New Delhi: Alumni of the South Asian University have slammed the disciplinary action against a Prominent Sri Lankan sociologist and his subsequent resignation from the institution over citation of American linguist Noam Chomsky’s criticism of the Narendra Modi government in a doctoral research proposal.
Terming the ‘voluntary retirement’ of the sociologist, Sasanka Perera as a ‘deep blemish on the ethics and authenticity of knowledge production in a university,’ the alumni have written a letter to K.K. Aggarwal, the president of the university along with the President of Sri Lanka, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and other government officials of the countries.
“The systemic institutional harassment that Professor Perera was made to undergo since April this year initially launched by the Dean of Social Sciences Sanjay Chaturvedi and the Head of Sociology Dev Nath Pathak, is however not surprising given the recent ongoing chain of events regarding the suspension of four core faculty members and the witch-hunt of students who dared to speak out for their basic rights as an intrinsic part of life and learning in what is supposed to be an international University,” says the letter written by the alumni.
The letter adds that for alumni of SAU working in leading universities in and outside South Asia and the larger international academic world, the punitive and arbitrary measures by the administration against its faculty and students for merely speaking out for their minimum rights – and in this case for solely supervising the writing of a PhD research proposal – is shocking and unfathomable.
“The situation, where a student is being questioned for citing a scholar and a professor is forced into retirement for supervising the student, ironically seems to validate Chomsky’s critique by indeed demonstrating a grave threat to Indian secular democracy and a violation of academic freedom,” says the letter.
The South Asian University (SAU) is an international body, jointly managed and financed by eight SAARC member states. It is hosted by India and supervised by administered by Ministry of External Affairs, as per the provisions of the South Asian University Act 2008.
Last November, a doctorate scholar had submitted a proposal on Kashmir’s ethnography and politics, which was approved by the supervisor, Professor Sasanka Perera, before being sent to the Dean of Social Sciences.
Nearly six months later, the university first sent a notice, seeking an explanation, to Perera in April and then to the doctorate student in May.
The notice asked the scholar to justify citing a private YouTube video he had uploaded, which featured his interview with Noam Chomsky, where the well-known linguist, reportedly claimed that Modi “comes from a radical Hindutva tradition” and is trying to “dismantle Indian secular democracy” and “impose Hindu technocracy”.
“What is worse is that the institutional harassment of Prof Perera did not come from external sources. As clearly authenticated by documents of the inquiry process, it came from the Head of Sociology and the Dean of Social Sciences augmented by the deafening silence of the faculty members of the Department of Sociology, other Social Science fields in the university and more generally, across the university,” says the letter written by the university’s alumni.
“All this is to say that the prolonged institutional harassment faced by Professor Perera that led to his early and unplanned retirement is a deep blemish on the academic integrity, ethics and authenticity of knowledge production in a university that claims to be of international standing,” the letter adds.
