Why Academic Freedom in India Hangs Between Attacks and Resistance
India has long been known for the vitality of its scientific community. In the social sciences, its remarkable creativity had made it a major player in some of the most stimulating international debates. The country has also sent its intellectuals to some of the world’s top universities. This dynamism is now deeply affected by attacks on academic freedom, as evidenced by two distinct sources of information. First, the Academic Freedom Index (AFI) shows that, while India’s record in this area was relatively good until 1990, it declined thereafter before beginning a precipitous fall starting in 2014. Since then, India has scored well below the global average and currently ranks among the bottom 10–20% of countries, a category where it stands alongside Russia and Rwanda, barely ahead of North Korea and Afghanistan, and below Vietnam and Hungary.
The second indicator rich in information for our discussion is none other than the index from the Scholars at Risk network’s Academic Freedom Monitoring Project, which annually documents cases of restrictions on academic freedom: Union government takeover of universities that are in principle under the jurisdiction of federal states, the use of public funding to extend state power over the scientific community, bans on peaceful demonstrations on campuses, and the use of force by police against students demonstrating peacefully, restrictions imposed on university research, the suppression of opinions critical of governments, etc. Between 2014 and 2024, India’s Academic Freedom Index score fell by more than half, placing the country in the category of nations where academic freedom is deemed “completely restricted”.
If we now compare the results of the Academic Freedom Index with those of the Democracy Index – both part of the V-Dem project – we see a strong correlation between the decline in academic freedom and democratic backsliding. Until 2018, the Democracy Index classified India as a “liberal democracy.” It was then downgraded to the rank of “electoral democracy” before joining the group of “electoral autocracies,” a position it has held for six years now. The V-Dem report also highlights a correlation between the decline in academic freedom and the political and social polarisation that has been growing in the country in a harmful manner since 2014.
This trajectory can of course be explained by the rise to power of Hindu nationalism, a movement also known as the “Sangh Parivar”, the family of the Sangh because its matrix, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS – Association of national volunteers) has not only created a political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party) which won the general elections in 2014, but also a trade union, a student union, a peasant union and a myriad of other organisations.
Also read: Between Blasphemy and Contempt: NCERT, Judicial Accountability and Educational Freedom
In the first two parts of this article, I will analyse the increasing number of infringements on academic freedom since 2014, using concrete examples from the public as well as private systems. In the third part, I’ll examine the ideological dimension of the problem, which is finding expression in the promotion of a nationalist mentality at the expense of the scientific mindset. Finally, I’ll turn to the mobilisation of those who try to resist.
1. Public Institutions in the Eye of the Storm
The first target of Hindu nationalists after Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 was Jawaharlal Nehru University, the flagship of India’s public university system. Founded in 1969 in New Delhi, JNU has for decades conducted ambitious interdisciplinary research programmes, particularly on Indian society and its transformations, with a commitment to opening its doors to students from all regions of India and all social backgrounds. Topping the rankings of social science universities, it still enjoys an excellent international reputation.
But in recent years, a smear campaign orchestrated by the Hindu nationalist movement has served as a pretext for the government to crack down on academic freedom there. In 2016, the government appointed Jagadish Kumar, a man close to Vijana Bharati (the RSS’s organisation of teachers and researchers), as the VC. This appointment sparked a wave of protests on campus and led to the arrest of several students for participating in so-called “antinational” activities. Ideological orientation has become the primary criterion used by the authorities to identify allies and enemies among faculty and students. In terms of hiring, this has resulted in the appointment of faculty members recognised less for the quality of their work than for their political affiliations.
The independence of certain committees involved in JNU’s administration, such as the Academic Council and the Executive Council, has also eroded, and faculty and student organisations (formally represented on these committees) have been excluded from certain meetings. The established procedures for appointing department heads have also been flouted. Some faculty members, after protesting against arbitrary administrative decisions, have faced reprisals in the form of the cancellation or suspension of sabbaticals, research funding, or retirement pensions, leading to numerous legal challenges. At the end of his term, Jagadish Kumar was appointed chairman of the University Grants Commission, thereby further expanding his sphere of influence.
