'It's suffocating': A leading liberal university is attacked in India
Jawaharlal Nehru University, named after India's first prime minister, is one of the country's premier liberal institutions, a hothouse of strong opinions and left-wing values whose graduates populate the upper echelons of academia and government.
But for the Hindu nationalists in power in India, the university and similar institutions are dangerous refuges of 'anti-Indian' ideas. And they do their best to silence them.
Masked men have stormed the JNU campus and attacked students, shouting slogans linked to a far-right Hindu group. Vocal followers of the right-wing ruling party who were installed as administrators suspended students for participating in protests and imposed new measures in December restrictions on demonstrations. Professors have been rejected promotions for questioning government policy.
“It's suffocating,” said Anagha Pradeep, a political science student who received warnings from JNU after protesting her housing conditions and helping screen a documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “And you can't learn out of fear.”
The pressure on JNU is part of a broader effort to neutralize dissenting voices – media organizations, human rights groups, think tanks – as right-wing Hindus pursue their goal of transforming India into an explicitly Hindu nation.
Not long after Mr. Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party took power in 2014, members of its ideological source, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, launched a campaign against elite universities across the country, taking steps such as filing police complaints against professors who lectured on subjects they hated.
Hindu nationalists, while trying to uproot the secular foundation that Nehru laid for India, are trying to replace the traditional intellectual values of universities with their own conservative ideas. The government has removed chapters from textbooks on India's former Muslim rulers and silenced researchers who asked questions pseudoscience promoted by right-wing officials.
“We want students to understand that patriotism is of utmost importance,” said Abhishek Tandon, who has headed the student wing of the RSS in New Delhi for 21 years.
He said his organization “will not allow anti-India forces within the campus to work against the integrity and unity of India.”
Sumit Ganguly, an India specialist at Indiana University, said the Hindu nationalists' campaign, including the appointment of education officials aligned with the right-wing government, would make academic freedom a “relic and an alien concept” in India can make.
“What we are seeing now is a steady accumulation of institutions with individuals who do not have the right professional qualifications but share the ideological preferences of the ruling party,” he said.
Some of these officials were effusive in their praise for their government benefactors. Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit, JNU vice-chancellor since 2022, has called Mr. Modi the 'greatest spokesperson for democracy' and a 'phenomenon'. Ms. Pandit and a university press officer did not respond to requests for comment.
Founded in 1967 and spread over hundreds of hectares of remote forestland in southwestern New Delhi, JNU has more than 7,000 students and about 600 professors and lecturers. The founders, including an American rural sociologist, envisioned a model research university that would be a breeding ground for debate and dissent, free from government interference.
In 1975, when the government declared an internal emergency – a particularly dangerous time for Indian democracy – university students protested against the suspension of fundamental rights facing deportation, arrest and jail time.
Even after that traumatic period, students still had room for dissent in the decades that followed. “No one has suffered under any ideology,” says Kavita Krishnan, an activist who arrived on campus as a student in the early 1990s. “The diversity was his strength.”
The current crackdown began in 2016, two years after Mr. Modi took office, when his government appointed Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar, a professor of electrical engineering, as head of the university.
Within days of his appointment, about a dozen students were charged with sedition after being accused of displaying slogans in support of a Kashmiri man hanged by India over a deadly attack on parliament. While there appeared to be some videos of the students manipulatedIndia's toxic social media space and its politicians have found an enemy in the university's students and professors.
Mr. Kumar ended a long tradition of consultation with students and faculty members and curtailed, according to teachers and students, a long-standing policy of encouraging applications from people from lower castes and other disadvantaged groups.
To inculcate “patriotism” and warrior pride, he invited retired soldiers to campus and proposed a battle tank on display.
Nearly fifty members of federal parliament sent a letter to the Minister of Education in January 2019 complaining that the university was being 'destroyed'.
In recent years, students associated with far-right groups have physically attacked other students for their liberal and secular views, bashing them with sledgehammers, iron bars and stones. Amid a wave of student protests in 2019 over a law that opponents called anti-Muslim, officers in riot gear raids a library at another university and hit students with bamboo sticks. At yet another university, officers fired stun grenades in students.
After masked men stormed the JNU campus and attacked students in January 2020, university alumni who were officials in Modi's government were quick to condemn the violence. But a politician from his party later justified the attack by describing the campus as a “center of sex and drugs” where thousands of used condoms and empty liquor bottles are produced every day.
Last year, members of the right-wing group RSS tried to intimidate students by carrying out executions marches with sticks and saffron flags – an emblem of Hinduism – on campus.
Nazar Mohamed Mohideena JNU student who has campaigned for affirmative action and is a follower of an anti-caste revolutionary resented by Hindu nationalists said he was declared a security threat to other students and his professor denied him access to a laboratory had denied.
Members of the RSS's student wing beat him up during a scuffle when he tried to save a portrait of the anti-caste revolutionary. Periyar, he said. (The group denied this allegation.) In October, Mr. Mohideen received a letter from the university saying he could not continue with his doctorate. studies, a decision he challenged in court.
“My struggle against oppression,” Mr. Mohideen said, “made me a visible enemy.”
Avinash Kumar, a representative of the JNU teachers' association, said the right-wing campaign against the university had changed in nature.
“Our campus has helped realize the real motto of education,” empowering students of all castes and classes and breaking down social hierarchies, he said. But those values are at odds with “what the ruling regime now represents,” he added.
“Any space where this type of environment thrives is being crushed,” he said.