New Delhi: British academic Nitasha Kaul, who has been in the eye of a storm after being denied entry into India last Sunday, has been critical about the RSS and Modi government’s Hindutva politics and notably went head-to-head with then-BJP general secretary Ram Madhav in a 2015 discussion moderated by journalist Mehdi Hasan at the University of Oxford.
An Indian-origin writer with a British passport, Kaul was invited by the Congress government in Karnataka to speak at the ‘Constitution and National Unity Convention 2024’ held from 24-25 February.
According to a source involved in organising the convention, she was one of eight Indian-origin academics invited to the event, who were grilled by immigration authorities upon arrival in India. The other seven, hailing from countries like the US, the UK, Canada and Germany, were eventually given entry.
“Access to India should not be weaponised in return for a compliant position on the ruling government’s policies,” 47-year-old Kaul told ThePrint over the phone Saturday, adding that she was detained at the airport for nearly 24 hours without explanation.
Born in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, Kaul belongs to a Kashmiri Pandit family. She obtained a BA (Hons) from Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi, and a PhD and MSc from University of Hull in the UK.
She is currently a professor of Politics, International Relations and Critical Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Westminster, London.
The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said Thursday that it was a country’s “sovereign decision” to allow or deny entry to a foreign national.
There have also been calls on social media for the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to revoke her Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card.
ThePrint reached the MHA spokesperson for comment in this regard but had not received a response by the time of publication. This report will be updated if and when a response is received.
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Nitasha Kaul: Critic of ‘Hindutva hate politics’
In her academic work, Kaul has focussed on the plight of Kashmiri women, the impact of colonialism on Kashmir and intersection of identity and economics. During a 2019 US Congressional hearing on Kashmir, she called the Modi government’s decision to scrap the special status of Jammu and Kashmir a “drastic and unilateral” move.
Recently, a 2010 statement by her on X in which she said Kashmir isn’t an “integral” part of India has resurfaced on the internet.
#Kashmir wasn't, isn't, and won't be an 'integral' part of India. If saying that is sedition, not saying it is a complicit 'old lie'.
— Professor Nitasha Kaul, PhD (@NitashaKaul) October 26, 2010
Kaul argues that this was an “academic statement based on the fact that Kashmir remains an unresolved interstate dispute”.
“As a scholar, I have to point out that a conflict zone, which has been kept that way by both sides to serve political interests, brings continued misery to the people,” she told ThePrint.
For malicious misinterpreters, unthinking fools & those who'd like to know better. My words are rooted in fact, evidence & reason. You recirculate my tweet from 2010 when Tufail Mattoo's killing (go google!) resulted in months of violence in which numerous lives were lost. 👇🏾 https://t.co/wWkIXMnKSc pic.twitter.com/hfBXnXc1Xc
— Professor Nitasha Kaul, PhD (@NitashaKaul) February 27, 2024
In op-eds for news outlets and journals, the British academic has criticised the RSS and Modi government’s “Hindutva hate politics” and rising ‘Islamophobia’ in India. In a 2020 piece titled “China : Xinjiang: India: Kashmir”, she argued that both India and China have oppressed ethnic Muslims in Kashmir and Xinjiang, respectively.
In 2013, she signed a petition against Prime Minister Narendra Modi (then-Gujarat CM) delivering a keynote address at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The university eventually cancelled the speech.
Kaul claims that when detained at Bengaluru airport, immigration authorities inquired if she had criticised Ram Madhav and the RSS.
“Immigration authorities didn’t offer an explanation as to why I was not allowed to enter but asked me if I had criticised Ram Madhav and the RSS,” she told ThePrint.
“I told them I was part of a panel debate at Oxford in 2015, where I debated RSS leader Ram Madhav, but that was nine years ago, and what does that have to do with the present?”
2015 debate & tag of ‘Pakistan sympathiser’
In 2015, a year after the Modi government came into power, then-BJP general secretary Ram Madhav was interviewed by journalist Mehdi Hasan at the University of Oxford.
The Al Jazeera show was titled “Is Modi’s India flirting with fascism?”
This was a heated debate during which Kaul, present on the panel, went head-to-head with Madhav and Gautam Sen, former adviser to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).
Citing ‘ghar vapsi’ and beef bans, she accused the BJP government of being “Hindu-supremacist” and “socially regressive”.
When she claimed that the RSS, Sangh Parivar and the BJP work hand-in-glove, Madhav sought to calm down a roaring audience by saying that violence and weapon-training is not encouraged by the RSS.
