On February 26, 2025, Yashada Sawant, an Indian student from the South Asian University (SAU) was publicly assaulted by Ratan Singh and a gang of goons with clear affiliations to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).
The attackers’ grouse was that fish was being served on Maha Shivaratri and Sawant’s ‘crime’, as the university’s mess secretary, was trying to stop the fish curry from being thrown away by them.
This is when the assault ensued, with Sawant being punched in the face and inappropriately touched by these students, who are yet to be punished by the university. What’s more concerning is that the university does not have a good track record on women’s safety.
The university’s canteens have always served both vegetarian and non-vegetarian food. On the day in question, special arrangements had also been made for those observing the religious holiday.
While there have always been on-and-off caste-based arguments over the ‘purity’ of food, they had never reached the depths of the recent incident.
Sadly, this is not the first such case. Since SAU’s current India-nominated President K.K. Aggarwal, who has no experience in running an international university, took over, his tolerance and even sponsorship of absolute parochialism, especially where the Hindutva agenda is concerned, has led to this deplorable state of affairs.
In her recent detailed tweet, Sawant has clearly described the role of different university officials who have attempted to sweep numerous sexual harassment complaints under the carpet. The same proctor, who was reprimanded by the Delhi high court in an earlier case for not following SAU regulations, still holds the reins and has been instrumental in pushing the overtly misogynistic agenda in the university.
Also read: An Entity Without Memory: Public Erasure of Manmohan Singh at South Asian University
SAU’s South Asian sensibility dismantled
South Asian University was established by the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in 2010 with taxpayer money from all eight member countries. Therefore, the legal and institutional ownership of the university is with SAARC.
It was meant to be a secular, English language university where no single political ideology, language or any one form of nationalism was to dominate. Its founding provisions and principles were meant to preserve its South Asian character.
The intention of the university’s founders was to bring in an element of parity and equality in the broader space of inequity and hegemony in which the university is physically located.
Unfortunately, notwithstanding these laudable efforts, a mere 15 years into its establishment, the downward spiral of the institution has gained a worrying pace. The race to the bottom is driven by the incumbent president, with alarming signs of an imminent crash.
The bottom line is: SAU is no longer effectively owned by SAARC and it is certainly not South Asian by any stretch of the imagination.
In its cultural and social outlook, the university has become blatantly North Indian, to the extent that it is making students from other regions in India feel extremely unsafe.
While Aggarwal and his handpicked coterie of yes-men and women are dismantling the institution, its academics have stood by in tacit support, hiding behind lofty pronouncements in the regional and global conference circuit.
With an overwhelmingly Indian student body and very few non-Indian officers in administration, the university has become a largely Indian entity.
Among others, the proctor of the university, dean of students, registrar, directors of various departments, deans and department heads and almost all non-academic staff are Indians. This could be the final nail in the coffin for the university’s South Asian character.
The mandatory student ratio has been breached with the introduction of new India-oriented courses (such as BTech degrees) and the expansion of all intakes benefiting mostly Indian applicants. From 2024 onwards, non-Indian students have been reduced to being mere spectators on campus.
SAARC & SAU Governing Board’s Culpability
As a formal intergovernmental effort in New Delhi, the university’s rapid parochialisation is a telling example of the utter ineffectiveness of both SAARC and SAU’s governing board members representing the eight SAARC countries.
The dismantling of the institution, that held considerable promise until seven years ago, is propped up by their lackadaisical attitude. By extension, this foreshadows the trajectory of what the Indian government claims to be its main vision and strategy in its immediate geographical region – the neighbourhood first policy – and is more like the figurative ‘fist’ in the neighbours’ faces.
The manner in which SAU marks the national days of the SAARC member states clearly exemplifies the path it is treading. Until December 2023, national days were not in the university’s calendar of events. Students from different countries, on their own volition, celebrated these occasions of national importance without any involvement of the university administration. This was to consciously maintain a distance from politically sensitive occasions in the larger interest of preserving the university’s multinational character.
Aggarwal’s decision to make the national days part of the university’s calendar initially appeared to be a progressive step towards cartographically recognizing South Asia. But as it ensued, only India’s Independence and Republic Days were celebrated with pomp and pageantry and the SAU President’s personal participation.
SAU as a Hindi Language and Hindu Enclave
SAU has also become an unapologetic Hindi Language enclave, further crippling the South Asian character of the university. When the International Mother Language Day was celebrated at the university on February 21, 2025, a North Indian student wrote ‘Jai Sri Ram’ on a Tamil poster put up by Indian and Sri Lankan Tamil speakers, leading to a needless scuffle.
The occasion had been peacefully and gracefully celebrated at the university since 2011, when every language spoken at the university was celebrated by its speakers and their histories and literatures were brought to the fore. This was a practice introduced by Bangladeshi students and embraced by all others.
The language chauvinism pervading the university does not operate in isolation. It is manifesting itself in a situation when the three-language formula of Independent India has effectively been disregarded by the present government. As anticipated, this already led to the re-emergence of language nationalism as a counter-force in southern states.
Students also do not feel comfortable in approaching the Dean of Students, Navnit Jha, who only speaks fluently in Hindi, and whose office has been compromised due to his track record in harassing students who are considered ‘too independent’.
