Preface
Kamran Asdar Ali

Scholars around the world are routinely reminded that the freedoms so central
to their enterprise are always under threat. These threats are not confined to any
corner of the world nor are they necessarily a feature of less developed or lessdemocratic societies. In many instances, academic censorship and intimidation
are meted out at the same time, and sometimes by the same agents, as record levels
of investment are simultaneously sown into academic research and the expansionof higher education institutions.
Ironically, attacks on academic freedoms in Asia (the focus of this volume)are on the rise and are evident even in countries like Japan that are consideredbeacons of democratic practice. Of course, state repression remains the mostcommon source of threat, especially in those parts of the world (and Asia) withauthoritarian-inclined governments. Increasingly, however, societal, political,
and commercial actors are also attacking scholars and scholarship that challenge
their values or interests. In some cases, threats emerge from within the academy,
with administrators, colleagues, and students putting pressure on topics andvoices they disagree with (the digital age has also meant online vigilantism). As
a result, pluralism, tolerance, and open dialogue are no longer synonymous withdemocracy or with academia.
In an important intervention on the topic, this Asia Shorts volume brings
together a comprehensive discussion on the issue of academic rights and freedoms
in different parts of Asia. A grim picture emerges as the chapters survey a rangeof societies in Asia. In order to add to the discussion, in this short preface, let mebuild on the excellent contributions and share my own understanding of academic
freedom in contemporary South Asia.

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India, the most populous democracy in the world, has made vast investments
in higher education, with over 1,000 universities, more than 42,000 colleges,
and around 20 million students. After India gained independence in 1947, theearly political leadership sought to ensure that the Indian academy subscribedto the highest standards of intellectual freedom and autonomy, and the state, forthe most part, obliged. Today, India’s universities are seeing their international
rankings rise. Once a top sending country, India is now also a destination forinternational students. All this is a function of India’s growing economy, but it also
belies the fact Indian scholars and students, typically those working in marginal
fields (the humanities and social sciences) and from marginalized backgrounds(often minorities, lower castes, and women), are working under increasingly direconditions.
In recent years, clashes over whether India ought to be a secular democracy
or one that celebrates its dominant Hindu majority, at the expense of its many
minorities, have left the autonomy of Indian universities precariously hollow. Theruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has overseen a years-long crackdown on critics
of its Hindu-nationalist policy agenda under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention)
Act (UAPA), a law purportedly intended to prevent acts of terrorism and othernational security threats, but also used to silence academic and non-academic
critics. In 2021, the Ministry of Education (MoE), in coordination with theMinistry of External Affairs (MEA), announced that scholars working in public
universities would need prior approval before participating in international virtual
conferences or seminars on matters related to the security or “internal matters” ofthe state. Although the guidelines were ultimately scrapped, Indian scholars muststill seek MEA approval for discussions (or to organize workshops/conferences)on sensitive subjects. Meanwhile, the safety of students and faculty on Indian
campuses is increasingly called into question, as state and non-state actors wield
violence and intimidation against critical voices with impunity. Readers may recall
the widespread violence in 2019 and early 2020, when Indian students and faculty
came under attack for protesting the revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special
administrative status and the passage of a controversial citizenship law known as
the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Further, the BJP government has been
replacing the higher administrators at federal and provincial universities with
its own chosen people and the autonomy of Indian universities has been sharplyeroded.
These changes and the intervention by the state forces are not new. For
example, in 2016 there were protests at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)
in New Delhi by a section of India’s civil rights activists and scholars against
the high-handedness of the Indian state’s attacks on one of the country’s mostPREFACE : xvii

prestigious public universities. JNU was a special case, as it received internationalpress coverage at the time. Yet it may be forgotten that the intrusion of the state
into academic life in India has a more complex history. The anger of academics,
civil rights activists, and liberal politicians on the happenings at JNU and atother campuses was clearly justified, but the fact remains that such disruptionsof academic life have consistently occurred in India despite its stable democratic
tradition with no history of military takeovers. I would argue that even with thishistory, JNU was not an exception.
Where there have been concerns about the integrity of the nation-state,security forces have regularly entered and occupied universities in the Northeastof India or in Kashmir (and other places). Similarly, lest we forget, in the late1960s the Maoist-influenced Naxalite revolutionary movement was joined by anumber of urban intellectuals and became popular among students in Kolkata
colleges. In early 1970, presidential rule was imposed on West Bengal to combat
the internal threat of a communist uprising and, subsequently, through militarizedstate action, thousands of activists and innocents were tortured, incarcerated, or
killed in police encounters. By the time the movement’s force subsided in 1972,
the region had lost some of its best and brightest. What needs to be rememberedis that the violence inflicted on the students, workers and peasants in West Bengal
was not perpetrated by an emergent right-wing religious party, but under theorders of an established and secular nationalist party i.e. Congress.
I mentioned the JNU event to bring forward the practices that the Indian state
followed previously in “trouble” areas or in peripheral parts of the nation-state(the occupation by paramilitary forces of universities, the using of sympathetic
student groups to silence dissent, the threats given to faculty members who
have politically oppositional views) can now be used in more prestigious public
campuses in India’s major cities. The point I want to emphasize is that, when theintegrity of the nation-building project is threatened, the Indian state, irrespectiveof its ideological bent, responds with violence against whomever it considers its
enemy, internal or external.
Unfortunately, the issue of silencing dissent is present across all South Asian
nation-states and India cannot be singled out. In the past decades during and after
the civil war in Sri Lanka, dissent and questioning of state authority by academics
was surveilled and continues to be silenced. In Bangladesh, there are recurringand recent examples of students, academics, and professionals being harassed andimprisoned on the grounds of the Digital Security Act (DSA) and other such lawsthat are being legislated to regulate online and internet communication.

