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3 Instances': Justice S. Muralidhar On Status Of Academic Freedom In India | Communalism | Caste https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OAWInDLXeY honor to be asked to deliver the first professor Gian Sai member. [Music] Just a few days before he passed away, we had a telephone conversation discussing what our strategy should be. the appeal that had been filed by the state in the Supreme Court and it took me by great surprise to learn after a few days that he was not around. I am I have at a distance admired the courage of professor Sai Baba and the positivity that he emanated from what I heard the previous speakers say. Here is a person who was never cynical, never defeist and always lived with hope not for just himself but for several others awaiting justice. [Music] I want to begin today's lecture by talking about three scenarios which I think will describe the status of academic freedom in India today. The first scenario goes like this and these are real stories not fiction. In December 2022, the Madhya Pradesh police booked Professor Inamul Rahman, principal of the government new law college in Indor for allegedly keeping a Hindu phobic and antinational book in the college library. This book was titled collective violence and criminal justice system co-authored by Dr. Shitel Kval and Dr. Farad Khan. This book was in the GNLC library since 2014. Dr. joined the GNLC 5 years later in 2019. The book according to the Akil Bharata Vidyati Parish the ABVP which is the student wing of the Rashtria Swami Sevak Sang the RSS. This book talked about the emergence of Hindu communalism as a destructive ideology. It is also supposed to have said that the Vishua Hindu parished and other Hindutwa outfits seek to establish a Hindu majority state and want to enslave other communities. The book had been already revised in 2021 to remove the so-called offending portions. The Madhya Pradesh Higher Education Minister Mooney Yadav who now happens to be its chief minister instituted an inquiry into how the book was being allowed to be used for reference in the college. Acting on a complaint by a secondyear LLM student Lucky Idual who was a member of the ABVP, the Home Minister Narut Mishra ordered the registration of an F under several provisions of the IPC. Section 153A, promoting enmity on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence. Section 295A, malicious acts intended to outrage feelings, religious feelings of any class. Section 500, criminal defamation. Section 504, intentional insult with an intent to provoke and breach peace. Section 505, statements conducing conducting to public mischief. The FI also named apart from professor Hman Dr. Faradak Khan the co-author of the book the book's publisher Amar law publication and professor Mirajis B the Supreme Court state the arrest of Raman and be Rahman resigned as principal the other two never returned to Indor in May 2024 about 18 months after this happened the Supreme Court of India quashed the FI terming it to be observe third. But the damage was done. None of the three could teach at the government new law college. Again, the second scenario goes like this. A shocking video emerged in the social media in the last week of August 2023. In it, Krypti Thiagi, a teacher at the Niha public school in Muzafur Nagar district in northern Uttar Pradesh, could be seen asking each of the students in her class to slap their seven-year-old classmate who was a Muslim. As the boy stands fearfully wailing with each slap, the teacher is heard asking the other students to do it properly. The superintendent of police of the district later told reporters that the teacher told the students to hit the boy for not remembering his timetables. The SP further disclosed that the teacher's justification was when mothers of Madan students don't pay attention to their children's studies their performance is ruined. The third scenario on 9th August 2023 a 17-year-old Dharit male student in a partly aided school in Nanganeri which is a town in Tinelwi district in Tamil Nadu was brutally attacked by Sigles by his three classmates who were marav and intermediate dominant cast forming part of the mukulats. When his younger sister tried to save him, she too was attacked. What had provoked the brutal assault? Urgked by the Dalik boy doing well in his class, far better than them, the dominant cast boys would constantly harass, humiliate, and taunt him with cast slurs and ask him to perform menial tasks for them. To avoid this, he stopped going to school. When the principal inquired, Dhid Boy confided the real reason. This then led to the incident I just spoke about. Both the boy and his younger sister were hospitalized with serious injuries for which they underwent surgeries. They were relocated to a different school. Within 3 days of this incident that sent shock waves throughout Tamil Nadu, the government after making all the right noises appointed Justice K. Chandru, a former judge of the Midas High Court as a one-man committee to suggest measures to be taken to create an atmosphere free of cast creed differences in schools and colleges in Tamil Nadu. Why was this necessary? As the New Indian Express reported in November 2015, school children in parts of Tamil were wearing wristbands in different colors, each indicating the particular cast to which they belonged. It is red and yellow for the tars, blue and yellow for the nadars, saffron for the yadabs. All socially and politically