Teaching a Lesson?: Academic Freedom and the Indian State
Prologue: Three Real Scenarios
The First
In December 2022, the Madhya Pradesh police booked Prof Inamul Rahman, Principal of the Govt New Law College Indore (GNLC) for allegedly keeping a “Hinduphobic and anti-national book” in the college library. This was book titled ‘Collective Violence and Criminal Justice System’ co-authored by Dr Sheetal Kanwal and Dr Farhat Khan. This book was in the GNLC library since 2014. Dr Rahman joined GNLC five years later in 2019. The book according to the ABVP, the student wing of the RSS, talks about the emergence of “Hindu communalism as a destructive ideology”. It is also supposed to have said that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other Hindutva outfits seek to establish a Hindu-majority state and want to “enslave other communities”. It had been revised in 2021 to remove the so-called offending portions.
The Madhya Pradesh Higher Education Minister Mohan Yadav (and now its Chief Minister) instituted an inquiry into how the book was being allowed to be used for reference in the college. Acting on a complaint by a second year LL M student Lucky Aidwal, and a member of the ABVP, Home Minister Narottam Mishra ordered the registration of an FIR under several provisions of the IPC. Sections 153A (promoting enmity on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence) and 295A (malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings of any class), 500 (defamation), 504 (intentional insult with an intent to provoke and breach peace), 505 (statements conducting to public mischief). The FIR also named, apart from Prof Rahman, Dr Farhat Khan, the book’s publisher Amar Law Publication and Professor Mirza Mojiz Baig. The Supreme Court stayed the arrest of Rahman and Baig. Rahman resigned as Principal. The other two never returned to Indore. In May 2024 the Supreme Court quashed the FIR, terming it as “absurd”. But the damage was done. None of the three could teach again at the GNLC.
The Second
A shocking video emerged in the social media in the last week of August 2023. In it Tripti Tyagi, a teacher at the Neha Public School in Muzaffarnagar district in northern Uttar Pradesh, could be seen asking each of the students in her class to slap their 7-year-old classmate, who is Muslim. As the boy stands fearfully wailing with each slap, the teacher is heard asking the other students to do it ‘properly’. The SP of the district later told reporters that the teacher told students to hit the boy “for not remembering his times tables.” The SP further disclosed that the teacher's justification was: ‘When the mothers of Mohammedan students don’t pay attention to their children’s studies, their performance is ruined.”
The Third
On 9th August 2023 a 17-year old Dalit male student in a partly aided school in Nanguneri a town in Tirunelveli district in southern Tamil Nadu, was brutally attacked by sickles by his three classmates who were Maravars, an intermediate dominant caste forming part of the Mukulathors. When his younger sister tried to save him, she too was attacked. What had provoked this brutal assault? Irked by the Dalit boy doing well in his class, far better than them, the dominant caste boys would constantly harass, humiliate and taunt him with caste slurs and ask him to perform menial tasks for them. To avoid this, he stopped going to school. When the Principal enquired, the Dalit boy confided the real reason. That led to the incident. Both the boy and his younger sister were hospitalised with serious injuries for which they underwent surgeries. They were relocated to a different school.
Within three days of this incident that sent shock waves, the government of Tamil Nadu after making all the right noises, appointed Justice K Chandru (a former judge of the Madras High Court) as a one-man Committee to suggest measures to be taken to create an atmosphere free of caste/creed differences in schools and colleges in Tamil Nadu.
Why was this necessary? As the New Indian Express reported in November 2015, school children in parts of Tirunleveli were wearing wrist bands in different colours, each indicating the particular caste to which they belonged. It’s red and yellow for Thevars, blue and yellow for nadars, saffron for Yadavs–all socially and politically powerful Hindu communities that come under the most backward classes category, while students of the Dalit community of Pallars wear wrist bands in green and red and the Arundhathiyars, also Dalits, wear green, black and white. Four year earlier, in August 2019, the Tamil Nadu State Education Department had issued a circular discouraging the practice in schools. The most vehement opposition to this move came from the BJP National Secretary H. Raja who tweeted that tying threads on wrists and wearing tilaks on foreheads are related to Hinduism. Banning these in schools, he said, was a blatant anti-Hindu action. He also asked: “Does the school education director have the courage to ban the symbols of other religions?”
