Harvard’s activities must alarm Indian philanthropists – Firstpost

The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University is in the eye of the storm over the organisation of the Pakistan Conference under its aegis, in which pro-Pakistan speakers were invited, obviously to whitewash Islamabad’s image in the wake of the Pahalgam carnage of 26 tourists. To counter the media backlash in India, the institute page has removed the detail of proceedings from its website and supplanted it with a statement claiming that the student organisers along with their faculty advisor were solely responsible for organising the event in which Pakistan Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb and Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US, Rizwan Saeed Sheikh, also participated.

This is indeed a poor defence, but whatever role different actors played in organising this event, it is not the first time that Harvard has been involved in anti-India and anti-Hindu projects. One recalls the ‘Dismantling Hindutva Conference’ held online in 2022 in which Harvard was the key player along with many other American and European universities. It was basically directed at the pro-Hindu policies of the Modi government. Surprisingly, anything going in favour of Hindus in the world rankles these “elite” institutions even as these claim to be the flag-bearers of diversity or the DEI philosophy.

Coming to the Indian billionaires, many of them have promoted and supported a number of India-centred study centres in many American universities.  People like Naryan Murty, Ambani, Mahindra, Piramal, et al have been contributing mammothly to foreign universities but it seems scrutinizing the use of their grants is not always done. Narayan Murthy’s funding of the Murty Classical Library at Harvard, with Prof Sheldon Pollock as the Chief Editor, is a case in point. Pollock, though a great Sanskritist, has been known to bring in Western bias and present a distorted and degraded interpretation of our scriptural texts, says Indologist Rajiv Malhotra in his book Battle for Sanskrit.

Funding in the name of DEI projects – supposedly aimed at bringing about social justice in India for the marginalized sections – seems innocuous, but actually these projects are carried out with the aim to create divisions in the Indian society on the basis of caste-affirmative action equation and cancel consideration of meritocracy. A classic example is what finds mention in Rajiv Malhotra’s recent book Snakes in the Ganga (pp. 281-82). The writer points out that a project undertaken by Harvard University to study the tribal Munda languages spoken in Chhattisgarh and Odisha states was not exactly for love of an obscure language but meant to promote a new theory that the Munda speakers were the original inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent which would mean that both Aryans and Dravidians were outsiders! This is a fraught project considering that the Maoist movement rife in that area could be part of the toolkit to dismember India.

On the other hand, when it comes to highlighting India’s positive influence on the world, Harvard is least interested. Malhotra’s attempts to get its researchers take up projects on Vivekananda’s influence on America got lip service only, so did his plea to promote India-loving Transcendentalist Ralph Emerson’s writings. In case of Thoreau, Harvard simply denied India’s influence. This is surprising because Thoreau’s book Walden Pond shows the deep influence of Indian spirituality. Similarly, Harvard ignored such request in the case of Nobel-awardee T.S. Eliot, who had studied Sanskrit texts and used Sanskrit aphorisms in his poems.

Even in admitting students, Harvard has been faulted for a biased approach. Malcolm Gladwell, the acclaimed author of The Tipping Point, clearly says that it discriminates against Indian students and prefers other races. This attitude had been criticised by the US Supreme Court also which in its 2023 judgment mentioned race-conscious admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina and found them violative of the Equal Protection Clause.

Now that the Trump administration has withdrawn grants to Harvard and some other universities for their promotion of DEI and Woke ideologies, will the Indian billionaires have a second thought about funding these universities? Why don’t they divert these funds to Indian universities and provide to Indian students good education — not the so-called American liberal education but the education suited to Indian values — at reasonable cost? The growing strictness about visa regime in America and Canada provides a huge opportunity to the Indian universities, government and the philanthropists to work together and come up with an elaborate world-class education system that will save for the country billions going out on account of foreign education and also help the country realize the vision of a developed nation by 2047.

Jagdish Batra is an academic and writer, presently working as Professor and Executive Dean at O.P. Jindal Global University, India. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.