Mumbai: Environmental protection. An ongoing war. The education system. Urban unemployment.
These might seem like ordinary topics of discussion at a university or higher educational institution, but at the Indian Institute of Technology–Bombay (IIT-B), lectures on these subjects—and the guest speakers slated to deliver them—have proved contentious in the past year.
Since November 2023, the IIT-B administration has cancelled guest lectures by at least four prominent intellectuals and experts, including environmentalist and historian Ramachandra Guha and cultural activist Ganesh Devy. In three cases, the events were called off at the last minute.
The institute has also penalised a student with Rs 120,000 for staging a play based on the Ramayana and disrupting a candlelight vigil for Palestinian children killed in the war. More controversially, it has issued guidelines prohibiting students and faculty from organising any events or guest lectures that “may be viewed as political” without the permission of the administration.
Article 14 sought comment from IIT-B’s director, Shireesh Kedare, and public relations officer, Falguni Banerjee Naha, on 7 September. The emailed questions concerned the interim guidelines, the committee to review external speakers and the cancellation of various institute events. There was no response.
We sent a reminder on 19 September. We will update this story if there is a response.
Diminishing Academic Freedom
These restrictions come as India’s ranking on the Academic Freedom Index (AFI) has plummeted to its lowest point since the mid-1940s, according to the Free to Think 2024 report, published on 8 October 2024 by the Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project (SAR), a network of 665 universities worldwide.
The index, released by the FAU Institute of Political Science in Germany and the V-Dem Institute in Sweden, placed India in the “completely restricted” category—countries where restrictions on academic freedom are consistently applied across all academic disciplines.
From 2013 to 2023, India’s AFI ranking slipped from 0.6 to 0.2 on a scale of 0 to 1.
India was in the bottom 30% of 179 countries, lower than Pakistan, Congo, and Russia.
The Academic Freedom Index is compiled by 2,329 experts from around the world.
These experts assess academic freedom based on five indicators: freedom to research and teach, institutional autonomy, freedom of academic exchange and dissemination, campus integrity, and freedom of academic and cultural expression.
The ninth instalment of the Free to Think 2024 report, which compiles the findings of the FAU and V-Dem, noted that the “most pressing threats” to academic freedom in India were the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) efforts to exert political control on academic institutions and university policies limiting student protests.
In the past, representatives of the BJP government have rejected reports published by V-Dem and other international institutions.
In March 2021, for instance, external affairs minister S Jaishankar dismissed a V-Dem report that described India as an “electoral autocracy…where freedom of the media, academia and civil society were curtailed first and to the greatest extent”. Jaishankar responded to the report by claiming that India did not need approval from “self-appointed custodians of the world”.
In November 2022, the government’s principal economic advisor, Sanjeev Sanyal, challenged another V-Dem report on India’s low ranking on the liberal democracy index, saying that such rankings are based on “superficial and often skewed use of media reports”.
The report listed dozens of cases across Indian universities where academic freedom is under attack.
The South Asian University in Delhi, for instance, suspended four faculty members in June 2023 for supporting students protesting against low stipends for scholars. In October 2023, more than 200 students from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Jamia Milia University and Delhi University were detained by the police for a pro-Palestine protest outside the Israeli embassy.
Later, in January 2024, 150 students from Salem’s Periyar University were detained for holding a silent protest against a visit from the Tamil Nadu governor.
In July 2018, the JNU administration issued show-cause notices to 48 professors for participating in a protest against the vice-chancellor’s policies. The notices invoked the union government’s Central Civil Services conduct rules, prohibiting government servants from making anti-government statements or joining political associations.
This led to outrage among JNU’s teaching staff, who pointed out that imposing such rules on teachers would take away their “freedom to dissent”.
Meanwhile, Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Services (TISS) instituted a new “honour code” for master’s students on 19 August 2024, requiring them to sign a pledge to “refrain from engaging in political, anti-establishment or unpatriotic discussions.”
After intense backlash from student groups, who accused the TISS administration of suppressing dissent, the institute revoked that section of its honour code on 16 September.
Democratic Decline
The restrictions on academic freedom correspond to a broader decline in India’s freedom of the press, speech, and expression in recent years. Between 2022 and 2023, for instance, India’s rank in the World Press Freedom Index fell from 150 to 161 out of 180 countries.
In 2024, the rank improved marginally, rising to 159. Meanwhile, in the 2024 Global Expression Report, India’s freedom of expression was deemed a “crisis,” ranked 123 out of 161.
