Jawaharlal Nehru University, named after India’s first prime minister, is one of the country’s leading 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 who hold power in India, the university and other similar institutions are dangerous dens of “anti-India” ideas. And they are working to silence them.
Masked men stormed the JNU campus and attacked students, shouting slogans associated with a far-right Hindu group. Vocal supporters Members of the right-wing ruling party who have been installed as administrators have suspended students for participating in protests and, in December, imposed new restrictions on demonstrations. Teachers have been denied promotions for questioning government policies.
“It’s suffocating,” said Anagha Pradeep, a political science student who received warnings from JNU after protesting her housing conditions and helping to screen a documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “And you can’t learn with fear.”
The pressure being brought to bear on JNU is part of a broader effort to neutralize dissenting voices: media organisations, human rights groups, think tanks – as right-wing Hindus pursue their cause of transforming India into an explicitly Hindu nation.
Not long after Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party came to 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 gave lectures on topics did not like it.
Hindu nationalists, while attempting to uproot the secular foundations laid for India by Nehru, are pushing to supplant the traditional intellectual values of the universities with their own conservative thinking. The government has removed chapters from textbooks on India’s previous Muslim rulers and silenced researchers who questioned pseudoscience promoted by right-wing officials.
“We want students to understand that patriotism is of utmost importance,” said Abhishek Tandon, who has been head of the RSS student wing in New Delhi for 21 years.
He said his organization “will not allow anti-India forces to work within the campus against the integrity and unity of India.”
Sumit Ganguly, an India specialist at Indiana University, said the campaign by Hindu nationalists, including appointments of education officials aligned with the right-wing government, could turn academic freedom into a “relic and quaint notion” in India.
“What we are witnessing now is a constant accumulation of institutions with people who lack adequate professional qualifications but who share ideological preferences of the ruling party,” he said.
Some of these officials have been effusive in praising their government benefactors. Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit, vice-chancellor of JNU since 2022, has called Mr. Modi the “highest spokesperson for democracy” and a “phenomenon.” Ms. Pandit and a university press officer did not respond to requests for comment.
JNU, which was founded in 1967 and is spread over hundreds of acres of secluded forest land in southwest New Delhi, has more than 7,000 students and around 600 teachers and instructors. Its founders, including a rural American sociologist, proposed a model research university that would be an incubator for debate and dissent, free from government interference.
In 1975, when the government declared a state of internal emergency (an especially dangerous time for Indian democracy), university students who opposed the suspension of basic rights faced expulsion, arrest and prison sentence.
Even after that traumatic period, students still had room for dissent in the following decades. “No one suffered because of any ideology,” said Kavita Krishnan, an activist who came to campus as a student in the early 1990s. “Their diversity was their strength.”
The current crackdown began in 2016, two years after Modi took office, when his government appointed Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar, a professor of electrical engineering, as principal of the university.
Within days of his appointment, around a dozen students were charged with sedition after being accused of displaying slogans supporting a Kashmiri man hanged by India for a deadly attack on Parliament. While some student videos were found to have been manipulatedIndia’s toxic social media space and its politicians found an enemy in university students and teachers.
Kumar ended a long tradition of consultations with students and teachers and, according to teachers and students, limited a long-standing policy of encouraging applications from people from lower castes and other disadvantaged groups.
To instill “patriotism” and martial pride, he invited retired soldiers to the campus and proposed putting up a battle tank on display.
Nearly 50 members of federal Parliament sent a letter to the education minister in January 2019 complaining that the university was being “destroyed”.
In recent years, students linked to far-right groups have physically attacked other students for their liberal and secular views, hitting them with sledgehammers, iron bars and bricks. Amid a wave of student protests in 2019 over a law that opponents called anti-Muslim, officers in riot gear raided to library at another university and beat students with bamboo sticks. At yet another university, officers shot stun grenades to the students.
After masked men stormed the JNU campus and attacked students in January 2020, university alumni who were officials in the Modi government were quick to condemn the violence. But a politician from his party later justified the attack by describing the campus as a “sex and drug center” that produces thousands of used condoms and empty liquor bottles daily.
Last year, members of the right-wing RSS group attempted to intimidate students by carrying out marches with saffron sticks and flags, an emblem of Hinduism, on the 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 threat to the safety of other students and was banned from entering a laboratory by his professor.
Members of the RSS student wing beat him during a fight when he tried to save a portrait of the anti-caste revolutionary. periyar, he said. (The group denied that accusation.) In October, Mohideen received a letter from the university saying that he could not continue with his doctorate. studies, a decision he is challenging in court.
“My fight against oppression,” Mohideen said, “made me a visible enemy.”
Avinash Kumar, representative of the JNU teachers’ association, said the right-wing campaign against the university had changed its very nature.
“Ours was a campus that helped realize the true motto of education,” empowering students from all castes and classes and breaking social hierarchies, he said. But those values are antithetical, she added, to “what the ruling regime now represents.”
“Any space where this type of environment thrives, they crush it,” he said.
