Why do we need Foreign universities in liberal arts…..Inviting Foreign Universities other than STEM streams need further deliberations …
Recently a Cambridge-based professor met me and asked why India is inviting foreign universities to set up campuses in India in areas other than STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and medicine). He was concerned that inviting universities like Harvard and others that have championed some anti-Hindu events in recent times and earlier cannot be trusted. I think he has substance in his logic. I am also unable to understand why the Indian government is inviting Universities to set up campuses in areas where we are superior and dont need any extra or foreign expertise. Who can best teach us our history or culture? Definitely ourselves. And if we think that some Top universities from the world can do it then no one can be more foolish than ourselves. As a rejoinder recall the Macaulay education policy and what it has done to the nation. We have become permanent slaves of the Britishers. !!
India needs expertise in STEM areas and that is a welcome initiative. Again we need certain safeguards in those areas to make sure that the country is benefitted. The basic objective to keep the top brains in the country and also save crucial foreign currency is a good idea but we must not forget that this is a big initiative and will have huge consequences. So the proposal and safeguards has to be really scrutinized at regular intervals with a high-level committee.
While pure science fields render themselves for objective assessment, many fields of Liberal Arts in the foreign universities suffer from deep prejudices and subjectivity and have the potential of causing much harm to a society such as in Bharat. Provisions under Sections 4.8; 8 and 9 of the Gazette Notification would not be an adequate safeguard and any violation would be obfuscated by bitter litigation and debate in India and abroad – thanks to a vicious eco-system that is in place.
We request all stakeholders and academicians of the country to take a deep look into the proposal and also discuss and debate whether we really need to include liberal arts and social sciences also where foreign universities can come and set campuseswith their own curriculum with no one to watch what the teacher is teaching inside the classroom.
BackGround and larger picture: –
The Government of India (GOI) has decided to facilitate Foreign Universities to set up campuses in Bharat and /or to collaborate with Institutions in Bharat.
This decision has been followed up by the University Grants Commission [UGC] notifying draft regulations (2023) that have also been notified in the gazette. This note suggests that till sufficient and effective safeguards protecting the national interests of Bharat are put in place, such facilitation of Foreign Institutions should be restricted initially to the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematical Sciences [STEM] and Medicine.
Point 1.2 in the draft says, :” These Regulations shall regulate the entry and operations of Foreign Universities/ Institutions in India to conduct undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral, post-doctoral, and other programs and award degrees, diplomas, and certificates in all disciplines.’
At present any collaboration ought to be restricted to the fields of
Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematical Sciences and Medicine [STEM], and may later also be extended to Management, Economics languages etc., and that too after due consideration of the Intellectual Property [IP] rights over the discoveries made, the knowledge systems used by participating institutions, and (in Economics and Management) ensuring that there is no indoctrination and promotion of economic orders that directly or indirectly result in continuing in effect a colonial control of the West over Bharat.
The Guidelines notified in the Gazette on 2 nd May 2022 followed by later
announcements do provide for some safeguards. However, these are grossly
inadequate. Provisions under Sections 4.8; 8 and 9 of the Gazette Notification
would not be an adequate safeguard and any violation would be obfuscated by bitter litigation and debate in India and abroad – thanks to a vicious eco-system that is in place. This would make enforcement of these provisions impractical or impossible in principle.
It is a matter of fact and of recorded history that colonial rule in Bharat was
enforced by administrators taught at universities in Oxford and Cambridge. Their mandate was to put in place an ecosystem that promoted and educated grotesque distortions of Bharat’s history and culture that facilitated young minds to become and remain colonized. The education system – in topics now referred to as “Liberal Arts”, was used to create a dedicated “educated class” to provide a link between the colonizers and the common masses. It is now public knowledge that that baton with the same purpose has been passed on to many Ivy-league Institutions in the US.
