Saffron Fascism in Universities: How State Sponsored Hindutva Mobs are Dismantling India’s Academic Soul

The recent barbaric assault on the distinguished historian Prof. Syed Irfan Habib at Delhi University is not merely an act of campus rowdyism. It is a loud and violent declaration that India has officially entered a dark age of anti-intellectualism. When a scholar of Habib’s stature is publicly humiliated, drenched with water, and threatened while speaking at a literature festival, it marks the total surrender of the Indian state to Hindutva street power. This incident is a cold reminder that in Modi’s India, the library is being replaced by the lynch mob, and the professor is being replaced by the fanatic.

For over a decade, the world has watched with horror as India’s premier universities have been transformed into laboratories for extremist indoctrination. This is a systematic and state-sponsored campaign to lobotomize the country’s youth and erase any history that does not fit the narrow, hateful narrative of the RSS. The attack on Prof. Habib is a symbolic execution of free speech, proving that the Hindutva project cannot tolerate a single voice of reason.

A Global Pariah: The Death of Academic Freedom

The decline of India is no longer a matter of opinion but a documented fact supported by terrifying data. The world is finally seeing the “Mother of Democracy” for what it truly is: a graveyard for intellectual liberty.

• The Catastrophic V-Dem Collapse: According to the V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute 2024 Report, India’s academic freedom index score has plummeted from 0.70 in 2013 to a pathetic 0.38 in 2023.
• Ranking with Autocracies: This collapse has pushed India into the bottom 20% of countries globally, placing it alongside some of the world’s most notorious autocracies.
• Institutional Capture: Over 90% of Vice-Chancellor positions in central universities are now held by individuals with direct ideological links to the RSS, ensuring that the administration acts as a wing of the ruling party.

Legal Terrorism: The War on Thinking

The Indian state is using the law as a weapon of mass intimidation. Professors who refuse to bow to the Saffron deity are met with draconian charges intended to destroy their lives and careers.

• The UAPA Trap: The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act is used to silence scholars. While thousands are booked, National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data reveals a conviction rate below 3%, proving these are political arrests, not criminal ones.
• The Martyrdom of Prof. G.N. Saibaba: The wheelchair-bound academic was jailed for a decade despite 90% disability. His eventual acquittal came too late, as the state’s calculated cruelty led to his death, a case of institutional murder.
• The Elgar Parishad Purge: Prominent scholars like Prof. Hany Babu and Prof. Shoma Sen were thrown into jail for years without trial, successfully removing critical voices from the classroom.

Saffronizing the Syllabus: Erasing the Truth

The Hindutva regime is not just attacking people but also the books they read. The NCERT has become a tool for ideological brainwashing, scrubbing the past to manufacture a fake future.

• Historical Revisionism: The regime has removed chapters on the Mughal Empire, the 2002 Gujarat Riots, and the contributions of Muslim freedom fighters from textbooks to promote a Hindu-only narrative.
• The Attack on Science: Even scientific facts are being censored. Significant portions of the Periodic Table and the theory of Evolution were removed to make room for “Vedic” pseudo-science.
• Censorship of Seminars: In the last three years alone, over 40 academic seminars across India were forcibly cancelled due to threats of violence from right-wing groups.

The Foot Soldiers of Hate: ABVP and Campus Violence

The physical violence on campus is outsourced to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the RSS. These groups act as a private militia with total immunity from the law.

• The JNU Massacre (2020): Over 50 masked goons armed with iron rods brutalized students and faculty for three hours. Despite video evidence, the police arrested zero ABVP members.
• Library Brutality at Jamia and AMU: During anti-CAA protests, police entered university libraries and fired tear gas at students, leaving more than 100 injured and some permanently blinded.
• Targeting Minorities: Dalit and Muslim educators face double the hostility. The “institutional murder” of Rohith Vemula remains the foundational proof of how the Saffronized campus treats those from marginalized backgrounds.

The Siege of Kashmir: Education in the Dark

The situation in Occupied Jammu and Kashmir represents the ultimate form of academic repression, where the state has turned the entire region into an open-air prison.

• The Digital Blackout: Following the illegal revocation of Article 370 in 2019, Kashmir suffered the longest internet shutdown in a democracy, lasting over 200 days.
• Global Leader in Shutdowns: India consistently ranks as the global leader in internet shutdowns, accounting for over 50% of all shutdowns worldwide.
• Intellectual Isolation: By cutting off the internet, the regime effectively murdered research and communication for thousands of Kashmiri students and scholars.

The Hindutva Blueprint for Intellectual Genocide

The humiliation of Prof. Irfan Habib is a drop in an ocean of state-sponsored bigotry. It is a signal that the “World’s Largest Democracy” has become a graveyard for the intellect. When a nation begins to fear its historians, it is because that nation is ashamed of its truth and terrified of its future.

The international community can no longer ignore the numbers. With a bottom 20% global ranking in academic freedom and a justice system that weaponizes a 3% conviction rate against scholars, India is no longer a democracy in any meaningful sense. The “New India” is a land of mobs led by a state of tyrants. If the world continues to remain silent, the fire of Hindutva will not just consume India’s universities but will burn down the very foundation of global academic integrity.