Reproduced from Swarajyamag.com (2nd May, 2016) Click Here .
In response to historian Sanjay Subramaniam’s charge in The SundayTimes (20 December 2015) that the coming of BJP government had
endangered academic freedom in India because of growing atmosphere of
“intolerance” being engineered by the NDA government, I had sent a rejoinder to
TOI on 22nd December saying that the leftists were crying wolf since they still
retained Stalinist type control over most academic institutions and that it was
not the Left but those who dissented with the Left who remained endangered and
marginalized.
Giving my own example, I wrote “I was invited to join the
CSDS when it was not a Left citadel. In today’s CSDS, I wouldn’t even get a
peon’s job!” (My rejoinder was published in The SundayTimes on 3rd January 2016).
I had no idea that the ruling coterie at CSDS would want to
prove me right so soon, so brazenly and with such vengeance.
I was invited to join the CSDS in 1991 when the founding
fathers of CSDS were still at the helm of affairs. They considered me a
valuable addition to CSDS on account of my role as editor of Manushi and my own
research, writing and active interventions which were nationally and
internationally celebrated as having pioneered new thinking and socially rooted
approach to women’s and human rights issues. In those days, CSDS was a genuine
citadel of liberalism and therefore much hated and defamed by the Left.
Therefore, voices like mine were welcomed, not throttled.
