The Sunset at Sonepat: Ashoka University and the Collapse of a Liberal Illusion

Even as many individual faculty, students, and alumni of the institution have rallied behind the professor, Ashoka University itself maintains a sullen silence.

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

The mask has fallen. A generational lie has been exposed. A mythology, carefully constructed and sustained for nearly two decades, has collapsed.

Ashoka University, the star gem of Indian liberal arts private universities—the benchmark every upcoming elite private university in India publicly (or privately) measures itself against, and aspires to become—has been outed.

Like many other Indian institutions of ‘modernity’ lately, it has been shown up in the face of contradictions that test our republic in the current historical moment. One may argue Ashoka University, and by extension the entire galaxy of similar private ‘elite’ institutions, have been showing themselves up in very obvious ways over the past half decade or so, but this truly feels like the final point of no return.

The Arrest That Unmasked a University

On 18 May, Ali Khan Mahmudabad, associate professor and head of the Department of Political Science at Ashoka University, was arrested for his social media posts concerning the India-Pakistan border skirmishes in the wake of the Pahalgam terror attack.

The Supreme Court granted him interim bail on 21 May, but refused to stay the investigation. It also directed for an Special Investigation Team (SIT) to be formed to investigate the posts, and further ordered Mahmudabad to "not write any online article or make any online speech related to both posts which are subject matter of investigation."

Professor Mahmudabad’s long posts try to balance war-mongering mass impulses with points about the human costs of war and the military-industrial complex, while trying to juxtapose the absurdist coexistence of hyper-nationalist jingoism with the communal hate and violence of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

These are positions which are hardly radical and would be consistent with most critical-thinking, left or liberal-oriented social science faculty. Conservative commentators may disagree with the tone and timing, but many would agree that the text of the posts do not easily lend themselves to any serious legal infraction.

Bizarrely however, Professor Mahmudabad was first pulled up by the Haryana State Commission for Women on grounds that his posts had “disparaged women officers in the Indian armed forces and promoted communal disharmony”.

When his legal team contested it, another complaint was filed locally and, acting upon it, the Haryana police arrested him with haste. The legal absurdity of the complaint and the ambiguity of the original issue raised by the Haryana State Commission for Women has been explored at length already.

The right-wing conservative galleries and news anchors have been ratcheting up the rhetoric against the professor, highlighting his family’s past, while on the other side, much has been written also defending his academic freedoms, and that he was likely ‘targeted’ for being an assertive Muslim faculty member who dared to take an anti-war stance. 

A Deafening Silence from Sonepat

In the midst of all this, the spotlight has also fixed itself upon the Ashoka University management—or rather, their inaction.

Once the news broke, the administration was quick to distance itself from Professor Mahmudabad and, till the time of writing, has not indicated any willingness to defend him.

Even as many individual faculty, students, and alumni of the institution have rallied behind the professor, Ashoka University itself maintains a sullen silence. Attacked by its own community as well as outsiders, both liberal and conservatives (for different reasons), the institution appears lost, lonely, and confused.

A precipitous downfall for the university which revelled in being informally labelled as the ‘Harvard of India’. For contrast, at this current moment, Harvard University is fighting the US President Donald Trump to preserve its academic freedom, even at the cost of federal funding cuts that have already amassed in excess of 2 billion USD. 

In this juxtaposition lies the crux of the matter. ‘Elite’ Indian private universities like Ashoka University are primarily savarna formations—which have always had an almost cringe-worthy desire to ape the institutions of the west.

The Savarna Soul of Liberal Institutions

Their promoters’ gaze often falls only at the out-of-reach exalted and exclusionary nature of these legacy institutions, within the confines of which they have sought to create their own desi sanitised echo chambers. Backed by capital investment from savarna entrepreneurs, these institutions started popping up in the late 2000s.

Was this a disaggregated instinctive savarna reaction to the OBC reservations in education, implemented in 2006? To create a parallel caste-sanitised academic space? If not, what pedagogical impulse animated the wide-ranging gamut of savarna capital from Ambani, Jindal, Dalmia, Goenka, Premji, Mahindra, Munjal, Jain, Thapar, etc, to suddenly start investing in private universities? Almost none of these institutions have any caste-based diversity resulting from a clear policy in hiring or admissions. 

The predominantly Bania-Khatri industrial capital that funds these institutions is among the staunchest opponent of not just caste-based affirmative action in India, but is also inherently inimical to social justice and critical agency as core democratic fundamentals. It is therefore not surprising that most of these institutions have almost no tolerance for student politics or any form of collective, consensus-building, and caste-based social inclusion.