One of the salient features of the current administration is the weaponisation of the offices of the Dean of Students and Hostel Wardens amid the deafening silence of the gender sensitisation committee. They have been successful in silencing students with the ever present threat of expulsion. The same threats to faculty have also succeeded spectacularly, with the suspension of four faculty members in 2023.
Hindi hegemony appears on many other fronts too. SAU’s sports festival this year is called ‘Khel Kumbh’, the word kumbh being written in Hindi on all official posters shared on social media. Khel means sports in Hindi. Would it not have been more inclusive if the word had been adopted from one of the minority languages represented in the university’s student body?
In the same way, the word kumbh is also problematic, given its religious connotations with Hinduism via the Indian state sponsored Kumbh Mela in Allahabad. But this is the SAU administration’s ruse to signal to the government that it is looking after its interests, given the way the latter has lately culturally upended this important religious festival.
Surely, there would have been many ways to conceptualize and name this sports event and many other university events within the cultural and linguistic plurality India and South Asia have to offer.
But this is not the only association SAU has with Hinduism officially. While freedom of faith existed in SAU, from its inception, it did not involve itself in religion. This very sensible approach was adopted by the two earlier presidents though both hailed from a Hindu background. My own position was that the university can have a dedicated space or spaces for worship for those who required them, while not sponsoring events or ideas belonging to any particular faith.
Today, for all intents and purposes, SAU is a Hindu organization. Though in theory, the university is not supposed to have dedicated places of worship, in practice the situation is different with a shrine informally set up in ‘Block A’, one of the hostel areas for students. But interested staff and faculty also freely visit this place. Though this is known, no opposition has been voiced, which is in effect tacit encouragement for the institutionalisation of Hinduism. If so, why not similar spaces for Jainism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity which are all major faiths in the SAARC landscape and in the university too?
The situation gets worse: For an institution that hitherto has intentionally stayed away from sponsoring religious events, it does now just as consciously. On February 19, 2025, SAU sponsored a lecture by devotional speaker Amogh Lila Prabhuji, in collaboration with the educational wing of International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), Delhi.
Moreover, the community dance typically associated with ISKCON activities was enacted with the active participation of faculty, staff and students. This can certainly be a regular practice if need be, but it would be non-discriminatory, only if the university also sponsors events by other religions and allows them the same space to practice aspects of their faith as well. This, however, is not the case.
Here is a video of the Dean of Students and the Proctor of @SouthAsianUni participating in a religious event in what should be a secular institution. These are the people in power who are instigating hindutva goons in the university to attack female students and other minorities. pic.twitter.com/FFSzJbTStD
— southasianconsciense (@canchomskyliv) February 27, 2025
These are just a few well-known examples. But the rot runs deeper, even into the dubious recruitment of teachers and new teaching program designs. Moreover, new ‘professorial’ recruits who are running newly established centres and schools such as the Faculty of Arts and Design and the Centre on Climate Change do not have serious academic credentials. Their academic trajectory of having worked in dozens of institutions of no great repute raises questions about their ability to initiate these centres and schools. But significant scholarship on these areas have been produced across South Asia. For instance, Arts and Design are fields where Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have excelled in and produced good scholars. They were not even considered for positions in SAU. Moreover, Delhi itself has reputable institutions in these fields from JNU’s School of Arts and Aesthetics to College of Arts, from where well-trained academics or recent graduates could have been recruited. It is evident that the administration is not interested in placing emphasis on academic rigour or established scholarship. Instead, it is looking for people it thinks can be controlled rather than seeking to benefit from their intellect and experience. This effectively results in the relentless pursuit of mediocrity, compromising the future of the university in much the same way many other major universities in India have been in recent times.
One could argue, this downward spiral is contained within SAU and is not a reflection of the Indian government, the university’s governing board, or the SAARC secretariat in Kathmandu. But this would not be a valid proposition. India is the only country that has had representation within the university for many years through a staffer of its Ministry of External Affairs. Hence, the Indian government is well aware of the situation in the university, and its wishes and diktats are often informally communicated to the SAU administration.
No other country has been accorded this privilege. Moreover, the responsibility of the governing board and the SAARC secretariat is to ensure that the university is run according to the norms, rules and regulations which have already been collectively designed, approved and established, in the interest of the member states.
Regrettably, one cannot see this expected oversight from these mechanisms. Governing board meetings are effectively mere rituals of scant significance, where members simply fly in from their respective countries for a free foreign trip and a few hundred US dollars per head. No one other than Indian representatives makes any contribution of substance. India for its part, dictates while the rest nod in uniform agreement.
The SAU administration’s self-assuredness in their illegalities and arrogance emanate partly from this situation where it is guaranteed protection by the Indian government come hell or high water, and there is silence from the rest of the board. This also comes from the fact that no other country other than India pays their dues at present, and that too in relatively smaller amounts. This institutionalised ‘loss of face’ by being cash-strapped does not help; nor does the resultant sense of superiority of India. This combination does not augur well for the professional running of an institution, much like the United Nations, which is driven by the vested interests of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (P5) and the organisation’s major contributors.
If SAARC does not own up to its own creation, it should move away from SAU as should all member states so that the undeserving reputation the university is given by this association is formally and legally severed. At least then, hapless students will thus not be misguided to an institution in search of a South Asian enclave in Delhi, and be marginalised and isolated in a toxic space.
Sasanka Perera is chairman at the Colombo Institute for Human Sciences and director at Tambapanni Academic Publishers.
