On 29 April 2025 , ‘X’ was abuzz in the morning with posts on an anonymous account with snippets and screenshots of MA dissertation defense titles of one of the leading IITs of the country. These dissertation defense invitations were from the MA Society and Culture program 2025 batch of IIT Gandhinagar. These invitations reflected clear radical sympathizers of Islamization as the core driving force of the dissertation components of more than 6-7 MA thesis. These had a Kerala connection, a Bengal bias, and an international cohort of scholars from Portugal, Canada, etc in the mentoring system. Immediately, the posts started to go viral and people in the comments section demonstrated shock and disbelief.
🚨 Must share : Is IIT Gandhinagar now so arrogant they are using students to write research targetting PM Modi?
We ban BBC documentaries because they ignore Indian court judgment but right in the heart of Gujarat, we have radical Christian professors indoctrinating handpicked… pic.twitter.com/8tnU50OGOo
— Eminent Intellectual (@total_woke_) May 2, 2025
This came as a rude joke to readers of X, particularly in the wake of the current Pahalgam attacks when the country is waking up to a challenging time with terrorists threatening Hindus from all angles. These titles could have been the last thing that any parent could dream of. The media immediately started picking up this story and this news forum decided to understand more about these viral posts. A few hard hitting questions, such as ‘what is the role of HSS in IITs?’ ‘Why waste taxpayers’ money?’ , and questions related to security and safety of young students who probably have been silenced by some fuzzy “honour code” that has pushed them to live under extreme stress without opening their mouth regarding the ongoing illegal activities on IITGN campus, were asked.
Now the student has been forced to delete all his social media today. What are they hiding? Why are they threatening the handful Hindu students they have?
It's not harmless. Remember IIT Bombay Dalit student Darshan Solanki? His suicide they wanted to milk but when it came out… pic.twitter.com/eqX7mZcfH7
— Eminent Intellectual (@total_woke_) May 2, 2025
The idea of including Humanities and Social Sciences into the IIT system goes back in time to the early 1950s, when IIT Kharagpur, IIT Bombay and such technological academic mega hubs were emerging into prominence. The HSS departments as they are known today, were an integral part of the earliest departmental structures in IITs. Their primary role was to be a strong support/service department for engineering studies, and provide a humanitarian and socially sensitive perspective to budding engineers. They were meant to be strong in language, literature, philosophy, social studies, and economics – the pillars of any developing and upward mobility society.
Eventually, these departments started to grow and in the early 2000s, they attracted some of the best university graduates to their core research and teaching cadre. The core idea of establishing HSS as integral part of technological education was initially based on a western model of famous Marxist philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas’s Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World and the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. Considering, the early IITs were modeled on universities and institutions from Europe and America, with a philosophy to bring high quality education to Indian technocrats of the newly independent nation, the HSS departments too borrowed freely from the early western critical theories and philosophies.
However, the rut started happening after 2008-2010, when the departments of HSS across the country’s IITs, including the “new” IITs became a haven for radical intellectuals and outdated pedagogy, relying on the same Marxist philosophies that needed revisions. The early HSS departments also had in-fighting, competition with university academics, and research scholars’ exploitation that was rampant, in spite of their pseudo-socialist approach. It was a small group of scholars initially, that has grown in proportion in the current time to at least more than 20-25 faculty members in HSS per IIT.
The ‘new IITs’ as they were known as; Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, Indore, Ropar, Jodhpur and a few others had come up around 2008 or so. They were struggling to build a niche of their own. The promising scholarship among young students in HSS gave a glimpse of hope to these IITs, so that new areas and new fields could be explored through establishing different programs and cutting edge research. The intention was good – to bring strong scholars beyond engineering and sciences to the IIT fold, and create interdisciplinary engagement. It was at the cusp of these exciting times, that a set of vested interests entered into the IIT system between 2011-2018 and slowly sabotaged the entire system. These people led by ‘new scholars’ and ‘young academics’, entered the IIT system as full time faculty and brought radically new ideas, such as establishing a Postgraduate Program with an opaque title called ‘MA in Society and Culture’, which was launched at IIT GN in 2014. Old IITs had offered MA programs earlier in specific areas, such as English, Economics, Development Studies, etc. This MA in Society and Culture at IIT was designed to be unique and different from department specific approach of IIT Madras and excel in interdisciplinary studies. It provided a thorough Marxist approach to the curriculum. The course had diverse areas with less rigour focussed. Eventually, in 2024 IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay had to start their MA programs in ‘Society and Culture’ and MA by Research. Suddenly, the numbers in MA Society and Culture at IIT Gandhinagar increased manifold in the 2023-24 batch.
