Poor old humanities and social sciences (henceforth HSS) disciplines are under attack again. And this time, the charge against HSS is being led by the self-designated ‘Indian Right’ on social media.

Social media is abuzz, as it so often is, with angry reactions from ‘Right-Wing’ users targeting humanities and social sciences departments from top Indian institutions. Sometimes, the attacks are becoming so unhinged as to call for the abolition of all HSS departments from India’s public-funded institutions. India’s mainstream English media, too, has taken a cue from its younger but more robust counterpart and joined the discourse in its usual sensationalist style. The whole thing is creating more cacophony than a cool, rational debate on the matter, and therefore clarity of thought – the mother of all good public policy – has fallen victim to it.

At the centre of the storm lies a series of ‘exposé’-s carried out by a few social media handles, in which the involvement of faculty members from certain top Indian institutes in activism-oriented academic projects was brought to light before a larger (social media) public. Names were named, allegations of anti-national activities were raised, and both political as well as institutional authorities were tagged in these social media posts. Result?

Sympathisers of both the Left and the Right hurled online abuses at each other; one top institution from Western India blocked (and later unblocked) a social media handle spearheading the campaign against the HSS departments; and the authorities who were tagged in the posts, in the hope of some kind of high-handed divine intervention on their part, have nonchalantly ignored the posts so far.

One suspects that nothing more than this can ever be achieved anyway by such vituperative social media outbursts and peremptory calls for abolishing HSS departments from India’s public-funded institutions. It would yield much better and more positive results if the same agitating social media handles had applied themselves to mastering one or more HSS disciplines, and then proceeded to counter the academic reports, studies and activism they oppose so passionately. Such a challenge would have been........

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