In May 2023, a viral video of Kuki-Zo women being paraded naked, and who were subsequently raped by a mob, brought forth the decade-long simmering ethnic tensions to erupt. But it took more than two months for this heinous crime of sexual abuse and violence against women to find momentary attention in the Indian media – that too only after it was reported and run by the New York Times. In contrast, the Indian media was quick to report from the “ground” Israel-Palestine war that was unfolding on the global stage (Apoorvanand 2023). The long history of occupation, killings and displacement by Israel was rendered absent as all attention was on the violence by Hamas. The diplomatic position of the GoI was uncritically regurgitated by the media in a decontextualized manner– empty of its checkered past.
This uncomfortable silence and surrender are not merely restricted to the newsrooms. They plague the academic spaces, recently reflected in the astonishing silence and on the issues on university campuses. The deafening silence on educational campuses can be traced to the shrinking space for social sciences in the neo-liberal economy. A couple of months later a titled “The History and Politics of the Palestinian Present” at a private university stoked backlash against the speaker as the talk was criticized for being anti-Israel, anti-Hindutva, and pro-terrorism (The Wire 2023). Earlier, the professor’s talk on the conflict was declined by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Such instances of denying permission to deliver lectures, staging protests, or organizing events have been frequent. The state of academic freedom is evident in India’s lower ranking on the Academic Freedom Index developed by the V-Dem Institute of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden (Sundar and Fazili 2020).
The questions that these developments prompt are: one, were academic spaces always silent; two, the importance of social sciences and humanities for democracy; and three, why student activism is central to both education and democracy. A quick look at the past would show the role that education and student politics played in India’s national movement.
Academic Freedom: Dissent and Democracy
Student agitations are dismissed as disruption and deviance in these times by those who are challenged by them. Youth activism has been dismissed as utopian idealism. The idiom “alchemists of revolution” by Marx and Engels on the other hand, captures the youths’ envisioned potential and role as agents of social change (Martelli and Garalyte 2019).Student politics and activism are reckoned as critical forces in challenging powerful establishments and the status quo.
India’s anti-colonial movement against British rule has witnessed widespread involvement of students. Universities became hubs of critical thinking and sites of protests. After India’s independence, the rebellious legacy of student politics remained. A few examples are the demand for the creation of a linguistic state that resulted in the formation of Andhra Pradesh in the 1950s and much later Telangana in 2014. The Peasant Uprising in 1967 that culminated in the Naxal movement drew young students’ active support and enthusiastic participation, swaying even youths from urban-middle-class backgrounds studying in elite institutions (Bhattacharya 2007). The National Emergency of 1975 was another crucial political juncture that saw massive participation of the university students in the Jayaprakash Prakash Narayan-led ‘sampoorna kranti’ (total revolution) to retrieve democracy from the dictatorial clutches of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Students continue to be at the centre stage in resisting the government’s excesses, more recently in the country-wide protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act.
In 2017, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung jointly organized A Dialogue on Student Politics in India (CSDS-KAS 2017). Discrimination based on caste, gender, and class in academic spaces is a commonly shared concern voiced by student representatives of different universities. Drawing students from different parts of the country and the world, universities represent a society’s diversity, internal conflicts, and collective aspirations. It mirrors the socio-political triumphs and failures unfolding in society at that moment. The students’ protest against injustices and oppression reflects their vision of the future. Their resistance has proved to be a shield guarding the democratic ideals enshrined in the Indian Constitution.
Education and Political Economy
In the early years of India’s independence, the vision for education was to cultivate a scientific temper and create conditions for both innovations and critical thinking, seen as crucial for social progress. Technological innovation aimed to offer a panacea to complex social issues like hunger with which the country was grappling (GoI 2024). The first five-year Plan thus emphatically focused on the key sectors of agriculture, education, and research. Further, with ‘scientific temper’ being constitutionally enshrined as a fundamental duty, ideals of humanism and secularism were seen as intrinsic to education that sought a better and just society.
