Professor Suryanarayana Doolla of IIT Bombay was booked under provisions of the SC/ST Act after a student whom he had reportedly caught using ChatGPT during an examination died hours later. The professor, who was performing invigilation duties, soon found himself at the centre of protests, allegations of caste discrimination and demands for action against him even before the police investigation had established what had happened. The case has since triggered outrage over how a premier technology institution can become vulnerable to identity-based mobilisation over something as basic as enforcing an examination procedure.
The controversy has also revived a larger question about the direction in which India’s IITs are moving. These institutions were created primarily to produce scientists, engineers and technologists. Yet over the decades, they have increasingly become experimental grounds for full-fledged humanities and social-science departments, postgraduate programmes and research ecosystems. The concern is no longer whether engineers should learn ethics, communication or economics. It is whether importing autonomous humanities ecosystems into technology institutes also imports the ideological frameworks and activist politics that have transformed university campuses across the world.
Protests followed, and the family reportedly refused to take the student’s body, seeking compensation and the invocation of provisions of the SC/ST Act against the professor. Mumbai Police registered a case containing charges, including under the said provisions. IITB, however, stated that Wakode had never previously complained about caste discrimination either to the administration or the SC/ST Cell on campus.
The allegation against the professor was enough to transform the campus. Students protested for three days and submitted an 18-point charter that included demands for Doolla’s suspension, an independent inquiry, greater student representation, compulsory sensitisation workshops for faculty and administrative changes. IIT Bombay Director Shireesh Kedare signed the charter, Doolla lost his deanship, and the institute apologised for its earlier communication about the circumstances preceding Wakode’s death.
Things kept escalating, and the narrative began to become considerably less straightforward. IIT Bombay’s Faculty Forum backed Doolla, saying he had been performing his duties in accordance with the Senate-approved academic policy. Students and alumni also issued statements supporting him. Wakode’s close friend Yatish Kumar told NDTV that he had never observed his friend experiencing caste discrimination and said the examination episode appeared central to what happened, although Kumar acknowledged that he could not know everything Wakode experienced.
On 22nd September, OpIndia reported that CCTV footage from the examination hall showed Wakode apparently looking at an object in his pocket before Professor Doolla approached him, questioned him and took him aside. According to the report, the footage did not show Doolla publicly humiliating the student in the examination hall. The IIT Bombay Student Representatives body also softened its position, saying it did not condone academic misconduct, stood with Doolla as a member of the faculty community and wanted an impartial investigation.
The matter is now under police investigation. The campus political machinery, however, did not wait for that process. According to media reports, students associated with Left and Ambedkarite activism have taken prominent roles in the protest. Among them was Huma Namal, a Humanities PhD scholar who was seen leading slogans asserting that casteism existed at IITB. Sociology professor Suryakant Waghmore separately confronted the IIT Bombay Faculty Forum over its support for Doolla and questioned its intervention in the matter.
Notably, Waghmore’s academic profile is itself problematic. IITB listed his areas of research as social exclusion, politics at the margins, caste, marginalised groups, state-civil society relations and social movements. His work examines how exclusion operates and how marginalised groups mobilise politically. These are not peripheral interests accidentally colliding with campus politics. They concern precisely the categories through which much contemporary political mobilisation is organised.
IITB was built to produce scientists and engineers. However, an examination incident could now travel almost instantly through the vocabulary of structural discrimination, caste hierarchy, marginalisation, institutional power, representation and collective mobilisation.
The problem is not the vocabulary by itself. Concepts such as discrimination, marginalisation and institutional power can describe real social problems. The problem begins when these concepts become ready-made political frameworks through which an incident is judged before its facts have been established, and when they are weaponised against basic institutional functions such as maintaining academic discipline and enforcing an examination system. To understand how such frameworks acquired this power inside universities, one has to look at how parts of the humanities moved from studying society to seeking its transformation.
The intellectual foundations of what is now loosely described as “woke” campus politics were laid long before the term itself became fashionable. Karl Marx located social conflict primarily in material relations. Ownership, labour and class provided the foundation through which political institutions and social arrangements could be interpreted. The capitalist and worker occupied different positions because one controlled the means of production while the other sold labour.
