The Indian Express of September 9, 2025 said the Delhi University was set to confer an honorary doctorate on Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Dr Harini Amarasuriya, who is an alumna of Hindu College, one of Delhi University’s better-known colleges. The conferring of an honorary doctorate on a deserving person has conventionally been a matter of recognising the knowledge he or she has produced. Of recent, this academic recognition is increasingly becoming a political act, offered as an extension of political largesse or influence peddling. When Amarasuriya or any other Sri Lankan government representative, political or bureaucratic, accepts an award, it is not a simple private act, as it implicates both the government and by extension the country.
Let us consider the political dimensions of this honorary doctorate. If the prime minister attends the dedicated convocation and accepts the award, she goes beyond being mere Harini. The symbolic implications of her association with Delhi University at the present time – if she accepts the doctorate, and that too under the direct auspices of the Indian government – cannot be equated to the time she was an undergraduate at the Hindu College from 1991–1994. According to a notice issued on September 8 by the registrar of Delhi University, a meeting of the university’s main decision-making body, the Academic Council has been called for the September 11 to discuss this matter. But the interest to offer an honorary doctorate to Amarasuriya did not come from within the university. Instead, it has allegedly been prompted by a letter from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs.
If so, conferring of this doctorate on the Sri Lankan prime minister is not an academic or intellectual exercise, but a vaguely disguised political act with serious implications. Against the backdrop of the recent politics of Delhi University marred in controversy and dismantling of academic freedom, an environment very different from Amarasuriya’s undergraduate days in the early 1990s and closer to India’s RSS-dominated BJP government’s divisive politics, her acceptance of the honorary doctorate is a conscious or poorly thought out endorsement of the university’s recent actions.
Professor Apoorvanand of Delhi University’s Hindi department was recently sidelined in its search for a head of department, not due to any lack of qualifications but because his ideological stance was not to the taste of the government and therefore also the university administrators. It was not too long ago that Amarasuriya fought against such decisions by former Sri Lankan governments in her own former university, the Open University of Sri Lanka. Delhi University’s recent (June 2025) attempt to remove proposed postgraduate political science syllabi on Islam, Pakistan and China is another case in point. Ideology yet again dictated the limits of academic freedom, and the paths inquiry can take under authoritarian rule.
Also read: The Quiet Dismantling of Liberal Education at Delhi University
The syllabi were dropped because they did not allegedly align with the ‘India First’ perspective. Amarasuriya would not have agreed to this if it had happened in her own former university. These are merely two of the many violations of Delhi University that goes against the spirit of any decent university. Does the prime minster of Sri Lanka want to give legitimacy to an institution that is now better known for such draconian and unethical acts than advanced learning? In the recent past, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India’s external affairs minster S. Jaishankar created controversy over Sri Lanka’s Kachchativu Island, claiming it was ceded to Lanka in 1974, misrrepresenting history and fact.
Jaishankar blamed the Congress party government of that time for ‘giving away’ the rights of Indian fishermen. Sri Lanka for its part has never seriously addressed this issue. And it is this Indian government that is now directing that the Sri Lanka prime minister to be given an honorary doctorate by Delhi University. Why? Are not serious and shady politics with long-term consequences and the attempted creation of obligatory relationships at play here? Does the prime minister want to be associated with these unenviable institutional politics of Delhi University and hegemonic Indian national politics represented by its present government? It is a different matter altogether, if Amarasuriya for sentimental reasons wants to accept this so-called honour. It tantamounts to an official and formal indication of Sri Lanka’s prime minister getting too close to indefensible acts attributed to Delhi University on the one hand and India’s present government on the other. After all, this is a matter of symbolism and implication.
The prime minister, having studied social anthropology at Edinburgh University and having a doctorate that she has actually earned through hard work, should know well what symbolic inferences mean in politics. She is giving needless legitimacy to a university that has now become a suffocating organisation more associated with disrupting academic freedom than freedom of inquiry. And, she is doing this not as Harini, but as prime minister of Sri Lanka and the country’s minister of education who is on record for her positive and progressive positions on academic freedom among others both during her university tenure and in politics.
It is unfortunate that the prime minister’s office and the Sri Lankan education ministry are straddled with advisors sadly lacking in intelligence and commonsense and certainly not exposed to the symbolic implications of Indian and regional politics. It is also unfortunate that the prime minister also does not seem to have decent advisors or even personal friends worthy of consultation, and is incapable of independent reflection.
This article was originally published on The Island and has been republished with permission.