II
Report Card on Academic Freedom
The above instances give us a fair idea on where we stand on academic freedom in our country today. The expression ‘academic freedom’ has been deliberated and debated sufficiently, the world over mainly because it faces threats universally even more now than ever before. An updated version of the Academic Freedom Index (AFI), prepared by the FAU Institute of Political Sciences and the V-Dem Institute was brought out in 2025. It gives an overview of the state of academic freedom across 179 countries. Its analysis showed that countries with anti-pluralist parties in government have lower levels of academic freedom than those where anti-pluralist parties have little to no political influence. It notes how anti-pluralist parties lack commitment to the democratic process as the legal means of gaining and losing power. Once installed in power, anti-plural parties tend to deepen differences between political camps, reduce the space for public contestation and undermine mutual forbearance.
In the AFI of 2025, India features at the bottom 10 to 20 percent of the countries where academic freedom is “completely restricted”. This is a huge dive from 2013 when it was within the category of ‘fully free’ and 2022 when it fallen to ‘mostly restricted’. India features in the index just above Syria, Iran, Laos and Palestine. India performs worse than even Hungary, Hong Kong, Sudan, Yemen, Bangladesh and Russia. The AFI reveals that more than half of the world’s population currently lives in “completely restricted” or “severely restricted” levels of academic freedom. Whereas in 2006, approximately 4 billion people lived in places with robust environments for academic freedom, today, that number has declined by more than a quarter to 2.8 billion.
A report titled Free to Think is brought out periodically by an international coalition of academics and experts named Scholars at Risk (SAR). In the latest version it has assessed data collected from July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2024, of 391 attacks arising from 313 incidents in 51 countries and territories. The SAR Report talks of the ‘concerning’ trends in eighteen countries including India over the past decade. India is among the countries where universities have cancelled lectures, poetry readings and film screenings related to violence in the Middle East. Often university leaders have justified the cancellations by expressing unspecified security concerns. India also figures among those countries where state and higher education officials called in police or security forces to break up protests.
The academic freedom that these empirical studies speak of can be best understood by referring to the report released on May 31, 2024 by the Working Group on Academic Freedom comprising international experts, constituted under the aegis of the UN. They have prepared a set of Nine Principles for Implementing the Right to Academic Freedom. The foremost of these identifies academic freedom as a human right to acquire, develop, transmit, apply, and engage with a diversity of knowledge and ideas through research, teaching, learning, and discourse. Such engagement could take place inside the academic community (“intramural expression”) or outside the academic community including with the public (“extramural expression”). Another principle recognised is the right of the student to academic freedom at all levels beginning with childhood schooling.
The UN Special Rapporteur (SR) on the Right to Education, Fareeda Shaheed, submitted her report on academic freedom at the 56th session of the UN Human Rights Council, held between June 18 and July 12 2024. In it she noted importantly that students should have the right to express themselves on specific subjects without fear of reprisal. Also, the respect due to cultural diversity and the need to ensure a multiperspective approach, including in subjects such as history should be accounted for. She urged that while educators should be encouraged to foster critical thinking and to provide diverse perspectives, they should do so in a manner that upholds the principles of pluralism, respect for others and the pursuit of knowledge, including a supportive environment where students are encouraged to think critically, engage with varying viewpoints and develop informed perspectives. Most significant is the SR’s proposal that academic freedom should be considered to be an “autonomous human right grounded in several provisions of international law.”
