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Indian Express
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
Ali Khan Mahmudabad's arrest: At private universities, the promise of academic freedom belied
Academic freedom (or lack of it) across India's educational institutes has been a matter of discussion for some time. Unfortunately, our rank in the Academic Freedom Index, developed by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, based at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, is 179. What is also alarming is the gradual decline of this score. Educators seem to exercise a lot of self-censorship both within and outside the classroom. Online classes, recordings of lectures and even students are mostly viewed as potential 'risk hazards'. The fear of 'going viral' for something that we might have said in the classroom makes us more aware than we should be in a free academic environment. Initially, the lack of academic freedom was seen as an exclusive trait of public universities, where the state's involvement often acted as a deterrent. Against this backdrop, the newly emerged private universities like Ashoka University, Shiv Nadar University and O. P. Jindal Global University, to name a few, became an accommodating space for critical studies and discussions. Notably, all of these universities are known for charging exorbitant fees. Several well-known academics left public universities to join these emerging spaces. Many thought that negotiating academic freedom in these alternative spaces would be easier. Beyond the security and safety that a government job offers, the aspirations and hopes surrounding these private universities were significant. The recent arrest of Ashoka University professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad and the subsequent distancing of the university administration from the faculty member show that private universities are no better when it comes to academic freedom. One may argue that the university did not take any action against Mahmudabad for expressing his personal opinion on social media. But its distancing says a lot. In its carefully crafted statement, the university authority said, 'They do not represent the opinion of the university', adding that they would 'continue to cooperate with the Police and local authorities in the investigation, fully.' This is not the only time when a private university has deserted its employees. Ashoka University has distanced itself many times in the past — Rajendran Narayanan, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Arvind Subramanian are some prominent names on the list. This is not to say that the space of solidarity has disappeared, but it has shrunk. Faculties and students globally have come out in support of these academics, including Mahmudabad. However, it cannot absolve the university of its responsibility to stand by its faculty to uphold academic freedom. The hypocrisy of these universities gets exposed further when they thrive on their faculty's successes but do not offer support during their tough times. In these universities, the use of social media by faculty members is never discouraged. Rather, they are expected to share updates about their achievements, like recent publications and research grants. University handles are also happy to share and glorify these profiles to attract students. But if their academic engagement invites the government's wrath, they prefer silence or distancing. Private universities are exclusionary by their very design. Only people of a certain economic class can afford them. In many of these places, no affirmative action is followed either in students' admission or in teachers' recruitment. The aspiration of academic freedom is a major factor in making them thrive. As private universities fail in this most fundamental aspect, it is high time to rebuild public universities and make them spaces for critical academic debate and discussions. The writer teaches Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Guwahati
San Francisco Chronicle
27-04-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
The American democratic republic has died. It was 236 years old
The American democratic republic, a modest British colony that transformed itself into the world's richest country and greatest military power, has died. It was 236 years old. No official announcement was made of the end of the long-enduring republic, which was launched in 1789. No autopsy was scheduled. The proximate cause of death was America's rapid decline in democratic governance. In March 2025, the director of Varieties of Democracy, a Sweden-based think tank, cautioned that the U.S. was on the verge of losing its status as a democratic republic. The American democratic republic is survived by a country of the same name, the United States of America, now a presidential dictatorship. Ending the democratic republic was an explicit goal of the American dictator, Donald Trump. After the 2020 election, he led a failed coup against the republic. Later, as a candidate to return to the Oval Office, he pledged to 'terminate' the Constitution and declared that, in a second term, he would govern as a dictator, ruling by decrees. Trump's assertion of dictatorial power — and widespread acceptance of such power among