INDIA: Protests continue over academic freedom curb

Students and teachers at Delhi University went on marches last week to protest against the removal of a celebrated essay by the late scholar and linguist AK Ramanujan on the Hindu epic, the Ramayana.

The essay titled "Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five examples and three thoughts on translations", which was part of the history honours course at Deli University, had attracted the ire of Hindu religious activists because it talks about 300 different versions of the Ramayana that abound in India and beyond.

The decision to remove the essay was taken by the university's academic council, which is in charge of syllabus content, despite a recommendation from an expert committee created by the supreme court to keep the article in the syllabus.

Angered by their peers' apparent capitulation to right-wing pressure and undermining of academic freedom, lecturers protesting the essay removal have launched a nationwide signature campaign to build pressure on the council and the vice-chancellor to review the decision.

"We will not let the thing die quickly. We have an action programme and will build pressure on the university to take back its decision," said Abha Dev Habib, an executive council member who had, as an academic council member in 2008, been among those who supported the continuation of the essay in the syllabus despite the controversy surrounding it.

Habib said nearly 2,000 people including academics had signed the petition so far.

"This is a glaring example of an academic institution succumbing to pressure from right-wing political parties," said council member Rakesh Kumar, who was one among only nine academics who expressed a dissenting opinion against scrapping the essay.

"The council has severely compromised its standards and has conveyed to our students the message that only the ideology that is supported by the majority will be accepted."

A writ petition had been filed in the high court on the grounds that the essay hurt religious sentiments. The matter was then taken up by the supreme court, which directed the university to seek the opinion of experts and place it before the academic council.

Notably, three of the four experts, whose names were kept confidential, were happy with the essay but the fourth expressed an opinion that second-year students may find it difficult.

According to one expert: "By all accounts there is no single version of the Ramayana. Many writers, poets, dramatists and scholars have interpreted the story in their different ways. In fact, if the story had been static and did not hold the potential of re-narration, perhaps it would not have survived over 2,000 years."

The fourth member, who termed the Indian psyche incapable of handling different versions of the Ramayana, seems to have convinced the council to scrap the essay. "Epic personalities are divine characters and showing them in bad light is not easily tolerated," he noted in the report.

But Professor Renu Bala, another dissenting academic council member, argued: "Nothing religiously offensive was found by the experts. India is a diverse country and there are 300 versions of the Ramayana. We give students the right to vote when they turn 18, so why not the right to think?"

In 2008, activists from the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student arm of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata party, barged into the history department to protest the teaching of the Ramanujan text and vandalised the place, forcing then department head Professor SZH Jafri to take refuge in his office.

The matter is set to escalate now, with teachers and students planning a one-day seminar and several street plays to educate students about the importance of academic freedom and secular beliefs in academics.

Meanwhile the ABVP is celebrating the essay's removal and says it will oppose any attempt to restore it in the syllabus.