When teachers and students tried to react (by means of a referendum calling for the resignation of the VC, for example), they suffered reprisals in many forms. The former had their salaries suspended or their requests for early retirement rejected, steps that led to endless legal proceedings. The latter were hit harder by repression when they tried to organise meetings or film screenings denouncing the actions of Hindu nationalists in Kashmir or elsewhere in India.
In February 2016, for example, the police stormed the campus to break up a demonstration organised by the student union on the pretext that pro-Pakistan slogans had been chanted, which turned out to be false information. Smriti Irani, the Minister of Human Resource Development, who oversaw JNU as well as all national universities, added that "the nation cannot tolerate the slightest insult to Mother India".
Several other public universities were affected in a similar manner. After the process for appointing its leaders was altered at the expense of the autonomy this venerable institution had previously enjoyed, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (an entity fully funded by the government and the UGC) set out to restrict political activism by requiring all students to sign a “code of honour” prohibiting them from participating in political debates, sit-ins, and “unpatriotic” or “anti-establishment” (sic), with anyone violating this code facing expulsion.
One doctoral student was thus handed a two-year suspension for participating in a demonstration outside parliament. At Ambedkar University in Delhi, demands to conform to certain principles perceived by faculty members as ideological triggered a mass exodus among them. In April 2025, Dalit and Muslim students were expelled for protesting the administrative mishandling of a harassment case that led to a suicide attempt.
Other public institutions are affected, such as the prestigious Indian Institutes of Management (IIM), funded by the Union government, which traditionally enjoyed a high degree of autonomy. In 2023, the government enacted new rules regarding the appointment of IIM directors and members of their boards of directors. Under these rules, the President of India becomes the chancellor of each IIM, granting the Union government the authority to appoint the director and the chair of the board of directors. This also gives the President of India the power to dismiss directors and dissolve the boards of directors of the IIMs, making their governance and oversight a prerogative of the state.
The directors of three IIMs resigned following conflicts with boards of directors they considered to be subject to political directives. In one such case (at IIM Raipur), the Chattisgarh high court ruled that disciplinary authority did not lie with the institute’s director (as specified in the IIM Act of 2017) but rather with its board of directors. The director resigned, citing, among the reasons for his departure, the “restriction of professional autonomy” and the erosion of academic freedom. Before him, two directors of IIM Calcutta had also resigned in protest against the control the board of governors – now directly appointed by the government – sought to exert over the institution’s operations.
Public research institutes have also come under attack. The most striking example is the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in Delhi. Established in 1973, the CPR was recognised as a leading think tank on public policy. Its independence and the rigour of its work had earned it a formidable reputation on issues of urban governance, environmental protection, education, and transparency in public life.
In 2022, the CPR was targeted, probably for conducting research that implicated a company with close ties to the Indian government and that was described as violating environmental standards. Three weapons were used to neutralise the CPR: first, a charge of tax fraud, then a ban on receiving foreign funding and, simultaneously, the suspension of the funding by the Indian Council of Social Sciences Research (a funding body of the government originally conceived as the National Science Foundation in the US).
Since many of the projects led by the CPR were funded by international organisations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and universities such as Georgetown and Brown, the government was able to use the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA) against it to deprive it of foreign funding, alleging fraudulent practices that remain unproven to this day. Its president, Yamini Aiyar, had no alternative but to resign. It should be noted here that the FCRA became law during the period of the State of Emergency (1975–77) – during which Indira Gandhi suspended democracy in India – to control the flow of funds to NGOs. Its use against the CPR is just one example of how existing legal tools are being misused to bring independent institutions to their knees.
The attacks against the CPR – whose Board of Governors has been restructured to induct fellow travellers of the ruling party – are also revealing of the use of the ICSSR by the government. This key institution has been captured and used as a pawn to further the governments' agenda: on one hand it has supported research and events on topics dear to the ruling party, on the other it has reduced funding. It has not even provided funds to pay salaries aligned to the 7th pay commission - whereas that was the norm since the 1970s.Several premier institutions in India from Centre for Development Studies (in Kerala) to Madras Institute of Development Studies (in Tamil Nadu) have been severely affected by this.
The weapon of funding is used today against the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. The CSDS was founded in 1963 by the father of Indian political science, Rajni Kothari, and has since been a hotbed of internationally recognised research. From 1965 onwards, it also housed a "data unit" that collected, compiled, and disseminated data (particularly electoral data) with remarkable scientific rigour. In 2025, at a time when accusations of vote rigging were gaining momentum in the public arena, the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR), which financially supports the CSDS, used the charges against a researcher of relaying false information to accuse the institution as a whole, and subjecting it to a prolonged inquiry process while withholding funding for salaries since the summer of last year.
The Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) has seen its autonomy curtailed in another way. Founded in 1931, the ISI has long enjoyed a strong international reputation. However, a 2025 law transformed the Institute’s governance by replacing the current 32-member board of directors – elected internally – with an 11-member board, including the President of India, in his capacity as chancellor of the universities, a director appointed by the President himself on the recommendation of the Union government, representatives from three government departments (the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, the Department of Science and Technology, and the Ministry of Finance), four other individuals appointed by the Union government, the Director of the ISI (selected from a list provided by the Union government), a dean (appointed by the board of directors), and an administrator. The board no longer includes representatives of academics and students.
The reform of the ISI is part of a broader policy of control over statistical data, which has also resulted in a reduction of the autonomy of the International Institute of Population Studies (IIPS) in Mumbai. Placed under the authority of the Ministry of Health, the IIPS is responsible for a major recurring national survey, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), which is the primary source of health information in India.
In 2023, a study based on data from the fifth round of the NFHS (2019–21) highlighted the poor performance of certain health and nutrition indicators, as well as the dramatic rise in anaemia among children and adolescents. These findings contradicted official government statements touting its nutrition programmes. The survey also showed that nearly one in five Indian households still practiced open defecation – further contradicting the official narrative that the practice had dropped from 600 million people to “negligible” levels due to a public policy of increasing latrine construction. K.T. James, the director of the IIPS, was suspended from his duties for allegedly unrelated reasons and eventually resigned a few months later. It was subsequently announced that the sixth NFHS report would not publish the data on anaemia.
2. Salvation through the private sector?
One might think that private universities, which are not funded by the state, are more immune to its control, but this is not the case.
In the social sciences, the most renowned of India’s private universities was undoubtedly Ashoka University, established by a group of businessmen who wished to create an institution modelled on American liberal arts colleges. It has a thirteen-member governing board, eight of whom come from the business world - among them Pramath Sinha is the chairman of the Board of Trustees -, and one of whom is a representative of the government of Haryana, the state where the campus is located.
In 2021, the university’s president, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a renowned international intellectual who is a perceptive analyst of India’s current affairs, particularly in his columns for the Indian Express, was pressured to step down from the presidency and, two years later, to resign from his teaching position at the institution. In his resignation letter, Mehta wrote:
"After a meeting with Founders, it has become abundantly clear to me that my association with the University may be considered a political liability. My public writing in support of a politics that tries to honour constitutional values of freedom and equal respect for all citizens, is perceived to carry risks for the university."
Following the departure of Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Arvind Subramanian, former chief economic advisor in the Modi government, also resigned. In his resignation letter, he wrote: “That even Ashoka – with its private status and backing by private capital – can no longer provide a space for academic expression and freedom is ominously disturbing.”
In 2023, a young professor, Sabyasachi Das, was also led to resign due to an article he had written on the 2019 general elections, based on multiple data sources showing the existence of voter manipulation by the ruling party. At the same time, Ashoka University cut the budget of the Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD), a research laboratory known for producing databases on political life and public figures in India, and left no other option to its director, political scientist Gilles Verniers, but to step down.
Within a few years, the TCPD had established itself as a major research hub on Indian politics. It maintained partnerships with leading institutions such as Sciences Po and the University of Michigan. The official justification given for the centre’s closure was its merger with a new data centre. In practice, the TCPD’s missions were abandoned in favour of an entity that excluded the social sciences, considered a more sensitive field. The announcement of Gilles Verniers’ departure was followed by the collective resignation of the Centre’s scientific council, which included internationally renowned academics.
The violations of academic freedom committed by Ashoka University are well documented because of the institution's high profile due to its numerous agreements with Berkeley, Yale,Penn, Cambridge, King's College London, SciencesPo, among others.
The efforts of private universities to avoid displeasing the government – or even to anticipate its wishes through self-censorship – can be explained by the dependence of the businessmen who founded them and finance them on that very government: resistance amounts to exposing oneself to tax audits, police investigations, and the loss of public contracts.
