Criminalising Thought: How Indian Universities Are Abandoning Academic Freedom

The Hindu

20-05-2025

Published : May 20, 2025 16:21 IST - 9 MINS READ
Wilhelm von Humboldt, a great liberal reformer and a humanist, once defined the university as 'nothing other than the spiritual life of those human beings who are moved by external leisure or internal pressures toward learning and research'. Even if a university did not exist, Humboldt felt that a human being would otherwise 'privately reflect and collect, another might join with men of his own age, a third might find a circle of disciples. Such is the picture to which the state must remain faithful if it wishes to give an institutional form to such indefinite and rather accidental human operations'.
This classic Humboldtian assertion about what a 'university' may symbolise—or ought to actualise—for people of any given generation remains profoundly relevant today. A similar idea was revisited in 1969 by public intellectual Noam Chomsky during a period of profound uncertainty and crisis in America's educational landscape, when student-led activism across campuses compelled universities and the intellectual elite to reflect on their role and to reimagine their place in society—even in terms of institutional propriety.
Today, once again, universities and colleges across the globe find themselves at a critical juncture, amid a global lurch toward right-wing extremism and an ideologically driven, majoritarian assertion of the state. This moment represents not just an impasse, but a deep crisis—one that goes well beyond the economic, technical, or administrative upheavals typically associated with issues of access or resources.
Far more troubling is what the recent arrest of a professor reveals: that Indian universities are in the grip of a deeper learning crisis—one in which the very foundations of our 'constitutional values' and 'constitutional morality' are barely visible, if present at all. On May 19, Dr. Ali Khan Mahmudabad, who heads the department of political science at Ashoka University in Haryana, was arrested over a social media post. There is nothing in the post that could, by any juridical standard, justify such an action—and yet, the arrest was carried out.
In any functioning democracy that respects its constitutional principles, the nature of arrest or juridical process, which is its own form of punishment in the Indian public institutional experience, calls for public outrage and institutional alarm.
Even in the daily churn of detentions, FIRs, and censorship orders—the theatre of majoritarian assertion enacted through extreme state power—the extreme frivolity of the complaints against Mahmudabad has come as a shock. His institution has distanced itself from the case, but his students and colleagues have supported him to the hilt, including by standing vigil at the police lock-up. Social media has erupted in protest and at least one television channel exposed the absurdity of the charges through an interview with Renu Bhatia, the chairperson of Haryana State Women's Commission who filed the police complaint against Mahmudabad.
Also Read | G.N. Saibaba reveals torture and injustice during 10-year imprisonment
The story here is not only about the arrest, but also what it signals.
Mahmudabad's post was not in any way advocating insurrection. It acknowledged the strategic achievements of Operation Sindoor and praised the symbolism of women leading the military briefing.
His post posed a question—measured and reflective—about symbolism alone in the absence of substantive justice for India's minorities. It was not a provocation, nor was it partisan. It was the work of a public intellectual engaging with the moment.
However, the state chose to respond not with debate or critical deliberation but with an FIR. Suddenly, the post and the question it asked became a threat and the thought it raised became a liability. The arrest marks what academics might call an epistemic rupture, a point at which power demands that knowledge retreat and where knowledge is punished for resisting.
For me, the issue is simple, in the context of the arrest, how did the university concerned have nothing to say or offer in support of its own faculty? Ashoka University did not defend the right to expression. It did not invoke the autonomy of scholarship. It did not uphold its duty to protect inquiry. It did not even ask for a fair hearing. This silence is not just loud. It is also instructive.
What is important to remember here is that this is not a misstep. It is a pattern. Across borders, the university, as a space and institution, is being recast, not as a site of contestation but as a risk-managed domain of reputation and restraint.
In Thailand, American scholar Paul Chambers was arrested over his remote association with a webinar deemed offensive. He had not spoken or organised it. Still, he was charged. In the US, Georgetown professor Badar Khan Suri was detained by Homeland Security on immigration grounds shortly after publishing critical research. Neither case involved speech that was unlawful. Both involved speech that was inconvenient.
The Indian university, however, is at a sharper inflection point. It is not simply adapting to political pressure. It is retreating from its role altogether. It no longer mediates between state and society. It no longer affirms the legitimacy of dissent. It no longer distinguishes between critique and criminality. In this vacuum, students watch as their teachers weigh each word, delay each paper, dilute each thought. The institutional memory of the university, once passed through debate and disagreement, is now being rewritten in silences.
As the scholar James Yoonil Auh observes, universities today face a 'quintilemma', a five-fold crisis eroding the foundations of higher learning. Truth is politicised. Autonomy is fragile. Belonging is conditional. Survival is transactional. And purpose, perhaps most dangerously, is adrift. The arrest of Mahmudabad, and the institutional silence that followed, touches all five.
