Academic freedom in higher education is now almost a myth in India. Certainly, political parties have always tended to interfere with education, but that had not prevented the growth of minds and subjects in different directions and the flourishing of a vibrant academic atmosphere. This has changed so strikingly that the report of a study coordinated by universities in Germany and Sweden, Academic Freedom Index Update 2023, noted a sharp decline in academic and cultural freedom and institutional autonomy most clearly since 2014. This validates the experience of teachers, scholars and students all over the country. Dissent, criticism and independent opinion are penalised by suspension, expulsion, withdrawal of scholarships or, in the case of teachers, stalling promotion and retirement benefits, even sacking, as demonstrated by VisvaBharati University, for instance, or by South Asian University’s hostilities with students, although SAU has denied the charges. Research is fettered by the restriction of overseas grants — in the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi, say — or by limiting subjects of study when granting foreign scholarships to underprivileged students or removing texts that do not fit a certain ideology. And these are just a few features of the change that has placed India among the bottom 30 per cent of the 179 countries assessed.

The report uses various indices to measure academic freedom but does not associate the decline with political developments. That association, apart from being obvious to any concerned citizen, has been made by experts abroad, especially in the context of a 2021 report by the V-Dem Institute in Germany that said that India’s electoral democracy had been replaced by an electoral autocracy since 2016. The conditions are ideal for dogma to take over scholarship and research. The emphasis on the study of the majority religion while history is distorted to establish the lineaments of an immutable Hindu rashtra that automatically defines certain groups as ‘outsiders’ comprise one aspect of this. The other is the percolation of values encouraged by the subversion of faculty selection that Indian scholars have noted. Acute caste discrimination seems aimed at sidelining achievers from specific population groups. That a senior official of the national accreditation agency should speak out against granting questionable grades to institutions is one more indication of the government’s desire to dismantle systems and processes of learning.