IITs had been recognized for a long time for being excellent undergraduate rigour oriented academic institutions. These MA programs, became a leeway for lateral entry into the system without appearing for GATE, JEE or other such rigorous entrance examinations. This created a kind of moral warfare among senior Undergraduate students, who had slogged for years to enter the IIT system and new MA students entering the system, as if through ‘backdoor’. After the government started changing the education scenario, and post a new emerging economic order based on development goals, rather than caste-class-race structures, the HSS departments and the very basis of MA in Society as Culture as based on caste, radical Marxist ideologies, anti-Hindu sentiments, pro-radical Islamic sentiments started to take firm roots in the system. Between 2016 -2018, a set of radical scholars from universities in US, Australia, UK, Korea, Portugal and other parts of the world got recruited in various IITs, ISERs and IIMs. Eventually, some of the ‘founders’ of these programs had to leave for Ashoka University, Flame University and other private universities. The problem started after that phase of replacement. These scholars became the ‘ghost presence’ on campus by continuously desiring to be ‘collaborators’, and the autonomy of student research passion was curtailed by consistent interference and deliberate dismantling of academic rigour. The ground realities of India were different from these ideologies that were being pushed-in through clear agenda setting. As a result, depression and feeling of inadequacy set in among these students. Courses based on harmful psychoanalysis, ghosts and ghouls, and language oriented biased perspectives were introduced and made quickly available to all parts of the country. In addition, groups such as the Ambedkar-Phule circle entered the scenario, causing damage to the community’s well-being based on caste and sectarian ideologies.
Their main agenda has been to demolish the idea of anything that is ‘Made in India’, including intellectual capacity, considering that was the war-cry of the newly elected government of India. This demolition campaign included the intellectual and ethical capacity of research scholars, and MA students in different parts of the country. The ‘IIT products’, including PhD, MA students and BTech students were the target of these groups and silencing their abilities through low quality academic politics, activated international networks that supported these new ‘intellectuals’ from beyond the country to achieve promotions, grants, and other favours. Merit and honesty were the first target. Honey trapping young girls and boys became a common modus operandi for these people in order to silence the competition that could have been given by PhD students from IITs. These places became more of product export places, with human brains being the product that could be exported to other countries, rather than encouraging them to live and work in India.
This nexus has become so powerful that they have been able to tempt PhD students to join this “movement” as they call in their language through a fuzzy ‘honour code’. They have PhD students from IIT Gandhinagar marry them with the temptation of getting placed in IITs, IIMs and other central and state universities. They lived together for several years, and she immediately started teaching at IITGN even before she had completed her PhD. These students were instrumental in replacing guides in the same institution and taking their position. There are many such instances. In fact, IISERs, IIMs and IITs have been “assured” to some of these students who have been instrumental in leading the Left agenda. Their primary focus has been to recruit their “own members” in different IITs, destroy ongoing research activities by serious scholars, compromise ethics, and have left activist or linguistic predominance through Bengali, Malyalaym, and Tamil groups, and have religious dominance through Christian and Islamic supremacy.
Is there a misuse of autonomy that could be perceived? It was observed from interactions with various students that most faculty members are married within the campuses, causing a strange dynamics and ghettoisation of ‘friend groups’. It has clearly seeped into engineering departments as well. The problem is not simply intellectual corruption, but rather other dangerous signs of becoming safe havens for urban naxal and left oriented radicals, who are slowly but steadily eliminating any academic deliberations with their own extreme ideological positions. India could have been a great contributor to studies in digital media, cultural research, scientific-religious deliberations, etc. However, these groups systematically remove the capacity of young students by pressurizing them with brain washed ideologies, lampooning the ‘original research’ by creating parodies that are clearly visible in the invitation emails. What is sad is that they are supported by many engineering counterparts, who are possibly trying to win the next big awards, while working with these ‘friends’.
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