powerful Hindu communities that come under the most backward classes category. While students of the Dalith community of Palers wear wristbands in green and red and the Arundati also dalits were green, black and white. Four years earlier in August 2019, the Tamadu State Education Department had issued a circular discouraging the practice in schools. The most vehement opposition to this move came from the BJP National Secretary H. Raja who tweeted that tying threads on wrists and wearing tilts on foreheads are related to Hinduism. Banning these in schools, he said, was a blatant anti-Hindu action. He also asked, does the school education director have the courage to ban symbols of other religions? The above instances, the three instances I spoke of, give us a fair idea on where we stand on academic freedom in our country. The expression academic freedom has been deliberated and debated upon sufficiently the world over mainly because it faces threats universally, even more than ever before. An updated version of the academic freedom index prepared by the FAU Institute of Political Sciences and the VDM Institute was brought out in 2025. It gives an overview of the state of academic freedom across 179 countries. Its analysis showed that countries with anti-pluralist parties in government have lower levels of academic freedom than those where antipuralist parties have little to no political influence. It knows how antipuralist parties lack commitment to the democratic process as the legal means of gaining and losing power. Once installed in power, antiplural parties tend to deepen differences between political camps, reduce the space for public contestation, and undermine mutual forbearance. In the academic freedom index of 2025, India features at the bottom 10 to 20% of countries where academic freedom is completely restricted. This is a huge dive from 2013 when it was within the category of fully free and 2022 when it had fallen to mostly restricted. India features in the index just above Syria, Iran, Laos and Palestine. India performs worse than even Hungary, Hong Kong, Sudan, Yemen, Bangladesh and Russia. The E AFI reveals that more than half of the world's population currently lives in completely restricted or severely restricted levels of academic freedom. Whereas in 2006 approximately 4 billion people lived in places with robust environments for academic freedom. Today that number has declined by more than a quarter to 2.8 billion. A report titled free to think is brought out periodically by an international coalition of academics and experts named scholars at risk s. In the latest version, S has assessed data collected from 1st July 2023 to 30 June 2024 of 391 attacks arising from 313 incidents in 51 countries and territories. The SE report talks of the concerning trends in 18 countries which includes India over the past decade. India is among the countries where universities have canceled lectures, poetry readings and film screenings related to violence in the Middle East. Often university leaders have justified the cancellations by expressing unspecified security concerns. India also figures amongst those countries where state and higher education officials call in the police or security forces to break up protests. The academic freedom that these empirical studies speak of can be best understood by referring to the report released on 31st May 2024 by the working group on academic freedom comprising international experts constituted under the ages of the United Nations. They have prepared a set of nine principles for implementing the right to academic freedom. The foremost of these identifies academic freedom as a human right to acquire, develop, transmit, apply and engage with a diversity of knowledge and ideas through research, teaching, learning and discourse. Such engagement could take place inside the academic community which is called as intramural expression or outside the academic community including with the public called extramural expression. Another principle recognized is the right of the student to academic freedom at all levels beginning with childhood schooling. The UN special rapeer on the right to education Farida Shahid submitted her report on academic freedom at the 56th session of the UN human rights council held between 18th June and 12th July 2024. In it she noted importantly that students should have the right to express themselves on specific subjects without fear of reprisal. Also the respect due to cultural diversity and the need to ensure a multi-perspective approach including its subjects such as history should be accounted for. She urged that while educators should be encouraged to foster critical thinking and to provide diverse perspectives, they should do so in a manner that upholds the principle of pluralism, respect for others and the pursuit of knowledge, including a supportive environment where students are encouraged to think critically, engage in varying viewpoints and developed informed perspectives. Most significant is the special rapetier's proposal that academic freedom should be considered to be an autonomous human right grounded in several provisions of international law.
'Conquering Institution': Justice S. Muralidhar On Dismal Prospect Of Secular Education