III
The legal regime and the courts
Let us at this juncture briefly examine what the legal regime in our country is concerning education and academic freedom. Article 39 (f) of our Constitution talks of the unenforceable right of a child to be provided by the State opportunities and facilities to develop in a healthy manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity. Another directive principle in Article 45 originally provided that within a period of ten years the State shall endeavour to provide free and compulsory education to all children up to the age of fourteen years. In 1993, the Supreme Court in a landmark decision titled Unni Krishnan, J.P. & and Ors. vs. State of Andhra Pradesh and Others [(1993) 1 SCC 645] declared the right to education to be a fundamental right of every citizen up to the age of 14. Almost ten years later in 2002, Parliament inserted Article 21-A in Part III of the Constitution to recognize as a fundamental right, the right of every child between the ages of six and 14 to free and compulsory education. That, however, was made dependent for its enforcement on a law made by Parliament. Incidentally this amendment was notified only 8 years later with effect from April 1, 2010 the same date on which the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE) became operational. Correspondingly, Article 45 was amended to the effect that the State shall endeavour to provide early childhood care and education to all children till they complete the age of six. However, by restricting the fundamental right to education under Article 21-A to children between the ages of 6 and 14, the constitutional promise remains incomplete. The judgment in JP Unnikrishnan was in a case concerning the malaise of capitation fees being collected for engineering and medical seats in private educational institutions. That problem, however, continues.
Two other constitutional provisions that require to be noticed are Article 51-A (h) which states that it shall be the duty of every citizen “to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform” and Article 51-A (k) which states that every citizen who is a parent or guardian shall provide opportunities for education to his child or, as the case may be, ward between the age of six and fourteen years. Article 25 of the Constitution guarantees to all persons freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion. Article 30 of the Constitution recognizes the fundamental right of both religious and linguistic minorities to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.
The High Courts and the Supreme Court engage on a regular basis with numerous issues concerning the right to education including the admission of students to professional courses, reservation of seats, appointment of teachers and Principals in schools, VCs in universities, anti-ragging measures, recognition and affiliation of educational institutions and so on. As regards minority institutions, two important decisions in the recent past deserve mention. In November 2024, the Supreme Court recognised the right of Madrassas in UP to run schools providing for religious instruction and imparting education in other subjects up to standard 12. It did not, however, permit them to award degrees or diplomas. In the second decision, by a narrow majority of 4:3 the Supreme Court held that the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) would not lose its minority character only because it stood converted into a university by way of a per-Independence statute.
However, these instances do not quite test the courts’ responses to curbs on academic freedom. Where they do, the result can be disappointing. One such instance has been the judiciary’s handling of the cases of students and teachers jailed for protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019 and its aftermath. It will be recalled that spontaneous protests erupted not just in Delhi but throughout the country and even among the Indian diaspora world over. Several hundreds of the protesting students and academics were arrested by the police. Some of them were booked under the repressive Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act [UAPA] for alleged anti-national activity only to ensure that coming out on bail is next to impossible. Five years have passed, and with no prospect of the trial in these cases commencing any time soon, there appears to be no real justification for denying them bail.
The case against Prof. Saibaba
The way the Supreme Court of India dealt with the case involving Prof. G.N. Saibaba, who taught English at the Delhi University, has had many a legal scholar express surprise and disapproval. Yet, a detailed discussion of the case at this stage is not warranted as it is now pending in the Supreme Court. The entire case of the prosecution in support of its invoking the draconian provisions of the UAPA was that he was part of a banned terrorist organisation and planned to commit terrorist acts. The case rested entirely on the electronic evidence in the form of CDs, pen drives and a laptop seized from his residence on September 12, 2013. He was arrested on May 9, 2014. Having been afflicted with polio since childhood, Prof. Saibaba was permanently on a wheelchair. Despite this, bail was refused. It took him ten years to finally emerge free.