The liberalization of the Indian economy, however, transformed the role and relation of education with society. The educational institutions have ably adjusted to the altering demands of the economy with its thrust on entrepreneurship and technological innovations. Instead of being equal contributors to knowledge production, the disciplinary streams came to be increasingly ranked (Science, Engineering and Management courses) as ‘superior’ and I (Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), ‘inferior’ with the former promising material prosperity, and social status (Kaur 2005). Such dichotomies ignore the truism that technological innovations do not happen in a vacuum but are produced in interaction with socio-political contexts. This was however not the case always as histories of IITs and IIMs in the early years of independence show a state awareness of holistic awareness that would alone pave the way for informed citizenship and democracy (Thakur 2010).
The sway of purported disciplines, hierarchically placed in the new economy has influenced the widening interdisciplinary distance. Such separations create the illusion that technology is value-neutral and uninfluenced by the political contexts and ideologies of its time. The IT boom surge in the early 2000s led to a surge in the private institutions imparting STEM education (Nigam 2020). It was further fostered through the initiative of GoI to diversify and introduce engineering and management schools in premier central universities renowned for their flourishing HSS courses (Pandey and Kausar 2017). Additionally, the social sciences departments in technical institutions are expected to, on one hand, market imperatives and on the other hand, ideological state intents (Chaudhuri 2021).
Increasingly, the space for social science education is being hollowed out. This accompanies a steady silencing of critical voices by cancelling public lectures and silencing student protests, including incarceration. Interdisciplinary conversations are indispensable to democracies for educating citizens to be active participants and informed about the ways to contribute to society (Stobie 2016). However, with the shrinking of spaces and silencing of voices that help evaluate the problems in the status quo, a just and thriving democracy becomes hard to sustain. India, the largest democracy in the world, envisioned employing education to promote humane technoscientific practice for societal progress and cohesion. But the undemocratic silencing undermines the purpose of education altogether.
References
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Bhattacharya, Amit. (2007). “Summer of 69 in St. Stephen’s”. The Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/deep-focus/Summer-of-69-in-St-Stephens/articleshow/2112041.cms
Chaudhuri, Maitrayee. (2021). “Higher Education and the Social Sciences in a ‘Smart’ India.” In D.V. Kumar (ed.) The Idea of a University: Possibilities and Contestations (pp. 104-126). Routledge.
CSDS-KAS (2017). “Student Politics in India: Issues and Challenges: A CSDS-KAS Dialogue with Student Leaders”. https://www.lokniti.org/media/upload_files/A-Brief-note-on-Sudent-Dialogue.pdf
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Nigam, Neeti (2020). “The Rise and Fall of the Indian Engineering Degree”. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/education/how-the-indian-engineering-degree-lost-its-sheen-this-decade-6182675/
Pandey, Neelam and Heena Kausar. (2017). “JNU to offer engineering and management courses, UGC nod pending”. Hindustan Times. https://www.hindustantimes.com/education/jnu-to-offer-engineering-and-management-courses-ugc-nod-pending/story-DPOJDb9kl5zVtrQBMvEgVO.html
Sundar, Nandini and Gowhar Fazili. (2020). “Academic Freedom in India: A Status Report, 2020”, The India Forum. https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/academic-freedom-india
Stobie, Tristian. (2016). “Reflections on 100th anniversary of John Dewey’s ‘Democracy and Education’”. Cambridge International Education. https://blog.cambridgeinternational.org/reflections-on-the-100th-year-anniversary-of-john-deweys-democracy-and-education/
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The Wire. (2023). “Asked by O.P Jindal University to ‘Express Regret’ Achin Vanaik Stands by his lecture on Palestine”. https://thewire.in/education/asked-by-o-p-jindal-university-to-express-regret-achin-vanaik-stands-by-lecture-on-palestine
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Rama Devi is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Centre De Sciences Humaines, Delhi, India. Deepshikha Sharma is a postgraduate student at the University of Twente, the Netherlands.