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riBC1Bp-2IQ The dismal prospect for secular education could well characterize what is happening in government run schools across the country including the kandri vidyas. There is a renewed stride and see to these schools hosting events that further the Hindu right-wing agenda. Professor Krishna Kumar laments the disillusionment of teachers in government schools being reduced to event managers or uploaders of incomplete data with little or no time for their primary task which is imparting education. All this on top of the fact that there are several documented studies to show that the state of infrastructure in the public schools across the country is pathetic to say the least. A wfulful shortage of everything essential. Teachers, classrooms, chairs and tables, blackboards, clean drinking water, clean toilets. Naturally, therefore, the private tuition industry is flourishing. The hope of academic freedom to pursue education is but a distant dream for those who cannot afford the costs. In the third scenario, the attack on the Dalith boy by the dominant cast Hindu boys, the Tamil Nadu state government stepped in to provide relief for both the medical treatment of the young boy and his sister, but also ensured his admission to another school where he continues to do well in his studies. When Justice Chandru met him, he wished even his attackers that they would do well in their studies. And Justice Chhatru was astonished that such a young boy could display so much maturity. He was again recently attacked physically, but it is possible according to media reports that this did not have a cast angle. Dr. Sia Dingra talks about the recent phenomenon of dozens of RSS swam seek triumphantly marching across the JNU campus with the drums, trumpets and clashing symbols. Many wielded the customary shaka latis unimaginable 12 years ago. One of the professors who spoke to her commented, and I quote, “Earlier, admittedly, the teachers had a bias against students who subscribed to the BJP RSS's ideology, but there was never a full-blown attack on academics itself.” And he added, and I quote, “The problem is that as a result of the former left's volability all these years, JNU came to represent the deep feelings of victimhood and otherization harbored by the right. That is why winning JNU has been almost more important for them than winning some state elections. It is like finally conquering the institution that has represented their intellectual marginalization and humiliation for decades. This is the same ABVP which has facilitated the rise of many a present day leader. the prime minister, the home minister, the Raa Mantri, several ministers of the union cabinet, many of the chief ministers of the BJP ruled states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, former ministers like the late Arun Jetti, Praash Jawadka, Ravish Shanka Prasad and even the vice president, former vice president Wenaidu. They were all student leaders once who cut their teeth with the ABVP and were focused on challenging the ruling establishment of their times. They do they they did undergo persecution and even imprisonment during the infamous emergency unleashed by Mrs. Gandhi and her cronies. However, one doesn't recall their being called to tou or antinational. Professor Gan Prakash disagrees with the widely shared prognosis that what we are undergoing as a country today is another undeclared emergency. According to him, what we have today is a more virulent form of totalitarianism where dissent is simply eradicated from public spaces aided by the complete control of the mainstream media both electronic and social. Also, the heavy hammer of a bouquet of repressive criminal laws brought against the present day academics and students appears unrelenting. The instances that have been much discussed in the media reveal a pattern to the ABVP's methods. They can vandalize departments if they feel that a teacher has said something in class that they think is in insulting to Hinduism or hurts religious sentiments. protests against appointment to academic positions of whom they perceive to be left liberal, secular or urban maxel. In November 2018, historian Ramchandra Goha withdrew from a teaching position he was offered at the Ahmedabad University. Dr. Fio Khan was offered his first job to teach Sanskrit literature at the Banaharas Hindu University could not conduct a single class. Some 30 students of the ABVP staged a sit in outside the vice chancellor's office in protest saying that it wasn't right for a Muslim professor to be teaching them Sanskrit. They obviously disagree with the recent Supreme Court judgment that reminded us that Udu is an Indian language and that language is not tied to religion and that multilingualism is a reflection of India's reality. Women teachers in Maharashtra have had their classes disrupted by angry mobs of ABVP cards demanding apology for what they perceived to be an insult to Chhatrapati Sivaji. Instead of proceeding against them, the Satara police booked the teacher for causing disturbance of peace and this had to be undone by the Bombay High Court. Subsequently, even private universities are succumbing to pressures of not only the ruling establishment but vigilante mobs furthering the right-wing agenda by not supporting their own faculty who have asserted the right of academic freedom. These institutions have forced their resignation. The resignation of professor Sabisachi Das of Ashoka University is one such instance. This vindicates the observation of the special rabbiteer and I quote her. Academic freedom is curtailed when universities seeking state resources and/or patronage enter into compromising relationships with people in power. We are seeing this play out in the US now resulting in a curious situation whereby academic freedom is suppressed with the apparent support of the academic establishment. The net result is a system operating mostly through hidden selfcensorship. Most more recently, Professor Mahudabad was booked for a social media comment made by him following the press briefing held by the armed forces on operation sindur. The Supreme Court protected him from arrest but astonishingly directed that the SIT constituted by it will analyze the hidden meaning of the words used by him. Even private think tanks have not been spared and the center for policy research has been raided with the IT and the ED uh issuing showcase notices to it.
