Written by: P John J Kennedy
5 min readAug 13, 2026 02:33 PM IST
First published on: Aug 13, 2026 at 02:33 PM IST
On Sunday, Jawaharlal Nehru University cancelled a discussion on Umar Khalid’s PhD thesis, later published as a book. The event had been approved, the venue booked. The university cited “non-disclosure of full facts.” However, the secretaries of the students’ and teachers’ associations have claimed that the Dean who granted permission was “fully informed.” Having spent a few decades inside a university system, I recognise the expression “non-disclosure of full facts.” It is the language institutions quickly reach for when caution has quietly overtaken judgement; a pattern too familiar across Indian academia.
In the JNU episode, what should trouble us most is not that the event was cancelled. It is what the event was about: A discussion on Umar Khalid’s thesis, Fractured Communities: Adivasi Histories and the Politics of Power. The event marked the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, a UN-observed day since 1994 that India also observes. Adivasi history and land dispossession are established, funded areas of scholarship. The thesis has been examined, awarded, and published by a mainstream press. Nor was it vetted casually. Khalid submitted it only after a Delhi High Court order forced JNU to accept it. JNU’s own Centre for Historical Studies then evaluated and passed it. Historian Ramachandra Guha has called it one of the finest doctoral dissertations by an Indian scholar he has read. The university now calls this work too risky to discuss. The same university once certified it as sound scholarship. Isn’t that ironic?
The university’s defence is that this was genuinely procedural; a failure of disclosure. But paperwork is not resolved by cancelling an event outright, a day before it happens. If disclosure were the real issue, the obvious fix was to ask for it. Cancellation was chosen instead.
So, the problem was the author, really. The idea was never in question; the person was. Khalid has been jailed without trial for nearly six years under UAPA, his case yet to go to trial, his bail applications repeatedly refused despite the Supreme Court’s own principle that bail should be the rule and jail the exception. He spends his sixth consecutive birthday in custody this week. No conviction, no finding of guilt, yet that status alone was apparently enough to make his scholarship undiscussable, on a day meant to honour the very people his research is about. Besides, the university’s choice of language requires analysis: Not “we disagree,” not “we were pressured,” but a “breach of trust,” a failure of “disclosure,” a question of “process.” This is the language institutions reach for when they want to act politically without admitting it. Procedure becomes the alibi.
Historian Timothy Snyder has a term for this — anticipatory obedience: An institution complying with power before power has even asked. There’s no ministry directive on record, only a Dean’s permission quietly reversed. That absence does not prove there was no pressure; it may only mean the pressure worked before it needed to be spoken. A university operating autonomously asks whether an idea is worth testing. One operating heteronomously asks whether it is worth the risk. JNU’s Dean, in cancelling the approved event, was not making a scholarly judgement. He was making a risk calculation.
Besides, this is not an isolated reflex. Delhi University abruptly cancelled a scheduled seminar on land and democratic rights last October, prompting its convener Nandini Sundar to resign in protest. The pattern recurs because it works: Small, procedural, deniable, each instance easy to explain away. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the Academic Freedom Index, compiled annually by V-Dem and FAU Erlangen, put India’s 2025 score at 0.14 out of 1, its lowest since the index began in 1900, lower than during the 1975-77 Emergency. India now ranks 156th of 179 countries assessed. It is built from incidents like this.
In the end, what stays with me of this unpleasant episode is not just the ban. It is also the occasion: A university refusing to discuss Adivasi dispossession on the one day set aside to remember it, because of who wrote the book, and marking that refusal on the day its author turns another year older in prison, untried; and the quiet sense that universities like this are dying, a little more with each such decision.
The writer is former professor and dean, Christ University, Bengaluru
JNU cancelled the auditorium booking for a discussion on Umar Khalid's book hours before it was to begin, sparking a row over its stated reason. 
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