New attempt to capture academia?
From my article in The Hindu today, New science awards, old political project:
The government has been trying repeatedly to shut … the opposition to its policies and world view emanating from academia, a space the Hindutva programme has thus far failed to breach by choking funding and revenue through the Finance Ministry and provisions of the Foreign Contributions (Regulations) Act, using bad science or pseudoscience, interfering in administrative matters, and even using violence. …
This said, nothing illustrates the ham-fisted character of the government’s attempts … as clearly as the sites of ‘alternative’ scholarship it has set up. The purpose of these sites appears to be to realise or sustain the plausibility of the claims of the Hindutva political project. … Having failed at political capture from the outside, the BJP has been taking the inside-out route. The RVP awards seem like an attempt to bring scholars in line by hijacking their reward mechanisms.