In the 20th century, the Frankfurt School widened that critique. Intellectuals and scholars associated with Germany’s Institute of Social Research, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, remained heavily influenced by Marx but extended their attention beyond economics towards culture, authority, psychology, mass society and the institutions through which social arrangements reproduce themselves.
Critical Theory also gave scholarship an explicitly transformative purpose. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the Frankfurt School tradition as seeking the critique and transformation of society, with emancipation among its practical aims. Horkheimer’s Critical Theory was supposed to do more than accumulate knowledge about the existing world. It sought to expose domination and contribute towards changing the conditions that produced it.
This particular intellectual move changed the role available to the scholar. A researcher studying an institution could ask how it functioned. A critical theorist could ask whose interests it served, which hierarchy it maintained, who was excluded by its rules and what political or social changes were required to dismantle those structures.
Academic inquiry and political transformation could occupy the same intellectual project. Later scholars expanded the field. For example, Michel Foucault shifted attention towards the relationship between knowledge and power and towards institutions that classify, discipline and regulate people. His work became enormously influential across sociology, literature, history, gender studies and other humanities disciplines.
Feminist theories placed sex and gender relations at the centre of analysis. Postcolonial scholarship examined culture and knowledge through histories of imperial power. Critical race scholarship argued that racial disadvantage could persist through structures and institutions even without an openly racist individual producing every unequal outcome. Queer theory challenged established categories concerning sex, sexuality and normality.
These traditions did not develop as one centrally organised movement, but their cumulative effect was enormous, affecting educational institutions worldwide. The objects capable of being analysed as manifestations of power expanded from property and class into language, knowledge, culture, identity, sexuality, race, colonial history and ordinary institutional practice.
Politics consequently acquired an almost unlimited field of operation. A curriculum could reproduce hierarchy. Language could perpetuate exclusion. Representation could become a form of power. Food preferences could be analysed through caste or race. Admission criteria could reproduce privilege. Standards that appeared neutral could be challenged as products of historical dominance. Scholarship equipped activism with both a vocabulary and an intellectual justification.
There is very limited room for such intellectualism in the field of engineering, as physical reality imposes unusually unforgiving boundaries. A bridge does not remain standing because its designer has the correct politics. A chip does not become faster because its architect has written an elegant theory of power. A failed algorithm cannot be rescued by arguing that its output deserves a different interpretation. Engineers simply do not have time to become “intellectuals”, as their job demands logic and evidence.
On the other hand, humanities operate in a completely different terrain. A sociologist studying inequality chooses which variables deserve attention. A historian chooses which events and causal explanations require emphasis. A literature scholar may read the same text through class, caste, colonialism, gender, psychoanalysis or religion. Two competent scholars can work from the same material and construct sharply different interpretations.
While humanities also demand evidence, the interpretation of the “evidence” depends on who is reading it, and the person has considerable freedom in how to interpret it. Political assumptions therefore have more opportunity to shape which questions are asked, which explanations appear persuasive and which problems become academically fashionable.
Once a department develops a dominant intellectual framework, the process can reinforce itself. If social relations are habitually examined through oppression and privilege, scholarship searches for new areas in which oppression and privilege can be identified. Each additional application supplies another body of scholarship supporting the framework. Academic politics then becomes self-reproducing.
A 2026 review by Heterodox Academy examined two dozen studies of political attitudes among US university faculty published between 2012 and 2025. Although estimates varied considerably, the studies consistently found that left-leaning faculty outnumbered right-leaning faculty. The imbalance was generally larger in the humanities and some social sciences than in STEM, economics, business and several other disciplines. Ratios found by different studies ranged from roughly 2:1 to 82:1.
The machinery of academia can perpetuate that imbalance without requiring any central authority. Professors supervise doctoral scholars. Existing academics sit on recruitment committees. Researchers review their colleagues’ work. Departments decide what courses are taught, which theoretical traditions students are expected to master and what subjects deserve new appointments. The people already occupying a discipline therefore exert enormous influence over the people who will occupy it next.