The March 7, 2017 judgment of the trial court finding Prof. Saibaba and the other co-accused guilty was overturned by the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court on October 14, 2022. It held that the proceedings in the criminal cases were null and void for want of valid sanction in terms of Section 45 (1) of the UAPA. Literally overnight, an appeal was filed by the State of Maharashtra, and was heard by a special Bench of the Supreme Court (M. R. Shah and Bela M. Trivedi JJ) in the residence of one of the judges on the next day October 15, 2022 which happened to be a Saturday. The acquittal was stayed, perhaps a rare occurrence in the history of the court. As a result, Prof. Saibaba continued in the Anda cell in the Nagpur Central Jail with the Supreme Court being unmoved by his deteriorating medical condition.
It took another 6 months for the Supreme Court, by an order dated April 19, 2023, to remand the appeals to the High Court for a fresh hearing. For the second time, by judgment dated March 5, 2024, another Bench of the Bombay High Court at Nagpur (Vinay Joshi and Valmiki Menezes JJ) acquitted all the accused by holding that not only was there no valid sanction to prosecute any of the accused, but that the evidence gathered did not prove the case of the prosecution. Fortunately, in the further appeals by the State against this judgment, no stay was granted by the Supreme Court. Thus, Prof. Saibaba could ultimately come out of jail a free man with his head held high but his body badly wrecked by the callous treatment he received at the hands of the State during the 10 plus years of incarceration. The process was the punishment. Unfortunately he did not live long thereafter and succumbed to post-operative complications after undergoing surgery for gallbladder stones. He was just 57. He was an intellectual whose Ph.D was on ‘Indian Writing in English and Nation Making’. Two volumes of his writings and poems while in prison have been published. The question that troubles one’s conscience the most is this? Who will be held accountable, and when, for what the system did to a man of learning and forbearance?
Justice appears to have eluded academics and students in the above instances where they have been accused of being anti-nationals and charged with offences under the draconian criminal laws. But then it also appears to elude them when they are victims at the hands of non-state actors like vigilante groups and the dominant castes. I will make good this comment by referring to the aftermath of the three scenarios that I referred to at the beginning of my talk.
V
The three scenarios and their aftermath
In the first scenario, the Indore GNLC case, it was only in May 2024 that the Supreme Court quashed the FIR against Prof Rahman and his three co-accused, after terming the criminal case as ‘absurd’. However, Prof Rahman, who was forced to resign, remains uncompensated for the agony and humiliation he has undergone. The others too have not been able to return to GNLC.
This is not an isolated instance. There have been persistent attacks by Hindu right-wing groups on educational institutions, across the country, run by Christian missionaries. The priests and nuns are harassed, congregational prayers disrupted, their land is encroached upon or buildings bulldozed and some of them falsely accused of indulging in forcible conversions. These cases too are engaging the attention of courts.
In the second scenario, the case of the young Muslim boy slapped repeatedly by his classmates at the instigation and instruction of his teacher, was taken to the Supreme Court by Tushar Gandhi. The Court found egregious violations of Section 17 of the RTE Act which prohibits any child being subject to physical punishment or mental harassment. The State of Uttar Pradesh has been asked to bear the entire costs of the education of the child till he completes his schooling. The case remains pending in the Supreme Court for monitoring.
The dismal prospect for secular education could well characterize what is happening in government run schools across the country, including the Kendriya Vidyalayas. There is a renewed stridency to these schools hosting events that further the Hindu right-wing agenda. Prof. Krishna Kumar laments the disillusionment of the teachers in government schools being reduced to event managers and uploaders of incomplete data on the internet with little or no time for their primary task: imparting education. All this on top of the fact that there are several documented studies showing that the state of infrastructure in the public schools across the country is pathetic, to say the least. A woeful shortage of everything essential- teachers, classrooms, chairs and tables, blackboards, clean drinking water and clean toilets. Naturally, therefore, the private tuition industry is flourishing. The hope of academic freedom to pursue education is but a distant dream for those who cannot afford the costs.
In the third scenario, the State Government stepped in to provide relief both for the medical treatment of the young Dalit boy and his sister but also ensured his admission to another school where he continues to do well in his studies. When Justice Chandru spoke to him, he wished that his attackers would perform equally well in their studies. A remarkable maturity for a person so young. He was recently again attacked physically but it is possible, according to media reports, that this did not have a caste angle.
