Inside Modi's Assault on Academic Freedom

Abstract: The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's Hindu supremacist ideology along with anti-intellectual hostility has resulted in a dramatic decline in India's academic freedom. Since 2014, students and faculty critical of the regime have been vilified, physically attacked and arrested, books and seminars banned, standard historical narratives rewritten, and foreign scholars denied visas. Three overlapping but distinct phases in this takeover are visible: the first involved suppression of existing scholarship and thought, while the second rested on the capture of administrative, faculty and student positions enabling an ideological rewiring of higher education. In the third phase, the government has introduced basic structural changes that destroy the federal structure of India's education system, and reduce faculty to government staff.