“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may have been good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”¹
I was troubled for the first time as a law student when the Hindu Brahmanical credentials of a Supreme Court Judge were furnished to lend credence to their argument as to how the Indian Judiciary as an institution is deeply infected with majoritarianism; any subsequent counter by citing instances where judges from a different religious or other background adjudicated upon a Hindu cause was refuted, if not rebuked, without any logical justification. The sight becomes even more worrisome because this supposed discussion without discourse was happening before a room full of first-year students who are on the brink of their ideological conception.
This particular instance spoke volumes to me about the underpinning hypocrisy of the Indian educational discourse. I distinctly remember a public address wherein we were cautioned about the present suppression of voices and perspectives in the political spectrum, their implications on the nature of academia, so on and so forth; little did I know that in reality, this meant something completely different from what was being propagated. An uncountable number of anecdotal accounts can be produced to highlight the glaring situation and the underlying motivations. However, it is pertinent to delve into the deeper ramifications of such a phenomenon and to understand that the perpetuality of this phenomenon, namely the distorting and dislodging of the very fabric of Indian ideology, has explicit societal as well as political implications in the future.
There is an organized mechanism that functions behind this unapologetic propagation of liberal ideology, which in its most myopic effect translates to unfounded aversion to every establishment that has ever existed. The enduring effects are to be countered at a later stage only if, as a society, we manage to get past the first set of problems. There is a plethora of surveys that have found that premier educational institutions like Harvard are largely dominated by liberal “intellectuals” and have a subsequent impact on the political discourse of the United States of America².
It will be sheer foolishness to label this fact as a problem restricted to the US because the global stature of such institutions is well-known, and the diverse nature of their student population makes it easier to showcase the global hue of this problem. As far as India is concerned, this so-called US problem translates to a much bigger Indian problem in light of an institutional change that is transpiring with private institutions as its epicenter, the large-scale hiring of foreign-educated professors who have the aforementioned ideological baggage, which is then thrust down our throats in the form of an erroneous attempt to steer society towards betterment.
In any way whatsoever, foreign education or further education and its value is not disregarded through this article; the problem arises when a degree from a foreign institution is made to be a norm rather than a CV adornment, thereby restricting the multitudinous nature of academia, which should ideally be founded on diversity of opinion specifically, in the humanities.
There is a peculiar nature of this ideological and political transmission, which has been expounded upon in detail by Arun Shorie in his book, Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud³. One of the many tactics he mentions is “objective whitewash for objective history,” which is to say, if someone musters the gumption to challenge this systematic framework, they are immediately labeled as communal rewriters of history. Every attempt to restore and reimagine Indian history from a lens that is different and uncomfortable to the liberal way of thinking is blatantly written off as a political maneuver.
Shorie rightfully observes that the ultimate recourse available to these intellectuals is to question the timing of such restoration attempts⁴. Is it their case that just because someone’s voice has been suppressed for years, they have lost the liberty and authority to question such intellectual suppression altogether? Or is any suppression of the other side of the spectrum justified?
Most of the students enrolled in colleges arduously make their way to these institutions, largely unaware of the political issues, and are therefore being exposed to this sort of politico-ideological decision-making for the first time. Such unilateral dissemination of perspective essentially blinds them to every other viewpoint, having a disastrous impact on their subsequent political life. The beauty of this well-oiled mechanism is its veiled nature; this one-sided propagation is touted as a harbinger of a social revolution and further encourages numerous students to adopt the same trajectory.
This is a systematic oppression of opinion by wresting the ability to think and comprehend social issues from students like me, where we are taught that establishments by their very existence are unjust. All of this, while simultaneously oiling the age-old establishment of academia that has the cascading effect like no other institution in this country can ever have.
The question of paramount importance here is if the government can be rebuked, if the judiciary can be absolutely discredited within the walls of a classroom, why is any criticism of the academic institutions frowned upon? Or are they not susceptible to such questioning?
Sankalp Guru
Views expressed through this article are personal.
¹ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1st published 1859, Batoche Books 2001) 49.
² The Harvard Crimson, ‘Faculty Survey 2022: Over 80 Percent of Harvard Faculty Identify as Liberal’ (13 July 2022) https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/7/13/faculty-survey-political-leaning/ accessed 4 March 2025.
³ Arun Shourie, Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (HarperCollins India 2014)
⁴ ibid.
