It is a sad state of affairs in the academia when a student has to apologise for his research proposal. That is what happened in the South Asian University, which is a joint venture of eight countries of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. The proposal seemed to be suited to acute regional concerns as it sought to study Kashmir’s ethnography and politics. Perhaps the turning point was the student’s uploading of a video interview with Noam Chomsky, who criticised Narendra Modi’s government for attempting to dismantle India’s secular democracy and establish a ‘Hindu technocracy’. It is ironic that the student was given a show-cause notice, after which he apologised and took down the video: that reinforced the Mr Chomsky’s point. Kashmir, in any case, is not a popular subject. The government discourages critical research on socio-cultural, religious and economic issues; perhaps it finds criticism and independent thinking unacceptable? But political leaders cannot decide what researchers should think about. The student’s PhD proposal was regarded as ‘anti-national’ by the university authorities, although his research supervisory committee of three faculty members, including his own supervisor, had passed it. An academic project was politicised by the university.

The SAU is not a purely Indian institution. Yet there seems to be no wider horizon or supervision that might have prevented the sabotage of an academic project. The supervisor resigned after a disciplinary inquiry was instituted against him. His achievements here and abroad should have made him a valuable asset to the university. Yet that was overlooked in following the government’s supposedly unspoken wishes. It is not education but compliance that seems to be preoccupying many institutions now. But what are academics doing to preserve their space? The department or the teachers of all departments could have resisted this muffling of research and their colleague’s departure. United and unyielding resistance with an insistence on the freedom of research topics is needed to bring an end to politically motivated interventions in higher study. The government scholarship for the overseas study of students from underprivileged families no longer allows research on India’s history, society and culture. This narrows the field of study drastically, yet protests against this have not been visible. If the education system is gradually losing its feet, then the academic space must be fought for to be retrieved.