Break Up India Gang Targets IIT Kanpur: Proven Plagiarism in PhD Thesis Counter Blasted by Fake Charges of Caste Discrimination

PART - I

India takes pride in its IITs as globally celebrated centres of excellence. Indian taxpayers money goes into funding these institutes to compete with the best in the world. When media (Wire.in: https://thewire.in/caste/400-academics-condemn-caste-discrimination-institutional-harassment-in-iit-kanpur; Countercurrents: https://countercurrents.org/2019/04/05/caste-discrimination-at-iit-kanpur/) reported that 400 scholars, academics and activists from 16 countries, representing a comic mix of institutions and freelancers have endorsed a statement of solidarity against the “caste-based discrimination and institutional harassment” of a Dalit academic from IIT-Kanpur, Dr. Subramniam Saderla, I could immediately sense that yet another sinister conspiracy against India is brewing fast and furious.

The smear campaign against IIT Kanpur arouses suspicion for the following reasons-- 

1. The only source of the petition is a report in The Indian Express. No original source or document has been cited. Surely, the signatories, eminent as they should know that a Petition cannot be based on a news report. 
2. A motley group of academics in remotely placed foreign universities had joined hands with political activists, writers, dancers, filmmakers- have arrogated to themselves the right to sit in judgement over and  demonise IIT Kanpur--one of the prime educational institutions of India-- without even the pretence of seeking facts from the concerned institution, leave alone carrying out a thorough investigation into the matter;
3. Even a casual glance at the list of signatories is enough to convince any non-partisan person with a modicum of integrity that this is a well calculated move by forces hostile to India to use their Indian mercenaries to defame and destroy the best of academic institutions in India in a manner similar to the CIA backed puppets targeting ISRO in 2000. 
4. Most of these worthies have an established track record of being sympathetic to Break-Up India Forces & the Tukde Tukde Gang.
5. The most astounding name is #276 on the list: Robert Langdon, the fictional character of Dan Brown’s best seller-‘Da Vinci Code’ and ‘Angels and Demons’.  Intriguing how he came out of the fiction to sign the petition to support one Dr Dr. Saderla in Kanpur -- A new code, definitely.
6. Professional India/Hindu basher Arundhati Roy is leading this pack along with another professional India basher and Sonia Gandhi acolyte Noam Chomsky; accompanied by Mallika Sarabhai, Gita Hariharan, Gayatri Spivak Chakravarthy- -and many such compulsive critics of the political party currently heading the Government of India;
7. The list of signatories also includes some well known Urban Naxals such as Nalini Sundar, Ram Punyani, Achin Vanaik, Anand Teltumbde, Abhishek Atreya, Abhishek Dhar, Nivedita Menon among others. 
8. Most of the foreign academia signatories are repeat offenders who are willing to lend their name to any and every campaign against India whenever their political bosses order them to do so as for example, Alpa Shah, Dilip M. Menon, Abhishek Bhattacharyya, Chandra Talpady Mohanty.
9. Just as the leaders of this group – Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky -- have no connection to science and technology, the majority of signatories are from the field of humanities and social sciences, with not even a cursory knowledge of what a Ph. D. in Aerospace Engineering from an IIT entails. Such a ham-handed hit job can only be unleashed by paid hirelings or those who are executing hidden agendas of powerful vested interests due to ideological commitment or monetary rewards.
10. None of these signatories or partisan news reports unleashed by them, mention the fact that Dr. Saderla had filed FIRs against four eminent professors of IIT Kanpur under the draconian SC/ST Atrocities Act. This law has been often misused by unscrupulous persons as an instrument of blackmail, extortion and vendetta. So rampant has been its misuse that the Supreme Court of India had recommended amendments in this Act to remove easy-to-misuse & lawless provisions in this Act.  Are the local police of Kanpur competent to decide the veracity of plagiarism charges and the suitability of a candidate to hold an academic post?

Sadly, the fear of political backlash prevented Government of India from implementing the suggestions of the Supreme Court with regard to SC/ST Atrocities Act. Under the abovementioned Act (as with domestic violence law & anti rape law) mere allegation is enough to get the accused person arrested and jailed even before the trial has begun. Contrary to the foundational principle of Indian jurisprudence that a person is assumed innocent till proven guilty, under the SC/ST Act, the burden of proof is on the accused. Getting bail is extremely difficult in such cases. Proving one’s innocence in such cases can take years, if not decades. This means that the lives and academic careers of the accused professors would have been destroyed forever even if at the end of the trial they are declared innocent, while Dr. Saderla would have lorded over IIT Kanpur unchallenged for times to come since everyone in IIT would be terrorised into silence by the harm he could inflict on those who dare question his wrongdoings.

Since the names and political track record of signatories against IIT Kanpur rang alarm bells in my mind, I decided to contact my old friends in IIT Kanpur and get their version of the story.

I delineate below the facts provided by the academic community of IIT Kanpur and  relevant documents in support of their version which prime facie indicate that Dr. Saderla is likely to have misused the SC/ST Atrocities Act as a weapon of vindictiveness to escape scrutiny of charges of  outright plagiarism.

Given all these implications, I urge every Swarajya reader to give careful attention to the following facts as provided to me by reliable sources in IIT Kanpur.

The IIT Kanpur version:

This  case is not about caste. It is about cheating. Let’s look at facts.

Subramniam Dr. Saderla was appointed assistant professor on January 1, 2018 in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, under a Special Recruitment Drive (for SC/ST/OBC/PwD) in IIT Kanpur.  On March 14, 2019, IIT Kanpur’s highest academic body - the Senate - pronounced him guilty of plagiarism in his doctoral thesis and decided that his Ph. D. thesis be withdrawn and recommended to the Board of Governors of IIT Kanpur that his Ph. D. degree be revoked. This decision has triggered a media protest alleging that a Dalit professor’s degree is threatened because he had complained about being harassed on account of his caste by some IIT professors. 

Without any investigation into the academic document and no knowledge of technical subjects, a media campaign has been orchestrated to question and protest against the expertise of the institution to judge whether a technical document of research is plagiarized or not. 

