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Over the past 10 years, India has seen a significant decline in academic freedom, now ranking in the bottom 10-20% globally on the V-Dem Index of Academic Freedom. Despite its vastly bigger higher education sector, India performs worse than all countries in South Asia other than Afghanistan and Myanmar. However, all countries in the region have seen scholars targeted in recent years – whether on blasphemy charges, like Junaid Hafiz in Multan, or on charges of hurting religious sentiments, like a faculty member and students in Pune’s Savitribai Phule University. Student clashes between groups supported by the administration and others are common across the region. Sri Lanka, under its current dispensation, and Nepal top the South Asian list in terms of academic freedom, but they too face challenges, especially in the privatisation of higher education and the attendant shrinking of space. 

One may well ask whether a regional comparison is useful, given the differences in country size (see Table 1), and the fact that Myanmar and Afghanistan are not democracies. Indeed some commentators have claimed that the very idea of South Asia as a region is dead. 

But it is important to think regionally – not only by way of comparison but by way of conceptualising the problem – because apart from being a value in and of itself, free intellectual exchange would lead to better scholarship. Take my own discipline of sociology. For far too long, caste was studied as if it was based on religious strictures alone – rather than being a South Asian phenomenon of discrimination.  Scholarly debates in India on personal law do not draw on the Pakistani or Bangladeshi experiences, although that would have been the most obvious comparison; for instance, when considering triple talaq.

In history, both Indian and Pakistani textbooks work selectively to bolster official ‘national’ narratives. This is compounded by the lack of access to each other’s archives which were artificially apportioned at partition. Even on issues that need common research such as climate change or epidemics, country boundaries are used as defining frameworks, as if waters, winds and viruses are obedient slaves to nationalist narratives. Add to this the difficulty of visas for research (or even tourism between India and Pakistan) and what all of this essentially means is that foreign scholars can do comparative studies which South Asians themselves cannot. 

Beyond the advantages of thinking in South Asian terms, there are also serious disadvantages to not thinking regionally or allowing free exchange. One feature of the attack on academic freedom within each country is the construction of the enemy-neighbour. Going beyond the effacement of each other’s histories and sociologies, in recent years even the acknowledgement of the other has been actively criminalised in both India and Pakistan. Kashmiri students have been the worst victims but across India, students have been jailed under charges of sedition or terror for playing Pakistani songs, cheering the Pakistani cricket team, even cheering Pakistan along with India. In Khyber Pakhtunwa, Pakistan, four students were expelled for singing India’s national anthem during a youth festival on campus. 

Pakistanis and Indians are not given visas to attend conferences in each other’s countries, also reducing the chances both have to host international conferences. For example, the 2018 Association for Asian Studies Conference held at Ashoka University attracted much controversy because of the Indian government’s refusal to give Pakistani scholars visas. Following the India-Pakistan war in 2025, Delhi University’s Standing Committee for Academic Matters refused to pass courses on Pakistan and China and instructed faculty not to include works by Pakistani scholars. In 2026, a Committee at Jammu University decided to drop Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Jinnah and Iqbal from an MA Political Science course. 

While the India-Pakistan rivalry is prominent and has affected the international framing of South Asia, several other borderland exchanges, both intellectual and material, happen on a regular basis – whether across the boundary between Nepal and Bihar or between Bangladesh and West Bengal, or between the Tamils in Sri Lanka and India. Kanak Mani Dixit who has been in the forefront of promoting the idea of South Asia, has called for a ‘penumbra Southasia’, where fuzzy intellectual and cultural borders soften the hard political divides, and affiliations are decentralised between regions rather than between nation-states.  

But here too, there are periodic restrictions to the detriment of intellectual freedom. The popular revolt against Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh followed by an interim government and then the electoral victory........

© The Wire