What is astonishing though are the observations and findings in Justice Chandru’s report titled ‘Nanguneri Never Ever’ which is a must read for anyone interested in knowing the ground realities of school life in rural Tamil Nadu. When Justice Chandru met the three upper caste accused boys who had attacked the Dalit student of their school, they expressed no remorse. When they were released on bail by the Juvenile Justice Board, they received a hero’s welcome back in their village. None of the teacher associations or even political parties, including the DMK, responded to the Committee’s queries. Justice Chandru notes that all over Tamil Nadu caste Hindus still do not permit their wards to eat food cooked in school premises by female Dalits as part of the noon meal scheme. Also, asking Dalit students to clean school toilets is not frowned upon. The practice of wearing coloured wrist bands and tilaks as caste markers continues.
Elsewhere in the country, the harassment and humiliation faced by students belonging to the socially disadvantaged classes continues unabated notwithstanding the suicides of Rohit Vemula and Payal Tadvi both of whose mothers are before the Supreme Court demanding concrete measures to prevent these tragic instances.
VI
Whither public universities?
We have been witness to the steady decline of the public university. They were nurseries for different shades of politics for long and now are sought to be brought in line forcibly through strong arm tactics of the state. JNU attracted national attention when in February 2016 three of its student leaders, Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban, were arrested by the police under the charge of indulging in anti-national activities. In May 2020, the campus witnessed violence orchestrated by unidentified and masked mobs. What was seen as a stronghold of the political left has now been eviscerated of its characteristic ability to stand up to and question the establishment. Neither the teacher nor the taught have been spared. They are being taught a lesson alright.
In the elections held this year in JNU, the ABVP won a central panel post after almost a decade and lost two others by narrow margins. It also won 23 of 42 councillor seats, including two at the School of Social Sciences, for long the hub of Marxist professors and students. Writing for the online journal The Print, reporter Sanya Dhingra talks about the recent phenomenon of dozens of RSS swayamsevaks triumphantly marching across the JNU campus with drums, trumpets, and clashing cymbals. Many wielded the customary shakha lathis. Unimaginable 12 years ago. One of the Professors who spoke to her commented: “Earlier, admittedly, the teachers had a bias against students who subscribed to the BJP-RSS ideology, but there was never a full-blown attack on academics itself.” He added: “The problem is that as a result of the formal Left’s volubility all these years, JNU came to represent the deep feelings of victimhood and otherisation harboured by the Right. That is why winning JNU has been almost more important for them than winning some state elections. It is like finally conquering the institution that has represented their intellectual marginalisation and humiliation for decades.”
This is the same ABVP which has facilitated the rise of many a present-day leader: the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, the Raksha Mantri, several ministers of the Union cabinet. many of the serving Chief Ministers of the BJP ruled states like UP, MP, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. Former Ministers like the late Arun Jaitley, Prakash Javdekar, Ravi Shankar Prasad and the former Vice President Venkaiah Naidu were all student leaders once who cut their teeth with the ABVP and were focused on challenging the ruling establishment of their times. They did undergo persecution and even imprisonment during the infamous Emergency unleashed by Mrs Gandhi and her cronies. However, one doesn’t recall their being called tukde tukde or anti-national.
Prof Gyan Prakash disagrees with the widely shared prognosis that what we are today undergoing as a country is another undeclared emergency. According to him, what we have today is a more virulent form of totalitarianism where dissent is simply eradicated from public spaces aided by the complete control of the mainstream media both electronic and social. Also, the heavy hammer of a bouquet of repressive criminal laws brought against the present-day academics and students appears unrelenting.