An entire Institute is being harassed and destroyed by people who think they know more about doctoral thesis and its evaluation than established Professors with years of experience.  This is a systematic conspiracy to suppress plagiarism simply because the person involved in plagiarism happens to belong to a certain caste. Does conjoining the word ‘Dalit’ with ‘professor’ make plagiarism acceptable? No matter how many ‘leading scholars’ sign a petition to pressure IIT Kanpur’s Board of Governnor’ decisions, let us remember (1)   only the IIT Kanpur Senate – comprising 200 odd senior Professors holding doctoral degrees from leading Universities across the World -- is qualified to make that judgment, and (2) being an expert in one field does not qualify one to comment on another. The experts who have signed the petition should know this.

The facts are simple and speak for themselves.  On 15.10.2018 an email was received by the Director, IIT Kanpur and other faculty members of IIT Kanpur from an anonymous source which alleged plagiarism in the Ph. D. thesis of Roll no. Y10101064, which was, in fact, that of Dr. Saderla when he was enrolled in IIT Kanpur as a doctoral student. The email included the thesis of Dr. Saderla and sources from which entire pages had been lifted. The common portions had been highlighted. In this email, the sender compared Dr. Saderla’s case to a previous case of plagiarism by Abhishek Singh, an M. Tech. student of the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Kanpur, whose M. Tech. degree was revoked by the IIT Kanpur’s Board of Governors in 2017, following a recommendation by the Senate. The sender demonstrated that the amount of plagiarism in Dr. Saderla's thesis was not just limited to introductory chapters, as in the case of Abhishek Singh, but is of a much greater magnitude. 

In his email, the student writes:

“I am also unhappy and misillusioned to see the severe discrimination between student and faculty on campus when applying academic rules. For a small error, SSAC and Senate easily terminate a student. Our intentions and capability are questioned when we may be merely acting out of ignorance. Even more importantly we do what we do because we have faith in our guide and our teachers. But when a faculty commits serious mistakes he is left off without even a warning. I have seen faculty exploit students, forge data, misuse project funds and even plagiarise.  Some do it openly and are never challenged. Some are challenged but never punished. Some are never challenged and also awarded. The hypocrisy of IITK and the academic system is getting to me now. It makes me wonder, why do I spend sleepless nights over my work at all? I can simply copy.”

According to the student, paragraphs after paragraphs, pages after pages have been copied by Roll no Dr. S. Dr. Saderla in his Ph. D. thesis from at least two theses of his seniors, and even a paper published by one of them. Not only the Ph. D. thesis, but  Dr. Saderla has also copied material worth an entire page in a paper published by him in International Journal of Intelligent Unmanned Systems from the thesis of Roll no Y4101064. Would a good Journal have accepted this paper if it knew of this plagiarism? Will this Journal continue to accept this if it was told about the plagiarism? At the same time, the plagiarized paper would, no doubt, have played a role in Dr. Saderla’s career progression.

The email sender attached Dr. Saderla’s thesis with highlighted portions that were copied from the thesis of his seniors. The student mentions: “For example, page 1-5 of   Chapter.1 of Prof. Prof. Subrahmanyam.S’s thesis are an exact copy of page 29-34 of Chapter.1 of Prof. N.Peyada’s thesis. Again, page 145-149 of Chapetr.6 is an exact copy of page 87-92 of Prof. N.Peyada’s thesis. Section 7.3.1 of Prof. Prof. Subrahmanyam.S’s thesis is an exact copy of Section 5.1 of the 2014 paper of Kumar & Ghosh in The Aeronautical Journal, vol. 118. So is Section 7.3.2 from Section 5.2 of the paper and section 7.4 from section 5.4 of the same paper. The entire Appendix A of Prof. Subrahmanyam.S’s thesis is a complete copy and paste of the Appendix B of the thesis of Prof. R. Kumar

Dr. Saderla immediately converted this into a caste issue. He filed an FIR against four professors of the institute, without any evidence, to support his charge that they were responsible for the email. The Hon'ble Allahabad High Court, stayed the FIR in totality on 22.11. 2018 — a very rare event which only highlights the mischievous intent of the FIR.  

On 12.11.2018, another anonymous email was received by the Institute Director and faculty in which the sender claimed that he/she had been proved right. While there were reports that police action will be pursued against the anonymous sender, no action was initiated against Dr.  Saderla. The sender alleged that Dr.  Saderla had plagiarized his M. Tech. thesis as well. The sender said that entire Chapter 1 is copied from Chapter 1 of the thesis of Girish Sagoo. This is identical to the plagiarism of the EE student Abhishek Singh whose M. Tech. degree IIT Kanpur cancelled. Large parts of Chapter 4 are copied from Chapter 6 of another student (Roll no. Y210165). Section 4.4 is taken from a book of Jategaonkar without any reference. The introduction of Chapter 5  is copied from an AIAA paper. The gravity of the plagiarism in Dr.  Saderla’s M. Tech. thesis is perhaps best captured by the fact (see included image) that nearly the entire last chapter on “Conclusions and Future Work” is copied! If the Conclusions are copied, what was the contribution of the M. Tech. thesis?  