What does this teach students? They are urged to think critically but only within sanctioned boundaries. To speak freely, but never too loudly. To analyse, but not antagonise. This is a contradiction at the heart of modern academia, one that demands boldness and punishes it in the same breath.
Yet the university, at its conception, was never meant to serve consensus. It was designed to disturb it. It was not built to affirm power but to question it. The earliest universities were sanctuaries for thought deemed too unruly for the court or the church. They existed not to mirror the world as it is, but to imagine what it could be. That architecture, intellectual, civic, moral, is now under siege.
Nor is this erosion confined to India. In the UK, the Public Order Act has drawn sharp criticism for curbing student protests under the guise of public safety. In Hungary, entire gender studies departments have been dismantled through state defunding. In the US, 'anti-woke' legislation increasingly dictates the permissible contours of race, gender, and history education in public institutions. The global university is becoming less a site of inquiry and more a stage for ideological compliance.
Highlights In 2021, Dr Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of India's most respected political theorists, was forced to resign from Ashoka University.
Economist Arvind Subramanian resigned in protest soon after. Their departures sparked student outrage and drew global condemnation.
In 2023, economists Sabyasachi Das and Pulapre Balakrishnan left Ashoka University amid institutional discomfort with Das' research.
In this landscape, what does it mean to teach in India today? To learn? What does it mean to enter a classroom knowing that a question, however measured, however thoughtful, may be interpreted not as dialogue but as defiance? What does it mean when students must calculate not only what they think, but how safely it can be expressed?
The quiet assertion by Mahmudabad reminded us that India's pluralism is not extinguished. It appears, briefly and brilliantly, in moments like a military briefing led by women, or a question raised in good faith. But a pluralism glimpsed is not a pluralism guaranteed. The real challenge is not to celebrate its performance on national stages but to defend its presence in libraries, lecture halls, and living memory.
In the long run, it is not one arrest or one post that will define a republic. It is the ambient fear that settles into place afterwards, the kind that does not silence outright, but teaches people to pre-empt their own silence. The greater risk therefore lies not in censorship but in the habit of self-erasure.
And this is not the first time. Indian academics have for long found themselves marked, maligned, and made examples of, for asking the wrong questions, publishing the inconvenient paper, standing by the unpopular view. The targets shift. The tactics evolve. But the pattern endures. What we are witnessing is not an isolated aberration but the escalation of a longer campaign, one that demands our immediate and unflinching attention.
The arrest of Mahmudabad for a reflective and measured social media post is in essence a continuation of a deepening crisis, where the space for thought is shrinking and the cost of asking a question can be criminalisation.
The pattern is not new. In 2021, Dr Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of India's most respected political theorists, was forced to resign from Ashoka University. His writings had become, in the words of the university's founders, a 'political liability'. Economist Arvind Subramanian resigned in protest soon after. Their departures sparked student outrage and drew global condemnation, with over 150 international scholars calling it a 'dangerous attack' on academic freedom. Mehta's exit was not a resignation. It was an eviction masked as discretion.
Also Read | Prof Hany Babu's house raided again
There are others. In 2016, Amit Sengupta resigned from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication after being abruptly transferred to a remote campus, a move he described as retaliation for supporting the protests that arose around Rohith Vemula's death.
In 2023, economists Sabyasachi Das and Pulapre Balakrishnan left Ashoka University amid institutional discomfort with Das' research. The language of these repressions may vary—administrative reshuffling, legal harassment, subtle coercion—but the message remains constant: dissent will be punished, and inquiry will be policed.
This is not just a problem for the university. It is a threat to the republic. Because when a professor is arrested not for inciting rebellion but for posing a question, what is being criminalised is not speech but thought itself. And when universities respond with silence, or worse, with complicity, what is lost is not just academic freedom, but the very idea of a university as a space of fearless inquiry.
The consequences are already visible: classrooms grow quieter, students second-guess themselves, curricula bend toward the comfortable. What is being taught, implicitly, is not how to think, but how not to.
If India is to preserve its pluralistic imagination and its constitutional morality, it must protect its scholars, not as agitators, but as stewards of the democratic conscience. The stakes are no longer theoretical. They are existential. Because once a society begins to punish its thinkers for thinking, it begins to forget how to think at all.
Geetali and Ankur Singh from the Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES) contributed to this column.
Deepanshu Mohan is Professor of Economics and Dean, O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU), Sonipat, Haryana. Aman Chain, Harshita Hari, and Najam Us Saqib of the Centre for New Economics Studies contributed to this article.