Research has found evidence that political imbalance can go beyond self-selection. Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers surveyed a combined 800 social and personality psychologists and found that only 6% described themselves as conservative overall. Conservative respondents feared professional consequences from revealing their politics, while many respondents said they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues in decisions ranging from reviewing papers to hiring. The more liberal the respondents were, the more willingness to discriminate they reported.
A field develops a strong ideological reputation. Students comfortable with that worldview become more likely to enter it. Those hostile to its assumptions become less likely to imagine a career there. Faculty trained in the existing intellectual culture supervise the next generation and eventually hire from it. Political imbalance starts looking like disciplinary consensus because fewer people remain inside the discipline to challenge its assumptions.
By the 2010s, American universities had moved far beyond professors holding private progressive opinions. The politics had become institutional. Yale University provided one of the defining cases in 2015. After university authorities circulated advice concerning culturally insensitive Halloween costumes, lecturer Erika Christakis questioned whether administrators should be deciding what costumes adult students could wear.
The resulting confrontation expanded into protests over race, inclusion, emotional safety and the university’s responsibilities towards minority students. Christakis stopped teaching the following semester, while Yale issued a public statement saying that she retained the university leadership’s support and stressing that freedom of expression and academic inquiry were paramount principles.
Middlebury College followed in March 2017. Political scientist Charles Murray was invited to speak, but student protesters disrupted the event. Murray and Professor Allison Stanger managed to continue their discussion from another location. When they later left the building, protesters confronted them and attacked the vehicle in which they were leaving. Middlebury President Laurie Patton described pushing, shoving and violence and announced an independent investigation.
Evergreen State College became an even stronger warning later that year. For years, minority students and faculty had participated in a voluntary “Day of Absence” by meeting off campus. In 2017, organisers proposed asking white participants to remain away from campus instead. Biology professor Bret Weinstein objected, arguing that voluntarily removing oneself from a shared space was fundamentally different from asking another racial group to leave it.
Students demanded that Weinstein be fired. “Fire Bret” graffiti appeared on campus, demonstrators searched for him, and the campus police chief advised him to remain away temporarily for his safety. More than 50 faculty members later signed a letter seeking a disciplinary investigation of Weinstein. He and his wife eventually resigned after settling their legal claims against Evergreen for $500,000. The college admitted no liability. Evergreen cancelled the Day of Absence the following year.
At Berkeley, a university synonymous with America’s Free Speech Movement faced demands in 2017 to cancel an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos. Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said the university could not prohibit a speaker on the basis of his views, even when those views were considered hateful or discriminatory. The event nevertheless became the focus of violent unrest and was cancelled.
Stanford Law School supplied a later example in March 2023 when students repeatedly disrupted Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan during an invited event. A university DEI administrator became involved in the confrontation. Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez subsequently issued a memorandum stressing that protest was protected but disruption was not, introduced mandatory training for law students on freedom of speech and professional norms, and established protocols for future events.
These controversies arose at different institutions under different circumstances, but the institutional trajectory was strikingly similar. Concepts organised around identity, harm, exclusion, representation and power moved from scholarship into student activism. Student activism generated demands upon administrations. Administrations created bureaucratic mechanisms to answer those demands.
DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) statements showed how deeply this infrastructure could reach. American universities increasingly asked applicants for faculty positions to explain their commitments, experience or proposed contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion, social justice, antiracism or belonging.
A Heterodox Academy analysis of more than 16,500 faculty job advertisements from the 2025 hiring cycle found that 11% of full-time advertisements explicitly required applicants to address DEI in their application materials. The figure had fallen dramatically from approximately 25% in 2024, but another 37% of 2025 advertisements still indicated that DEI commitments would be valued. Social sciences and humanities were more likely than STEM and professional disciplines to request DEI material. Only 13% of advertisements requesting DEI-related material mentioned viewpoint diversity.
Ideas that began as subjects of scholarship had therefore acquired a role in determining who could join the academy. Universities were no longer merely studying competing ideas about equality. They were asking prospective employees to demonstrate their relationship with one particular institutional vocabulary surrounding it.
