Trump’s attack on academia: An unsettling reminder that it’s happened in India and elsewhere before

US President Donald Trump’s aggressive clampdown on academia over the past few weeks has brought back not-so-fond memories. His bullying tactics instilled renewed relevance to my own experiences in the last decade of the Indian right-wing’s explicit bias towards its academic critics, the West’s implicit bias towards non-white scholars – and the universal indifference of many academics on the left amid the singling out of critical scholarship.

In the early 2000s, writing about the Hindu-Muslim violence of 2002 in Gujarat, first as a journalist and later as an academic, I gained a deeper understanding of violent conflict that went beyond communal riots. With rigorous training from Oxford, I was able to teach and publish extensively on the topic.

Yet, as expected, my academic research on Gujarat found little favour with the Bharatiya Janata Party because it systematically demonstrated the party’s central role in orchestrating attacks on Muslims in 2002. (The research of several other scholars faced the same hostility.)

The rise of majoritarianism brought out the worst in Indian academics who endorsed the ideology of the Sangh Parivar. Many of them began to voice it explicitly. The faculty at various universities, including the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management, either smugly advised me to change the topic of...

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