Crisis of Academic Freedom and the Collapse of Enforceability in India’s Higher Education
Azher Ahmad & Maleeha Shafi | 04 July 2025 | Maktoob Media
In a country where the Constitution guarantees the right to free speech, the Indian university is fast becoming a paradox, where critical voices are either disciplined, disappeared, or dismissed. Over the past decade, a steady, almost surgical dismantling of academic freedom has unfolded across India’s higher education institutions. What we are witnessing is not simply censorship from above, but a structural self-sabotage, where universities are being remodelled to reproduce compliance over curiosity, nationalism over knowledge, and fear over freedom.
FIRs have become the new curriculum. Professors are suspended for quoting Ambedkar, students arrested for commemorating dissenting figures, and entire departments reprimanded for hosting talks deemed “anti-national. In 2020, masked mobs assaulted over 30 students and faculty at JNU, and not a single arrest was made for weeks. More recently, in June 2024, Delhi University professor Ashok Vohra faced legal action for allegedly “objectionable” content in his lectures, which was a content rooted in philosophical analysis, not incitement.