The Cisco caste case showed how quickly contested identity claims could travel from workplace allegations into law and public policy. California’s Civil Rights Department sued Cisco engineers Sundar Iyer and Ramana Kompella in 2020 over allegations that they had discriminated against a Dalit colleague. According to Iyer’s account and court material cited by OpIndia, the complainant had been recruited and highly compensated by Iyer, while another Dalit employee had been offered senior leadership positions. The state voluntarily dismissed its case against Iyer and Kompella in April 2023.
Yet the Cisco controversy had already become one of the most prominent examples invoked in America’s caste-discrimination debate. California’s SB 403 subsequently sought to explicitly include caste within the state’s definition of ancestry for civil-rights protections. The bill passed the legislature but was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom in October 2023, who said existing California law already prohibited caste discrimination and that the legislation was therefore unnecessary.
The episode demonstrated the larger danger of converting disputed identity-based allegations into broad institutional assumptions. By the time the underlying case weakened, the political framework built around it had already travelled into a statewide legislative battle.
The same framework spread through universities elsewhere. At the University of Cape Town in 2015, student protests targeted the campus statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes. The university council voted to remove it after a month of demonstrations centred on colonial symbols, racism and transformation. The statue came down on 9th April.
Rhodes Must Fall then travelled to Oxford. Campaigners demanded the removal of Rhodes’s statue from Oriel College and broader changes concerning representation, curriculum and the university’s colonial inheritance. More than 1,000 protesters assembled outside Oriel in 2020 after the campaign revived during the Black Lives Matter protests. The college expressed its wish to remove the statue and established an independent commission. Planning and heritage complications eventually led it not to begin the removal process, but it adopted measures involving research, equality and diversity and installed contextual information about Rhodes.
A dispute over one statue had developed into a project concerned with whom universities commemorate, what they teach, who works and studies there and how colonial history should shape the institution in the present. The political logic was no longer contained within any individual course. It had become a theory of institutional transformation.
The backlash is significant because some elite universities are now attempting to recover boundaries they allowed to collapse. The University of Chicago had articulated the principle much earlier. Its 1967 Kalven Report argued that universities should protect the political freedom of individual faculty and students while generally refusing to take institutional positions on political and social controversies. The university, in that conception, exists as the arena for disagreement rather than as another political participant.
Harvard moved in the same direction in 2024. Its Institutional Voice Working Group concluded that the university and its leaders should not issue official statements about public controversies that do not directly affect Harvard’s core academic function. The university accepted the recommendation, reasoning that official positions could damage institutional credibility and make disagreement more difficult for members whose views conflict with the university’s declared position.
The trajectory should matter to India. Some of the world’s most prestigious universities spent years allowing political frameworks to seep from departments into institutional administration. They are now rediscovering the usefulness of boundaries, neutrality and viewpoint diversity. India, meanwhile, is deliberately expanding humanities ecosystems inside the country’s premier institutes of technology.
Humanities departments were present in IITs almost from their foundation. IIT Bombay‘s Humanities and Social Sciences department dates to 1958. IIT Madras describes HSS as one of its foundational units, established in 1959. The original purpose was compatible with a technological institute. Engineers require communication, economics, ethics and some understanding of the societies their work affects.
That modest educational purpose did not remain modest. IIT Bombay’s HSS department today has 41 faculty members and 265 students on its rolls. It awards PhDs across its disciplines, runs an MA-PhD programme in Philosophy and offers an MA by Research in Human Sciences, Sociology, and Linguistics, Literature and Performance.
The MA by Research programme was launched in 2022-23 and explicitly prepares graduates not only for academic research but also for journalism, media, content production, think tanks, museums, galleries, international research agencies and NGOs. This is a self-contained humanities postgraduate programme. Its purpose goes far beyond supplying ethics or communication classes to BTech students.
The movement from humanities for engineers towards humanities inside an IIT as an independent academic ecosystem had begun much earlier elsewhere.
IIT Madras launched its five-year Integrated MA in July 2006, during the first UPA government. Official IIT Madras annual reports record that the programme began in the 2006-07 academic year. By 2011, its curriculum had two streams, Development Studies and English Studies.
IIT Madras later described the programme as a milestone in its contribution to liberal arts and social-science higher education and said it had opened an avenue for arts and humanities students to enter IIT Madras. Students no longer entered the Institute of Technology to study technology while acquiring humanities exposure. Students could enter IIT Madras because they wanted an arts and humanities education.