IIT-B’s guidelines and the spate of event cancellations have triggered alarm among many students and faculty members, who perceive it as stifling academic freedom at one of India’s most prestigious engineering and technical education public institutes.
“Through these guidelines, the institute appears to be cracking down on left-oriented events, ones that are linked to issues of caste, class and academic freedom,” said a teaching staff member, speaking to Article 14 on condition of anonymity.
While students and faculty at IIT-B hesitated to express their concerns openly, some student groups have been vocal on social media.
For instance, the student-run Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle posted a statement on its Instagram page in November last year, alleging that cancelling guest lectures and events due to “unforeseen circumstances” had become routine at the institute.
“Even reading-sessions which have focused on nuances of caste, class or gender have been disrupted by the campus security, or have been unilaterally cancelled,” the statement said.
The Interim Guidelines
On 14 November 2023, IIT-B’s registrar office issued the “Interim Guidelines on Holding of Events at IIT-Bombay”.
The guidelines, of which Article-14 has a copy, state that the institute is funded by the Government of India (GoI) and “has the mandate to carry out the vision of the GoI in taking our country to a higher level of development”.
The document claims that while IIT-B encourages free and open discussions on educational subjects, it “must remain apolitical” and that students and staff must avoid activities that “may invite socio-political controversies.”
The guidelines differentiate between events that are “purely non-political” and those that are “potentially political”—ones that “have any content that may be viewed as political or socially conflicting”.
While non-political events can be organised without prior permission from the IIT-B authorities, the guidelines make official approval mandatory for potentially political events, whether organised by students, faculty or non-teaching staff. Students, on their part, can organise events only through student bodies officially recognised by the institute.
Further, according to the guidelines, “political” events that involve inviting external speakers or screening films or documentaries need clearance from an “external speaker review committee” appointed by the institute’s director. The committee’s approval is required even for events that are part of academic courses or activities.
Ten months after being issued, these interim guidelines remain in force at IIT-B, leaving professors and students increasingly worried about their impact on academic activities.
In conversations with Article 14, faculty members listed several problems with the guidelines' framing. Chief among them was the definition and interpretation of the term “political.”
“In some fields of study, like social sciences and policy, everything is political. So how will this review committee determine what can be approved and what cannot?” said one faculty member.
Teachers and students at IIT-B claimed that no official announcement had been made about the constitution of an external speaker review committee in all these months.
“We have no idea how this committee has been selected, how it operates, or what the expertise of its members is,” said the faculty member.
Another concern is the absence of any signature on the interim guidelines document.
“It was emailed to the staff from the registrar’s office, but there are no signatories on it,” said another faculty member. “So who has officially authorised them?”
Cracking Down On Palestine Support
The guidelines regulating “political” events at IIT-B were issued in response to two specific guest lectures on Palestine issues hosted by the institute’s humanities and social sciences department in November 2023.
The first proposed talk was by Achin Vanaik, a retired professor of political science and international relations. Vanaik had been invited from Delhi on 7 November to lecture on the long history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Vanaik had already given the same talk at other institutions, including IIT-Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University, and OP Jindal University.
In the week before his scheduled lecture in Mumbai, however, video clips of his talk at OP Jindal were shared on social media by some members of the Bharatiya Janata Party, who accused him of being “in support of Hamas, a terrorist organisation”.
At IIT-B, too, some students emailed the institute’s administration to protest against Vanaik’s alleged “anti-religious”, “anti-Hindu”, and “anti-semitic” views, claiming that he had, on previous occasions, “expressed solidarity with suicide bombers”.
The email claimed that Vanaik’s talk could “polarise the minds of students” and that events carrying a “political colour” should not be held at the institute.
On the morning of 7 November, just before Vanaik was to take his flight to Mumbai, he was informed that the event had been cancelled due to “unforeseen circumstances”.
“This was obviously because of the controversy over my talk at O P Jindal,” Vanaik told Article 14. “I was not expecting the cancellation because people are interested in the Israel-Palestine issue. At O P Jindal, over 200 people attended my talk. It is a small group of pro-Hindutva students who objected to it.”
In September, Article 14 reported how pro-Palestinian protests and social media posts nationwide, including in states run by the Opposition, had been effectively criminalised, with 51 people in seven states facing criminal cases, including under the India’s draconian anti-terrorism law.