A cursory look at the attachments received from the anonymous source reveals that the extent of plagiarism in the Ph. D. thesis is alarming and, indeed, far more extensive than the precedent case of Abhishek Singh’s M. Tech. thesis as briefly shown below:

1. Descriptions and discussions of his results are copied. For example, as the anonymous student points out, on p. 194-195 in Sec. 7.3.4(b) of Chapter 7 when discussing his research data, Dr.  Saderla writes “The estimated parameters are compared to the wind tunnel estimates (column 2). It can be observed [Tables 7.5(a-b)] that the estimated aerodynamic parameters such as C_(Y_β), C_(l_β), C_(l_(δ_a )), C_(n_β) are consistent and in close agreement with the wind tunnel estimates for most of the lateral-directional flight data sets. The most of the flight data sets gave consistent values of the estimated damping (C_(l_p) and C_(n_r)) and the cross (C_(l_r) and C_(n_p)) derivatives (parameters). The obtained values of aerodynamic parameters such as C_(Y_p) and C_(Y_r) were also consistent for most of the flight data sets. However, the values of the estimated parameters such as C_(Y_0), C_(l_0) and C_(n_0) deviates from the wind tunnel estimates but their value is quite small or negligible as desired for most of flight data sets.” This is copied almost exactly from the top para of “Estimation of lateral-directional aerodynamic derivatives from flight data using conventional and neural based methods” by R. Kumar and A. K. Ghosh (The Aeronautical Journal, 118, 1453-1479, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001924000010149). So blatant is this copying that even Dr.  Saderla agreed to this tacitly in comment 3 of his rebuttal letter to the institute. Of course, this begs the question: If the description of data is copied, can we trust the data? If not, then what was the Ph. D. given for?
2. Technical explanations of anomalous data have been copied verbatim in places from the 2011 Ph. D. thesis of Dr. Rakesh Kumar. How can it be that data collected after an interval of 5 years has exactly the same discrepancy? Was the data the same, simply mined again? Then, what was Dr. Saderla’s Ph. D. research about? 
3. On p. 43 of his Ph. D. thesis, Dr. Saderla claims that “our flight vehicles are powered by electric motors, the weight of the aircraft remains constant throughout the flight.” Later, in Sec. 6.2, where all four pages are lifted verbatim from REF, Dr. Saderla writes, however, that “The exact location of CG during flight is determined from the instantaneous fuel quantity …”. Thus, while plagiarizing Dr.  Saderla has forgotten that his vehicles run on electric motors, not fuel!
4. Finally, around 50% of the final conclusions are copied. If so, then have you really said anything new in your Ph. D.? 

All the evidence, all facts suggest that Dr. Saderla is a repeat offender -- who has plagiarized portions of both his postgraduate theses, as well as a published journal article. Repeat offence attracts a far higher penalty — see, for example, the UGC guidelines cited below in this article — and this would make it even harder to defend the continuation of Dr. Saderla in his current position as a faculty in one of the premier Institutes of the country.

Before proceeding further, let’s first note the process through which plagiarism complaints are handled at IIT Kanpur:

Step 1: Matter is referred to Academics Ethics Cell (AEC) for investigation. The AEC only identifies the extent and source of plagiarism. It is a preliminary fact finding body and its recommendations can be overruled by statutory bodies such as SPGC (step 3 below) and Senate (Step-4 below). It does not have the mandate to recommend punishment and the final decision in any case lies in the hands of the Senate or the Board.

Step 2: The report of the AEC is shared with the accused for his/her response/clarification/defence.

Step 3: All documents are given to the Senate Postgraduate Committee (SPGC) for discussion and recommendation, which includes suggestions for appropriate punitive action.

Step 4: Everything is placed before the Academic Senate of IIT Kanpur, which is the highest decision making body for all academic matters and consists of nearly 200 members, all Professors. The Senate discusses the matter in detail and gives a decision. In academic matters this is the final decision. It can, when necessary, also recommend revocation of degree in matters related to plagiarism of theses to the Board of Governors of IIT Kanpur. Only when the Senate has decided, can it be claimed whether or not IIT Kanpur has found a student to have plagiarized.

This is a very thorough and transparent process.

IIT Kanpur Director asked the Academic Ethics Cell (AEC) to investigate both the Ph. D. and the M. Tech. theses. The AEC submitted its report to the Director in early November, which was then passed on to Dr. Saderla for his response.  What did the AEC report say? It most certainly did not exonerate Dr. Saderla of plagiarism, as is being made out in the media. The committee [AEC] felt  strongly about the infractions of matching or nearly matching  passages should be immediately corrected. AEC report found copying in certain introductory passages in several chapters and in mathematical basics and preliminaries. It found  the complaint to be prima facie correct because sections  specified pages in the thesis  matched corresponding  specified pages in the other research  documents by other authors. Dr Dr. Saderla was to  give an apology letter to Director IIT Kanpur, in view of his misdemeanour. However, Dr. Saderla has never tendered an apology for his misdemeanour, as subsequently noted by the Institute.

The Senate Post-Graduate committee (SPGC), a statutory sub-committee of the Senate, considered the report of the AEC and the evidence provided, and recommended that several pages were plagiarized and, as such, the current Ph. D. thesis of Dr.  Saderla should be withdrawn immediately. Furthermore, noting that the letter tendered by the student (Dr.  Saderla) is not an apology, the SPGC said that there should be an apology by Dr. Saderla for plagiarism.  A revised thesis needs to be submitted and be evaluated de-novo according to the Senate’s decision.  The SPGC recommendations were unanimous, and were agreed upon by the Chairperson of the Academics Ethics Cell who is a member of the SPGC and attended the meeting.

Matters finally arrived at the Academic Senate on 14.03.2019. It is widely held that a strong Senate is the core that protects the academic integrity of an Institute, and their presence, and probity, is why, even after 60 years, the older IITs have gone from strength to strength. The Senate discussed the matter in excruciating detail and finally accepted the SPGC recommendations, which included that Dr. Saderla's thesis be withdrawn immediately. The Senate, exercising its statutory powers, also recommended to the Board of Governors that Dr. Saderla's Ph. D. degree be revoked, as was done in the precedent case of the M. Tech. student Abhishek Singh. This is consistent with the Plagiarism Policy of IIT Kanpur as given in the Senate approved manual on disciplinary matters (so called SSAC manual of IIT Kanpur).

