The recommendation by a committee at Jammu University on March 22 to purge material about Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Syed Ahmed Khan and Muhammad Iqbal from the MA Political Science syllabus is a distressing signal about the state of higher education in India.
The decision has been framed as a response to public sentiment, but it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of a university. Aristotle once said that it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
By removing apparently “controversial” figures, the university is telling its postgraduate students, who are ostensibly being trained for high-level analysis, that they are not intellectually mature enough to study the architects of the subcontinent’s history without being “corrupted” by them.
The primary casualty of this erasure is critical thinking. Studying the Two-Nation Theory advanced by Iqbal and Jinnah, alongside Khan’s concepts of Muslim distinctiveness, is essential to understanding the evolution of Muslim political dynamics in South Asia. Not reading the primary proponents of those ideas is akin to studying the French Revolution without mentioning the Jacobins or the Cold War without reading Karl Marx.
When a curriculum is sanitised to include only thinkers deemed “acceptable”, it ceases to be a tool...
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