Long before an emergency was imposed on the country by prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1975-77, an emergency was imposed on Indian higher education in the early 1970s. The ever-insecure new prime minister was eager to prove her progressive credentials in the battle against the verna-cular elite who had come to dominate the Indian National Congress.
While a few small-time, now-forgotten politicians and time-serving academics kept up a steady barrage, Nurul Hasan, the Leninist minister of education and a former historian, began to emancipate the Indian intellectuals of their irrationalities, backwardness and ahistoricity and introduce them to the beauties of historical materialism and objective truths of history. Hasan belonged to the landed aristocracy in Uttar Pradesh and evidently his Leninism had not cured him of his sense of noblesse oblige. The ultra-positivist Marxism he had dutifully picked up during his student days in England — a country known for its steady export of intellectual shibboleths that it never takes seriously itself — made him immune to any self-doubt. As a self-declared vanguard of the proletariat, he sought to cleanse higher education of all other ideological strands, including deviant schools of Marxism. Mrs Gandhi, nervously aware of the power of intellectual dissent in a Brahminic society, found such drawing-room revolutionaries excellent tools to ensure political control. The new dispensation, among other things, ensured the dominance of a small clique of historians in Indian academe. In science, an even smaller clique already ruled the roost. A coterie of power-hungry, strategically placed educational administrators, who knew nothing about education but everything about academic politics — the names of G Parthasarathy, Raja Ramanna and M G K Menon immediately come to one's mind — completed the picture. New rules and a stricter visa regime were introduced to control scholars and monitor them. Non-Indian scholars of India were discouraged unless they belonged to 'friendly countries' as defined by the foreign service bureaucracy — East Europe and the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, old rules and regulations were rediscovered to keep dissenting scholars under control. Professor Arun Bose, no longer an ardent Leninist but still a creative Marxist thinker, was picked up for questioning while teaching a class at Delhi because he had published a book through Penguin, London. All commercial contracts with foreigners required previous clearance; books were no exception. Technically, no university could invite a foreign scholar to give a lecture even while he was visiting India as a tourist. It too required prior clearance, and of course, as everybody knows, foreign participants of all seminars had to be cleared. I had to once cancel a biannual conference of the World Future Studies Federation because there was tremendous pressure from the government to pack it with sycophantic scientists and academics. It is no accident that when the BJP tried to fiddle with higher education after coming to power in 1998, it did not have to introduce a single new law. All the rules and regulations were in place. All they had to do was to appoint a few partisan academics and bureaucrats to important posts. Even minor promotions or postings were enough for our public-spirited intellectuals and bureaucrats to change sides. Luckily, most of the people the BJP appointed were first-class fools. The BJP's official ideology, a servile imitation of European nationalism of the Italian and German kind, was not designed to attract anyone even remotely thoughtful. The ones they inflicted on the academe had no legitimacy among intellectuals and made the policy-makers and the educational bureaucracy the laughing stock of the country and the world. Yet, Murli Manohar Joshi could have earned kudos from even his enemies by freeing Indian higher education from the stranglehold of officialdom and by dismantling the patronage structure that has devastated the world of knowledge in the country. But he only substituted one set of flunkies with another. Indian higher education is still waiting for politicians with vision, who will trust the intellectuals more than they trust the bureaucrats of the ministries of education, culture, information, home and foreign affairs. But that is too much to hope for in a political culture built around the borrowed idea of a nineteenth-century, colonial nation-state. It requires imagination and courage to build an environment of freedom. It requires the state to return higher education to their practitioners and to give them priority over semi-literate politicians and bureaucrats. The government has no business producing history texts or determining who can participate in academic seminars in India, or represent India outside the country. Fear of democracy has been the underside of Indian democracy ever since the Republic was born. Nowhere is the fear more apparent than in Indian higher education. As a result, most universities today are intellectual deserts, where good work takes place by default, not design. We love to talk once in a while on the brain drain but we hate to admit that most gifted scholars run away from the country not for money but to protect their dignity and avoid the loving embrace of the intellectually challenged bureaucracy.