The programme eventually evolved again. IIT Madras today offers two-year MA programmes in Development Studies, Economics, English Studies and Public Policy, with 25 Indian seats in each stream. The department says the courses prepare students for careers across academia, publishing, policy, governance and corporate consultancy.
Development Studies itself illustrates how far removed this can be from the popular defence that engineers need “soft skills”. Its curriculum has included subjects such as Foundations of Social and Political Thought, International Relations, history, Western philosophy and other social-science courses.
The available IIT records establish the 2006 expansion. They do not show that the UPA government personally designed the curriculum or ordered IIT Madras to start it. The relevant development is institutional: under the higher-education environment of the period, a premier technology institute crossed into standalone liberal-arts education.
The current government has not reversed this expansion. It has incorporated the underlying philosophy into national education policy. NEP 2020 explicitly states that even engineering institutions such as IITs “will move towards more holistic and multidisciplinary education with more arts and humanities”. It calls for rigid disciplinary boundaries to be removed and says departments in Literature, Languages, Philosophy, Indology, Art, Sociology, Economics and numerous other subjects should be established and strengthened across higher-education institutions.
This is considerably more ambitious than asking a computer-science student to study ethics. It represents an ideological commitment to the comprehensive multidisciplinary university as the preferred institutional form.
A Swarajya essay published soon after NEP 2020 warned that following this model could turn specialised institutions such as IITs and IIMs into copies of campuses such as JNU. Its broader warning concerned precisely what Western experience had already demonstrated: importing departments does not merely import subject matter. Academic fields carry intellectual cultures, professional networks, political assumptions and forms of activism with them.
The government may oppose JNU-style Left politics electorally, but its education policy is helping reproduce the academic structures through which such politics acquires institutional permanence.
The expansion becomes harder to justify when the composition of Indian higher education is considered. The All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2023-24 puts total higher-education enrolment at 4.50 crore. Arts accounted for 32.1% of undergraduate enrolment, compared with 13.5% for Science and 12.9% for Engineering and Technology. Around 1.1 crore students were enrolled in Arts programmes, more than twice the number studying Engineering and Technology. At postgraduate level, Social Science was the largest stream, accounting for 18.6% of enrolment.
The IIT system is tiny by comparison. AISHE 2023-24 recorded total IIT enrolment of 1,49,839 students. India therefore has no shortage of institutions in which literature, sociology, political science, philosophy and related subjects can be studied. What it has in far shorter supply are institutions carrying the infrastructure, selection standards, research capacity and international reputation associated with the IIT name.
Turning those specialist institutions into general universities solves no obvious shortage in humanities education. It does risk diluting one of the institutional models India has managed to make internationally recognisable.
IIT Bombay offers a particularly useful case because the humanities ecosystem is no longer theoretical.
Professor Suryakant Waghmore’s official IIT profile places social exclusion, marginalised politics, caste, social movements and state-civil society relations at the centre of his work. During the Wakode controversy, he publicly opposed the Faculty Forum’s defence of Doolla. OpIndia has separately documented his political commentary on caste, vegetarianism, the RSS, Hinduism and other subjects.
What makes the episode important is not merely that caste was discussed on an IIT campus. It is the speed with which an unproven interpretation acquired institutional consequences. A professor enforcing an examination rule was booked under a stringent law, removed from an administrative position amid protests and publicly cast within an oppression framework before investigators had established whether caste played any role in the incident. When ideological frameworks begin deciding what an event means before evidence does, they cease to function merely as academic tools and start affecting the basic integrity of the institution itself.
OpIndia has also documented the public political positions of Anupam Guha, an Assistant Professor at IIT Bombay’s Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies. IIT Bombay’s own profile says his research seeks to apply an “immanent critique of the political economy of techno-social systems”, with interests including the political economy of AI, AI and justice, AI and politics, labour and digital societies. OpIndia reported that Guha had publicly described himself as a communist and had taken positions on the CAA, Article 370, capitalism and other political controversies.
