It is not very often that the resignation of a professor from a private university in India hits the headlines and triggers international outcry. However, if that professor is Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of the country’s foremost public intellectuals and a highly regarded social scientist, academician and columnist, then the uproar seems understandable.
Last week came the news that Professor Pratap Bhanu Mehta, fondly called PBM by his students, resigned from Ashoka University. According to media reports, PBM has written in his resignation letter to the University, “After a meeting with the university’s founders it has become abundantly clear to me that my association with the university may be considered a political liability. My public writing in support of a politics that tries to honour constitutional values of freedom and equal respect for all citizens is perceived to carry risks for the university. In the interests of the university I resign.”
PBM was also its former Vice Chancellor. He stepped down from that position in 2019, citing personal reasons. However, many understood that it was because of pressure from certain quarters who felt his anti-government public pronouncements and articles were jeopardising Ashoka’s standing with those in the highest echelons of power.
Established in 2014, Ashoka University is India’s first elite private liberal arts and sciences university located in Sonipat, Haryana. So why did PBM’s resignation create so much outrage? What does the whole episode speak about the state of our polity and why is it a blow to democracy?
HUGE OUTRAGE
As soon as the news of Mehta’s resignation became public, prominent personalities made their displeasure public and condemned the management of Ashoka University for wilting under political pressure and removing a highly respected faculty merely for his critical views on the government and the trajectory the nation had taken under its stewardship.
In solidarity with PBM, former chief economic adviser (CEA) to the government of India, Arvind Subramanian resigned from his position as an economics professor at Ashoka. In his resignation letter, he wrote, “That even Ashoka – with its private status and backing by private capital – can no longer provide a space for academic expression and freedom is ominously disturbing. Above all, that the University’s commitment to fight for and sustain the Ashoka vision is now open to question makes it difficult for me to continue being part of Ashoka.”
Former RBI governor, Raghuram Rajan commented, “Free speech is the soul of a great university. By compromising on it, the founders have bartered away its soul.” Also, a group of nearly 180 academicians wrote a letter to the trustees, administrators and faculty of Ashoka University, expressing distress over PBM’s resignation. They wrote – “A prominent critic of the current Indian government and defender of academic freedom, he had become a target for his writings. It seems that Ashoka’s trustees, who should have treated defending him as their institutional duty, instead all but forced his resignation.”
Meanwhile the students of Ashoka also organised protests against their management and demanded that PBM be reinstated immediately.
SALIENT FEATURES OF AN ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY
Former Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban coined the term ‘illiberal democracy”. As the PM of Hungary, he once commented – “European parliament elections next year could bring about a shift toward illiberal “Christian democracy” in the European Union that would end the era of multiculturalism.”
According to Orban, these democracies look at the community as the basic political unit and not the individual. Citing Turkey, India, Singapore, Russia, and China as examples and models of illiberalism, Orban theorises that such states promote national self-sufficiency (atma-nirbharta), national sovereignty, familialism (idea that families should provide welfare and not the state), full employment and the preservation of cultural heritage. Orban is accused of being dictatorial and authoritative and was instrumental in positioning Hungary as one of Israel’s closest ally in Europe.
A prominent feature of such states is also the promotion of “the great leader” and the clampdown on “voices of dissent”. The basic democratic “right to ask uncomfortable questions” is seen as “against national-interest” and some sort of a conspiracy against the state. This nurtures a climate where people and institutions start crawling when asked to bend. No wonder, referees of democracy call such democracies “partly free”.
Why PBM?
One cannot deny that Pratap Mehta was one among the many Indian liberal public intellectuals and academics who along with Sadanand Dhume, Ashutosh Varshney and Gurcharan Das “shielded Narendra Modi from detractors and doomsayers on his way to the prime minister’s office. Today they have joined the ranks of those they once pilloried” (“The liberals who loved and lost Modi” by Praveen Donthi in the Caravan Magazine, 16 May 2019).
However, Mehta quickly realised his blunder and made amends by becoming openly critical about how “India is heading into uncharted waters with no leadership at the helm, just the simulacra of one” (PBM in IE June 16, 2020).
The best answer to the question – why PBM was articulated by Yogendra Yadav (No one is asking the right questions about Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s ouster from Ashoka University – The Print 24 March 2021) by saying, “The heart of the matter is his criticism of the policies, politics and the personality of the current government, including that of the Supreme Leader. He is not one of those virulent and nagging Narendra Modi-critics who are a pain in the neck every morning. Pratap is sharp but subtle. He questions their ideology, but you cannot put him in an ideological box. He chronicles the decline and fall of our institutions without falling back on ready-made descriptions. He takes apart the Modi government’s nationalist claims by clinically examining issues of national security.
“And Pratap exposes the Prime Minister, after giving him maximum benefit of doubt, not just for his ideology, but for his sheer incompetence. That must hurt. Pratap Mehta is not one of those deracinated Left-secular critics the Modi government would not mind. He understands, decodes and lays bare the architecture of New India. He is a serious challenge to the hidden hand that shapes the policies and politics today. Hence the need to silence him.”
INALIENABLE RIGHT TO DIFFER AND DISSENT
One of the four rightly guided Caliphs, Umar bin Khattab once delivered a public sermon in which, quoting the Prophet ﷺ, he demanded people to abstain from fixing heavy mehr. A woman stood up and challenged the Caliph by quoting verse 20 from the fourth Surah (An Nisa) of the Holy Qur’ān: “If you desire to replace a wife with another and you have given the former ˹even˺ a stack of gold ˹as a dowry˺, do not take any of it back. Would you ˹still˺ take it unjustly and very sinfully”? It is reported that Caliph Umar returned to the pulpit and took back his words saying – “the woman is right, and Umar is wrong. Whoever wishes may give as much mehr as he wishes to give.”
This incident not only highlights the tremendous integrity of Caliph Umar and his adherence to Islamic principles but also brings to light the incredible liberty given by Islam to ordinary citizens for differing and dissenting with the stand and position adopted by the state.
The entire affair of Mehta’s resignation is indeed a sad chapter of our decline into a condition where intolerance prevails and “fear of the powerful” dissipates any endeavour to differ and dissent. Is it not time to unite? We have nothing to lose but our chains.