Recent developments at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, including protests directed at philosopher Divya Dwivedi, have brought into sharp focus a question Indian universities have been quietly postponing: what happens to disagreement when institutions stop treating it as an intellectual matter and begin managing it as a problem of order? The issue at stake is not the correctness of any one scholar’s arguments, nor the intent of those who oppose them. When Universities Become Sites of Silent Repression - The Wire
It is the growing tendency for universities to respond to contested ideas not through debate, critique, or counter-argument, but through procedural escalation, reputational anxiety, and administrative intervention.
This is not an argument about individual guilt, intent, or the correctness of any particular scholarly position. Nor is it a defence of one person’s views. It is an attempt to understand a broader institutional shift, one in which disagreement increasingly migrates from the domain of intellectual engagement into the terrain of discipline, procedure, and risk management. What that shift reveals is less about ideology than about the condition of democratic institutions today.
India continues to describe itself as a democracy committed to free expression. Constitutional guarantees remain intact, courts periodically reaffirm them, and censorship is officially disavowed. Yet writers, journalists, academics, and students continue to experience forms of silencing. Not through mass bans or explicit prohibitions, but through slower, more diffuse mechanisms that make speech costly, uncertain, and professionally risky.
Public universities face an additional constraint. As state institutions, they are tasked with producing critical knowledge while remaining subject to intense political oversight. Faculty learn, often implicitly, that dissent can be reframed as indiscipline, critique construed as misconduct, and disagreement converted into administrative procedure. Universities do not ban ideas outright. They render certain ideas institutionally risky.
Bupinder Singh Bali
09/02/2026