You seemed emotional when students raised those slogans—‘Jai Bhim Lal Salaam’—on your last day. What were your feelings?

It was spontaneous on their part. The core group had organised a lovely farewell where they weren’t speaking about me, but about the course and what they learned from the readings. I was walking out to my car, and the slogan suddenly started. And yes, I did become emotional. That moment captured something for everybody. It captured a moment of hope and resistance, and young people and the future. That sense of hope and freedom that that moment captured and what the university can be, that’s what was meaningful for everybody.

The fact is, there are tens of thousands of committed, brilliant teachers in this country. These teachers mean something; they do something. What was special about this moment? There were two things. One is that JNU has been under such a horrific attack since 2016. Umar Khalid is still in prison, as is Sharjeel Imam (activist known for his allegedly inflammatory speeches made during anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests, which led to his arrest under sedition). These people are still in jail without trial for five years. JNU has been under attack, and the faculty has been under attack. I have personally been under attack, among many others. So, it was like a moment of vindication, a moment of hope, a moment of resilience and joy also. It was the kind of tears that come to your eyes when your team wins. I do not enjoy sports at all, but here our team is the team that believes in a secular India, in an India that is just and fair. That’s our team.

You referred to JNU being under attack. When you joined in 2008, what was JNU then versus now?

I don’t want to romanticise anything pre-2014, nor India, nor JNU. There were many issues—faculty posts were not filled, and reserved faculty posts in particular. But what has radically changed after 2016, when the new Vice Chancellor, Jagadesh Kumar, took over, was that we began to understand suddenly that this is what an authoritarian fascist regime looks like. Between 2014 and 2016, the kinds of things that happen routinely on campus—9 pm hostel mess talks. Different groups would invite different people from all over Delhi.

Every day at 9 pm, some political group or the other, right wing, left wing, Ambedkarite, whatever group, there would be these talks in the mess that would go on for an hour, or an hour and a half, discussions. Faculty were selected through certain procedures. Selection committees, panels passed through certain kinds of procedures before they were finalised. Deans and chairs were appointed by rotation, by seniority. What this means is that nobody had a fiefdom. It was a democratic process. You’re not seen as a powerful person. Nobody stands up when you enter the room because you’re a colleague who’s taken on a responsibility, not power.

What happens after 2016 is that all these things are dismantled. All hostel talks have stopped. Now, only talks that are cleared by the administration can get space inside any seminar room. You will notice that in all student group talks, the venue is written as “outside SSS1, outside SSS2”. We talk on the stairs outside; they don’t give us room inside. At every event, security guards are around filming. If you ask them why they are being filmed, they say it’s our job. And you know, it’s their job. They have to get their salary. So we just let them do it. A number of events have been cancelled. The West Asian Studies centre had invited two ambassadors from West Asian countries, and that event was cancelled at the last minute because there was a feeling that Palestine would be talked about. There is a hard kind of censorship going on in terms of any kind of conversation.

Two, the appointment of Deans and Chairs is at the pleasure of the Vice Chancellor. Literally, the Vice Chancellor picks and chooses. So, now it’s a post of power. It’s a post where you have to please the administration. Faculty are now selected by the Vice Chancellor directly. There is a selection interview board, and there is a selection committee, but nobody from the centre is usually on the selection committee. Normally, the chair would be present, that of the centre. So, now the chairs are not present. One of the first things Jagadesh Kumar did was to introduce the idea that the Vice Chancellor can introduce people into selection committees. And that was the beginning of the end, because you have people who are there simply to stamp. So it’s very evident that faculty appointments for the past many years, since 2016, have been decided in advance.

Are you saying these are ideologically loaded faculty members being hired? So, 10, 15 years down the line, JNU will be dominated by right-wing Hindu teachers?