Another controversy emerged in 2023 around a course taught by IIT Bombay HSS professor Sharmishtha Saha. According to OpIndia, students complained after guest speaker Sudhanva Deshpande discussed Palestinian armed figures and political violence during a session of the course Performance Theory & Praxis. The episode brought a contentious international political conflict directly into a humanities classroom at a technology institute.
During the present Wakode agitation, a Humanities PhD student emerged as one of the visible voices asserting casteism within IIT Bombay, while a Sociology professor fought publicly with the faculty body defending the accused engineering professor.
An HSS department does not merely teach engineers how to communicate. It recruits faculty whose professional work centres on caste, exclusion, identity, political economy and social movements. It trains postgraduate scholars in those disciplines. It hosts courses built around political theory and social interpretation. The people and concepts generated by this ecosystem then participate in the politics of the wider campus.
Engineering departments can produce political individuals. Humanities departments produce political vocabularies, theoretical frameworks and generations of scholars trained to apply them. That gives them far greater institutional reach.
IIT Bombay is not an isolated example of academics using the authority of elite institutions to push political narratives. In 2023, an unpublished paper by Ashoka University economist Sabyasachi Das claimed to find evidence suggesting electoral manipulation benefiting the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The paper was amplified politically, including by Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, before completing peer review. Ashoka University publicly distanced itself from the controversy, stressing that it valued research subjected to critical peer review and that the social-media activism of individual faculty members did not represent the university. OpIndia had debunked the claims made by Das.
IIT Gandhinagar has faced similar questions over the political conduct of academics. In 2025, old social-media posts by Material Science professor Amit Arora went viral in which he mocked Prime Minister Narendra Modi, described “Bharat” as a “Brahmanical, oppressive, and bigoted version” of India, reposted material supporting Umar Khalid and expressed support for pro-Palestinian student activism. The controversy came amid separate questions over research themes and ideological activity within IIT Gandhinagar’s Humanities and Social Sciences department.
Such cases show how the influence of academic politics can travel beyond the classroom. Professors attached to prestigious institutions do not speak in a vacuum. Their institutional credentials give political claims an authority that ordinary activism does not possess, allowing ideological interpretations to enter media narratives, public policy debates and eventually political decision-making.
The defence usually arrives in one sentence, that is, ‘engineers need humanities too’. An engineer may need ethics. Artificial-intelligence developers should understand privacy and responsibility. Civil engineers work in communities and need to understand economic and social consequences. Communication matters. History of science can be useful. Philosophy can sharpen reasoning.
All of that can be taught without transforming an Institute of Technology into another general university. Engineers need accounting, but an IIT does not consequently need a standalone BCom programme. Engineers encounter laws, patents and regulation, but an IIT does not require an autonomous law school merely to teach intellectual property. Doctors require statistics without every medical institute becoming an independent university of statistics.
The logic suddenly changes when humanities are involved. A reasonable demand for broad undergraduate exposure becomes the justification for independent postgraduate programmes, doctoral pipelines, autonomous research agendas and departments that have less and less connection with the technological purpose of the institution.
IIT Bombay openly advertises its MA by Research as preparation for careers in journalism, media, museums, cultural institutions, think tanks and NGOs. IIT Madras trains independent students in English Studies and Development Studies. These programmes are not designed to produce better engineers. They produce humanities graduates.
There is a form of interdisciplinary education that makes obvious sense inside an IIT. A philosopher working with computer scientists on AI ethics can contribute directly to technological research. An economist studying automation and productivity fits naturally alongside engineers building automation systems. A psychologist researching human-machine interaction has an obvious connection with technological design. Scholars studying technology policy can contribute to questions of regulation, labour and innovation.
That is interdisciplinarity organised around the mission of a technology institute. An independent English Studies programme preparing graduates for publishing is not the same model. Nor is a sociology ecosystem primarily organised around caste, social movements and marginalised politics. India has thousands of institutions capable of housing those disciplines. The prestige of an IIT should not itself become the reason every discipline deserves a place inside one.
The assumption driving multidisciplinary policy is that specialisation represents an educational weakness, but experience suggests the opposite. AIIMS does not need an English Literature department to remain one of India’s premier medical institutions. National Law Universities are not deficient because they do not award degrees in mechanical engineering. Specialist research institutes achieve excellence precisely because money, people and institutional attention are concentrated around a clearly defined purpose.