On the Legal Regimes And Courts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMkDc2nzwAg I now move on to something that is very close to what I do. That is the legal regime and the courts. Let us briefly examine what the legal regime in our country is concerning education and academic freedom. Article 39F of our constitution talks of the unenforcable right of a child to be provided by the state opportunities and facilities to develop in a healthy manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity. Another directive principle is in article 45 which originally provided that within a period of 10 years the state shall endeavor to provide free and compulsory education to all children up to the age of 14 years. In 1993, the Supreme Court of India in the landmark decision titled JB Uni Krishna versus State of Andhra Pradesh declared that the right to education is a fundamental right of every citizen up to the age of 14. It took another 10 years for the parliament in 2002 to insert article 21 capital A in part three of the constitution to recognize as a fundamental right the right of every child between the ages of 6 and 14 to free and compulsory education. that however was made dependent for its enforcement on a law made by parliament. Incidentally, this amendment was notified only eight years later with effect from 1st April 2010, the same date on which the right to free and compulsory education act, the RTE act became operational. Correspondingly, article 45 was amended to the effect that the state shall endeavor to provide early childhood care and education to all children till they complete the age of six. However, by restricting the fundamental right to education under article 21A to children between the ages of 6 and 14, the constitutional promise remains incomplete. The judgment in JT Uni Krishna was in a case concerning the malaise of capitation fees being collected for engineering and medical seats in private educational institutions. That problem however continues. Two other constitutional provisions that require to be noticed are article 51 capital A clause H which states that it shall be the duty of every citizen to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform. Another provision is clause K of the same article 51 capital A which states that every citizen who a parent or guardian shall provide opportunities for education to his child or as the case may be ward between the ages of 6 and 14 years. Article 25 guarantees to all persons the freedom of conscience, the right to freely profess, practice and propagate religion. Article 30 recognizes the fundamental right of both religious and linguistic minorities to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice. The high courts and the Supreme Court engage on a regular basis with numerous issues concerning the right to education including the admission of students to professional courses, reservation of seats, appointment of teachers and principles in schools, vice chancellors in universities, anti-aging measures, recognition and affiliation of educational institutions and so on. As regards minority institutions, two important decisions in the recent past deserve mention. In November 2024, the Supreme Court recognized the right of the Madras in UP to run schools providing for religious instruction and imparting education in other subjects up to standard 12. It did not however permit them to award degrees or diplomas. In the second decision by a narrow majority of fours to three, the Supreme Court held that the Aligar Muslim University would not lose its minority character only because it stood converted into a university by way of a pre-independence statute. Yeah. Thank you. [Music] However, these instances do not quite test the court's responses to curbs on academic freedom. Where they do, the result can be disappointing. One such instance has been the judiciary's handling of the cases of students and teachers jailed for protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 and its aftermath. It will be recalled that spontaneous protests erupted not just in Delhi but throughout the country and even among the Indian diaspora world over. Several hundreds of the protesting students and academics were arrested by the police. Some of them were booked under the repressive unlawful activities prevention act the UAPA for alleged antinational activity only to ensure that coming out on bail is next to impossible. 