Hindu is not the point. Hindutva and RSS are the point. It’s not the religious. They’re organisationally linked. Many of them were in the ABVP [Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad], many of them were students of JNU in the ABVP, and then they’re appointed as faculty. It’s a very clear ideological agenda. And they seem to think if the left did it, it was okay, and when we do it, it’s an issue. No, when the Left left, the Left didn’t appoint people from the Left. They appointed intellectuals. People were not selected for their Left ideology. They were selected for their scholarship, for their books, for their writing. But now the people who are coming in have no qualifications other than that they owe allegiance to the Sangh. And they make it very clear. They’re very open about it. That’s their job. They’ve been brought in to do this.

So scholarship does not matter; it is ideological commitments. What will happen to JNU 10–15 years down the line? Two Cabinet Ministers in Modi’s government studied in JNU, donning the Foreign Affairs and Finance portfolios.

Well, I have always found that very difficult to boast about. But see, the point is not what will happen to JNU. The point is what is happening to the university system. All over the country, public universities are being destroyed. Private universities are permitted, but they also come under the control of the regime. This has happened all over Delhi University (DU) also—very good teachers who had taught for years were not confirmed or kept as ad hoc teachers. They’re jobless, but the people who have come in their place have no clue how to teach.

In DU, this has started—in JNU not yet, but it will start—which is the implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP), which has a very clear agenda. It actually has two aims. One is to saffronise education. It is an RSS document. And two is to end the system of public universities and to introduce a very neoliberal regime in order to produce labour which is conveniently useful for a neoliberal economy. For example, one of the statements in the National Education Policy is “we are training our students to have three or four jobs in a lifetime”.

This is something they’re proudly boasting about, which means that they are going to produce young people whose education will equip them to fit in here or there or there at a minimum level of education, so that wherever the economy needs them, they can be slotted. So, there will be mass layoffs, and then there will be some hiring. But the hiring and firing is going to actually be of a set of people who will not have anything else. They will not have any other options. When an education policy says our goal is to train young people to have three to four jobs in a lifetime, you are telling us that they cannot expect stability. There will be no institutions. You cannot expect a livelihood from one job.

So, you change the faculty; you change the syllabus, so that there is absolutely no serious work being done. Then, you fill up time with innumerable classes and assignments. It has even been reported in mainstream media: Delhi University students and teachers are staggering under the weight of endless classes and continuous assignments, and it is clear that the point is to stop students and teachers from having any time to do any critical thinking. It is a very low level of education, but packed.

So this is the RSS agenda. Do you see any signs of pushback? The control over the history syllabus was one of their key points in the 1980s and 90s. Is it now that they have free run?

It’s not that there is no pushback, but the power is in their hands. For example, there is a university in this city, I will not name it, where the Vice Chancellor has decided that PhD examiners will be appointed by him/her. This makes no sense. Usually, in most universities in India, the supervisor gives a list of examiners, which is discussed in the centre. There are levels and levels. And finally, five are empanelled, and two of them are selected by an academic council. This Vice Chancellor has decided to appoint their own examiners.

And those examiners have no clue how to examine. In fact, they are meant not to have any clue. So, for example, if there is a study of five biographies of women—and this is just an example—from a broadly cultural studies field, it goes to someone who teaches in a home science department of some university. And one of the comments that comes back is “the sample size is too small”. What does that mean? This is a study of five biographies. Is it a statistical study? This person has no clue.

So what I’m trying to say is that there is a destruction of the possibility of critical thinking. There is a destruction of any kind of serious work. The M.Phil has ended. And then there’s a so-called four-year BA [Bachelor of Arts] program, which is already collapsing before our eyes. That fourth year involves a ridiculous regime of writing a dissertation in three months or some short period of time, and then they have to produce a video based on that. They have to publish that. These ideas are not coming from academics. No serious academic would think a thesis can be written by a 4th-year BA student with a video and a publication. What I am saying is, these are just a combination of illiteracy and motivated malice.

What about State governments? Are they able to resist any changes?