The instances that have been much discussed in the media reveal a pattern to the ABVP’s methods. They can vandalise departments if they feel that a teacher has said something in class that they think is insulting to Hinduism or hurts religious sentiments. They protest, many a time violently, against appointments to academic positions of those they perceive to be left liberal ‘sickular’ or urban naxal. In November 2018, in the face of such protests, historian Ramachandra Guha withdrew from a teaching position he was offered at the Ahmedabad University. Dr Firoz Khan, who was offered his first job to teach Sanskrit literature at the Banaras Hindu University, could not conduct a single class. Some 30 students belonging to the ABVP staged a sit-in outside the Vice-Chancellor's office in protest saying that it wasn't "right" for a Muslim professor to be teaching them Sanskrit. They obviously disagree with the recent Supreme Court judgment that reminded us that Urdu is an Indian language and that “language is not tied to religion and that multilingualism is a reflection of India's reality”. Women teachers in Maharashtra have had their classes disrupted by angry ABVP cadres demanding apology for what they perceived to be an insult to Chhatrapati Shivaji. Instead of proceeding against them, the Satara police booked the teacher for causing disturbance of peace. It required the Bombay High Court to castigate the police and quash the case.
Even private universities are succumbing to pressures of not only the ruling establishment but vigilante mobs furthering the right-wing agenda. By not supporting their own faculty who have asserted their right of academic freedom, these institutions have forced them to quit. The resignation of Prof Sabyasachi Das of Asoka University is one such instance. They too have cancelled lectures of guest speakers at the last minute without assigning reasons. This vindicates the observation of the SAR report that “academic freedom is curtailed when universities seeking State resources and/or patronage enter into compromising relationships with people in power, resulting in a curious situation whereby academic freedom is suppressed with the apparent support of the academic establishment. The net result is a system operating mostly through hidden self-censorship.” More recently, Prof Mahmudabad was booked for a social media comment made by him following the press briefing held by the armed forces on Operation Sindoor. The Supreme Court protected him from arrest but astonishingly directed that the SIT constituted by it will analyse the ‘hidden meaning’ of the words used by him. Even private think tanks like the Centre for Policy and Research, perceived to be not aligned with the establishment, have been targeted by the law enforcement and revenue agencies.
VII
Other challenges to Academic Freedom
Among the serious challenges both to institutional autonomy and academic freedom is the corporatisation of education. Major business enterprises are in the field of education and have been successful in commoditizing, branding and marketing education as a product, affordable to a few, and out of reach for the many. Teachers are reduced to service providers and students to being consumers. Commentators on this worrying trend tell us that the focus now is less on research and more on performance and outcomes. The high costs of pursuing professional courses, including law, in private elite universities compels many a student to borrow heavily to complete the basic level of education and then succumb to the temptation of opting for the highest paying job. A direct impact is on academic freedom to choose one’s career path.
The use of digital technology has not made it any easier for academic freedom. On the contrary, the challenge today is to sift fake news from the real, spotting the manufactured AI generated work from the genuinely researched ones and shutting out the garbage that the net is host to. How does one protect impressionable minds from the onslaught of WhatsApp forwards where a half-baked comment based on misinformation passes off for expert opinion? In this scenario the internet has the potential of posing yet another threat to academic freedom.
Add to this the fact that most campuses today are fortresses where CCTV cameras facilitate constant surveillance, and biometric attendance is the norm. Campus violence is on the rise, as is drug abuse. Police everywhere are infiltrating student WhatsApp groups. The faculty too is under their radar. Signing of letter petitions protesting arbitrary actions of the government or even of right-wing groups and their role models invites show cause notices to the faculty for crossing the line.
VIII
The Deep State and Academic Freedom
Loss of institutional autonomy is felt most when control is sought to be exercised over what can constitute the syllabus and the reading material that can be referred to. This concerns both schools and colleges. The RSS has an educational wing called Vidya Bharti. It is stated to operate 12,754 formal schools and 12,654 informal schools across India with 3.2+4.5 = 7.7 million students and about 1.5 lakh teachers. Most of these schools are affiliated to the Central Board of School Education, various state boards, and the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS). Vidya Bharti’s books are published in Hindi and 12 other regional languages, including Bengali, Tamil and Odia, and are taught in addition to the government-approved curriculum. The online media outlet Newslaundry has, in an investigative report, noticed the following question and answer appearing on page 5 of Bodhmala 4, a textbook on cultural knowledge intended for Class 4 students:
Q: “Which are the countries along our present-day border that were once part of our country?”