IITs acquired their prestige through science and technology. Every expansion consumes more than money. New departments require faculty positions, administrative attention, buildings, scholarships, research funding, committees and representation in institutional decision-making. They create new constituencies with their own academic priorities and their own demands for further expansion.
A subject becomes a department. A department acquires postgraduate programmes. Programmes create faculty lines. Faculty supervise doctoral researchers. Researchers reproduce the discipline. Students organise around the questions the discipline studies. The department eventually becomes a permanent institutional interest.
Western universities have already run this experiment. Critical theories moved from scholarship into activism. Activism moved into university administration. Identity politics generated DEI bureaucracies. DEI principles entered faculty recruitment. Campus disputes began to revolve around speech, representation, identity and harm. Administrators found themselves adjudicating ideological disputes unrelated to their universities’ traditional academic missions.
Harvard is now restricting institutional political speech. DEI statement requirements in American recruitment are falling sharply. Universities are rediscovering viewpoint diversity after decades in which ideological imbalance was allowed to deepen. India does not need to repeat the entire cycle before learning from it. The IIT Bombay episode has already shown the early stages.
A disciplinary incident involving an engineering examination rapidly became a caste-political confrontation. An engineering professor faced an SC/ST Act case and lost his administrative position before the investigation had established the allegations against him. Left and Ambedkarite activists mobilised. A Humanities research scholar became a visible voice in the agitation. A Sociology professor challenged the faculty body defending his colleague. The institution apologised for its initial account. Days later, CCTV footage and statements from Wakode’s friend and the Student Representatives body complicated the narrative that had produced the mobilisation. The ecosystem was ready before the facts were.
That is precisely what ideological institutions do. They supply a ready-made explanation through which an ambiguous event can immediately be interpreted. For Marx, it may have been class. For later critical traditions, the available categories multiplied. On a contemporary Indian campus, caste provides an exceptionally powerful one.
India can teach humanities without turning IITs into humanities institutions. It can fund sociology departments in universities created for social sciences. It can build better philosophy departments, better history departments and better literature departments. It can improve humanities research on its own merits.
IITs can simultaneously teach every engineer ethics, writing, economics, constitutional principles, psychology and the social consequences of technology. Neither objective requires mixing the two institutional missions until the meaning of an Institute of Technology disappears.
The 2006 expansion of standalone humanities education at IIT Madras showed where the earlier model could lead. IIT Bombay’s postgraduate humanities programmes have pushed the process further. NEP 2020 now wants multidisciplinary transformation to become the norm across higher education.
The timing could hardly be worse. India needs technological depth in artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, energy storage, cyber security, robotics and defence technologies. Its premier technology institutions should be obsessed with building capacity in those areas.
Instead, policymakers are expanding the institutional footprint of disciplines that India already teaches at a massive scale and whose experience in Western universities provides ample evidence of ideological homogeneity and campus politicisation.
The phrase “engineers need humanities” obscures what is actually being built. Engineers can be taught humanities. IITs do not need to become humanities universities, and the IIT Bombay fiasco offers a glimpse of what India risks importing when it forgets the difference.
Facial recognition can connect missing-child photographs with found-child records across states, while AI, CCTV and digital trails open new leads. Yet a machine match is only a lead until investigators independently verify identity and circumstances.
For decades, India’s economic potential was bottlenecked by a railway network that forced heavy freight and premium passenger expresses to share the same congested tracks. Today, a monumental paradigm shift is underway. Through the operationalisation of Dedicated Freight Corridors (DFC), the multitracking of high-density routes, and the deployment of 12,000 HP locomotives, Indian Railways is physically segregating its traffic. This deep dive explores the engineering and economic overhaul—from double-decker freight to the Kavach safety shield—that is fundamentally rewriting the nation’s supply chain geometry.
An exploration contract allows a country to study an area, map its geology and collect samples. It does not give permission to start mining. At present, no country has an approved commercial exploitation contract for minerals in the international seabed, including India.
Selected issues, clear explanations and thoughtful perspectives—delivered when we publish.