3. Hindu nationalism at work
Vigilantes, the Indian police and the judiciary
In 2022, Inamul Rahman, the principal of the Government New Law College in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, was arrested by the police on the grounds that his institution’s library had held on its shelves, since 2014 (five years before Rahman took office), a book titled Collective Violence and the Criminal Justice System. The complaint had been filed by a student, a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (the student union of the Hindu nationalist movement), accusing the book of being “Hindu-phobic and anti-national.”
The book, however, had already undergone revisions in 2021, and the sections deemed “offensive” had been removed. The 2022 police report named not only the dean but also one of his colleagues, a co-author of the book, and its publisher. Although the Supreme Court dismissed the charges against the dean in May 2024, he resigned, and the two professors were unable to resume their teaching at the university.
The methods employed by student and youth organisations affiliated with the RSS and the BJP, such as the ABVP, vary: they mobilise against the inclusion of certain authors (such as Michel Foucault) in reading lists, demonstrate against teachers for forcing them to remove certain texts from their course syllabi, demand the cancellation of lectures, or disrupt events they disapprove of, and even protest against the consumption of non-vegetarian food in student dormitories. Systematically, they claim to be victims of “provocations” that offend their religious sentiments.
The best-known example of this violation of campus integrity is undoubtedly the incident at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) when, on January 5, 2020, students and faculty were attacked by a group of masked intruders armed with stones, sticks, and iron bars, who also vandalised student housing (targeting in particular the rooms of Muslim students from Kashmir). No fewer than forty students and faculty members required emergency medical treatment. Eyewitness accounts indicate that the police, having been warned of the attack, merely stood by without intervening. Unsurprisingly, the attackers were not identified and went unpunished.
One of the targets of these groups enforcing cultural policing on campuses is what they call “permissiveness” or “licentiousness”. They therefore strive to restrict female students’ movements, impose curfews in the dormitories reserved for them, and enforce dress codes, often in the name of their own safety. When referring to JNU, the Hindu nationalist activists also place particular emphasis on the depraved culture said to prevail there.
Also read: India Among Countries Facing Gradual but Continuous Erosion of Academic Autonomy: Report
In addition, Hindu vigilantes can exert direct influence on university policy, including recruitment. In October 2019, the University of Ahmedabad announced the arrival of a leading Indian intellectual, Ramchandra Guha, to take up a position as professor and director of a winter school named after Mahatma Gandhi. The ABVP immediately expressed its hostility to this appointment, arguing that Guha was “critical of Hindu culture”. A few days later, the historian declined the appointment.
The cultural policing that ABVP and other "vigilantes" exercise over universities, not in relation to recruitment (the issue hardly arises in the public system, where the government has all the levers of action at its disposal) but in terms of freedom of expression on campus is a further sign that freedom of expression and academic freedom are sometimes difficult to distinguish.
The legal proceedings against Ali Khan Mahmudabad provide another example of the impact of Hindu nationalism over the Indian state apparatus. In May 2025, the BJP's youth wing, the BYJM and the head of the state women’s commission of Haryana, filed a complaint against this academic, author of a notable thesis at the University of Cambridge and the then head of the political science department at Ashoka University, because of a message posted on social media in which he said that the respect shown in the media to a Muslim army officer reporting on the ongoing clashes with Pakistan was welcome, but that there was a certain "hypocrisy" in this given the way members of her community were treated. He had also praised the actions of the Indian army and advocated for peace. The aforementioned Commission and the BYJM accused him of endangering national sovereignty, communalism and creating public disorder.
Ali Khan Mahmudabad was arrested and then released on bail pending trial, but his passport was not returned to him for months, till the Supreme Court of India asked – successfully – the state government to refuse sanction as a “one-time gesture of magnanimity”. The Supreme Court had also noted that it was watching the faculty in Ashoka and that if they created any trouble then they should know that they fall under its jurisdiction.
This case may be more of an attack on freedom of expression than academic freedom, but the academic world is nonetheless concerned, given that Ashoka University publicly distanced itself from its professor despite huge support from faculty and students.
