Not for king or country

India has had its own traditions of upholding academic freedoms. Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee’s defence of the autonomy of Calcutta University, Tagore’s insistence on founding a “different” kind of university, and Dr Zakir Hussain’s confrontation with vested interests while setting up the Jamia Millia come to mind.

Unfortunately for us, armed with patronage (represented by grants) and brute power, the state in our so-called free India has been systematically undermining what should have been citadels of freedom. Organisations like the UGC, AICTE and the IMC (which themselves are supposed to be autonomous) have used the coercive sanctions of the state to perform this role. Laws have been so written (and so interpreted) that even if one were to take Ravi Mathai’s approach and not seek recognition, you cannot operate freely. You must obtain the “recognition” of these bodies and of the ministries of the government in order to set up an academic institute irrespective of the fact that you may not want to be so recognised! We find people setting up colleges in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Dubai, Singapore, on the peripheries of the Indian state rather than where the writ of our republic prevails. This is ironic. At the height of “imperial tyranny” during the non-cooperation days, the British authorities did not prevent Mahatma Gandhi and his followers setting up Vidyapeeths outside the realm of state control. The right that the British conceded to the Mahatma is to-day denied to the citizens (subjects?) of free India.

The argument is made that if an institution takes government grants, then it must be subjected to state control. This is a silly argument not worth taking seriously. King’s College and Queen’s College at Oxford and Cambridge were set up by monarchs who chose not to make it a condition that the appointment of professors or the choice of syllabi be at the monarch’s behest. They understood the value of separating financial patronage from control. Father Jerome D’Souza who was a member of the Constituent Assembly was aware of this pitfall. He argued persuasively (and successfully) that minority educational institutions should not be deprived of their autonomy simply because they take state aid. The argument stems from the conditions precedent for scholarship to thrive. Scholars need freedom like trees need sunlight. Otherwise they will both wither.

The attack on the autonomy of academic institutions takes place irrespective of which party is in power. I suspect that the one common continuing link is the bureaucracy. No bureaucracy, certainly not the one we are blessed with in free India, likes the idea of flourishing independent islands of dissent beyond its control. Under all dispensations, the bureaucracy furthers its agenda of gaining creeping power. Not only is the appointment of the boards of these institutions in the hands of the government, but so is the appointment of the directors. By a clever sleight of hand, in 2002 the government took over the powers to appoint directors without prescribing a transparent search process. The joint secretaries who are government nominees on these boards rarely attend the meetings (I have this from one of the members of a board); they send their assistants and treat the institutions with the contempt which they think is appropriate. Incidentally, for the directors of these prestigious institutions to travel abroad (for instance to attend an academic conference) they need the approval not of their board but of a joint secretary in imperial Delhi!

Please note that travel abroad has nothing to do with reservations or quotas which are getting publicity and frankly where there is an emerging consensus that some variant (with or without the creamy layer, with or without capacity expansion) is both necessary and desirable. If institutions take the plea of autonomy to resist social change where there is broad consensus (for example, clubs refusing to admit blacks or Jews), one can readily grant the need for state intervention. But reservations are a red herring. The real intent seems to be to make the syllabus, the compensation, the content of scholarship, the freedom (including the freedom to travel) subject to the control of the state. This will strangle scholarly achievement. No wonder that our Nobel-laureates seek to work in foreign universities. Incidentally, all of our sciences Nobel-laureates

(Raman, Khorana and Chandrashekar) were products of the much-maligned British educational system; free India is yet to produce one. Our economics Nobel-laureate (Sen) prefers the unfettered scholarly environments of Cambridge and Harvard! Is it because most of our elite (business, political, bureaucratic) send their children to foreign universities, that no one seems to care if the desi ones degenerate under stifling state control?

The writer is chairman of Mphasis. These are his personal views