An anonymous social media complaint about Ambedkarite and anti-caste writings has reached the Prime Minister’s Office. What happens when a complaint without academic standing acquires the authority of the state?
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B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste has outlived not only unhappy readers, but also the disapproval of the speech on which it was based, the debate that followed its arguments, and decades of political dispute over its interpretation of caste and Hinduism. It has now acquired a new kind of reader: an anonymous social media complainant who has labelled it “poison”. The complaint subsequently reached the Prime Minister’s Office, triggering correspondence with central universities about courses in which Ambedkarite writings are taught.
On September 26, an account on X tweeted a list of books and academic readings used in Indian universities and referred to them as “poison” being infused into the minds of the youth. The list included Annihilation of Caste by B.R. Ambedkar, Gulamgiri by Jyotirao Phule, Against the Madness of Manu by Sharmila Rege, works by Gail Omvedt on caste and democracy, Debrahmanising History by Braj Ranjan Mani, and writings by Periyar, Savitribai Phule, Uma Chakravarti, R.S. Sharma and several other scholars. According to the post, these readings constitute an attempt by a “leftist cabal” engaged in grooming students.
The next day, September 27, an officer from the Department of Higher Education sent a message to some central universities. It referred to correspondence received from the Prime Minister’s Office regarding the X post and requested that the universities provide their comments, along with enrolment figures for the courses in question. The communication was marked “Urgent”. Universities named in reports included the University of Hyderabad, Pondicherry University, Rajiv Gandhi University, Tezpur University, Maulana Azad National Urdu University and the English and Foreign Languages University, among others.
It is too soon to tell what, if anything, will eventually be removed from these syllabi as a result of this communication. It is important to note that there has been no governmental directive prohibiting the inclusion of Annihilation of Caste in university syllabi. There has been no notification requiring universities to delete Ambedkar or Phule from their syllabi.
What has happened here, rather, is preliminary. And for that very reason, more illuminating. An unnamed complaint about the content of university syllabi, originating on social media and reaching the apex of the state, has found its way back down to the universities, which are now expected to respond to it.
This is not a story about banning a book. Not yet.
It is a story about what happens when an anonymous complaint acquires an institutional life.
A syllabus at a university is more than a list of texts. It is a list of texts that the academic community deems worthy of being read, discussed and presented to students. It is the outcome of work carried out by various departments, boards of studies, schools and academic councils, among other statutory authorities.
The issue, then, is not whether it is possible to revise a syllabus, but whose demand such a revision would meet, on what grounds, and through what institutional process.
In this particular case, the nature of the question has taken on an unusual form. The original complaint has not come from a faculty member, an academic council, a curriculum committee or an academic discussion. It came from an anonymous social media post. Not only is the complaint itself ideological, it is also not an academic argument about the books. Yet it was sufficiently consequential to enter the administrative machinery of higher education.
There is something important here about the status of the complainant. An academic curriculum is normally open to challenge because those who challenge it can enter into an argument about it. A scholar can dispute the interpretation of a text. A student can question its relevance. A department can propose an alternative. An academic council can reject a recommendation.
But what happens when the person demanding scrutiny has no such standing?
The anonymous complainant does not have to defend a syllabus, teach a course, identify a scholarly disagreement or even appear in the discussion that follows. The complaint simply has to travel far enough.
And here, it did.
The older history of literary censorship in India often provides us with recognisable antagonists. A book attracts a complaint. A police case follows. A court is approached. A government orders a ban. A publisher withdraws the book. An author is threatened. Even when the process is messy, there is usually an identifiable site at which the act of suppression can be located.
The newer forms of censorship are harder to locate.
A committee revises a syllabus. A textbook development group removes a passage. An academic council sends a course back for revision. An institution announces that a text no longer fits its pedagogical objectives. No one necessarily says, “We are censoring this.”
Curricular censorship belongs to a wider transformation in which suppression can occur through administrative structures rather than through a clearly identifiable censor. Matthew Bunn’s account of “new censorship theory” describes forms of structural censorship in which suppression occurs without a single identifiable suppressor.
But the present episode introduces another possibility.
What if the person initiating the censorial demand is himself faceless?
The X account is visible. The post is visible. The books are visible. The political accusation is visible. What is not visible is the person behind the account, at least as a participant in any recognised academic or institutional process. Yet the complaint acquires force because it is picked up by institutions that do have authority.
This reverses the familiar relationship between complainant and institution. In the older model, a person approaches the state and asks it to act. The state then decides whether the complaint has sufficient legal or administrative standing. Here, the complaint appears to have travelled almost instantaneously from the social media sphere into the machinery of higher education.
The person who made the accusation does not have to appear before the university.
The university is the one that has to answer.
That is what makes the present case more than another episode in the long argument over academic autonomy. It points towards a different kind of censorial power, in which the authority of the censor can come not from the identity of the complainant but from the institutional machinery that chooses to take the complaint seriously.
Written in 1936 following the rejection of Ambedkar’s speech to the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal because of its radical attack on the caste system, Annihilation of Caste continues to be an integral part of discussions on caste, religion and modern Indian society. This is not a peripheral book that has suddenly started making an appearance in classrooms. It is one of the core texts through which students encounter the history of the caste system in India.
A university does not assign a book simply because all of its sentences are true. It does not expect students to accept its arguments. On the contrary, the reason for reading a text is usually to engage with an argument. Students read Ambedkar to engage with an argument on caste. They read Gandhi to engage with another argument. They read Marx, Savitribai Phule, Periyar, Manu, Weber, Freud or Foucault not because the university has certified that all of their ideas are indisputably true, but because the intellectual history of their disciplines could not have developed otherwise.
For bell hooks, the classroom could be a “radical space of possibility” in which education became more than the mere transmission of authorised knowledge, but a practice of freedom. And the practice of freedom begins with the freedom to engage with ideas.
But there is another question that is perhaps even more revealing. Why should an anonymous person be able to determine that this intellectual encounter is itself a matter requiring governmental attention?
The anonymous post is not really interested only in what Ambedkar wrote. It is concerned with what might happen when students read him.
The imagined danger lies in the reader.
The current Ambedkar episode provides us with a different variation. In this case, the text has not been removed, but its existence in university syllabi is being scrutinised.
What troubles me most is the anonymity of the individual who complains about Ambedkarite texts. Individuals have the freedom to criticise a book or a syllabus. They have the freedom to say that a university teaches the wrong things. The democratic problem arises when an anonymous complaint acquires the government’s power—the power that the complainant never possessed on their own.
The censor does not have to sit in a government office, sign an order or appear in court. The censor does not even have to have a face.
The question is not only who is afraid of Ambedkar.
It is who has the right to decide what the student may or may not read.
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*Assistant Professor at the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Presidency University, Bengaluru
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