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To conclude this discussion, let me turn to Pakistan, and offer a historicalperspective on the ongoing silencing of free speech and academic freedoms. Since
the 1980s the country has witnessed the “occupation” of its universities by security
services and the curtailment of academic freedom through the intervention of stateauthorities on a regular basis. Like India, Pakistan has a long history of student
activism and struggle for justice (although, unlike India, it has a history of militarytakeovers); one recalls the student movement against the dictator, General Ayub’sregime (1958–1969) in 1962 or the participation of students in the 1968 struggle
which ended in Ayub’s removal. Irrespective, various Pakistani governments,
whether civilian or military, did not hesitate to use force to clamp down on student
unrest, whether in Dhaka (it was part of East Pakistan then) in February of 1952
during the language protests or in January 1953 in Karachi, leading to several
deaths in both cases. One should also remember the horror of the night of March26, 1971, when many Bengali (then East Pakistan) intellectuals, academics, andstudents were killed in Dhaka University by Pakistani armed forces,Yet, the systematic banning of student unions by General Zia’s regime (1977–1988) in February of 1984 was unprecedented in Pakistan’s till then turbulent
history with its educated youth. The dictator’s aversion to political parties created
opportunities for ethnicity-based student groups to be formed. Some of these
may have had state sponsorship to create factionalism within more ideologicallymotivated student parties. In the absence of student elections and unions, theimplicit encouragement of certain religious and ethnic student groups createdrivalries on campuses in Karachi and elsewhere.
One recalls, in the late 1980s, the increase of extreme intra-group violenceat universities in Karachi. The state watched while mayhem reigned for a while
and then sent in its paramilitary forces, Rangers, to control the situation, muchto the relief of parents and students alike. In retrospect, one can now see how
the situation may have been manipulated at these campuses to create space forthe security services to enter colleges and universities. Those student groups andaffiliated political parties may now regret the violence they had unleashed on eachother for very small gains, but the damage to the general academic atmosphere of
Pakistan’s universities remains. They have become securitized camps that remain
under an unparalleled surveillance system (this is even before the more recent
threat posed by Islamist groups). Once the security services entered the premises,in one form or the other, they maintained their presence physically and, in manycases, also by enforcing “ideological compliance.” Through various regulatory
structures, the teaching of humanities and social sciences in Pakistan (much like inIndia) is constantly monitored by state-sponsored agencies, promoting a sanitizedcurriculum and a state-sponsored version of national history. The Pakistani civilPREFACE : xix

society was weak in the late 1980s after being brutalized by a harsh military regime
for a decade, but the spectre of that period still haunts the country while academic
independence and free speech, primarily in public universities, remains restricted.
Another legacy of the 1980s military rule in Pakistan is the introductionof anti-blasphemy laws. To give an example, languishing in a jail in the Punjab
province of Pakistan for almost a decade is Junaid Hafeez who taught at theBahauddin Zakariya University in Multan (Pakistan). Due partly to Hafeez’ liberal
views, and partly based on administrative rivalries, a segment of students wasencouraged to accuse Hafeez of blasphemy: a very serious allegation in Pakistan.
When a prominent human rights lawyer, Rashid Rehman took his case, he wasmurdered in his own office not even six months into the proceedings. Blasphemy
accusations (the insult to the Prophet of Islam or other religious figures) are often
used to target minorities. Yet in the case of Hafeez, who is Muslim and part of thereligious majority, it is being used to curtail freedom of expression and opinion
while Pakistan’s over-burdened and flawed judicial system in most cases fails toprotect the accused.
My detour into a brief (and incomplete) history of the relationship between
South Asian states and academic freedom is to caution those fighting for civilrights in Asia and elsewhere to learn from their past, as under the pretext of law
and order there can be repression of speech at universities to silence academic orsocial dissent. This important volume documents the structural and comparative
perspective in order to historically situate the ways in which freedoms are being
curtailed across Asia, and forces us to think about solidarities that may need to becreated to struggle against such techniques of surveillance and silencing.