While a student group called IIT for Bharat celebrated Vanaik's lecture cancellation, other students from the humanities department sent a letter to their department head, raising concerns about the institute's loss of academic freedom.
The second controversial event occurred the same week, on 6 November, when English professor Sharmishta Saha screened Arna’s Children—a 2003 documentary about a children’s theatre group in Palestine—in her class. Saha had invited Sudhanva Deshpande, a well-known publisher and theatre personality, to deliver a virtual guest lecture introducing the film.
One of the students present in the class shot videos of Deshpande’s talk on his phone and later posted the clips online. The videos were widely shared on social media, with some users accusing Deshpande of showing “solidarity with Hamas.”
On 8 November, some students reported Deshpande’s talk to the IIT administration while simultaneously filing a police complaint against him and Saha.
In a statement issued the next day, Deshpande emphasised that he had said nothing that glorified Hamas and that he “did not even mention Hamas” in his talk.
However, on the morning of 11 November, members of the Vivek Vichar Manch—a right-leaning group at IIT-Bombay—protested outside the IIT campus gate, raising slogans such as “desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro salon ko” [shoot the traitors to the nation] against Deshpande and Saha.
The IIT administration responded that day, announcing the appointment of a fact-finding committee to investigate the students’ behaviour—which the institute condemned—Deshpande’s talk and what took place during that class.
Three days later, the interim guidelines on holding “political” events on campus were issued.
That same day, the Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle (APPSC) accused the IIT-B authorities of disrupting a silent candlelight vigil in honour of Palestinian children being killed by Israeli bombing.
The student group organised the vigil to mark Children’s Day and informed the institute’s administration of the plan.
However, according to a statement posted on the APPSC Instagram page, the campus police were already present at the venue when the students arrived and ordered them to disperse. The statement claimed that the police also confiscated stationery items that students had carried to make posters, video-recorded the attendees, and demanded to see their identity cards.
Guha Uninvited
Amid these controversial developments, noted environmentalist and historian Ramchandra Guha was disinvited from IIT-B’s annual National Environment Conference (NEC), which was scheduled to take place in February 2024.
As a public intellectual, Guha’s works cover a range of subjects, including Gandhi, democracy, cricket and ecology. In his columns, he has also been a vocal critic of right-wing extremism and Hindutva policies.
However, Guha was invited solely as an environmental expert to the IIT conference, and he decided to speak on the history of Indian environmental debates.
In the invitation letter he received as early as 17 September 2023, the environmental science and engineering department told Guha that it would be “really enlightening for our audience to hear from you”.
However, on 9 November 2023, Guha received another email claiming the department had “received feedback to confine all the talks in NEC 2024 on emerging technical products and processes in environmental engineering.”
Because of this, the email said, “We are looking for speakers having experience and expertise in core environmental engineering areas”.
In other words, Guha was told he did not meet the requirements for speakers at the conference because he was not an engineer.
In his email response, Guha told the department that the reason for uninviting him sounded “fishy” and that he was deeply saddened.
“I wonder if the IIT management is worried that my presence would offend the ruling party bosses in Delhi,” his email added. “In this climate, some academics lack the spine to defend basic intellectual freedoms.”
Cancellation of Devy’s Talk
Cultural activist and literary critic Ganesh Devy, who was to speak at IIT-B’s Institute Lecture Series on 31 January, was the next public intellectual to be uninvited.
Devy had been invited to talk about “The crisis within: on knowledge and education in India”, and students had been informed about the event a month in advance.
Arrangements for his travel to Mumbai had also been made.
Devy is noted for his extensive work documenting indigenous languages across India.
In 2015, Devy returned his Sahitya Akademi Award as part of his vocal criticism of growing intolerance and the killing of intellectuals in India.
Two days before his scheduled lecture at IIT-B, the institute emailed students and faculty to announce that the talk had been cancelled due to “unforeseen circumstances.”
At the time, an IIT spokesperson told the Times of India that the institute’s “colloquium committee” had decided to postpone the lecture.
Another IIT official told The Free Press Journal that the talk had been cancelled because of “negative feedback about Devy’s past” and fears that a controversy similar to that around Deshpande’s talk could emerge.
According to the official, the institute could not prevent a guest speaker from making a “political or disturbing” comment.
