For decades, some Indian universities have functioned like islands unto themselves. Never mind that they are sustained by public resources and obligated to serve national capacity. The question that must be confronted is whether universities are spaces of disciplined inquiry and public responsibility, or of ideological vanity insulated from scrutiny?
What is unfolding at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), which came under direct central government oversight in 2023, must be understood against these questions. The current reset at TISS comes as a long-delayed institutional correction. A necessary effort to restore academic discipline, procedural integrity, and public accountability. However, there’s been resistance from within.
A recent ground report in The Print has documented anxieties within sections of academia, who have presented these changes as repression and surveillance. Yet, it seems to me that many of the voices portraying themselves as anti-establishment are, in fact, beneficiaries of a deeply entrenched academic establishment. What they call “persecution” seems to be withdrawal of comfortable complacency in the status quo.
‘Thinking twice’ in the classroom is not repression
The report opens with a lament from a TISS Guwahati professor who claims he now has to think twice before speaking in class, fearing that his words might be recorded by students. The inference is that this anxiety is the outcome of repression.
This kind of framing appears to be inspired by the writings of Michel Foucault on the carceral continuum, suggesting that control and surveillance seep into everyday spaces, including classrooms. In this case, however, what is being experienced is not incarceration, but belated accountability. The erosion of the assumption that the classroom is exempt from public scrutiny.
As a professor, I deliberate carefully before speaking in class. Not out of fear but because it’s a professional responsibility. Without such restraint, teaching degenerates from the rigorous testing of ideas into moral hazard. A university classroom is not a confessional booth for ideological indulgence. It is a public intellectual space. Transparency should sharpen thought, not paralyse it. If academic authority cannot withstand visibility, the problem lies not with scrutiny, but, more likely, with the ideas being advanced.
The banality of caste framing
Narratives surrounding arrests or administrative action involving students increasingly follow a predictable script: identity first, legality later, if at all. Caste is foregrounded while procedural facts are basically glossed over. This was seen in the protests over the suspension of a Dalit student for alleged misconduct at TISS.
This is not sensitive activism but the banalisation of caste framing. And it does more harm than good to the ‘cause’. Reducing caste to a reflexive explanatory shortcut does lasting damage. It induces public fatigue, erodes analytical clarity, and weakens genuine anti-caste politics. Not every legal action involving a Dalit person amounts to caste persecution. Treating it as such hollows out the moral force of social justice itself. The TISS administration’s insistence on procedure over rhetoric is, therefore, not anti-social justice, but essential to preserving its credibility.
Selective human rights and strategic amnesia
Another event had some sections of TISS crying foul, namely the police action on a memorial event for GN Saibaba in October 2025. The students who organised this gathering on Saibaba’s death anniversary describe him primarily as a “human rights activist”, while omitting his documented Maoist affiliations that kept him under continuous state scrutiny.
Students claim they face charges merely for organising a memorial. What is downplayed is that police intervention followed the illegal conduct of an event on campus without institutional permission. The current TISS administration’s insistence on adherence to procedure is not ideological censorship but institutional hygiene. Universities cannot function if rules apply only when politically convenient.
Standardised tests and the myth of ideological engineering
A recurring anxiety concerns the move toward standardised admissions, particularly CUET, framed as an assault on TISS’s “pro-poor ethos”, and even insinuated as a “saffron agenda”.
If that were true, Indian political formations would have to control global testing regimes such as the SAT, GRE, and GMAT. The claim collapses under its own absurdity.
The fact is that standardised tests reduce discretionary power. They limit the subjective and ideological filtering historically enabled by interview-heavy systems. Constitutionally mandated reservations are intact. Affirmative action, as envisioned by B R Ambedkar, was never meant to be replaced by discretionary interviews conducted by morally self-assured committees.
The TISS reset restores merit with inclusion, rather than unchecked discretion. The unease is not about access, but about the loss of gatekeeping authority.
That discomfort becomes explicit in casual remarks about the campus becoming “more North Indian,” with students from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar now “dominating” admissions.
For decades, dominance by students from Bengal and Kerala was treated as natural. The increased presence of students from UP and Bihar is framed as decline. I’d call it democratisation. Standardised admissions allow TISS to reflect India as it exists, not as certain elites preferred to imagine it.
This is precisely what the current reforms defend: social mobility without ideological filtering.
Asymmetric tolerance, ‘spies’, and the fascist veto
Indian academia often romanticises anti-establishment activism as morally neutral. It is not. Anti-establishment politics is itself an ideology that long enjoyed asymmetric tolerance on campus.
Procedural violations, such as the mass screening of a banned BBC documentary in 2023, were passed off by some as ethical resistance, while legally certified but right-leaning material was treated as illegitimate. This double standard created a culture where procedure was selectively honoured.
In this context, anxieties about “spies on campus” flourish. Claims of recording, reporting, police visits, and silent WhatsApp groups circulate without evidence. Suspicion becomes proof.
This discomfort is rhetorically neutralised by invoking “Nazis” or “fascist toolkit.” The effect of such terms is to shut down discussion rather than examine what is actually happening. It’s also worth considering that public denunciation, ideological vetting, ritualised shaming, and the fear of being reported were not the sole province of fascist regimes. They were also central to Stalinist, Maoist, and East German systems, comparisons avoided because they implicate comfortable traditions.
What is unfolding at TISS is better understood as the dismantling of an ideological enclosure. As that insulation weakens, scrutiny increases. The unease this produces is real, but calling it repression is a stretch.
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From manufacturing consent to manufacturing dissent
Noam Chomsky spoke of manufacturing consent. In India, a different phenomenon has emerged: the manufacturing of dissent. As soon as rules and discipline start being enforced, they are spun as repressive or authoritarian.
The real crisis confronting TISS is not state interference. It is the diminishing relevance of ideologically saturated academic ecosystems in a world that demands policy competence, employable skills, and institutional credibility.
The current changes at TISS defend the most vulnerable students, not ideological vanguards. Those with social and cultural capital can afford a campus culture that treats confrontation with the state as part of pedagogy. But it leaves first-generation students with damaged CVs and limited prospects.
Universities are public institutions, not ideological communes. The TISS reset restores discipline and institutional responsibility, not authoritarianism.
To paraphrase Jayaprakash Narayan: “Echo chambers khali karo, real janata aa rahi hain.”
The discomfort some are feeling is understandable. But relevance is unavoidable.
Kedar Naik is assistant professor (political science) cum officer on special duty at the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune. He posts on X@bigfootkedar. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
Well written and timely.
What else you can expect but a verbal vomit from a right winger. The talk of reset has been a buzzword in the RSS circle since 2014. The aim was to remove the little bit of space left for dalits and adivasis had with this reset. The problem of right winger sis they want to oppress don’t want to be called for it. The aim may be at left wingers but the target is aspirations of Dalits and Adivasis and removal of them. The talk of reset resonated in 1930s Germany. We need to a aware of the repeat of it in India.
Loved this….I hope now institute will get balanced ideology instea did maosit cabal