IIT Kanpur Senate decision on Dr. Saderla has a precedent in 2017.  IIT Kanpur had then, withdrawn the Masters thesis and revoked the M. Tech. degree of Abhishek Singh, a student of Electrical Engineering, when his thesis was found to have been plagiarised. The student was recalled from his job in order to register, revise, and resubmit a corrected thesis. This decision of IIT Kanpur, as of universities worldwide, seeks to implement a zero-tolerance policy regarding plagiarism. It is noteworthy that in his M. Tech. thesis, Abhishek Singh had plagiarised only the Introductory chapters and nowhere else, but IIT Kanpur held that plagiarism is unacceptable in any form.  Dr. Saderla’s plagiarism is severer than this M. Tech. student because the degree in question here, a Ph. D., is much higher than the M. Tech. degree of Abhishek Singh. While the latter’s copied content was limited strictly to the Introductory chapters, Dr. Saderla has copied content throughout his Ph. D. thesis, as indicated above. 

The decision of the IIT Kanpur Senate, clearly follows the practice of universities world-wide based on the understanding of Plagiarism as “The practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.” (Oxford English Dictionary).   Plagiarism is a fundamental crime in academics, where communication is through the written word. It is wrong on all ethical and moral counts because a plagiarist

• Seeks to build his/her reputation, gain credit or some benefit fraudulently by relying upon the efforts of someone else;
• Tries to cover his/her own lack of knowledge, expertise, creativity or hard work by misrepresenting the work of someone else as their own.
• Plagiarism is also legally wrong, as the ownership of a written work lies with the author (or the publisher), and taking it without permission is tantamount to stealing.
• It is important to make two remarks in the context of plagiarism in academic research in engineering: In contrast to, say, literature, the entire contribution of an engineering research can often be in a sentence or two. Therefore, plagiarism in engineering cannot simply be measured in terms of volume or percentage.
• In a thesis, or even a research article, the Introduction is a crucial part. A well written Introduction says that the author has understood the work of past researchers, and is able to place his/her work in the proper context. Thus, by copying an Introduction, a plagiarist is attempting to falsely misrepresent his/her academic depth and/or hide the fact he/she is unaware of the current state of knowledge. 

UGC guidelines state that more than 10% similarity constitutes plagiarism, without discriminating between Introduction and other parts of the work. Section 8 of the UGC guidelines stipulates that, in case the degree has already been obtained and plagiarism is proved after award of degree or credit, then the degree or credit shall be put in abeyance for a period recommended by the appropriate statutory body overseeing academics in the Institute. The punishment increases greatly if this is a repeat offence. 

Dr. Saderla has plagiarized close to 25% of both his M. Tech. and Ph. D. theses, which makes him a repeat offender, the least punishment, as per UGC guidelines, would be that Dr. Saderla’s Ph. D. degree be held in abeyance for at least a year. Because no such mechanism exists, IIT Kanpur had, previously, revoked the degree of the M. Tech. student Abhishek Singh in 2017. To newly create such a mechanism only to save Dr. Saderla’s Ph. D. degree, but not Abhishek Singh, who had plagiarized less, only once, and in a lower degree (M. Tech.), would, of course, suggest that IIT Kanpur discriminates between students on the basis of caste. 

Despite due diligence having been followed in the case of Dr. Saderla and the precedent case of Abhishek Singh, enormous pressure is being mounted upon the Institute by one-sided/ motivated reporting in the media. Without a smidgen of proof, the media has decided to lend full support to a weird collection of academics and activists attempting to give a casteist hue to a straightforward case of plagiarism. Without accessing the details of the case, reporters are pronouncing judgement on what constitutes plagiarism. Where were the campaigns and the international luminaries in 2017 when IIT Kanpur revoked the M. Tech. degree of Abhishek Singh who was from the general category? Therefore, is what is being played out in the media caste politics, or an objective academic discourse? Plagiarism is a fact, and not a matter of opinion, and hence is blind to race, religion, gender, caste, color, nationality, ethnicity, region, age.

Practice Makes Perfect?  

This is not the first time that Dr. Saderla has taken refuge under caste or invoked the SC/ST Act to escape the scrutiny of his academic credentials. This is what he did when he was initially recruited as Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, by IIT Kanpur. Within 12 days of joining, Dr. Saderla alleged that he was harassed and discriminated based on his caste by four senior faculty, in particular, of IIT Kanpur. This claim was filed ONE day after several faculty raised questions that the manner in which the 2017 Special Recruitment Drive (meant for SC/ST/OBC/PwD), through which Dr. Saderla was recruited, had compromised fundamental rights of other SC, ST, OBC and PwD candidates. Available facts do indeed raise serious questions about the Special Recruitment Drive of 2017. But that is a story for another day. The issue today is “Did Dr.  Saderla plagiarise his M. Tech. and Ph. D. theses?” This is an academic question, bereft of caste and not a matter of opinion or social justice.  The answer to the question is, unfortunately, an unequivocal “Yes”. The response to plagiarism is a matter of Institutional policy, and not social crusade. The Academic Senate of IIT Kanpur has, under the autonomy given to it by the Indian Constitution, taken the stand of “zero-tolerance” to plagiarism. This stand should be respected and applauded, not made the villain of an ill-informed, neo-colonial campaign. Of course, how one can have a percentage of tolerance towards plagiarism boggles the mind. Would Chomsky tolerate plagiarism at MIT?

After several inquiries, the Board of Governors (BoG) in its meeting on 6th September, 2018, found that there was NO evidence to invoke Section 3 of the Act 33 of 1989 (Atrocities Act) against any of the four faculty whom Dr.  Saderla had accused of caste harassment. In fact, one of the faculty was exonerated of all charges.

Despite, the decision of the BoG, Dr. Saderla did not give up on invoking caste.  He went to the NCSC to challenge the decision of the BoG in exonerating the four professors of caste allegations. The NCSC orders were again stayed by HC Allahabad. 

It is clear that Dr.  Saderla has found out that by invoking his caste and the SC/ST Act to complain to the NCSC and file FIR, he can terrorize and suppress questions about his academic credentials, or convert serious academic concerns into media hysteria and signature campaigns over Dalit prosecution. Does that augur well for the Indian academic system?  The attack on the academic autonomy of IIT Kanpur, sanctity of its institutional mechanism, policy framework, most of all the experience and expertise of our academicians will inflict long-term damage to the IIT system, and its academics which is immeasurable and irreparable.