5 years have passed and with no prospect of the trial in these cases commencing anytime soon, there appears to be no real justification for denying them bail. And now I come to the case of Professor Sai Baba. The manner in which the Supreme Court of India dealt with the case involving Professor Gian Sai Baba who taught English at the Delhi University has had many illegal scholar express sus surprise and disapproval. A detailed discussion of the case at this stage may not be warranted as it is still pending the Supreme Court. Yet what we need to know is this. The entire case of the prosecution in support of its invocation of the provisions of the UAPA was that Professor Saiaba was part of a banned terrorist organization had planned to commit a terrorist acts. The case rested entirely on the electronic evidence in the form of CDs, pen drives, and a laptop ceased from his residence on 12th September 2013. He was arrested on 9th May 2014. Having been afflicted with polio since his childhood, Professor Alibaba was permanently on a wheelchair. Despite this, bail was refused. It took him 10 years to finally emerge a freeburn person. As was mentioned earlier on 17th March on 7th March 2017 the trial court found professor Sai Bababa and the other co-acused guilty but this judgment was overturned by the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court on 14th October 2022 more than 5 years thereafter the high court held that the proceedings in criminal cases were null and void for want of valid sanction in terms of section 45 subsection one of the UAPA Literally overnight and this too was adverted too. Literally overnight an appeal was filed by the state of Maharashtra which was taken up by a special bench of the Supreme Court on the very next morning which was a Saturday that is 15th October 2022 in the residence of one of the judges. The acquitt was stayed perhaps a rare occurrence in the history of the Supreme Court. Professor Sai Bababa continued therefore in the Andas cell in the Nagpur central jail with the Supreme Court being unmoved by his deteriorating medical condition. It took another 6 months for the Supreme Court by an order dated 19th April 2023 to remand the appeals to the high court for a fresh hearing. For the second time by judgment dated 5th March 2024, another bench of the Bombay High Court at Nagpur acquitted all the accused by holding that not only was there no valid sanction to prosecute any of the accused but that the evidence gathered did not prove the case of the prosecution. Fortunately, in the further appeals by the state against this judgment, no stay was granted by the Supreme Court. As a result, Professor Saiaba could ultimately come come out of jail a free man with his head held high but his body badly wrecked by the callous treatment he received at the hands of the state during the 10 plus years of incarceration. The process was the punishment. Unfortunately, he did not live long thereafter and succumb to a post-operative complication after undergoing surgery for gallbladder stones. He was just 57. He was an intellectual whose PhD was in on Indian writing in English and nationmaking. Two volumes of his writings and poems while in prison have been published. The question that troubles one's conscience the most is this. Who will be held accountable and when for what the system did to a man of learning and forbearance? Justice appears to have eluded academics and students in the above instances where they've been accused of being antinationals and charged with offenses under draconian criminal laws. But then it also appears to elude them when they are the victims in the hands of the non-state actors like vigilante groups and dominant casts. I will make good this comment by referring to the aftermath of the three scenarios I referred to at the beginning of my talk. In the first scenario in the Indor government new law college case, it was only in May 2024 that the Supreme Court quashed the FIR against Professor Rahman and his three accused after the terming the criminal case is observed. However, Professor Rahman who was forced to resign remains uncompensated for the agony and humiliation he has undergone. The others two have not been able to return to the GNLC. This is not an isolated instance. There have been persistent attacks by Hindu right-wing groups on educational institutions across the countries run by Christian missionaries. The priests and nuns are harassed. Congregational prayers are disrupted. The land is encroached upon or building buildings bulldozed and some of them falsely accused of indulging in forcible conversions. These cases too are engaging the attention of courts. In the second scenario, the case of the young Muslim boy slapped repeatedly by his classmates at the instigation and instruction of his teacher. That case was taken to the Supreme Court by Tushar Gandhi. The court found egregious violations of section 17 of the RTE act which prohibits any child being subject to physical punishment or mental harassment. The state has been asked to bear the entire cost of the education of the child till he completes his schooling. The case remains at the Supreme Court for monitoring. Heat. Heat.
