On 14 August, Jason Arday — Cambridge University’s youngest Black professor — was found dead at his London home, days after resigning his post. His family’s statement did not mince words that he had endured a sustained campaign of harassment stretching back over three years, one that intensified into media scrutiny that questioned not just his scholarship but also his life story.
Various newspapers produced dozens of passages from Arday’s 2015 PhD thesis that they claimed closely matched an earlier dissertation. The plagiarism charge didn’t hold and Liverpool John Moores University upheld his degree after review. Cambridge first framed the scrutiny as a smear campaign, then opened its own inquiry – at which point Arday resigned. Simon Baron-Cohen, the university’s autism research director who had spoken to Arday hours before his death, told the BBC that Arday described feeling unable to continue under the weight of relentless scrutiny that discredited absolutely every detail of his life.
Whatever the eventual, sober accounting turns out to be, the story of Arday’s rise and fall should be instantly recognisable to Indian academia: it follows a pattern that runs through the careers of Dalits with grim regularity.
The familiar target in Indian academia
The story is quite familiar in the Indian context. A scholar from a historically excluded community is appointed to a position their community has rarely, if ever, held. The appointment is publicised — sometimes by the institution itself — as a marker of progress, and enough ink is spent on boasting that equality has been achieved. Dalit President, Dalit Chief Justice, Dalit Chief Minister — see, equality has been achieved. So goes the narrative.
For a while, the scholar is a symbol, profiled, feted and held up as proof that the system works, so nothing else needs to be changed. Then the scrutiny begins, if it hadn’t already happened before the appointment. But it’s not the ordinary scrutiny of their work that all professionals invite; it is scrutiny of their credentials, their qualifications, the manner of their appointment, their family history — their right to be there at all. Then, often, anonymous complaints surface.
Institutions that were quick to claim credit for the appointment suddenly become slow, or unwilling, to defend it once the questioning starts. India has its own well-documented version of this arc, and it did not begin with Arday.
In 2018, Subrahmanyam Saderla, newly appointed as an assistant professor at IIT Kanpur, became the subject of scrutiny after four senior faculty members objected to his appointment. Then, an anonymous email reached senior faculty and the institute’s director alleging plagiarism in a PhD thesis that Saderla had completed at the same institution three years earlier. Colleagues who had never raised the matter with him suddenly began discussing whether his appointment had been a mistake—whether he had benefited from reservation and lacked the competence to hold the post.
An internal inquiry found all four senior professors guilty of caste-based harassment and violations of the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act. IIT Kanpur’s Board of Governors declined to revoke Saderla’s degree and recommended action against the four professors. But a day before the Board meeting to decide on that action, the report was leaked. Overnight, 70 faculty members signed a letter to the Board chairman asking it to take no action and instead seek a reconciliation.
Vipin Vijayan, a Dalit research scholar at Kerala University is still waiting for his PhD after his department head, CN Vijayakumari, refused to sign off on his final thesis. She questioned his right to study Sanskrit in explicitly casteist terms, despite the scholar having met every formal requirement. In Telangana, Sujatha Surepally, a Dalit professor of sociology, has alleged that being publicly labelled an “urban Naxal” triggered surveillance, a stalled promotion, and a professional boycott. In Punjab, Harpreet Singh, a Dalit assistant professor in the economics department, faced casteist remarks and was denied promotion, prompting an inquiry after an eight-day sit-in.
Such cases are the tip of the iceberg. Rohith Vemula’s case was described by activists as an “institutional murder” — language that, however contested, points to the same underlying claim that Arday’s family is making now: professional destruction by narrative can be as lethal as any single act.
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Whose plagiarism gets a scandal and whose gets a Presidency
BR Ambedkar argued that caste in India is not merely a division of labour but a division of labourers into a hierarchy of graded worth. Nowhere is that hierarchy of presumed worth more visible than in who is asked to prove they deserve their chair and who is simply assumed to be worthy.
What connects Arday’s Cambridge and Saderla’s IIT Kanpur is the asymmetry of suspicion. An anonymous claim against a scholar from a marginalised group quickly escalates into a referendum on their entire life. Equivalent irregularities — and they are not rare — among dominant-group peers run into a wall of silence. Indian universities have had their own unresolved plagiarism and credential controversies involving upper-caste scholars that generated a fraction of the scrutiny and ended with a fraction of the consequences.
This is not a new pattern. In 1929, Jadunath Sinha — then a young philosophy lecturer at Meerut College — accused his own examiner, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, of lifting substantial, unattributed passages from his doctoral thesis. Sinha laid out dozens of parallel passages in the Modern Review and eventually sued for copyright infringement; Radhakrishnan countersued for defamation. The case was settled out of court, possibly under political pressure, with no judgment ever delivered, and the matter vanished from public memory. It cost Radhakrishnan nothing. He went on to become India’s first Vice President and second President, celebrated annually on Teachers’ Day, while Sinha’s name survives mainly in footnotes.
The asymmetry that defined Saderla’s case — an obscure junior academic’s meticulous, documented complaint against a senior figure, absorbed and neutralised by the institution the senior figure belongs to — has a lineage in Indian academia stretching back nearly a century.
There are a number of other similar cases. Chandra Krishnamurthy, Vice Chancellor of Pondicherry University, saw one of her published papers formally retracted after a nine-month investigation found roughly three-quarters of it had been plagiarised. She was placed under a bureaucratic “compulsory wait” and quietly replaced, with no comparable media cycle and no referendum on her life outside the university. Her successor, Gurmeet Singh, carried an undisclosed plagiarism complaint from his time as a Delhi University professor into the same Vice Chancellor post; the university invoked confidentiality to withhold the finding, and he received a clean vigilance clearance regardless. Vinay Kumar Pathak, Vice Chancellor of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Technical University, was reappointed by the Uttar Pradesh governor for a further three-year term even after an RTI request showed a paper on his CV was substantially lifted from foreign publications, sometimes “100 per cent plagiaristic copy.”
None of these cases produced an anonymous email campaign, international headlines or a resignation. Yet they were followed by promotions and extended periods of authority — in contrast to the case of a Dalit scholar three years into his first faculty post, whose entire PhD was placed under re-examination based on an anonymous complaint traced to one of the professors already found guilty of harassing him.
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What Indian institutions owe
None of this argues against accountability. Plagiarism should be investigated wherever it is found, and due process should protect everyone, including the accused, from trial by media. But Indian universities, the UGC and funding bodies need to ask themselves a harder question than whether their misconduct procedures are fair on paper: are those procedures, and the informal culture around them, applied with the same weight of doubt regardless of who sits in the chair, regardless of caste?
Arday’s death will likely become, in the UK, a moment of institutional reckoning about how universities protect scholars from disproportionate public scrutiny once the initial celebratory press cycle ends. Indian academia does not need to wait for its own Arday moment. It has already had several — Subrahmanyam Saderla, Vipin Vijayan, Sujatha Surepally, Harpreet Singh, and others whose names never made national news at all. The question is whether it is willing to recognise the pattern before another one becomes fatal.
Pardeep Singh Attri is an Assistant Professor in Strategy and Organisation at the School of Management, University of Bath (UK). He tweets at @pardeep_s_attri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)