Strangely enough, the Institute administration appears to be cowing down under the media onslaught distorting the issue of plagiarism into one of harassment of a Dalit professor and is afraid to bring up the issue of plagiarism in the M. Tech. thesis of Dr. Saderla to the notice of the Senate. This is especially relevant given that the Board will meet on 8 and 9 April to discuss this matter and knowing the Dr. Saderla is a repeat offender would have important bearing on the Board’s decision.

Lastly, those in the media who lent enthusiastic support to this hit job aimed at IIT Kanpur need to answer the following questions

• Will the verdict of  media, writers, dancers,  activists and the local police constable on technical scientific matters over-ride  the Senate of IITs?
• Are signature campaigns going to usurp the academic sovereignty of IITs?
• Is a motley crowd of scholars  based in western universities, and fictional protagonists like Robert Langdon, going to dictate the academic standards in India’s institutes of national importance?
• Would the Western universities, even under their programs of diversity hiring, accept as faculty, a minority candidate whose thesis violated plagiarism policies followed by them?
• Would even acclaimed  scholars, whose names are associated with the petition that ‘calls upon’  IITK Senate to ‘rescind’ its decisions on Dr Saderla’s PhD  thesis and degree, allow and accept similar  ‘social justice’ media petitions from sundry fields to influence their academic judgments? If not, is this a campaign to dumb down IITs?
• Why are journalists assuming merely by word of mouth and without serious investigation of credible evidence, that the Senate of an eminent institute like IIT Kanpur — which has 200 odd senior Professors — is trivialising and distorting  academic issues into caste- based vendetta?”’

Given this background and the facts provided by respected academics from IIT Kanpur, the smear campaign unleashed by this international network of academics and activists comes with a clear message —“You natives don’t know how to run your institutions or manage inter- community affairs. We, who are situated in foreign universities, will teach you how to behave.” This is a ‘civilizing mission’ in a new sinister avatar.

We had better wake up to the fact that those interested in Breaking-up-India have been working hard to create caste and communal conflicts in India for   centuries. They have on their pay roll very glamorous names among academics, journalists, writers, filmmakers, politicians and people within the system. And they have spared no occasion to humiliate and demonise India by using dubious and controversial  propaganda tracts about  caste and  religion based atrocity as their favourite weapons.

This is not just a matter affecting four IIT professors or the survival of IIT as a premier institution. It is also about the survival of India as an independent nation instead of being ruled by foreign agencies through remote control. If we allow foreign lobbies to destroy the autonomy of IITs and hijack decision making of key institutions and ministries, we are sounding the death knell of higher education in India. 

First published in Swarajya, April 7, 2019.  See Link: https://swarajyamag.com/politics/iit-kanpur-case-is-plagiarism-okay-if-you-are-from-the-right-caste

He Wants to “Smash Brahminical Patriarchy” : Holding a Mirror to the Racist Arrogance of Jack @Twitter

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey with a poster saying "Smash Brahmin Patriarchy" poses for a photo. (Credit: Twitter)

The outrageously racist slogan –“Smash Brahminical Patriarchy” --that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sported on a placard for a photo op after a closed door meeting with handpicked Indian feminists--would have gone unchallenged but for the a whole array of intellectual warriors that have emerged after decades of Nehruvian slavery to the West. They successfully punctured the pompous description of that meeting by journalist Anna MM Vetticad, who wrote, @Jack "took part in a roundtable with some of us women journalists, activists, writers... to discuss the Twitter experience in India. A very insightful, no-words-minced conversation."

Twitter India has issued a half hearted statement in defence of their CEO.  But it carries no conviction. The very selection of persons Jack chose to interact with in that close door meeting, spoke volumes. It is now well established that Twitter favours “Break Up India” and anti Hindu voices, including those of Maoists, Kashmiri Jehadis and professional Hindu baiters.

He chose not to invite any of those who have for long felt aggrieved at Twitter favouring India bashers and undermining and even blocking voices that stand up for Hindu culture & civilization. Thus the really aggrieved were left out and the pampered children of Twitter who want to have us all banned out of existence were the ones given close door audience.

It is not a coincidence that half British, half Italian, Jack Dorsey was raised a Catholic and his uncle is a Catholic priest in Cincinnati. He attended the Catholic Bishop Dubourg High School. Jack seems to have spoken not so much as the CEO of one of the most versatile products of IT industry but as a Christian who imbibed all the prejudices and aggression against Hindu civilization from his Christian upbringing. They find various pegs to hang their frustration with Hindu civilization and the attacks come under various garbs—rights of women, rights of Dalits & minorities—a euphemism for Islamists and evangelicals out to harvest Hindu souls in India. Sometimes it is Brahmanism, at other times it is the alleged threat posed by “fascist Hindutva and BJP” or “the monster” that is Modi.  The real target behind each of these is Hindu civilization.

This game of demonizing Hindu civilization in general and Brahmins in particular started once the British morphed from humble traders come to “The Wonder that was India” in search of its legendary material & intellectual wealth to colonial rulers who acquired control of large territories in the Indian sub-continent through force and fraud.

Christians have good reason to be angry with Brahaminical hold over Hindu society. Brahmins have been repositories of traditional knowledge and scholarship, including astronomy, physics, technology, mathematics, architecture, engineering & health care in the form of Yoga and Ayurveda. They composed the greatest classics of world literature, philosophy, science and technology millennia before the Christian world acquired an alphabet and developed the art of reading and writing. The awareness of this great heritage is what kept most Hindus from being swept off their feet and embrace Christianity. The fact that despite 200 years of British colonial rule, Hindus could not be converted to Christianity en masse has left the Christian world in a permanent state of outrage against Hindus in general and Brahmins (meaning carriers of Hindu traditional knowledge systems) in particular.

As for patriarchy and its evils, Jack needs to understand, it is the Abrahamic religions which have gifted misogynist ideas and ideologies to this world. Even their respective Gods are authoritarian patriarchs who are jealous and vindictive. And they treat women as sub human creatures. By contrast Hindu faith traditions continue to be matriarchal despite centuries of onslaughts, ridicule and tyrannical pressures on Hindus to give up their culture.

