INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN INDIA
Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy.
(Babasaheb B.R. Ambedkar, 1949)
Our Ethos
International Solidarity for Academic Freedom in India – InSAF India – is a diverse group of diasporic Indians based in different parts of the world. Our work centres academic freedom as inextricably linked to social justice, and knowledge production as bound to the fostering of our social selves.
In the decades after 1947, India built its academic institutions and its own practices and cultures of academic freedom with its foundations in the resistance movements of its most marginalised communities. However, increasingly in the past few years, a leadership with roots in a Brahmanical Hindutva ideology, a militant and masculinist version of religious nationalism, is systematically assaulting existing infrastructures of academic freedom while also simultaneously repressing the people’s movements that sustained it. The very institutions that were envisioned to dismantle colonial and casteist power structures - the parliament, the judiciary and the legislature - are surreptitiously deployed as instruments for protecting and reproducing colonialism, caste injustices, gender injustices, and other forms of social, economic, political and ecological injustices.
When academics are sent to jail for asking difficult questions and for defending the rights of the disenfranchised, then society cannot be called free. Shrinking academic freedoms in India dovetail neatly with the logic of social excommunication in a patriarchal caste society, with its unconditional 'castigation' and 'trials', equivalent to what B.R. Ambedkar called 'punishment in the penal code' in both 'its magnitude and its severity'. This is not simply a concern for an individual's freedom of expression. The issue at stake here is a radical conception of social justice that is linked to our social selves. We do not exist as individuals in a society. In a society, there can only be social selves. The attacks and constraints on academic freedom not only cancel our social selves but also suspend the very idea of the social itself through suspending knowledge production and formation.
Our Work
Bane haiñ ahl-e-havas, mudda'? bh?, munsif bh?,
kise vak?l kareñ kis se munsif? ch?heñ
[The power hungry have become both prosecutor and judge -
who will advocate for me, from whom shall I expect justice?]
(Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Nisar Main Teri Galiyon Ke)
We advocate for collective academic freedoms and consider it our obligation to raise our voices and participate in various actions to direct international attention to the endangering of academic freedom through the repression of marginalised people’s movements that create the very space for academic freedom to grow and thrive.
We advocate for building global solidarities with Indian and international peoples' movements for radical social, economic and ecological justice. We also collaborate with the international community to publicly address cases of violation of academic freedom in any collaborations with Indian educational institutions and governmental agencies.
We seek to critically examine not only the persistent harms of colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism, but also the potential pitfalls of decolonial efforts. Such a reflective stance is essential to ensure that our initiatives are transformative and do not replicate the very structures of domination they seek to dismantle.
We campaign for the release of Indian academics, scholar-activists and artistes who have been imprisoned for speaking truth to power and for choosing the side of the most marginalised and oppressed in Indian society. Our campaigns raise awareness that it is the constitutional duty of the state to ensure that education and research can flourish as a public good, and we demand the Indian government refrain from any political intervention in the autonomous functioning of educational institutions.
We resist the covert canonisation of regressive political thought under the guise of introducing students to Indian ‘philosophy' or culture.
We consistently reflect on the interconnectedness of various forms of oppression to develop strategies to address the interconnections holistically.