SRINAGAR: Founding member of the Delhi-based South Asian University (SAU) Sociology department has put in his papers following the university issuing a show cause notice to a PhD scholar and initiating a disciplinary inquiry against his supervisor, Professor Sasanka Perera. The scholar has already apologized for any offence caused by the proposal.
“The notice, it is learned, flagged a private YouTube video of an interview with Chomsky, which the scholar recorded in 2021 and uploaded in 2022. In this video, cited in the scholar’s PhD proposal, Chomsky is heard saying that Prime Minister Narendra Modi comes from a “radical Hindutva tradition” and is attempting to “dismantle Indian secular democracy” and “impose Hindu technocracy”,” Delhi-based newspaper, The Indian Express reported. “The notice demanded an explanation from the PhD candidate and the supervisor regarding the choice of topic. A response to this was submitted on May 15 which included the rationale of pursuing the interview as academic research and an apology, following which the purported video was taken down.”
The scholar was pursuing a PhD on Kashmir’s ethnography and politics at the SAARC-funded University that is managed by MEA. Perera who was supervising the research is a cultural anthropologist with a distinguished academic background. With a Master’s and PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Perera has taught at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, for 20 years and founded the Colombo Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and Culture. He has been the Chairman of the Department of Sociology (2011-2014), the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences (2011-2018), and the Vice President of SAU (2016-2019) at the SAU.
The newspaper reported that the SAU confirmed that an inquiry was initiated but denied that the PhD proposal directly led to Perera’s resignation.