When Universities Become Sites of Silent Repression
Bupinder Singh Bali | 09 February 2026 | The Wire
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.
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. When philosophical disagreement over caste, feminism, or political thought is shifted from classrooms and seminars into committees and complaints, something fundamental changes in how democratic institutions relate to dissent…