Have Our IITs Been Hijacked By Their Social Science Departments?

On 29 April, 2025 , X was abuzz in the morning with posts on an anonymous account with snippets and screenshots of MA dissertation defense titles of one of the leading IITs of the country.

These dissertation defense invitations were from the MA Society and Culture programme 2025 batch of IIT Gandhinagar. They reflected that the driving force behind the dissertation components of more than 6-7 MA theses in question were sympathizers of radical Islamization.

Sample these abstracts:

1. "Through ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories, and textual analysis, the thesis investigates how traditional garments of ulama became visual markers through which ulama are recognized and revered by the wider Muslim community"

2. "Drawing on fieldwork with both Muslim and Hindu ritual specialists, it examines how local deities, ancestral spirits, and supernatural beings such as Chathan, Kali, Karinkali, and Nagam are reclassified within an Islamic cosmological framework as Jinns. The thesis interrogates the term “Islamization” beyond the conventional lens of religious conversion, arguing that it constitutes a broader, more complex process of cultural and spiritual transformation. The study frames Islamization as a dialogical process, wherein elements from indigenous belief systems are not outright rejected but recontextualized within Islamic metaphysics".

3. "Lakshadweep, India’s only coral archipelago situated off its southwestern coast, represents a unique socio-ecological setting where an indigenous Muslim Scheduled Tribe community has historically thrived, deeply reliant on marine fisheries…..Employing ethnographic observation guided by collaborative principles, it traces how Islam and indigenous knowledge mutually shape islanders’ engagement with the perilous sea and its resources. Faith here is not merely supplementary but a central anchor: concepts such as tawakkul (trust in God), the pursuit of halal (permissible) means, and religiously informed notions of restraint and responsibility aid in navigating risk, knowledge transmission, and extend into everyday practices of resource management and sharing. These elements together constitute a distinct maritime sensorium, where sea, faith, and ethical life are intimately entangled".

These had a Kerala connection, a Bengal bias, and an international cohort of scholars from Portugal, Canada, etc. in the mentoring system. Immediately, the posts around mentioning these theses started to go viral and people in the comments section demonstrated shock and disbelief. This came as a rude joke to readers of X, particularly in the wake of the Pahalgam attack.

The titles of these dissertations could have been the last thing that any parent could dream of. The media immediately started picking up this story.

A few hard hitting questions, such as ‘what is the role of HSS in IITs?’ ‘Why waste taxpayers' money?’ , and questions related to security and safety of young students who probably have been silenced by some fuzzy “honour code” that has pushed them to live under extreme, were asked.

The idea of including Humanities and Social Sciences into the IIT system goes back in time to the early 1950s, when IIT Kharagpur, IIT Bombay and such technological academic mega hubs were emerging into prominence.

The HSS departments as they are known today, were an integral part of the earliest departmental structures in IITs. Their primary role was to be a strong support/service department for engineering studies, and provide a humanitarian and socially sensitive perspective to budding engineers. They were meant to be strong in language, literature, philosophy, social studies, and economics – the pillars of any developing and upward mobility society.

Eventually, these departments started to grow and in the early 2000s, they attracted some of the best university graduates to their core research and teaching cadre. The core idea of establishing HSS as integral part of technological education was initially based on a western model of famous Marxist philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas’s Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World and the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt.

Considering that the early IITs were modelled on universities and institutions from Europe and America, with a philosophy to bring high quality education to Indian technocrats of the newly independent nation, the HSS departments too borrowed freely from the early western critical theories and philosophies.

However, the rut started happening after 2008-2010, when the departments of HSS across the country’s IITs, including the “new” IITs became a haven for radical intellectuals and outdated pedagogy, relying on the same Marxist philosophies that needed revisions. The early HSS departments also had in-fightings, competition with university academics, and research scholars’ exploitation that was rampant, in spite of their purported socialist approach.

It was a small group of scholars initially, that has grown in proportion in the current time to at least more than 20-25 faculty members in HSS per IIT.

