Harvard's activities must alarm the Indian philanthropists

Time of India

3 days ago

Dr Jagdish Batra is a senior academic, currently working as Professor of English at O.P. Jindal Global University, India. He has nearly four decades of teaching and research experience. His area of specialization is Indian English Fiction on which he has presented papers at many international conferences in Europe and South East Asia. A Rotary Study Exchange Scholar to USA, Dr Batra has published eight books besides some sixty research papers and a number of general articles/blogs etc. LESS ... MORE
The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University is in the eye of the storm over the organization of the Pakistan Conference under its aegis, in which Pro-Pakistan speakers were invited, obviously to whitewash Pakistan's image in the wake of the Pahalgam carnage of 26 tourists. To counter the media backlash in India, the Institute page has removed the detail of proceedings from its website and supplanted it with a statement claiming that the student organizers along with their faculty advisor were solely responsible for organizing the event in which the Pakistani Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb and Pakistan's Ambassador to the US, Rizwan Saeed Sheikh participated.
'Following our principles of operation, we did not consult any benefactor of the Institute about this conference,' says the notice, alongwith a formal expression of sorrow, though without naming Pakistan in it. This is indeed a poor strategy to avoid criticism directed at the university and the benefactor concerned who were equally responsible for organizing the conference at this critical juncture. What lends credence to this conclusion is also the removal of a page from the Institute site whose rump is still available on Google. It begins with 'Previewing the inaugural Pakistan conference 2025: 14 Apr 2025 — The Mittal Institute sat down with the two conference co-chairs—Muhammad Hadi from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Sannan Pervaiz …'. So, it is not just the students and the faculty advisor of the conference, but also the benefactor and two conference co-chairs. This conference by Pakistan sympathizers on the Harvard campus only shows disdain of the Centre for human rights of which the university professes to be the world champion.
It is not the first time that Harvard has been involved in anti-India and anti-Hindu projects. One recalls the Dismantling Hindutva Conference held online in 2022 in which Harvard was the key player along with many other American and European universities. It was basically directed at the pro-Hindu policies of the Modi government. Surprisingly, anything going in favour of Hindus in the world rankles these 'elite' institutions which are devoted to the DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity) philosophy.
One finds a number of India-centred study centres supported by Indian billionaires in many American universities. People like Murty, Ambani, Mahindra, Piramal, et al have been contributing mammothly to them without scrutinizing the operations of these institutions. Narayan Murthy's funding of the Murty Classical Library under late Sheldon Pollock is a case in point. Now, Pollock, much like Wendy Doniger, has been instrumental in presenting a distorted and degraded interpretation of our scriptural texts. Funding for the DEI projects supposedly to bring about social justice in India for the marginalized sections seems innocuous, but actually these projects are carried out with the aim to create divisions in the Indian society.
How Harvard has been aiming to create problems for India can be gauged from the Indologist Rajiv Malhotra's assertion in his recent book Snakes in the Ganga that a clandestine project undertaken by Harvard University to study the tribal Munda languages spoken in Chhattisgarh and Odisha states was not exactly for love of an obscure language but meant to promote a new theory that the Munda speakers were the original inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent which would mean that both Aryans and Dravidians were outsiders! One needs to be reminded of the Maoist movement rife in that area which might serve as part of the toolkit to dismember India.
When it comes to highlighting India and its positive influence on the world, Harvard is least interested. Malhotra's attempts to get its researchers take up projects on Vivekananda's influence on America got lip service only, so did his plea to promote India-loving Transcendentalist Ralph Emerson's writings. In case of Thoreau, Harvard simply denied India's influence – something clearly indicated in his book Walden Pond – besides ignoring such request in the case of Nobel-awardee T.S. Eliot, who had studied Sanskrit texts and used Sanskrit aphorisms in his poems.
Harvard has also been criticized by Malcolm Gladwell, the acclaimed author of The Tipping Point for its bias in admissions where it discriminates against Indian students and prefers other races. This attitude had been criticized by the US Supreme Court also which in its 2023 judgment mentioned race-conscious admissions programmes at Harvard and the University of North Carolina and found them violative of the Equal Protection Clause.
Now that the Trump administration has withdrawn grants to Harvard and some other universities, will the Indian billionaires have a second thought about funding these universities? Why don't they divert these funds to Indian universities and provide to Indian students good education at reasonable cost? The growing strictness about visa in America and Canada provides a huge opportunity to the Indian universities, government and the philanthropists to work together and come up with an elaborate world-class education system that will save for the country billions going out on account of foreign education.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.