However, students and faculty at IIT-B told Article 14 that just a week before Devy’s talk was cancelled, some student groups had been permitted to carry out a “large procession” on campus to mark the inauguration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya. The temple had been a controversial issue for years because it was built at the site of the historic Babri Masjid that Hindutva workers had razed to the ground in 1992. “Having a procession to celebrate this temple is as political as it gets,” said a student from the APPSC group.
Speaking to Article 14, Devy said he did not wish to speculate about why he had been uninvited from IIT-B at the last minute.
“It is not a very pleasant feeling when someone cancels an invitation, but I have other work to do and would not like to comment on it,” said Devy.
Unemployment Discussion Called Off
The most recent event to be cancelled at IIT-B was a closed-door panel discussion on urban unemployment organised by the institute’s Centre for Policy Studies on 16 August.
The event was supposed to feature the release of a research report evaluating the implementation of two central government schemes for urban employment and other state government and independent schemes.
The speakers invited for the panel discussion included prominent IIT alumni like social scientist Dunu Roy—the lead author of the research report—and Right to Information activist Shailesh Gandhi.
According to Roy, IIT-B’s Centre for Policy Research was among the many institutions that carried out the study. The event organisers had also invited a bureaucrat from the Maharashtra government—the additional secretary of planning—so that they could present the report’s policy recommendations.
On the morning of the event, soon after Roy arrived in Mumbai from Delhi, he was informed that the panel discussion had suddenly been cancelled.
“I was given to understand that some problems have arisen at IIT with external speakers coming for events,” Roy told Article 14.
“I had heard of previous events being cancelled, but I did not anticipate problems with this one because this was not a public event or a political discussion on any controversial issue,” he said. “Our report talks about the rise in unemployment in India, which is a relevant issue of great concern.”
Sources from within IIT-B indicated that the event organisers had sought approval from the institute director’s office around two weeks before the event but did not receive a response in time.
“The interim guidelines don’t specify how much in advance permission has to be sought for an event, which makes it very difficult for organisers,” said an IIT-B student who did not wish to be named.
After the 16 August panel discussion was called off, Roy said he wrote to the institute’s director and board chairman to express his reservations about it.
“I am in communication with them, and I have been told the event is going to be postponed and that the speakers are being reviewed by a committee,” said Roy on 10 September. “So now I am waiting for the committee’s decision.”
Punishment For A Play
Students and faculty pointed out that there was a precedent to this last-minute crackdown on certain kinds of events and discussions at IIT-B.
The institute was scheduled to host a two-day conference in December 2022 about the “Cultures of the political left in modern India.”
However, the institute announced its cancellation at midnight, just a day before the conference began.
This decision was not explained; participants were merely told it was a directive from the institute’s director.
In an interview with IIT-Bombay’s student-run magazine Insight, Subhasis Chaudhuri, the institute's director at the time, was asked why this conference had been cancelled.
Chaudhuri said, “Sometimes, as an administrator, one needs to make unpleasant decisions for the greater good of the campus”. He acknowledged, however, that cancelling conferences “definitely affects the [institute’s] reputation negatively” and should be avoided as much as possible.
However, since the imposition of the interim guidelines, several academic and cultural events have been subject to strict scrutiny.
For instance, on 31 March, a troupe of students staged a play called Raahovan—an adaptation of the Ramayana—during the institute’s Performing Arts Festival.
In the following days, the student group IIT for Bharat circulated video clips of the play on social media, claiming that its allegedly derogatory depiction of characters based on Ram, Sita, and Lakshman offended Hindu religious sentiments.
The group demanded that the institute take action against the students involved in the play.
In May, the IIT administration established a disciplinary action committee to investigate the play.
On 4 June, based on the committee’s recommendation, IIT fined the student Rs 1.2 lakh for being “involved directly in executing the play.”
A New Trend
For many experts whose talks and events the institute cancelled, IIT-B’s decisions are part of a larger, worrying trend of political interference in academic freedom.
“What we are seeing is the government’s efforts to control universities,” said Achin Vanaik, who believes that controlling education, film and media is an integral part of any regime’s attempts at “ideological homogenisation”.
“It is happening at JNU, TISS, and so many other places,” said Vanaik.
For Ramchandra Guha, IIT-B joining the ranks of educational institutes stifling free expression is a significant development.
“There was political interference in the past, too, but never in any science institutions,” said Guha. “For the first time in India, scientific institutes are facing interference.”
(Aarefa Johari is an award-winning independent journalist who writes about gender, labour, human rights, culture, and more.)
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