A: “Brahmadesh (Myanmar) and Bangladesh to the east, Pakistan and Afghanistan to the west, Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan to the north, and Sri Lanka to the south.”
A teachers’ guidebook, part of the same series, is stated to make this outlandish claim: “Earlier, Hindu culture prevailed all over Jambudweep...What we call Asia today was the ancient Jambudweep. The whole of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kazakhstan, Israel, Russia, Mongolia, China, Myanmar, Indonesia, Malaysia, Java, Sumatra, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan and Afghanistan were part of it.”
All this may not be cause for worry if it weren’t part of the general push for revival of what is termed as Indian Knowledge Systems. These ideas appear to have percolated into the curriculum of formal institutions like the NIOS which has already included in its readings the claims of Kanada’s atomic theory, Sushruta’s plastic surgery and Vedic mathematics. The book Vymaanika Shaastra is cited in NCERT’s new module on the Chandraayan mission for seemingly revealing that our civilisation had the knowledge of flying vehicles. This could also explain ISRO Chief Somanath claiming in 2023 that major scientific developments in branches like metallurgy, astrology, astronomy, aeronautical sciences, and physics took place in ancient India and were later taken to Europe by the Arabs. Textbooks on History across grades and on political science for classes 11 and 12, have been particular targets for re-telling and re-writing.
Last month the press reported that students in government schools in Delhi will soon study about the RSS alongside freedom fighters under a new educational initiative called Rashtriya Niti. Another news item disclosed that the RSS will be opening Sainik schools to train students for the armed forces. Long time watcher of the Hindu right wing groups, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, has reportedly said the idea behind the RSS operating such a large network of schools across the country is to “catch the Hindu minds young and instill the idea of ancient Hindu invincibility, a past when Hindu India was the dominant race all over the world and that the golden bird of Indian civilisation was destroyed by thousands of years of slavery, first in the hands of Muslims and then the [Christian] colonial powers”.
Then there are a slew of directives to universities and institutes of higher learning from the University Grants Commission (UGC). These could range from organising meditation sessions developed by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s organisation, The Art of Living Foundation, to celebrating events and festivals within campuses. There are revisions to, and even wholesale removal from, syllabuses and reading lists that do not pass muster of the right-wing groups. For instance, the forcible removal of the essay titled Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation by noted litterateur A K Ramanujan from the list of reading materials for the B.A Hons course in Delhi University.
The appointments to the positions of head of the Indian Council for Historical Research, the Directors of the various Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian Institutes of Management, the Vice Chancellors of various statutory public universities including Nalanda and Viswabharati, and even the Film and Television Institute are completely controlled by the Indian government with perhaps useful unofficial inputs from right-wing outfits.
When one steps back to view the changes in the past decade in the field of education it is striking how persistent, deep and pervasive has been the effort to capture the popular imagination of not just the public but of young impressionable minds. There is a concerted attempt to purge it of anything that can be seen as questioning the policies and actions of the ruling establishment. There is a smugness to debunking science and glorifying past learnings. When you prefix liberal with left and misspell secular as sickular, deriding intellectual discourse is relatively simple. What can be taught, how can it be taught, who can teach, who can be taught, what can be written about or commented on are no longer to be decided by the educational institutions. They are to be pre-cleared, vetted by extra-legal mechanisms and bodies. You can dream, you can imagine, but to act on them you need permission. Dissent is not to be encouraged, much less tolerated. In the India of 2025 Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem ‘Bol’ can be recited but terms and conditions apply:
बोल कि लब आज़ाद हैं तेरे
बोल ज़बाँ अब तक तेरी है
तेरा सुत्वाँ जिस्म है तेरा
बोल कि जाँ अब तक तेरी
Reciting Hum Dekhenge or shouting Azaadi in the campus of an educational institution might invite being labelled urban naxal, tukde tukde gang, Khan Market type or JNU type.
