This is the seventh consecutive academic year when I would have gone as a visiting faculty member to the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad to teach an elective course on ‘Transformational Social Movements’ to the second year of Post Graduate Programme students. But the invitation has not come so far and it looks like it is the end of my teaching stint at IIM, at least so long as the Bharatiya Janata Party remains in power at the Centre.
I had got an inkling of things to come even during my month-long last stay on campus during June-July, 2023. For the first time, guests, including a retired high court judge, were not allowed to enter the campus to meet me. A Harvard scholar was told that he could enter the campus only on the condition that he would not see me. I had to take a film-making team which had arrived from Mumbai, after they waited at the main gate for more than a couple of hours on a rainy day, to conduct an interview on the practice of prostitution by a community in a village in my work area as an activist in Hardoi district of Uttar Pradesh, to Ahmedabad Management Association campus across the road from the IIM old campus. I was told by the chief administrative officer of IIM Ahmedabad that this could not be considered an academic activity.
My argument was that I was invited to teach this course because of my experience as a grassroots activist and hence for me it was part of my academic activity. To bolster my argument I also told him that I could use the film in my class one day, when it is made, in a session on women’s rights. But he would not listen to any reason.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.