The writer, a former UK universities minister, is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School

On the barricaded highway around New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia university, the epicentre of protests against Narendra Modi’s shift towards majoritarian rule, the quality of the posters speaks volumes. While a few have just scribbled “Muck Fodi” on pieces of paper, others have produced well-designed artwork with pithy messages of defiance directed at the prime minister and his Bharatiya Janata party.

If the BJP were still presiding over growth rates to rival China’s — as it was until its disastrous demonetisation move of 2016 — it might have been harder to bring students to the streets. But with unemployment at a 45-year high and graduate jobs scarce, the opportunity cost of disrupting the diploma mills of the world’s soon-to-be-largest higher education system has fallen.

The protests, involving universities across the country, are about far more than dim prospects for young people. They represent a backlash against a run of anti-Muslim policies, culminating in a crackdown in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and a law that excludes Muslims from a fast-track path to citizenship for persecuted religious minorities. Their intensity shows a commitment to democratic values among people of all faiths who are fearful for the idea of India as a multi-ethnic, multilingual, multi-religious state.

India’s liberal universities are battlefields in this culture war. To the BJP, they are hotbeds of resistance to its Hindu nationalist agenda — teeming with entitled, virtue-signalling leftists, out of touch with the real India. After home affairs minister Amit Shah said they should be “taught a lesson and punished”, Delhi police allowed a mob with iron bars to beat up students at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Mr Modi has pledged to propel Indian universities to the top of global league tables even as he seeks to stamp out dissent within them. These objectives will be hard to reconcile: a toxic combination of state-sponsored attacks on students and faculty, thin research funding, dismal growth and eye-watering pollution could instead drive a new brain drain. India could not count a single university in the Times Higher Education’s ranking of the global top 300 in 2020, for the first time since 2012.

Much will hinge on Mr Modi’s plans to give greater autonomy and funding to a few opaquely selected “institutions of eminence”. Mirroring China’s creation of the C9 league of research-intensive universities, two of which now rank in the global top 30, the plan could provide a quick fix for national prestige. But it will do little for the vast majority of India’s 800 universities and 40,000 colleges if it ends up an empty exercise in marketing, or gaming metrics, that diverts attention from wider reform.

Political interference in Indian academia is hardly new. Every government has been able to parachute in the occasional pet vice-chancellor, but convention limited meddling to state-level institutions. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) wrote the playbook in the 1980s and 1990s, turning Calcutta university into a party fiefdom. Centrally funded national institutions were largely out of bounds.

If there is a difference today, it is in the scale of the interference. Education is a fixation for the BJP and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Nationwide, this government is rewriting textbooks and fixing appointments, even at the elite, centrally funded institutions. At Delhi university, for example, 4,500 vacant positions represent a golden patronage opportunity, as well as a chance to capture for a generation one of the jewels of India’s education system.

There is pressure on private universities, too, to stifle critics. Ramachandra Guha, a biographer of Mahatma Gandhi, found himself unable to take up a position at Ahmedabad University in Gujarat, home city of both the freedom fighter and Mr Modi. Others have stepped down from prominent roles. Academics returning to India with an easily withdrawn “Overseas Citizen of India” status feel vulnerable. Some self-censor.

For many in a country whose first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, so venerated the “scientific temper” that he enshrined its promotion as a civic duty in the constitution, the sense that academic freedom is dying has been traumatic. Last month, Venki Ramakrishnan, a Nobel Prize-winner, pointedly recalled how research in Germany and the Soviet Union had been set back decades by nationalism, pseudoscientific racial theories and suppression of ideologically suspect research.

Delhi’s state elections next month will signal whether Mr Modi will continue transforming India into a majoritarian state. If the BJP concludes that marginalising Muslims and waging a culture war against liberal elites is a winning strategy, there is more at stake than India’s universities. The country’s hopes of transforming itself into a knowledge economy and its distinctiveness as a democracy in an authoritarian neighbourhood are also under threat. This is nothing less than a battle for India’s soul and against the closing of its mind.

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