Co-founder of Ashoka University, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, said that the institution was not left-liberal in values but merely a place to study ‘liberal arts’. Bikhchandani, who made his fortune by entering the e-commerce business space in the 1990s, probably believes he was successful not through privilege but sheer hard work.

His biographical sketches available online reveal he comes from a "family of doctors and engineers", studied at St Stephens, and got his start in the business by requesting his brother studying at UCLA Business School “to rent a server”.

To someone like Bikhchandani, success and fortune in India are just waiting to happen for anyone willing to look for business opportunities and work hard. They do not understand why students may agitate, why professors may raise critical questions.

“Your parents don’t pay the fees they do for you to do aandolans,” Bikchandani once tweeted. He does not want agitations in Ashoka. He is glad it is ‘boring’ and bereft of any real social stakeholdership. 

Caste Islands in a Changing India

And so it is in Ashoka, and the top private ‘liberal arts’ universities in India–the student cohort is drawn largely from wealthy savarna households, almost exclusively from expensive international-curriculum schools.

The faculty at such universities are also from elite and wealthy, networked savarna families, recruited after they completed their PhDs abroad. Professor Mahmudabad himself is from an erstwhile royal family (not that it should matter in the context of his current arrest and harassment). The savarna elites are complimented by a smattering of ‘white’ professors for that racialised ‘international appeal’.

Taken together, it is an ecosystem of wealthy elites in the classroom, serviced by marginalised caste staff who clean and run the campus. The latter is almost as exclusively from poor and SC/ST/OBC backgrounds as the former is not.

At a time when the caste-census, despite decades of savarna stonewalling, has found itself at the centre of policy and political discourse, Ashoka and like-minded ‘liberal’ universities emerge as islands of caste-privilege. 

It is in these islands that a reproduction of elites takes place. A generational renewal. These elite universities have emerged as a conduit for placing wealthy savarna youth into overseas academia and employment.

As India becomes physically unliveable, its cities wrecked and climate destroyed, social contradictions made irreconcilable—a mass exodus of savarna ruling class is playing out in front of our eyes. Sonepat is a visa centre. The degree is a passport. 

The End of the Performance

In such spaces across India, critical thought itself becomes a performance that has no bearing to any real social context. Elite students write bold essays on Foucault and Gramsci on campuses where administrative overreach subjects them to ‘hostel raids’, profiling, total surveillance, and moral policing.

They are taught by faculty with powerful and inventive rhetoric who have no access to collective bargaining or protection against unjust coercion and termination from their employers.

Both such students and faculty are overseen by a wholly savarna administration, whose primary preoccupation is juggling market stakeholders, political actors, and easing anxieties of parents for whom ‘return on their (significant fee) investment’ means turning their child into an apolitical and compliant corporate-friendly employable tool.

Yet collectively, they believe—and lead us to believe—that their performance is reality, and that they indeed are critical-thinking, bold, innovative, and fearless future leaders. 

But all performances must come to an end or become stale. As years pile on, Ashoka University has transitioned from a brand which evoked awe to one which now inspires memes about disconnected social elites. Even the core champions of the project, its internal stakeholders have been shaking their head in disbelief.

With such a lofty promised performance—when academic freedoms are stifled, when a public figure and savarna thinker like Pratap Bhanu Mehta feels compelled to resign because he had become “a political liability” to the founders, when Rajendran Narayanan, Sabyasachi Das, and Pulapre Balakrishnan leave the institution, and when Professor Mahmudabad is arrested—the mask falls. 

Civil liberties weaken when you build institutions without a social-base and without collective consensus. These are the things that give a university its ‘spine’. Individual courage and valour of select faculty and students is not a replacement for that. Ashoka is finding this out. Other elite universities may soon do too.

The reputation of legacy institutions cannot be banked in money alone, it is built in integrity and consistent nurturing of critical thought. Not just a superficial performance of the same. 

Now as the mask lies fallen, the performance is over, the curtains drop—we see these new-era universities for what they are. In Sonepat stands the monument of their elite hubris and as the sun sets on its facade, as the sparkles and glitter and glamour peel off, it looks disoriented, scared, and lonely. 

(Ravikant Kisana is a professor of Cultural Studies and author of the book 'Meet the Savarnas'. He can be contacted on X/Instagram as 'Buffalo Intellectual'.The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect or represent his institution.This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)