The ‘new IITs’ as they were known as—Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, Indore, Ropar, Jodhpur—and a few others had come up around 2008 or so. They were struggling to build a niche of their own. The promising scholarship among young students in HSS gave a glimpse of hope to these IITs, so that new areas and new fields could be explored through establishing different programs and cutting edge research.

The intention was good – to bring strong scholars beyond engineering and sciences to the IIT fold, and create interdisciplinary engagement. It was at the cusp of these exciting times, that a set of vested interests entered into the IIT system between 2011-2018 and slowly sabotaged the entire system.

These people led by ‘new scholars’ and ‘young academics’, entered the IIT system as full time faculty and brought radically new ideas, such as establishing a Postgraduate programme with an opaque title called ‘MA in Society and Culture’, which was launched at IITGN in 2014.

Old IITs had offered MA programmes earlier in specific areas, such as English, Economics, Development Studies, etc. This MA in Society and Culture at IIT was designed to be unique and different from department specific approach of IIT Madras and excel in interdisciplinary studies.

It provided a thorough Marxist approach to the curriculum. The course had diverse areas with less rigour in each. Eventually, in 2024, IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay too started their MA programmes in ‘Society and Culture’ and MA by Research. Suddenly, the numbers in MA Society and Culture at IIT Gandhinagar increased manifold in the 2023-24 batch.

IITs had been recognized for a long time for being excellent undergraduate, rigour-oriented academic institutions. These MA programmes however, became a leeway for lateral entry into the system without appearing for GATE, JEE or other such rigorous entrance examinations.

This sparked a kind of moral conflict between senior undergraduates, who had worked hard for years to enter the IIT system, and new MA students, seen by some as having entered through the ‘backdoor’.

Between 2016-2018, a set of radical scholars from universities in US, Australia, UK, Korea, Portugal and other parts of the world got recruited in various IITs, ISERs and IIMs. Eventually, some of the ‘founders’ of the above mentioned MA programme left for private universities. The bigger problem started after that phase of replacement. These scholars became the ‘ghost presence’ on IIT campuses by continuously desiring to be ‘collaborators’, and the autonomy of student research was curtailed by consistent interference and deliberate dismantling of academic rigour.

The ground realities of India were different from these ideologies that were being pushed in through clear agenda setting. As a result, depression and feeling of inadequacy set in among these students. Courses based on harmful psychoanalysis, ghosts and ghouls, and language-oriented biased perspectives were introduced and made quickly available to all parts of the country. In addition, groups such as the Ambedkar-Phule circle entered the scenario as well.

‘IIT products’—including PhD, MA, and BTech students—became targets of low-quality academic politics. Meanwhile, international networks were activated to promote the new ‘intellectuals’ through grants, promotions, and other favours.

This nexus has become so powerful that they have been able to tempt PhD students to join this “movement”, as they call it in their language through a fuzzy ‘honour code’. They have PhD students from IIT Gandhinagar even marry them with the temptation of getting placed in IITs, IIMs, and other central and state universities as faculty. These students were instrumental in replacing guides in the same institution and taking their position. There are many such instances.

In fact, IISERs, IIMs and IITs have been “assured” to some of these students who have been instrumental in leading the Left agenda. Their primary focus appears to be to recruit their “own members” in different IITs, destroy ongoing research activities by serious scholars, compromise ethics, and have left activist or specific linguistic and specific religious predominance.

The problem is not simply intellectual corruption, but rather other dangerous signs of becoming safe havens for Left radicals, who are slowly but steadily eliminating any academic deliberations with their own extreme ideological positions. India could have been a great contributor to studies in digital media, cultural research, scientific-religious deliberations, etc. However, these groups systematically remove the capacity of young students by pressurizing them radical ideologies, lampooning the ‘original research’ by creating parodies that are clearly visible in the invitation emails.

What is sad is that they are supported by many engineering counterparts, who are possibly trying to win the next big awards, while working with these ‘friends’.

The author is an alumnus of IIT Gandhinagar.