Editorial: SAU South Asian no more

The slow dismantling of the South Asian University (SAU) in New Delhi validates two criticisms that fit like a glove to the ethnonationalist government in power in India: One, that the Modi regime takes delight in wrecking educational institutions with a secular culture, and, two, it doesn’t care about its own Neighbourhood First foreign policy.

News from the SAU campus in recent months confirms that the Indian right-wing is following its Trojan Horse playbook to corrupt and obliterate the university’s founding charter of free-mingling South Asian scholarship and turn it into a playfield of Hindu cultural nationalism.

Late last month, members of the ABVP gratuitously kicked up a fuss over fish being served on Mahashivaratri day and molested the student mess secretary when she tried to stop them from destroying the food. This is a familiar ABVP tactic: Pretend to be offended by a supposed slight to Hindu culture and use it as a ruse to attack gender, sexual, and religious minorities.

Last year, the university was witness to a laughable kerfuffle over a research proposal by a PhD student who wanted to study Kashmir’s ethnography and politics. The proposal cited Noam Chomsky’s criticism of Narendra Modi. For that basic exercise of academic freedom, the student was made to apologise and abandon the project. His thesis supervisor, a Sri Lankan professor, left the university in disgust.

In all this, the administration plays it scrupulously by the script, looking away when girl students complain about sexual harassment on campus, and looking askance when academics dare to pursue free inquiry.

At the time of its founding in 2010, SAU was envisioned by then prime minister Manmohan Singh as a world-class platform for collaboration by the best scholars from South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries. It was to serve as a metaphor for cooperation among Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

Instead, it is a metaphor for the shambles of that vision today. Coterminous with India’s utter disregard for SAARC since 2014, SAU’s South Asian character has faded away. The student body, the administration, faculty, the campus culture, and the research priorities have all become more Indian and Hindu than South Asian.

As per the charter, 50 per cent of the seats are reserved for Indians with 40 per cent set apart for students from other SAARC nations and 10 per cent from non-SAARC countries. The faculty was to be multinational, drawing upon the best scholarship available in the entire SAARC region.

However, the proportion of students from other SAARC nations has dwindled to about 20 percent today and only half a dozen of the 50 faculty positions are filled by non-Indians. One reason for the loss of diversity is the denial of visas to Pakistanis and to Afghans since the Taliban came to power in 2021.

As a result, a predominantly Indian, and distinctly Hindu, culture has taken over a space meant for secular South Asian scholarship. India’s Independence Day and Republic Day are celebrated with pomp but other countries’ national days are barely noticed. Reflecting the composition of faculty, administration and student body, North Indian Hindi flexes its muscles as the lingua franca on campus. The administration looks on as a Hindu temple cropped up on campus.

Just as SAARC sounds anachronistic in Modi’s India, SAU is South Asian no more. That much was clear as daylight when the university couldn’t bring itself to mourn the passing of its founder, Manmohan Singh, recently.