IX
The challenges ahead of us: How do we prepare for the day after tomorrow?
Academic freedom in the Indian context throws up the challenges of accommodating several competing interests and, on top of it, social inequalities exacerbated by caste, class and communal prejudices. The Supreme Court has in the context of accepting a limited quota for Christians in Delhi’s St Stephen’s College reminded that: “Every educational institution irrespective of community to which it belongs is a ‘melting pot’ in our national life. The students and teachers are the critical ingredients. It is there they develop respect for, and tolerance of, the cultures and beliefs of others. It is essential therefore, that there should be proper mix of students of different communities in all educational institutions.”
Is there then hope? This is what most of us here would want to know. History tells us that even these times pass. Many a teacher and a student is, in some or other corner of the country, resisting being taken over by or surrendering to the pressures and pulls of a repressive regime. They signify the resilience of the human spirit to stand firm against odds. Ours is a plural society with lived histories of inclusivity, sharing and compassion. If we don’t let that yearning within each of us get snuffed out, there will be hope. Most importantly, it is essential for us to nurture that spirit and the constitutional values that we wish to live by, so that future generations will learn from our experience and know what to value and to preserve.
The changes we have witnessed in the past decade may be of a more enduring nature than we can imagine. It renders the task of restitution of our belief in constitutional values of inclusivity and pluralism even more challenging. How do we reclaim secular spaces for academic freedom within public universities and institutions of higher learning? How should private universities be facilitated to regain institutional autonomy? How can we cultivate and nurture ‘scientific temper’ and a spirit of enquiry in young minds? How can we improve the conditions of our public and government schooling to provide a hope for academic freedom from childhood to adulthood? How do we restore dignity of the individual in the closed learning space without distinctions on the basis of caste, gender and general stereotyping? How do we utilise to their full potential, the spaces that we have on the internet and strengthen the voices of the influencers who share our values and concerns? We have had in our midst, not too long ago, different models of education that appear to provide that alternate space and alternate system of education. Illustratively one could look at the Shantiniketan model (as originally envisioned by Gurudev Tagore) or the Krishnamurthy Foundation of India school model. There could be many others. Can we replicate or adapt them for today’s needs? Our answers to these questions will determine the course of academic freedom for the generations that follow.
Epilogue
In signing off today’s talk I wish to recall a marvellous judgment delivered on August 11, 1986 by the Supreme Court of India (Chinnappa Reddy and M M Dutt JJ.) in Bijoe Emmanuel v. State of Kerala. The appellants before the Court in that case were three children-Bijoe, Bino Mol and Bindu Emmanuel. They belonged to the Jehovah's Witnesses, a Christian denomination. Daily, during the morning Assembly, when the National Anthem was sung the three children stood respectfully but did not sing because, according to them, it was against the tenets of their religious faith-not the words or the thoughts of the Anthem but the singing of it. This led to their being expelled from the school, which action they unsuccessfully challenged in the Kerala High Court. The Supreme Court reversed the High Court decision and held that the expulsion of the three children from the school was a violation of their fundamental right to freedom of conscience and to freely profess, practice and propagate religion under Article 25 (1) of the Constitution. The Court ended the judgment with a flourish reminding us that “our tradition teaches tolerance; our philosophy preaches tolerance; our constitution practices tolerance.” It exhorted us “not to dilute it.” The children were asked to be re-admitted to the school.
Thank you.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is the full text of Prof. G. N. Saibaba Memorial Lecture was delivered by Dr. S. Muralidhar, Senior Advocate and former Chief Justice, Orissa High Court on October 12, 2025 in New Delhi.