Kaul further claimed that on the issue of Kashmir, Hindu nationalists under the Modi government are an “extreme version” of Indian nationalists. “What they share is a more extreme version of ‘doodh maangoge, kheer denge… Kashmir maangoge, cheer denge’ (if you ask for milk we’ll give you pudding, if you ask for Kashmir we’ll tear you apart),” she had said.
“I didn’t know that Dr Kaul was a representative of the Pakistan embassy,” Sen retorted, evoking some laughter from the audience.
“This is defamatory. This is exactly the kind of anti-national label that they give to anybody who dissents with them. As a Kashmiri Pandit —,” she replied, as the room cheered in support of her.
Hasan then asked if Sen wanted to withdraw the remark, to which the latter declined.
Amid the controversy over her deportation, Ram Madhav spoke to Times Now Tuesday calling Kaul an “anti-Indian”.
“Had it been an Indian citizen uttering these things…they would have been subjected to the law and landed up in Tihar jail,” he told the news outlet.
Kaul has been labelled ‘anti-India’, ‘genocide-denier’, a ‘Pakistani ISI agent’ and a ‘Pakistan sympathiser’ since her deportation.
“These are utter falsehoods. I’ve criticised Pakistan on enforced disappearances in Balochistan. As a feminist critical scholar who strongly believes in secularism and liberal democratic values, how can I be accused of selective sympathy toward a theocratic state which has a state religion (of Islam) and an all-powerful military?” she told ThePrint.
In October 2020, she signed an open letter to free BBC journalist and British Kashmiri Tanveer Ahmed who was detained in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
During the 2019 US Congressional hearing on Kashmir mentioned earlier, Kaul had criticised the flouting of human rights in both Indian and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, adding that both countries have made “redundant” the promise of plebiscite through the United Nations.
Kaul’s critics & supporters
After narrating her experience on X, Kaul received online backlash over her past views on Kashmir and the RSS with some Indian media channels describing her as a “Pakistan sympathiser” and a “genocide-denier” of the Kashmiri Hindu exodus in the 1990s – claims she denies.
Her critics include journalist Aarti Tikoo and a fellow Kashmiri Pandit.
“The rationale here is pretty valid — an NRI working overtly or covertly, with an aim to challenge India’s sovereignty over Jammu & Kashmir, shouldn’t be welcomed in India,” Tikoo told ThePrint, adding that OCI holders shouldn’t have “unlimited impunity”.
Earlier this week, as the controversy brewed, Tikoo took to X accusing Kaul of being “escorted” by Kashmiri activists and Pakistani ISI agents when the two were on a panel at the 2019 US Congressional hearing on Kashmir.
Kaul rubbished these claims arguing that she “never used a limo” and that the funds for her travel and accommodation came out of a research budget allocated by her employer.
The 2019 US Congressional hearing on Kashmir, in Washington DC was an enlightening moment in my life—I was finally able to put faces on the criminals who had till then, hidden themselves in the plain sight, and whose truth I had long ago figured out on my own in Kashmir while… pic.twitter.com/zIZyxjx9T5
— Aarti Tikoo (@AartiTikoo) February 27, 2024
At the same time, Kaul has received support from certain sections of Indian academia and media. Sanjukta Basu, a Delhi-based academic whose research focuses on feminism and politics, argued that the incident may have been meant to instil fear in academic circles both in and out of India.
“We’ve seen how a Greenpeace activist was stopped from travelling to London and a Kashmiri journalist from going out of the country to receive an award. This is policing of movement based on personal views,” Basu told ThePrint.
“It instils fear into the academic circles both in and outside India.”
Basu was referring to an incident from January 2015 when a senior campaigner with Greenpeace India, Priya Pillai, was offloaded from a Delhi-London flight by Indian immigration authorities despite having a valid business visa.
The other remark was a reference to an incident from October 2022 when Kashmiri photojournalist Sanna Irshad Mattoo was stopped from flying to the US to receive the prestigious Pulitzer Prize despite a valid ticket and visa.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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Prof Nitasha Kaul had rightly called the film Kashmir Files a propaganda, a view shared by Air Vice Marshal Kapil Kak (a KP) & the jury of Goa film festival headed by an Israeli Nadav Lapid. One may nor agree with her view that Kashmir is not integral part of India but that should not be a reason to deny her entry into democratic India. A better way is to debate with her what constitutes an integral part of a nation.