Et tu Ashoka?

A pioneer in liberal education takes a hard knock

The controversy caused by the resignation of Professors Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Arvind Subramanian from Ashoka University, a liberal arts institution that aims to promote critical thinking, highlights the shrinking space for freedom of expression in India — even for an establishment that is backed by private capital. Though the precise details of Dr Mehta’s exit are unclear, it is evident from his resignation letter that his forthright commentary on government policy, upholding the same values that the university champions through its academics, had become a cause of acute discomfort for some of the university’s founders. Many of them represent stellar names in the business firmament and have gained considerable traction from their association with the university. The intervention was ill-judged enough to provoke the resignation of Dr Subramanian. As former chief economic advisor under the Narendra Modi government, Dr Subramanian would have been cognizant of the proscriptive nature of the regime he had served, which makes his departure all the more discomfiting for the university.

With the issue provoking opprobrium from Harvard and Yale, including a coruscating condemnation from the respected Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock, the dual resignations have become a mega-embarrassment for the university. But a chink in the university’s liberal armour was already in evidence in 2016 over an open letter signed by its student body and some professors condemning the state of violence in Kashmir. The university not only explicitly distanced itself from this letter but pressure from founders caused two of the faculty who had signed the letter to resign. Again, their discomfort with Dr Mehta’s public writings and speeches was the proximate cause for his decision to step down as vice-chancellor in 2019, though the official reason given then was that he wanted to focus on research. It is no surprise that these small erosions of liberality eventually caused the landslide of two high-profile resignations.

Sunday’s emollient joint statement issued by the chancellor, vice-chancellor, a founders’ representative, and Professors Mehta and Subramanian suggests some sort of truce between all parties but the reference to “lapses in institutional processes” raises more questions. What precisely were these lapses that enabled the founders to wield more power over respected academics than the senior faculty, many of them of international repute? And what is being done to address this “lapse”? Though as a private entity the university is not obliged to offer details, the fact is that Ashoka had acquired a global reputation as one of the last bastions of high-quality liberal arts academics in India when the courts and the media — those conventional guardrails of democracy — are weakening. Perhaps this controversy underlines the hard truth that it is unrealistic to expect private capital in India to champion the cause of speaking truth to power, whatever the government of the day. It was evident during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency as much as in successor regimes. The Confederation of Indian Industry’s craven apology to Mr Narendra Modi when he was Gujarat’s chief minister, to criticism by Anu Aga — ironically an Ashoka founder — for the communal riots in the state presaged the kind of compromises that would be made. It is a pity that an institution with the resources of Ashoka University had to feel the brunt of this weakness.