Feminine in the Christian Vs Hindu Imagination: The Christian civilization in the West was founded on the creation myth which asserts that God created Eve – the Mother of Mankind as a seductive temptress who was misguided by Satan appearing in the form of a serpent to eat the “forbidden fruit” from the Tree of Knowledge.  She in turn seduced Adam through her wiles leading to the downfall of the entire human race with Adam & Eve being thrown out of the Garden of Eden in disgrace and condemned to suffer till redeemed by Jesus Christ.  The Holy Bible says, “Öf the women came the beginning of the sin”.

But even before Eve turns into a destructive temptress, we are told that while God made Adam in his own image, he created Eve out of Adam’s “Spare Rib” in order to provide him a playmate in the Garden of Eden.  In other words, the feminine in the Christian imagination is not only made out of “faltu haddi”(spare rib), an  easily dispensable material of the male body but also created as an afterthought to be Adam’s plaything. Her existence has no intrinsic meaning or purpose.

The Iconic scientist Richard Dawkins says, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, caprciously malevolent bully.

With such a Malevolent God in command of the Christian world who assigns such a nasty role to women, it is no surprise that this world’s historic gift to women is Pornography which treats women as sub-human sex objects, as Use & Discard pieces of flesh. The, West has spread this disease globally and made it fashionable to use women’s bodies and sex appeal to sell everything from car tyres to soaps and cold drinks.

Let’s now compare the Christian imagination with the Hindu imagination with regard to the place and role of the feminine. The Hindu view of the feminine is not just relegated to ancient history but continues to have a living presence in our daily lives even today though it has had to jostle for mind space with competing ideologies and cultural influences imposed on us by wave after wave of foreign invaders, including the cultural imperialism of the West afflicting the whole world today.

An essential tenet of Hinduism—pre-Vedic, Vedic and post-Vedic—is that Shakti, the feminine energy, represents the primeval creative principle underlying the cosmos. She is the energizing force of all divinity, of every being-- both animate and inanimate. Furthermore, different forms and manifestations of this Universal Creative Energy are personified as a vast array of goddesses Lakshmi, Saraswati, Durga, Kali and their countless regional avatars.

Therefore, she is worshipped under different names, in different places and in different appearances, both as a Creator, Vanquisher & Destroyer of Evil. But Hindu deities don’t remain just distant heavenly figures. One constantly meets living incarnations of the divine in everyday life.

It is very common, for example, for a talented daughter to be commended as a virtual Saraswati and a fearless woman who battles wrong doings in society to be treated as Durga incarnate. Thus, every village in India has its gram devi or devata. The gram devatas are usually connected with extreme piety, but all the legends surrounding gram devis tell us of ordinary women who felt outraged by the acts of some evil doer who either tried to ravish them or cause harm to society. Their response to such desecration is to rise in terrible fury and thereby grow in stature so that they are able to span both heaven and earth. In each case they either destroy the devilish persona or punished it appropriately.  Any woman who manifests extraordinary strength and who is believed to be her own mistress, totally unafraid of men, begins to be treated with special awe and reverence and often commands unconditional obedience in her social circle, including from men.

It is perfectly understandable that this Brahmanical worldview could not be stomached by by pathologically patriarchal Christians or Islamic zealots. So they used all manners of stratagems to convert us to their respective religions. The latter went so far as to loot, plunder, desecrate and destroy countless Hindu temples and sacred sites in wave after wave of persecution spread over a 1000 years –all in order to force us to abandon and despise our faith traditions. Many succumbed to their persecution and converted. But those of us whose ancestors withstood centuries of persecution are being treated as a threat and hence targets of intellectual warfare.

Those who see India through the biased prism of the West tell us that women in India were not allowed to read or write till the British came up and introduced “modern education” in late 19^th century. In Europe women began to write and publish only in 19^th century. Even at that time, the prejudice against educating women was so strong that many had to use male pseudonyms. By contrast, the RigVeda, the oldest available text in Sanskrit or any Indo-European language written over 5000 years ago, mentions 30 rishikas (women sages) by name with specific hymns associated with them.

Ancient India produced countless women scholars and Smritikars who became living legends in their own time, recognized and celebrated by society at large as well as male authority figures of the time. One of the foremost names in this category is that of ancient philosopher

Gargi Vachaknavi (daughter of sage Vachaknu, born about c. 7th century BCE). She is said to have written many hymns in the Rigveda and chose not to marry all her life. Her own contemporaries honoured her as Brahmavadini, a person with knowledge of Brahma Vidya.

Adi Shankara, the most influential scholar of Advaita Vedanta celebrated the dialogues of another legendary figure Maitreyi with sage Yajnavalkya as the most profound expositions on the knowledge of the oneness of Atman and Brahman. Two of Delhi’s premier colleges are named after Gargi and Maitreyi. They may be the best remembered icons of feminine accomplishment in popular imagination today. But India produced countless such female scholars and spiritual leaders over millennia.

The Bhakti Movement which began in 1st century in Tamil Nadu and spread in waves in different parts of India till the 17^th C produced a whole range of extraordinary, wise, courageous and creative female saint poets whose names are revered even today in their respective regions.  They are considered at par with, and often superior to, their male counterpoints.

Almost all women saints obliterated the male-female binary, broke all the restraints imposed on women and lived remarkably free lives.  They lived and wandered alone, freely mixing with people of both genders as well as classes and castes.   Most of the women saints refused to get tied down in the shackles of domesticity.  Some refused marriage altogether while others walked out of marriages they found oppressive. Here are glimpses of a few of the earliest saint poets who began being venerated within their lifetimes and continue to inspire Hindus even in 21^st century. And people of all castes draw their inspiration from them.

