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Going after campuses is the toolkit of Trump, Netanyahu, Modi. Columbia University is latest
- Amitabh Dubey, The Print
- Mar 24
- 5 min read
The Right-wing populist’s professed aversion to “anarchism” never applies to actual Right-wing anarchism. Kapil Mishra is Delhi’s Minister of Law and Justice.
Academic freedom in the West has come a long way since astronomer Galileo was declared a heretic and imprisoned for challenging the Church’s view that the universe revolves around the Earth. Or has it? Columbia University caving to pressure from the Trump administration makes you wonder.
Faced with the threat of losing $400 million in federal funds, Columbia agreed to more coercive campus policing, added anti-Zionism to its definition of anti-Semitism, and stripped faculty control over the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department. This is a dramatic development for the US; Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock described it as “jaw-dropping” and “a historic and astonishing event,” given the history of US universities since at least 1915.
This is not an isolated assault on the campus as a centre of national life. Populist authoritarians—including Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, and our own Narendra Modi—have sought to vilify universities as the “other,” portraying them as incubators of subversion and “anti-national” thinking. In this paranoid populist imagination, the leader is the repository of the national culture while liberals and leftists are the foreign virus. The one ringleader to rule them all— billionaire populist Elon Musk—has referred to this as the “woke mind virus”. His more mindless fans have seized on the phrase, unaware of how ludicrously distant it is from Indian realities.
But we digress. Just as the RSS was a latecomer to European fascism, Modi’s populism is oddly emulating that of Orbán and Erdoğan. That’s right—the BJP is drawing inspiration from a toolkit developed by Christian and Muslim autocrats. Consider the following:
Turkey
Since 2016, thousands of academics in Turkey have been fired from universities with many being prosecuted and imprisoned. Erdoğan has ended university autonomy and changed the curriculum to reflect religious and conservative values. In 2021, students at Boğaziçi University protested the appointment of a ruling AK Party politician as rector. A cultural war ensued with the ruling party describing the students as “terrorist sympathisers” and “LGBT deviants”, but it was compelled to remove the rector in the end.
Hungary
In 2017, Orbán attacked the US-accredited, Budapest-based Central European University, painting it as an outpost of anti-Hungarian globalism and cosmopolitanism. Despite widespread protests in Hungary, the university eventually moved to Vienna. Before taking on the university, Orbán had neutered the Supreme Court, rewritten the Constitution, and ensured media control through oligarchs. If that sounds familiar, wait for this: He converted American investor and philanthropist George Soros into a symbol of foreign interference, and went after NGOs and educational institutions connected to Soros, of which Central European University was one. Sounds like a toolkit to me.
Israel
Netanyahu, predictably, considers Israeli academia a den of leftism and has sought to assert control of universities by appointing ideological allies to the council for Higher Education. His Likud party works with Im Tirtzu, an activist group, to target and vilify those it deems insufficiently Zionist. Taking a page from Trump, Netanyahu in 2024 wrote that, both in Israel and the US, “the leftist Deep State weaponises the justice system to thwart the people’s will”. Why is he upset? Because judicial institutions he cannot control — or bribe with the equivalent of Rajya Sabha seats — are pursuing serious accusations of cronyism and corruption against him.
The toolkit followed in India becomes clearer. Control media narratives by threatening media owners or handing over media platforms to cronies? Check. Label those you disagree with as “urban naxals” and “tukde tukde gang”? Check. Appoint unqualified ideologues as vice-chancellors of once-respected universities? Check. Force out dissenting faculty by denying them promotions and pensions? Check. Physical violence against peaceful student protestors at JNU, with the attackers subsequently roaming free? Check. If there is indeed a vast global conspiracy, Modi’s BJP is part of it.
What all these Right-wing leaders have in common is their use of nationalistic rhetoric to attack the weak: ethnic and religious minorities, the LGBTQ community, environmental activists, and those who stand up for them. And they do so by using identikit language — complaining about the politicisation of campuses, contrasting the docility of STEM students with the activism of social scientists, or questioning why 30-year-old students don’t have proper jobs. All to mask their own radicalism.
Also read: India’s deadly combo—market plunge, unemployment, stagnant wages & rising personal debt
The Right-wing toolkit
It’s no secret that the BJP emerged out of violent agitations, whether it was Jayaprakash Narayan’s 1974-75 Bihar movement or Lal Krishna Advani’s 1990 Rath Yatra. Consider Modi’s own roots in Gujarat. As an RSS pracharak he actively supported student protestors in the 1974 Navnirman movement. There were many cases of arson and vandalism and more than 100 people were killed in the violence. The movement eventually led to the resignation of Gujarat Chief Minister Chimanbhai Patel. In fact, there is an article on Modi’s official site titled “When student power rattled the unhealthy status quo!” As the saying goes: “Tuadda kutta Tommy, sadda kutta kutta.” Your dog is Tommy, our dog is just a dog.
The Right-wing populist’s professed aversion to “anarchism” never applies to actual Right-wing anarchism. Trump was quick to pardon the 6 January 2021 rioters, while the perpetrators of violence in JNU on 5 January 2020 roam free, even though their identities and ABVP affiliations are widely known. Umar Khalid and Kapil Mishra were both accused of fomenting violence in Delhi. The former has been in jail for more than four years while the latter is, believe it or not, Delhi’s Minister of Law and Justice.
On 13 February 2021, Disha Ravi, a 21-year-old environmental activist, was arrested and charged with sedition and criminal conspiracy for editing and disseminating a digital toolkit publicly uploaded by climate activist Greta Thunberg. A section of the Indian media that is pliant obediently whipped up a frenzy over this toolkit. In its bail order 10 days later, a Delhi court rejected the entire premise of the charges, stating that there was no evidence linking Ravi to any illegal activity and that “citizens, the conscience keepers of government in a democratic nation, cannot be put behind bars simply for their disagreement with the state”.
Perhaps those sections of the media and all those with a ticking brain should pay attention to this corrosive global toolkit wielded by Right-wing populists and authoritarians to undermine democracy and freedom.
(c) 2025, The Print
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