Britta Ohm: Indien als Lehrstück. Vom Ende der Wissenschaftsfreiheit in der Demokratie, in: BdWi Studienheft 14: Umkämpfte Wissenschaftsfreiheit. Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Politik, Oktober 2024, 56 S.
Western governments increasingly present India as a forward-looking, economically and technologically important partner country, also with reference to its status as the “world’s largest democracy”. Proto-autocratic and established liberal governments in Europe hardly differ in their appreciation of India. In this text, which unfortunately is not available online, Britta Ohm describes how the Hindu nationalist leadership under Narendra Modi has increasingly harassed and ultimately openly attacked universities and university campuses since coming to power in 2014 – especially when students and teachers have shown solidarity with the protests of the Muslim minority and lower-caste engagement. The gradual undermining and delegitimization of universities as places of critical understanding and intellectual debate in India can be seen as an anticipation of current trends in the United States and Europe. The first arrests of students at Jawaharlal Nehru University (NJU) in New Delhi in 2016 were made under the colonial “anti-sedition law” of 1870, which has never been repealed; it was later revealed that the slogans the students were accused of chanting had been chanted by infiltrated provocateurs who had infiltrated the protests.
“In many ways, this marked the starting point for the university as an open ideological and physical battleground, in which the use of force was determined by the Hindu nationalist government, right-wing extremist networks, private media corporations and social media platforms, and increasingly state organs (police, judiciary) and was brought to bear against the critical student body as well as scholars and university teachers.”
After the introduction of anti-minority citizenship laws, violence escalated at the Jamia Millia Islamia (National Islamic University) in Delhi in December 2019. The protests spread to other parts of the country and to the population outside the university. The movement became “too big for the police to crush. Instead, the government resorted to a strategy that had been tried and tested since colonial times and intensified in the wake of decades of Hindu nationalist mobilization: instigating a ‘riot’, a pogrom-like outburst, in a remote district of Delhi, for which the attacked were held responsible.”
To this day, mostly Muslim students and doctoral students are being held in prison without trial.
“Anyone who wants to (Hindutva-)critically examine questions of caste, minority and gender policy or issues of belonging, civil and human rights does so at their own risk. (…) India shows how far ideologically motivated attacks on academic freedom and the undermining of universities as places of intellectual debate can go without abolishing democracy as an official and globally marketable framework. At the same time, however, these attacks have undoubtedly contributed to the Modi government losing its absolute majority in the 2024 elections.”
The article ends by saying that we can learn from India not to retreat into a fearful defense of liberal-secular democracy, but to think about democracy in a new way, taking into account the setbacks we can expect, and to put “academic knowledge and the knowledge of the population into new relationships”.