The New Education Policy and the quest for indigenous knowledge
In 2020, the Indian government launched its New Education Policy (NEP), which intends to decolonise knowledge and promote traditional knowledge in order to restore India to its former status as “Vishwa Guru” (or “Guru of the World”). The NEP marks a step towards the Hinduisation of education, integrating religion-based epistemologies into secular school curricula. By legitimising metaphysical and mythological frameworks as valid forms of scientific reasoning, the NEP blurs the distinctions between empirical research and religious principles and erodes the very conditions necessary for academic freedom: scepticism, critical inquiry, and empirical validation. The reform also reinforces the centralisation of decision making in higher education.
A part of the NEP, the Indian Knowledge System is an official framework based on indigenous knowledge that universities must integrate into their curricula. In parallel, the state orchestrates the rewriting of certain textbooks, particularly in history and political science, to the point of sometimes reversing the victors and the vanquished in certain medieval battles between Hindu and Muslim warlords.
The so-called hard sciences are not spared, even when taught at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. Thus, V. Kamakoti, the director of IIT Madras, a computer engineer by training, extolled the antibacterial and anti-fungal properties of cow urine – the quintessential sacred animal of Hinduism – as a treatment for numerous digestive ailments.
IIT Delhi, for its part, boasted in 2017 of having received fifty research proposals from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and other institutes of technology on the benefits of cow urine and dung.
The institute gave the green light to thirty-four of these projects focusing on panchgavya – a concoction made from five cow-derived products, including milk, excrement, urine, yogurt, and ghee (clarified butter) – projects under the umbrella of the SVAROP programme (Scientific Validation and Research on Panchgavya), with the goal of developing capsules made from cow urine.
Indian education policy thus subordinates academic freedom to ideological imperatives, with basic research expected to contribute to a form of cultural renaissance rather than being guided by the pursuit of scientific knowledge.
4. Resistance
Over the past decade, resistance to attacks on academic freedom has taken the form of two types of movements.
Students were among the first to mobilise, which is not surprising, for while the rights and freedoms of teachers are often emphasised, the denial of academic freedom affects students just as much. Yet in India, student activism has played a major historical role, from the anti-colonial struggle to the fight against corruption in the 1970s.
Today, seventy-five years after independence, students find themselves deprived of some of their most basic rights as citizens. Many are arrested and imprisoned, not only for exercising their legitimate right to demonstration, but also simply for protesting against increases in tuition or housing fees. The particularly shocking case of Umar Khalid, leader of a student union at JNU, deserves special mention here, as he has been in prison for six years without the courts deigning to hold his trial.
While at public universities students are on the front lines – to such an extent that at JNU the latest elections saw the victory of anti-ABVP union leaders – private universities, for their part, seek to dissuade faculty and students from unionising, and sometimes go so far as to ban all activist action, particularly participation in campus demonstrations. But students at some private universities are publicly speaking out to defend academic freedom.
Faculty members, for their part, have formed networks entirely dedicated to defending academic freedom. The main one, the India Academic Freedom Network (IAFN), is organising numerous press conferences, petitions, and demonstrations. At the same time, through its website, this network reports on the attacks targeting the academic and research communities, both at large and small universities, and both in India and elsewhere in the world. Moreover, Indian academics are receiving support from their colleagues based abroad, through, for example, the Indian Solidarity for Academic Freedom in India (InSAF).
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While academic freedom has always been fragile in India due to the state’s control over universities and research institutions, Narendra Modi’s rise to power in 2014 led to a clampdown on free expression on the campuses of both public and private universities, with vigilante censorship of scholarly writing and academic events, and with students being punished and even incarcerated for protesting these developments. It also introduced a new ideological dimension – that of Hindu nationalism – that stifles the scientific spirit.
The effects of these upheavals are being felt concretely from many different points of view: some faculty members are striving to leave the country, rarely successfully, students who can afford it are enrolling in programmes abroad and some of the most prestigious institutions are slipping in international rankings despite the great value of the academics who are holding their ground as best they can. This trend may increase because of the 2018 reform which allows the recruitment of assistant professors with only a master's degree – a reform making political appointments even easier.
In an effort to regain lost ground and properly educate its elites, India is opening up to Western universities. However, those establishing campuses there are concerned about the restrictions on academic freedom faced by their faculty and students because, particularly in the social sciences, simply because no real intellectual progress is possible without a critical mindset.
Christophe Jaffrelot is Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London, Non resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Chair of the British Association for South Asian Studies.
This article was originally published on British Association for South Asian Studies website.
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