Over 150 academicians from worldwide universities, together with Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, and Cambridge, have come out in help of scholar and commentator Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who resigned from Ashoka University this week, saying that the founders made it “abundantly clear” that his affiliation with the establishment was a “political liability”.
An open letter addressed to the college trustees, directors and college state that the signatories had been “distressed” to study of Mehta’s exit beneath “political pressure from Ashoka University”.
“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,” the open letter states.
“We write in solidarity with Pratap Bhanu Mehta, and to reaffirm the importance of the values that he has always practiced. In political life, these are free argument, tolerance, and a democratic spirit of equal citizenship. In the university, they are free inquiry, candour, and rigorous distinction between the demands of intellectual honesty and the pressure of politicians, funders, or ideological animus. These values come under assault whenever a scholar is punished for the content of public speech. When that speech is in defense of precisely these values, the assault is especially shameful,” the letter additional states.
The signatories embody Homi Ok Bhabha, Anne F Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University; Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean at UC Berkeley School of Law; Rogers Smith, Christopher H Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science on the University of Pennsylvania; Milan Vaishnav of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Kate O’Regan, Professor of Human Rights Law at Oxford University; and Danielle Allen, director of Edmond J Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.
The Indian Express had first reported the information of Mehta’s exit on March 17.
The disaster at Ashoka University within the wake of Mehta’s resignation deepened Thursday. Calling the exit “ominously disturbing”, for tutorial freedom, Mehta’s colleague and former Chief Economic Advisor within the Modi authorities Arvind Subramanian despatched in his resignation, too. Students protested on campus, the school issued an announcement calling for Mehta’s return, and no less than two extra school members are mentioned to be on the verge of quitting.
Mehta wrote in his resignation letter, “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.”
Meanwhile, senior Congress chief Ashwani Kumar mentioned the “forced” resignation of Mehta is a impolite reminder that freedom of thought is welcome solely so long as it isn’t a political legal responsibility.
The “trustees of the premier educational institution”, he mentioned, are “clearly the principal villains, in not standing up to those who wanted Mehta to pay the price for his intellectual integrity”.
“They have forfeited their claim as trustees of the institution by acquiescing in the project to tame informed voices of dissent,” he mentioned in an announcement.
“The attack on academic freedoms is the most pernicious of devices to stifle opinion and to promote intolerance in the battle of ideas thereby robbing democracy of its defining distinction”.
“This is the moment for academia and public intellectuals to collectively fight for their space as keepers of national conscience and to remind the powers that be, that the power of their pen will not be captive to the lure of wealth or to the brute power of a muscular State,” he mentioned.
Arguing that “this is a time to act and assert our collective conscience in defense of our cherished values,” he appealed to all, together with “thinkers and public intellectuals not to be silenced into submission in this moment of test”.