'Business Enterprises Commoditizing Education': Justice Muralidhar On Corporatization of Education https://youtu.be/qHtBUhmoCOQ [Music] There are then other challenges to academic freedom. Among the serious challenges to both institutional autonomy and academic freedom is the corporatization of education. Major business enterprises are in the field of education and have been successful in commoditizing, branding and marketing education as a product affordable to a few and out of reach for the many. Teachers are reduced to service providers and students to being consumers. Commentators on this worrying trend tell us that the focus now is less on research and more on performance and outcomes. The high costs of pursuing professional courses including law in private elite universities compels many a student to borrow heavily to comp complete the basic level of education and then succumb to the temptation of opting for the highest paying job. A direct impact on academic freedom to choose one's career path. The use of digital technology has not made it any easier for academic freedom. On the contrary, the challenge today is sifting the fake news from the real, spotting the manufactured AI generated work from the genuinely researched ones and shutting out the garbage that the net is hosted to. How does one protect impressionable minds from the onsl onslaught of WhatsApp forwards where halfbaked opinions based on misinformation passes off for expert opinion. In this scenario, the internet has the potential of posing yet another threat to academic freedom. Add to this the fact that most campuses today are fortresses where CCTV cameras facilitate constant surveillance and biometric attendance is the norm. Campus violence is on the rise as is drug abuse. Police everywhere and infiltrating student WhatsApp groups. The faculty too is under their radar. Signing of letter petitions protesting arbitrary actions of the government or even of right-wing groups and their role models invites show cause notice to the faculty for crossing the line. Loss of institutional atom autonomy is felt most when the control is sought to be exercised over what can constitute the syllabus and the reading material that can be referred to. This concerns both schools and colleges. [Music] The RSS has an educational wing called Vidyabarti. As of today, if you go on the website, it tells you that the Vidya runs as many as 12,754 formal schools hosting 3.2 million students and 12,654 informal schools hosting 2.45 45 million students and it also employs 1.5 lakh teachers. Most of these schools are affiliated to the CBSC, various state boards and the National Institute of Open Schooling. Vidya Barti's books are published in Hindi and 12 other regional languages including Bengali, Tamil and Odia and they are taught in addition to the government approved curriculum. A question and answer on page five of Bodh Mala 4, a textbook on cultural knowledge intended for class 4 students reads like this question. Which are the countries along our present day border that were once part of a country? Answer: Bangladesh brackets Myanmar, Bangladesh to the east, Pakistan and Afghanistan to the west, Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan to the north and Sri Lanka to the south. A teacher's guide book part of the same series makes this amazing claim. Earlier Hindu culture prevailed all over Jamu. What we call Asia today was the ancient Jamudi. the whole of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kazakhstan, Israel, Russia, Mongolia, China, Myanmar, Indonesia, Malaysia, Java, Sumatra, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan and Afghanistan were part of it. So, a teacher is supposed to teach this to class 4 students. a teacher's guide book. Sorry. All this may not be cause for worry if it weren't part of the general push for revival of what is now termed as Indian knowledge systems. These ideas appear to have percolated into the curriculum of formal institutions like the National Institute of Open Schooling which has already included in its curriculum the claims of Canada's atomic theory, Susha's plastic surgery and Vic mathematics. The book Vimarika Shastra is cited in NCERT's new module on the Chundayan mission for seemingly revealing that our civilization had the knowledge of flying vehicles. This could also explain ISRO chief Somnat claiming in 2023 that major scientific developments in branches like metalology, astrology, astronomy, aeronautical sciences and physics took place in ancient India and were later taken to Europe by the Arabs. Textbooks on history across grades and political science for classes 11 and 12 have been particular targets for retelling and rewriting. Last month the press reported the students in government schools in Delhi will soon study about the RSS alongside freedom fighters under a new educational initiative called Raashtrianiti. Another news item disclosed that RSS will be opening sic schools to train students for the armed forces. A longtime watcher of the Hindu rightwing groups, Nilanjan Mhabadaya said that the idea behind the RSS operating such a large network of schools across the country is to catch the Hindu minds young and instill the idea of ancient Hindu invincibility. a past when Hindu India was the dominant race all over the world and that the golden bird of Indian civilization was destroyed by thousand years of slavery first in the hands of Muslims and then the Christian colonial powers. Then there are a slew of directives to universities and institutes of higher learning from the UGC. This extends from organizing meditation sessions developed by Shri Ravishanka's agency the art of living foundation to celebrating events and festivals within campuses. There are revisions to syllabuses and reading lists that do not pass the master of right-wing groups. The forcible removal of the essay titled 300 Ramayanas, five examples and three thoughts on translation by noted noted literature AK Ramanujan has been removed from the list of reading materials for the BA honors course in the Delhi University. Then you have the complete takeover of the Indian Council for Historical Research, the Artical Archaeological Survey of India, the Indian Science Congress, the appointments as directors of the various