The life of Avvai, a Tamil sant, a Shiva devotee who lived during the 1^st century is spell-binding.  She began composing poems of deep wisdom from when she was merely 4 years old. When she grew up to womanhood, marriage proposals began pouring in. Instead of arguing with her parents, she freed them of the responsibility by praying to Shiva that her youth and beauty should vanish since they were coming in the way of her chosen path.  

Immediately, Avvi was transformed into an old and haggard looking woman and thus freed from the obligation or expectation to get married.  Thereafter, she became a wandering teacher who let it be known that she would henceforth take care of the weak and orphaned and came to be revered as a spiritual guru.  She composed 13 books including one on materia medica, one on metaphysics in addition to 10 works which contain ethical sayings that including challenge to notion of “high” and “low” based on caste rather than karma.  She travelled from one part of the country to another, sharing the gruel of the poor farmers and composing songs for their enjoyment.  She was much sought after by chieftains of her time with some of them vying with each other to get her to settle in their respective kingdoms. But she refused to be bound down in any one place and lived the life of a wandering minstrel till she chose the moment of her departure from this world.

Even today her poems for children are often among the very first literature that children are exposed to in Tamil Nadu schools.

Late AK Ramanujan wrote that in the Virshaiva tradition of Kannada alone, he found that 60 of the 300 known saint poets were women. Of these the most famous is 12^th century woman sant, Mahadevi Akka. Nearly a 1000 poems are attributed to her. Mahadevi Akka became a passionate devotee of Shiva at a very early age. Since she grew up into a beautiful young woman, a local chieftain named Kaushika fell in love with her and somehow managed to get married to Akka Mahadevi through coercion. But she set onerous conditions for their relationship and gave him an ultimatum that she would walk out on him if he persisted in forcing himself on her.  In a supreme act of defiance which communicated her resolve to altogether reject sexual attention, she cast away her clothing and wandered naked with just her long tresses covering her body searching for soul mates among a community of saints. In her poems of passion she addressed Shiva as her beloved, to whom she had surrendered all. She declared, “My Lord, white as jasmine, is my husband; take these husbands who die, decay, and feed them to your kitchen fires!”(Speakers of Shiva, p-134)

Andal, who probably lived in 8^th or 9^th century A.D. is accepted as the highest among Alvars-the Vaishnav saints of South India in terms of literary merit and wisdom of her teachings.  In remembrance of Andal’s  unique relationship with Krishna, even today, a garland offered to her image at the temple in her hometown Srivilliputtur is taken to the famous Tirupati temple on the occasion of Venkatesa’s wedding festival, and to Madurai every year in the month of Chittirai (April-May) to adorn the deity there.

She too refused to marry, declaring herself the bride of Krishna. Her father willingly escorted the 16 year old Andal in bridal attire to the Srirangam.  After she fulfilled her wish of marrying her chosen beloved, she mysteriously got absorbed into a murti of Vishnu.  She left behind two poetic works.  But the tone and tenor of her poems to Krishna are not that of a meek devotee.  They assume intimacy and the attendant right to even express anger at the beloved.

The first woman saint poet in Marathi lived from 1233 to 1308.  She was a Brahmin widow, granddaughter of a learned woman priest and composed two narrative poems on the wedding of Krishna and Rukmani. 

Muktabai born in 1279 is considered one of the founders of Varkari sect along with her brothers Sopan Nivritti and Jnandev. She died at the young age of 18 and yet left a deep imprint with the profound wisdom contained in her abhangs. She is said to have surpassed many sages in wisdom and became the Guru of Yogi Changdev. Many of her abhangs are cast in the form of dialogues with other sants, and in these she discourses with them as an equal.

Another outstanding woman sant is Janabai, who is given special status because as per legend Krishna himself transcribed her verses and said he derives much pleasure from doing so. He would also join in helping her with all the household chores to save her from drudgery.

Lal Ded, the 14th century mystic poet, is alive even today in the memory and the language of Kashmiris, both Hindus and Muslims, as the Mother of Kashmiri Language as we know it today. Her vakh or verse sayings are part of the repertoire of village singers and of the sufiana kalam-- Kashmiri classical music, sung as a sacred invocation at the start of an assembly of sufis or spiritual seekers. Unhappy with her marriage, Lalla left her husband’s home and set out on her wanderings. The legend is that she wandered naked, singing and dancing in ecstasy. Lalla is placed first in time amongst modern Kashmiri poets and is also considered the mother of modern Kashmiri language and literature. Her vakh helped make Kashmiri an effective vehicle for the expression couched in deep philosophy.

Her poetry had opened new channels of communication between the elite and the common people. And it lives in the daily conversation of Kashmiris even today. 

Had such women appeared in the Christian world, they would have in all likelihood been branded as witches and burnt at the stakes as happened to countless women for centuries on end in medieval Europe. Western feminist scholarship has established that a large proportion of women hounded & burnt as witches were learned women or women of outstanding valor, such as Joan of Arc. Given that Jack @Twitter comes from such an inglorious heritage, he should speak with greater humility when dealing with the role and status of women in Hindu culture. 

This is not to deny that a large number of women in India have come to occupy subordinate position and face varied forms of discrimination. Today, the culture of son preference often takes lethal forms such as female feticide and disinheriting daughters from parental property. But there is enough evidence to prove that most of these ills have been the outcome of 1000 years of brutal conquests, slavery & subjugation by invaders who practiced severe forms of misogyny, including capturing Hindu women to be sold as sex slaves in Arab markets or confined to harems of Islamic rulers. Under such circumstances, confinement of women was a distress response, not a matter of choice. One of the traumatic responses to these brutalities was the tradition of jauhar among Rajputs whereby women voluntarily chose to be burnt alive rather than be captured by Islamic invaders. Today, westerners attribute all these practices to Hindu misogyny rather than Islamic brutality.

It is noteworthy that confinement of women in chardiwari is more typical of North Western regions of India that witnessed repeated Islamic conquests, loot, plunder, massacres and en masse capture of women as sex slaves. Where ever Hindu communities lived under Islamic rulers , Hindu women also took to ghunghat and purdah. Southern and Eastern India managed to escape the culture of crippling restrictions and women continued to move around in public without veiling themselves. In traditional Hindu art forms, women are never portrayed as veiled. This is evident in all our temple architecture from the ancient to the contemporary where the carved images of the feminine form are invariably modelled upon the greater goddesses.