These Institutions train people in how to obfuscate and dominate. Administrators coming out of all these Institutions were taught how to amass wealth from slavery, how to make fools out of the colonized people by not adhering to any treaty with them and exterminating civilizations, destroying indigenous industries etc. Several Liberal Arts programs typically include, among others, the teaching of subjects such as History, Sociology, Literature, and Philosophy, whose teaching has been shown to be susceptible to biases and prejudices suiting particular narratives, often anti-Hindu and anti-Bharat. This would be against the interests of Bharat.
As a result India was made a slave and its cultural heritage was plundered and shown in poor light to the extent that Indians today regard themselves as inferior. To top it all, after destroying Bharat’s integrated and peaceful society, the administrators of the colonizers trained in branches of Liberal Arts, reaped such came the Colonizers who mastered the art of fabricating narratives that concealed the harmonious way of Bharat’s civilization, blamed the misery befallen upon Bharat on fault lines created and exacerbated by them, and finally created Institutions that taught generations of our people into believing and internalizing the false narrative of the colonizers misery upon the people of Bharat that in order to survive people of Bharat had no option but to internalize, albeit falsely, that the cause of their misery was the attributes of Bharat’s Dharma itself. In the living cultural memory of Bharat’s civilization, one does not find any instances to indicate, for eg., caste conflict. Then
It is now clear that many of these Ivy-league Institutions propagate agendas through their Management and Economic courses as well. The concepts of Globalization are steered to make the world believe in catering to preferred currencies. “Wokeism” is used to influence youth and children to demand rights from parents, break away from families, and coerce them to invest in instruments that support the monopolistic bubble of preferred currencies – all designed to ensure that the benefits of exploitation during the colonial period continues to be enjoyed by the colonizers is the economic order designed for this purpose.
Western Societies are definitely not at peace with themselves at all. What is not desirable is that such entities introduce similar experimental ideologies in Bharat when Bharat has had some 5000 years of incredible civilization. This is particularly so when there are numerous examples of academics in these Institutions that masquerade as Gurus of Sanskrit or South Asian experts- only to be exposed by their shoddy work.
In Bharat, we have been actively engaged in trying to undo the scourge of caste consciousness that was deliberately engineered and imposed forcefully onto Bharat by Euro-Christian British colonialists – and used as a divide-and-rule doctrine. We have been struggling to uproot it from our consciousness on the one hand, while on the other hand addressing to the divide created on account of the destruction of our culture by appropriate affirmative action. The last thing we need is to learn the “Art” of describing our struggle to redeem our lost cohesive society in terms of concocted Atrocity literature. We do not need such clones of Western academia that are severely flawed. This has recently manifested itself in an anti-caste movement in the United States which has its roots in US Universities, such as the California State University, University of California, Davis, Colby College, Colorado College,
the Claremont colleges, and Carleton University. In August 2021, the California Democratic Party added caste as a protected category to their Party Code of Conduct. In December 2021, the Harvard Graduate Student Union ratified its collective bargaining agreement, which included caste as a protected category for its members. While there should be no discrimination on any grounds, it seems that the raking up of caste by these universities is designed to further the caste divide in society and is aimed against Bharat. With this agenda in place, the Liberal Arts program of many such universities would be suspect in their understanding of civilization and societal issues in India. Any collaboration on Liberal Arts with foreign universities would not be good for Bharat as a result.
Some 41 Universities in the US recently took it upon themselves to engage in a “dismantling global Hindutva” project. In the conference, the necessity to dismantle Hinduism was also discussed. These 41 Universities ought to be disqualified from any collaborative venture straightaway. As regards others, one must keep Liberal Arts out of the purview of any collaboration till the above issues are thoroughly assessed and debated and necessary checks and balances are put in place. No collaboration should be given a carte blanche without a serious impact analysis. Adequate time and effort have not been expanded to this effect.
Bharat is still recovering from the past onslaught on its true narrative, it may find a fresh onslaught hard to withstand. These issues should be considered before it is too late and before committing our youth to become scholars
Dr Asheesh Shah
Author: admin
To create policy awareness for a better INdia
