Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Why India’s top public intellectual resigned – By Nidhi Razdan
India’s reputation as a democracy took another big hit this week with the resignation of scholar and commentator Pratap Bhanu Mehta from the prestigious liberal arts institution, Ashoka University.
After a meeting with two of the University’s founders, Mehta, a strong critic of the BJP government at the centre, sent in his resignation and said “my public writing in support of a politics that tries to honour constitutional values of freedom and equal respect for all citizens, is perceived to carry risks for the university.”… A day later, eminent economist and former Chief Economic Advisor, Arvind Subramanian also resigned as a professor from Ashoka….
What this episode has shown is that an even an institution that is privately run, with plenty of private capital, by many well known names, succumbed to political pressure and completely crawled….