Traditionally, large parts of India were home to matrilineal family systems. But they could not be sustained in those areas which witnessed repeated Islamic invasions and/or Islamic rule. However, matrilineal family structure and inheritance pattern survived till 20^th century in many parts of South India and North East. It is worth reminding Twitter @Jack that the Victorian minded British administrators of India and the European missionaries, who followed in their wake, described the social and sexual freedom available to women among matrilineal communities of India in the foulest of terms and tarred them as prostitutes. By making their subjects ashamed of their women centric family structure, the British instigated social reform movements to force these communities to abandon their millennia old social system and adopt the patriarchal family system held superior by the British. When they carried out land settlement operations, they insisted that families had to be male headed and over rode the diverse personal laws of Hindus and forced them to adopt the patriarchal family structure prevailing in Britain with concentration of economic resources in the hands of men.

Thus for nearly 1000 years, our society has been forced to adopt the social economic and cultural norms superimposed by invaders. Since India failed to decolonize its education system and knowledge traditions in post-Independence India, many Hindus have been brainwashed into accepting alien norms superimposed on Indic culture as our very own Hindu/Indic traditions.

Consequently, the modern educated Indians, especially those in the grip of foreign funded feminism have grown up internalizing all the negative stereotypes about India as God given truths. But these are not borne out by facts of history. Even after adopting misogynist practices, Hindus could not be persuaded to abandon Goddess worship or to erase their traditional values which tell them that every woman is the embodiment of Devi and hence worship worthy. Countless rituals keep this memory and value system alive even today.

This is what explains the radically different response of Hindu society to modern day women’s rights movements as compared to the Christian or the Islamic world. For example, when in 19^th century western feminists were battling male power bastions and getting battered for demanding right to education & property,  right to vote and entry into professions—in India countless male reformers gave their entire lives to get rid of restrictions imposed on women during Islamic rule and bring women’s right at par with men’s. They created new schools, colleges and other institutions to enable women to occupy their rightful place in society.

Lala Devraj in Punjab, Maharshi Karve, Mahatma Phule in Maharashtra, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar in Bengal, Kandukuri Veerasalingam in Andhra, Periyar Ramasamy in Tamil Nadu, Swami Dayanand Saraswati from Gujarat and many stalwarts of social movements bore the brunt of attacks from the orthodox opinion resisting changes and enabled women to acquire leadership positions in public life. Many of them treated their wives as valuable comrades and helped them to emerge as leaders in their own right.

All these reform movements merged into Mahatma Gandhi led freedom movement in the 20^th century. Within the freedom movement, Indian women did not have to fight for their rightful space. Gandhi & countless others worked hard not just to create a favourable eco-system for women to participate in the movement for Swaraj, but also assume leadership positions. Unlike in the Christian West, women in India got equal rights and even leadership role without waging gender war.  

It is noteworthy that Brahmins of both categories—those using certain caste names with Brahmanical association as well as those who were Brahmins on account of being intellectual leaders of society-- were in the forefront of women’s rights movements.

Annie Besant was elected as Congress President in 1919 Sarojini Naidu was Gandhi's choice for Congress president ship in 1925. British suffragists got right to vote at par with men only in 1928. How Indian women came to be represented in legislatures in 1920s holds a mirror to the Christian world: When Montague and Chelmsford came to India in 1917 to work out some reforms towards self-government, Sarojini Naidu and Annie Besant led a small delegation of women to demand that the same rights of representation in legislatures be granted to women as well. British snubbed them saying, the yet to be “civilized” Indians would not be ready to give women equal rights.

However, the British were not only proven wrong but also shown as being far behind Indian men. Between 1922 and 1929, beginning with the Madras legislature, each one of the legislatures voted to make it possible for women to be represented in them on same terms as men. This happened without any rancor or battle by Indian women.

As early as 1931, Congress Party passed a Resolution that in free India, right to equality would be a fundamental right & that there would be no discrimination in education, employment, public life or politics. All these rights came to Indian women gracefully and with near unanimity, without women having to wage a gender war, the way western feminists had to do.

Jack@Twitter would do well to take note of the testimony of Margaret Cousins, an Irish feminist who played a major role in women's organisations in India as well as in Britain, :

"Perhaps only women like myself who had suffered from the cruelties, the injustices of the men politicians, the man-controlled Press, the man in the street, in England and Ireland while we waged our militant campaign for 80 years there after all peaceful and constitutional means had been tried for fifty previous years, could fully appreciate the wisdom, nobility and the passing of fundamental tests in self-government of these Indian legislators...

Barring a handful, both 19^th century reformers as well as Gandhi-led (as opposed to Nehruvian) reformers drew inspiration from the egalitarian worldview rooted in Vedanta and reverence for the feminine as expressed in the uniquely Hindu value system. Gandhi as well as earlier reformers used traditional icons like Sita, Draupadi, Gargi, Maitreyi, Mirabai, Rani Laxmibai as role models for women. Unlike modern day educated elites, their ideas of women’s role in society were not blindly borrowed from Western liberalism, individualism and its offshoot—feminism.

In short, Hindu society graciously accepted constitutional equality and much more without a fight because of the continuing hold of our traditional value system with regard to women whereas the Christian world has yet to get over the misogynist values intrinsic in its religion and civilizational roots. That is why in the West as well as intellectual slaves of the West in India defend the perversion that is pornography as “freedom of expression” and “ liberating women’s sexuality” from patriarchal controls.

To sum up my message to Jack @Twitter: Physician Heal Thyself! In this exercise Goddess worshipping Hindus alone, with their Brahamanical tradition of worshipping the feminine as the all powerful force that moves and sustains the universe, can help you heal by getting rid of intellectual slavery to a misogynist, racist, genocidal, jealous and revengeful God!


First published in The Open Magazine on November 25, 2018