political and business leaders and across American society — fatally broke the republic's structure. From the beginning, the U.S. Constitution, a pre-modern document, was deeply flawed. It originally permitted slavery, a grievous error rectified only after generations of bondage and a civil war that killed nearly 700,000 people. Even as the American republic sold itself as the world's democracy protector, its Constitution never established an explicit right to vote. Yet the republic endured because of its central principle: the separation of powers. No one person could run the United States — it was a republic made up of three co-equal branches of government: legislative, executive and judiciary. But, over time, the executive branch grew exceedingly powerful. Two world wars emphasized the president's commander in chief role and removed constraints on its power. By the second half of the 20th century, the republic was routinely fighting wars without its legislative branch, Congress, declaring war, as the Constitution required. With Congress often paralyzed by political conflict, presidents increasingly governed by edicts. Upon retaking office in January, Trump quickly removed limits on his power. Using a billionaire tech oligarch, he seized control over independent agencies, dismantled whole departments and fired or removed tens of thousands of government workers. Trump didn't stop with his own branch. He also attacked Congress's foremost power — to appropriate funds — by breaking law, the Constitution, and court precedent that said the executive must spend what Congress appropriates. And he made war on the courts that make up the judicial branch, challenging the power of judges to block his decisions, and he issued threats against those judges who dared to stop his lawbreaking. 'He who saves the country does not break the law,' Trump maintained. Following that mantra, Trump, himself a convicted felon, governed in a way that drew comparisons to the Mafia. The American government's main tool became extortion. It routinely threatened other governments — both overseas and within the U.S. — with financial ruin if they did not bend to Trump's will. The government used similar threats against civil society institutions — universities, nonprofits, media — and against some private companies, notably law firms. Those institutions that fought back by asserting their constitutional rights learned quickly that the government no longer recognized those rights. Congress was unwilling to defend such institutions or its own power. Ironically, the highest court of the judicial branch, the U.S. Supreme Court, sanctioned Trump's lawlessness even before he took office, with a 2024 decision putting the president explicitly above the law and immune from criminal punishment for official actions. By embracing that court-sanctioned dictatorial power, Trump ended the republic. Few Americans were aware of the republic's death. Confusion and fear of violence reigned among those who recognized the loss. Some opposition figures pointed to future elections as a way to overturn the dictatorship, but the Trump regime had previously issued edicts that would make elections unfair and unfree. A few voices called not for saving the old republic, but rather for designing a new American governing system. California seemed likely to be the center of any effort. Just last year, the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, Erwin Chemerinsky, published a book, ' No Democracy Lasts Forever,' calling for a convention to write a new Constitution. 'Our government is broken and our democracy is at grave risk, but I don't see any easy solutions,' he wrote, adding: 'We need to stop venerating a document written in 1787 for an agrarian slave society and imagine what a constitution for the twenty-first century should look like.' Funeral services for that first Constitution, and the country it made, are pending. In lieu of flowers, Americans can honor the deceased by taking Chemerinsky's advice and creating a new republic.
Asia Times
15-04-2025
- Politics
- Asia Times
At the birth of India, constitutional democracy was a huge gamble
The birth of Indian democracy is the stuff of legend. It was a moment of such staggering idealism and exuberance, a leap of faith so audacious, that the famous jurist and scholar Kenneth Wheare termed it 'the biggest liberal experiment in democratic government' that the world had seen. At its center lay the country's new constitution. That document, with its fabled chapter of fundamental rights, transformed in one stroke what had been the world's largest colony into the world's largest democracy. Think about the origins of this constitution. It promised freedom to a fifth of humanity. It embodied the enfranchisement of the world's largest electorate and the conversion of colonial subjects into rights-bearing citizens. This very exuberance has often been used to direct attention to its functional shortcomings. But today, 75 years on with Narendra Modi at the helm and the country classified in 2024 as an 'electoral autocracy' by the V-Vdem (Varieties of Democracy) institute, it has also become a powerful tool to highlight Indian democracy's contemporary problems. India's notoriously fractured opposition was able to assemble a coalition to take on Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2024 general election. It did so by appealing to the liberal vision underpinning the constitution. But have things really changed so much since the constitution's adoption in 1950? Unlike its American counterpart, India's constitution is not animated by the impulse to limit political power and secure public freedom. It is dominated by the idea of enabling political power for the aim of social and economic reform. It aimed to create a state explicitly committed to achieving what India founders believed to be social, economic and political justice. As the country's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru put it, they were freeing India 'through a new constitution to feed the starving people and clothe the naked masses.' This is partly explained by the circumstances of independent India's birth. This was marked by violence, the upheaval of partition and a fear of balkanization if the country became fragmented by religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities. Added to this were the pressures of establishing political sovereignty. And this upheaval crashed against an uneducated and destitute population with no experience of democracy and deep-seated social divisions. But the larger truth is that, for independent India's leaders, civil liberties were always eclipsed by what they saw as the more important concerns of destitution and social discrimination. They felt the urgency to secure the new state through which these concerns were to be addressed. This required substantial restrictions of civic freedoms and the licensing of coercive state power. From the outset, the constitution enshrined centralisation and executive supremacy. It retained the 'bureaucratic authoritarianism' of its British colonial predecessor, by placing authority in the hands of appointed bureaucrats rather than elected officials. It also gave the center power over the states, enabling it to create and dismember provinces at will, and it gave the executive power over the legislature. The government can dictate when parliament is summoned – or discontinued without dissolution – and can rule by executive decree in its absence. It also gave the state power over the citizen. Almost every fundamental right guaranteed in part III of the constitution is qualified on nebulous grounds such as public order, the security of the state or social harmony. Soaring rhetoric about freedom masked the reality that the constitution concentrated power to an unprecedented degree and enabled a vast armory of coercive laws. As Somnath Lahiri, member of the constituent assembly for Bengal and the leader of the Communist Party of India, remarked sarcastically in a debate in April 1947, the provisions for fundamental rights seemed to have 'been framed from the point of view of a police constable.' The Preventive Detention Act, the first piece of legislation passed in the new democratic republic in February 1950, allowed the government to preemptively jail anyone without a trial and without recourse to judicial review. It's ample testament to the fact that the constitution was never intended as a bulwark in the service of liberal individualism – whatever the framers might have said at the time. Since the constitution's adoption there have been more than 106 amendments and additions. These have further diluted the constitution's liberal intentions and eroded even the limited system of checks and balances. The tenth schedule – or 'anti-defection law' – added in 1985 is one egregious example. It forces individual legislators to vote according to party diktats on pain of disqualification. This has cemented party bosses' grip on legislative parties, disempowered individual legislators and degraded parliamentary oversight. Since the threat of backbench rebellions has become negligible, majoritarianism has become entrenched. Concentration of power and its use by the executive are, by design, baked into India's constitutional order and institutional structure, which has always been inhospitable terrain for any rights and freedoms beyond voting and elections. Anti-democratic tendencies operate through constitutional means, hindering the establishment of the principles of legality and legislative primacy. Given this situation, it is hardly surprising that almost all governments in India have used the powers they have been granted for these very purposes. Nehru's rule saw a first amendment that drastically curtailed freedom of speech. It also introduced a special schedule in the constitution to protect unconstitutional legislation from judicial review. Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution for 21 months from 1975 to 1977 in a state of emergency, when her leadership came under threat. Her government forcibly sterilized thousands as part of a botched population control program. Yet everything was duly legal and constitutional. Modi's growing authoritarianism, his attacks on opposition media and those who oppose him in the judiciary, then, are less a departure from the norm than a confirmation of it. The real story lies elsewhere. It is not the constitution or the legislature that is the most important issue here. It has actually been the disinclination of India's voters to deliver parliamentary majorities too often that has constituted the major check on executive power. For 25 years between 1989 and 2014, voters delivered split mandates and coalition governments, which diluted and dispersed political power. Unsurprisingly, this caused the country's democracy indices to rise. These actually peaked in the 2000s when the ruling coalitions comprised upward of a dozen parties. But the underlying problems remained the same. When the voters, contrary to all expectations, elected yet another coalition to office in 2024, they understood what the country's liberal intelligentsia has consistently failed to grasp. It is not the celebrated constitution, but the Indian electorate itself that has, over the years, doggedly held authoritarianism at bay. Only time will tell how long the voters will continue to do this. Tripurdaman Singh is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
CBC
18-03-2025
- Politics
- CBC
U.S. could lose democracy status, says global watchdog
A just-released annual report on the global state of democracy makes for depressing reading. But what's even more depressing is what might appear in next year's edition. Or rather, what might not appear in the 2026 volume: an old democracy, by some measures the world's oldest; a superpower that long circled the globe professing to spread freedom. "If it continues like this, the United States will not score as a democracy when we release [next year's] data," said Staffan Lindberg, head of the Varieties of Democracy project, run out of Sweden's University of Gothenburg. "If it continues like this, democracy [there] will not last another six months." His project includes 31 million data points for 202 counties, compiled by 4,200 scholars and other contributors, measuring 600 different attributes of democracy. Lindberg happens to be in the U.S. this week presenting this year's report — which only includes data through the end of 2024. Some grim milestones were breached this year. The number of autocracies (91) has just surpassed democracies (88) on this list for the first time in two decades, and nearly three-quarters of humans now live in an autocracy — where one person has unconstrained power — the highest rate in five decades. The latest report finds Canada and the U.S. in the "Electoral Democracy" tier, the second-highest. The report adds an important caveat: this year's version only includes details through 2024, meaning it does not cover the start of Donald Trump's latest presidential term. But it refers to ongoing events in the U.S. as unprecedented, mentioning Trump pardoning 1,500 criminals who supported him; firing independent agency watchdogs without process; purging apolitical police and military brass; ignoring laws; and his unilaterally deleting federal programs, and even a whole organization, created by U.S. Congress. In the last few days alone, Trump has smashed past several new milestones. He's just called his predecessor's pardons void and vacated. He gave a bitterly partisan speech at the Department of Justice, demanding the prosecution of the media and certain adversaries. He threatened numerous universities with sanctions. He invoked a 227-year-old war measures law during peacetime — for the first time ever — to deport accused gang members without due process. And, most importantly, when that deportation plan wound up in court, he may have — although it's still in dispute — defied a court order, cracking the ultimate constitutional safeguard. It's not just the scope of what Trump's done that has Lindberg envisioning the once-unthinkable: removing the U.S. from the democratic list and shifting it to the second-lowest tier among five, to a so-called electoral autocracy. It's also the speed. Like Erdoğan, Orbán, Modi — only faster Lindberg said Trump is doing many of the same things as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Narendra Modi in India — only faster. "It's the pace," Lindberg said. "He's trying to do in a few months what it took them eight to 10 years to achieve.… It's very dire." What could happen next? Watch the courts, he says. Their actions, and Trump's response, are fundamental. In the countries that halted an authoritarian slide, he said, courts played a key role, citing Poland, Brazil, North Macedonia and Zambia. Needless to say, a number of Americans might find his assessment controversial — offensive, even. But some of his U.S. peers readily concur. WATCH | Jan. 6 rioters pardoned by Trump rleased from prison: Pardoned Jan. 6 rioters released from prison 2 months ago Duration 2:14 "This is what electoral autocracy looks like," said Michael Miller, a professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who specializes in democratic erosion and runs a survey of experts in the field. "Electoral autocracy, or a weak democracy." That remains true even if Trump won an election, fair and square. Miller said most autocracies indeed have multi-party elections — approximately three-quarters of them, unlike the remainder in the most stifling category, the closed autocracy. What is an 'electoral autocracy'? In an electoral autocracy, you can vote, you can protest, you can criticize the government — but at a price. That price, Miller said, is the fear of retaliation: losing your job, public funding or a contract. Over time, fear takes hold, and people — including