IITs and the IM, the vice chancellors of various universities including the Nalanda University and even Vishwabarti and even recently the film and television television institute of India. When one steps back to view the changes in the past decade in the field of education, it is striking how persistent, deep and pervasive has been the effort to capture the popular popular imagination of not just the public but of young impressionable minds. There is a concerted attempt to purge it of anything that can be seen as questioning the policies and actions of the ruling establishment. There is a smuggness to debunking science and glorifying past learnings. When you prefix liberal with left and misspel secular as secular, deriding intellectual discourse is relatively simple. What can be taught? How can it be taught? Who can teach? Who can be taught? What can be written about or commented on are all no longer to be decided by educational institutions. They are to be pre-clared, vetted by extra legal mechanisms and bodies. You can dream, you can imagine, but on to act on them you need permission. Dissent is not to be encouraged much less tolerated. In the India of 2025, Fez emits Fez's poem bowl can be recited but terms and conditions apply. [Music] [Music] Reciting or shouting aadi in the campus of an educational institution might invite being labeled urban axel to create dupe gang khan market type or even ju type. I come to the last portions of this talk. Academic freedom in India throws up challenges of accommodating several competing interests and on top of it social inequalities exacerbated by cast class and communal prejudices. The Supreme Court has in the context of accepting a limited quota in Delhi since Stephen College for those following this Christian faith reminded all of us that and I quote every educational institution irrespect of the community to which it belongs is a melting pot in our national life. The students and teachers are the critical ingredients. It is there they develop respect for and tolerance of the cultures and beliefs of others. It is essential therefore that there should be a proper mix of students of different communities in all educational institutions. Is there then hope? This is what most of us here would want to know. History tells us that even these times pass. Many a teacher and student is in some or other corner of the country resisting resisting being taken over by or surrendering to the pressures and pulls of a repressive regime. They signify the resilience of the human spirit to stand up firm against the odds. Ours is a plural society with lived histories of inclusivity, sharing and compassion. If we don't let that yearning within each of us to get snuffed out, there will be hope. Most importantly, it is essential as for us to nurture that spirit and the constitutional values that we wish to live by so that future generations will learn from our experience and know what to value and what to preserve. The changes that we have witnessed in the past decade may be of a more enduring nature than we can imagine. It renders the task of restitution of our belief in constitutional values of inclusivity and pluralism even more challenging. How do we reclaim secular spaces for academic freedom within public universities and institutions of higher learning? How should private universities be facilitated to regain institutional autonomy? How can we cultivate and nurture scientific temper and a spirit of inquiry in young minds? How can we improve the conditions of a public and government schooling to provide a hope for academic freedom from childhood to adulthood? How do we build on the space that we have on the internet and spread the good work of through influences? How do we restore dignity of the individual in the closed learning space without distinction that the basis of cast, gender and general stereotyping? We have in our midst different models of education that appear to provide that alternate space at least in the recent past. The Shanti Niketan model or the Krishnami Foundation of India model for instance. Can we replicate these or adapt them for today's needs? Our answers to these questions will determine the course of academic freedom for those that follow. In signing off today's talk, I wish to recall a marvelous judgment delivered on 11th August 1986 by the Supreme Court in Bij Emanuel versus the state of Kerala. The three appellants before the Supreme Court were Bij Binol and Bindu Emanuel. They belong to the Yeho witnesses, a Christian denomination. Daily during the morning assembly when the national anthem was sung. The three children stood respectfully but did not sing because according to them it was against the tenets of their religious faith. Not the words or the thoughts of the anthem but the singing of it. This led them to being expelled from the school which action they unsuccessfully challenged in the Kerala High Court. The Supreme Court on 11th August 1986 reversed the high court decision and held that the expulsion of the three children from the school was a violation of their fundamental right to freedom of conscience and freely to profess practice and propagate religion under article 25 clause one of the constitution. The court ended the judgment with a flourish reminding us that our tradition teaches tolerance. Our philosophy preaches tolerance. Our constitution practices tolerance. It exhausts us. It exhausts us not to dilute it. The children were asked to be readmitted to the school. Thank you very much. Thank you.