A poster on the conference’s cancellation put up by the Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle. Image: The Wire
Mumbai: In a controversial turn of events, the management of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, has suddenly, at the very last minute, cancelled a two-day conference organised to discuss the ‘Cultures of the Political Left in Modern India’.
This questionable decision – announced past midnight, just a day before the scheduled event – has left most participants both confused and upset. While the official announcement did not give any reason for this sudden decision, sources in IIT Bombay did confirm that the director took the decision following a call from a “senior bureaucrat” from the Ministry of Education asking to cancel the conference.
The two-day conference, as noted on the official website, is funded by the ‘Institute of Eminence Cell, Government of India’. According to many participants, including PhD scholars and senior teaching faculty from many universities across India and some from overseas, the decision was announced at around 1 am on December 11. The conference was scheduled to start on December 12.
“We had already boarded a train from Delhi and covered half the distance. We suddenly got a call from one of the organisers informing us about the decision. They didn’t know what led to the sudden cancellation either,” a participant told The Wire.
In all, already, 150 papers have been submitted following a call issued at the beginning of November. Of them, 15 papers were selected, a participant confirmed. One speaker, Juned Shaikh, an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was to participate in the conference online. These conferences and paper presentations, while leading to important discussions, are also crucial for career furtherance, one PhD scholar from a central university said.
The papers that have been submitted cover a range of topics. To mention a few examples, Devesh Khatarker, a PhD scholar in sociology at the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences at IIT-B, was to present his paper on ‘The Role of The Din Bandhu (a newspaper run by the Satyashodhak movement led by Jotiba Phule) during the Sweepers’ Strikes of 1889 Bombay’.
Yet another paper ‘Tracing the dialogue between Marxism-Leninism and folk culture: Emergence of Jan Sanskriti Manch as a cultural movement’ by two PhD scholars Mohammed Kamran Siddiqui and Shivam Mogha was to be presented at the conference.
A senior scholar participating has been quoted as saying that some papers were critical of the Left movement too. “That’s what we do as scholars. We are not party cardholders and do not aim to be either,” one academic, who would have participated in the conference said.
The conference, organised by Paulomi Chakraborty, Ratheesh Radhakrishnan and Sharmistha Saha, all teachers at IIT-B, aimed to “bring together scholars engaged in identifying and examining the histories of the cultural practices of the political Left in modern India”.
The organisers have not yet officially commented on the controversy publicly, especially on the question of the motive behind this sudden cancellation.
In an email, however, sent out by the organisers to the participants, they state: “Following the directive from the IIT Bombay director that the conference on the ‘Cultures of the Political Left in Modern India’ cannot be held due to unavoidable circumstances, we are forced to cancel the event.” While the reason is not clear in the email, the organisers have specified that they were “forced” to cancel the event.
Meanwhile, to questions put to them by The Wire, seeking a response to the sudden decision of cancellation, IIT-B director Subhasis Chaudhuri said, “Since it was not under any of the six verticals under the Institute of Eminence, we were informed it could not be supported under that budget.” He, however, did not elaborate why this decision was taken just a day before the event and if the budget was not sanctioned, how had the institute taken the decision to go ahead with the conference in the first place.
The Institutes of Eminence was set up as a recognition scheme to empower higher education institutes in India by the University Grants Commission in 2017. The IoEs selected from public sector are given a grant of Rs 1,000 crore by the government for five years.
Significantly, only a few hours before the director announced the cancellation of the conference, Legal Rights Observatory (LRO), a right-wing legal collective had raised objections over the “motive” behind organising the event. “IITs are meant for technological education/research; diverting funds to further obsolete Leftist/ Communist ideologies is a criminal act,” the organisation claimed on its official Twitter handle.
Education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, the Union education ministry’s official handle, and Union home minister Amit Shah were tagged in the tweet. LRO sought “severe punishment” for organising the conference.
Speaking on this issue, students at IITB say this is not the first time that a faculty-organised event has run into trouble. In the wake of the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, and two other imminent countrywide exercises, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the National Population Register (NPR), a conference discussing the law had been organised on campus. The faculty members were allegedly asked to cancel the conference. The organising team and the administration allegedly reached a middle ground after the mention of NRC was removed from the conference’s topic.
Similarly, student-organised events too have been cancelled several times in the past years, more particularly after 2014.
In 2015, a lecture titled ‘Kashmir: The Blind Side of Indian Nationalism’ was denied permission by the IIT-B administration. Westminster university professor Dibyesh Anand was scheduled to speak at the event.
In 2019, another event organised by students to discuss the abrogation of Article 370 was also denied permission. The students, however, had gone ahead with organising the talk inside the institute’s park instead of at the scheduled venue.
Policing academia
The NDA regime, post 2014 has made quite a fetish of policing the campuses jn an attempt to control the debates and dialogues that emerge from withing student scholarship.
Just two months ago, a controversial circular issued by the Delhi University required every department as also students organisations to seek ‘police permission’ before any seminars or discussions were organised. Though this ‘advisory’ was purportedly issued following police advice after an incident at Miranda House in which men scaled walls, entered premises and allegedly harassed women students during Diwali festivities on October 14, the the advisory does not mention the character or nature of events it seeks to police. Does it for instance also apply to students protests seminars with speakers and listeners from outside the college attending, and performance events as well?
Advisory: ‘Shouldn’t be opened for all’
Issued by proctor Rajni Abbi, on October 27, the advisory stated that the guidelines were being issued “in the light of an advisory received from the police department”.
These guidelines were categorised under six points. It stated that “no event without proper permission of police should be organised or in case of emergency/ lack of time, at least one-day prior intimation should be given to the police station Maurice Nagar.”
Moreover, the advisory stated that only “a few college/ department students” should be allowed entry if events or fests are to be organised. It added that “entry should be allowed only after registration for the event” and that too “with the ID of the college”. “It should not be opened for all,” the advisory notes.
DU has also advised the colleges to deploy volunteers at the time of events and the advisory stated that the “number of volunteers may also be intimated to the police”. Quite apart from police permission, the advisory reminded the colleges to take “necessary permission from other departments, like fire and electricity” for such events.
Finally, it added that if any of the guidelines were not followed then the concerned college or department shall be held “solely responsible” for any untoward incident that may happen during any such event organised by them.
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