In the latest deportations and attempted deportations of students and scholars from the United States, it is a bit surprising to see the names popping up of Hamas-supporting Indian students, who are in that country legally. Indian students abroad were always thought to be sensible, hard-working, concentrating in their studies, keeping their opinions and ideologies—if they had any—to themselves. It is well known that several radical-left student activists of Bengal’s Naxal movement, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, left the Indian shores for the US when the heat from the police became unbearable. They turned full capitalist during their stay in the US and flourished in their respective fields, never to return to their homeland. That is the kind of effect the United States has always had even on “ideologically” motivated students and scholars who have gone to study there. As for the rest, they have always stayed away from ideological battles and extreme ideas and have reached the top of American society through sheer hard work. Radicalisation is a word that cannot be associated with them. This is the reason why Indian-Americans have the highest median household income in the US. So it comes as a surprise to hear that some Indian students have been supporting Hamas’ terrorist activities in the name of supporting the Palestinian cause—that they have been participating in campus protests in favour of the Hamas’ 7 October 2023 barbarity. This problem has become sufficiently mainstream for even a Microsoft employee of Indian origin to get sacked for disrupting an official program in support of the Palestinians.
To a large extent, this is a reflection of the hold that the leftists have had first, on our universities, and then the increasingly tighter grip that they have on the liberal arts segment of the western universities. The situation has become so bad in the West that the phenomenon has come to be known as wokism. Add to this cauldron the term intersectionality and you have a right royal mess brewing on western campuses, threatening to swamp Indian campuses as well. Intersectionality is a relatively new word to enter the western academic-activist space. To quote the Encyclopaedia Britannica, intersectionality means the “interaction and cumulative effects of multiple forms of discrimination affecting the daily lives of individuals… The term also refers more broadly to an intellectual framework for understanding how various aspects of individual identity—including race, gender, social class, and sexuality—interact to create unique experiences of privilege or oppression.” To put it simply, if someone is picking up women’s rights—specifically, women of colour—as a cause, then that person should also be ready to align oneself with causes like the “oppression” of Dalits by upper caste Hindus, of the blacks by the whites, of Palestinians by the Israelis, etc. It is about “interlocking oppressions” in areas like gender, sex, race, ethnicity, caste, physical appearance, and so on. Hence, anyone working on caste will automatically pick up the cause of Palestinians or Kashmiris, and go on campus protests, become anti-Hindu, anti-Jew, will support sex change operations of ten-year-olds, will fight for transgenders’ “right” to use women’s toilets, or play in girls’ teams. In other words, wokism or far left activism has resulted in the complete brainwashing of at least two-three generations of youngsters or more—and the academics are completely guilty of carrying out this brain-washing. Hence, it should not come as a surprise that Ranjini Srinivisan, the PhD scholar, who self-deported for fear of being jailed after her visa was cancelled, was working on the topic of caste in the Kolar goldfields as part of her urban planning dissertation. How caste comes into urban planning in 21st century India, no one knows, but unsurprisingly, she was also an anti-Semite and has been accused of being a supporter of the terrorist organisation Hamas.
The problem may not be that acute in India, yet, but there is a strong streak of loony left in India’s academic space as well, much of it imported from the West. It is just that India is far too rooted in its culture and tradition for its academic space to sink in wokism. In fact, India has started coming out of the hold that the left has had over academics for decades, which has resulted in the distortion of India’s history. The fight-back that has just started must continue. Even the West has started revolting against the loony left’s plan of destroying the family as the core of human social existence. Donald Trump’s victory is a testimony to that.
While it may be argued that the number of such “woke” Indian students is small when compared to the hundreds of thousands of students studying in the US, the problem is the perception. How many Chinese students have been deported for getting involved in anti-Semitic activities? Zero. Why isn’t that the case with the Indians? Hence, it is time to introspect why a section of our youth is going astray and how this can be prevented.