powerful media owners — start to self-censor. Miller sees an almost perfect replica here of moves by other modern strongmen, like Erdoğan and Orbán: "The exact playbook," he said. And he, too, sees the judiciary as key. Judges will keep rejecting unconstitutional acts, as they've been doing since the first days of Trump's presidency, starting with his attempt to rewrite citizenship eligibility. It's safe to expect Trump to complain, and perhaps be tempted to ignore a court order, but what matters, according to Miller, is whether he pulls back. "Then maybe you come back from the brink," Miller said. This is why so many eyes were glued to the case of alleged Venezuelan gang members this past weekend as a critical test. Trump had made unprecedented use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 outside wartime: he'd labelled the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang a terrorist group, making suspected members eligible for immediate deportation, without standard legal proceedings. Relatives insist some deportees were falsely accused, while the White House insists it acted on solid information, and used the centuries-old law for 137 deportations last weekend. Why one court case drew so much attention Over the course of one chaotic Saturday, the constitutional showdown unfolded in a Washington court. First, the American Civil Liberties Union sued on behalf of five plaintiffs. A judge issued a written order not to deport them, and the Trump administration agreed. But hours later, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, and deported the others. In an urgent hearing, the judge ordered those deportation flights paused; but the Trump administration said it was too late — two flights were already mid-air. Importantly, Trump's border czar Tom Homan later brushed off the courts in a TV interview. "We're not stopping. I don't care what the judges think. I don't care what the left thinks. We're coming," Homan told Fox News. The president himself has called for the judge's impeachment. This drew a rebuke Tuesday from the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, who in a rare public statement called this an improper use of impeachment, a violation of two centuries' understanding that judicial disagreements should be handled through appeals. WATCH | Trump clashes with courts over Alien Enemies Act: Trump starts clash with courts by using Alien Enemies Act 18 hours ago Duration 2:01 The White House is defending U.S. President Donald Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act to speed up the deportation of migrants with alleged ties to gangs, even after a judge requested two planes with more than 261 deportees return to the U.S. Federal lawyers have also resisted the judge's request for information in court. But the administration line is: this wasn't outright defiance; it was just too late to turn the planes around, as they'd already left U.S. airspace. Echoing that official line, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday: "We are complying with the judge's orders." This starts a high-stakes standoff that can't last forever. Trump may find new ways to sidestep court orders, but sooner or later, there will be a direct clash with a judge, Miller said. "They're saying, 'We're obeying the court order' — wink, wink," Miller said. "I don't think they're ever going to come out and say, 'We're ignoring a court order.'… [But] at some point it becomes unsustainable." That's just one of the guardrails Trump tested in recent days. He also took the unprecedented step of challenging a predecessor's pardons: Trump said that because Joe Biden used a mechanical signature for his recent pardons, members of the congressional Jan. 6 committee that probed Trump could still be prosecuted. And he escalated pressure on universities. Trump has now threatened federal funding for more than 50 universities over the suspected use of racial diversity programs in admissions criteria. His administration has also made nearly a dozen demands of Columbia University, which has already lost $400 million in federal funding as punishment for unrest related to Gaza protests. The demands include putting Columbia's department of Middle East, South Asian and African studies under academic receivership; Columbia is also being encouraged to enforce a definition of antisemitism that includes disparaging Israel as a racist project. Then there was a remarkable speech to the Justice Department, where Trump appeared to be publicly lobbying the legal apparatus to prosecute certain adversaries. In the epicentre of U.S. law enforcement, with a crowd cheering him on, Trump referred to certain political adversaries as "scum." He demanded accountability for people who investigated him, and referred four times to CNN and MSNBC as "illegal," accusing them of corrupt behaviour that must stop. "It was an absolutely extraordinary speech; one of the most extraordinary ever by a sitting president," Miller said. Equally stunning, in Miller's view: the minimal media reaction afterward. He cited this as an example of Trump's behaviour being normalized. It's become a cliché, Miller said, but just try, as a thought experiment, to imagine another U.S. president giving that speech. Imagine, say, Joe Biden saying those things; then imagine the reaction.