Some State governments have, I think. The Kerala government has taken a fairly firm stand. The Karnataka government took some kind of a stand. But when it is happening at such high levels, how do you push back against a Vice Chancellor who says he/she will decide examiners for all PhD theses? Because we must remember that the university system was never democratic. The structure is such that the Vice Chancellor has the final say. It has always been the case. That system lends itself to takeover very easily.

Now that the RSS is in control, they are able to take over it by appointing their people. JNU was a very rare space, but it was permitted to be democratic. Delhi University also had these bottom-up structures—college teachers would discuss syllabi, and it would go up. There was a structure in place, but all that depended on the Vice Chancellor permitting that. And that is now no longer possible.

Delhi University Teachers’ Association members and students protesting against the National Education Policy 2020, at Mandi House in New Delhi on September 5, 2025. | Photo Credit: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar

Today, if students go with a list of demands from a particular ideological bent, they would be laughed out of the room.

See, if they go with an ideological bent, they should be thrown out. I don’t think that is the issue. They would like to say that the resistance to their destruction of the university is coming from an ideological perspective. It is not, because you have a whole bunch of people who are not only holding different views within the Left, but also non-Left. There is, after all, a non-Left resistance to Hindu Rashtra and RSS. Some people are just serious academics who just want to save the university, good liberals who want to save the university.

The point is that, for example, readings are being removed from Delhi University syllabi, topics are being removed by people who have no clue about the course. They are looking at individual names, and they are removing people with Muslim names. They are removing titles which have words like Dalit in the reading list. They are just going by that because they are illiterate. They are there to enforce the RSS Brahminical perspective. And this is where I think it is not going to work. It is not really possible to push back informally because these things are carried out over our heads. It is exactly like the Election Commission is behaving today. They are just going to do it.

It is not that there is no pushback. I think where they are wrong is, they think that students learn everything in the classroom. We never thought that. Students learn from life, they learn from politics, and they learn from interacting with one another. They learn from their own experience. So, if you are told that the so-called Hindu culture was just beautiful and fair, which Dalit is going to accept that? Which woman is going to accept that? They know the lives they lead under this cultural formation.

What they will achieve is, of course, the end of the university. But I do not think that means the end of learning. And we are definitely going through a very dark phase. I do not think that we should underplay what this destruction means.

You wrote in Kafila that India should be recognised as a country of multiple minorities with no one religious community, and that Hindutva is the latest stage in the millennia-old attempt to produce one. You also say the claim of decolonising is a cover for a recolonising project. Does this idea of multiple minorities bother the Hindutva brigade?

Of course, they hate the idea that it is a country of multiple minorities. What I mean by that—it’s also in my new book—what I’m saying is something B.R. Ambedkar said. The fact is that there is no such thing as a Hindu majority, legally. Let us just look at the legal definition of Hindu. The legal definition of Hindu is, all those who are not Muslim, Christian, or Parsi. There is no positive definition of the word Hindu because there is not one single practice you can pick out that you can say all Hindus perform or believe in. There are meat-eating Hindus, there are non-meat-eating Hindus.

The RSS, BJP would say all Hindus now worship Lord Ram.

Well, they don’t. And this is the kind of thing Savarkar also did in Essentials of Hindutva.

“Everybody in Bharatvarsh celebrates Holi.” No, we don’t. “Everybody celebrates Rakshabandhan”. No, we don’t. So, he just said it. And that was part of his Hindu nation-building agenda. There is no legal definition of Hindu. Even the RSS cannot deny this. If we tell the RSS, come up with one thing, for example, Ram, and do a survey of the country and show us that 80 per cent of this country believes that Ram is the primary God, they won’t be able to do it. Not unless they carry it out with violence, which we know they are very capable of. But my point is that legally, this is the case. Because Hinduism is actually a collection of multiple communities with multiple beliefs.

And it has been the Brahminical agenda from the Puranas onward. There has been a break, obviously, in modernity. There has been a break with the Hindutva project. It is not the same project. But I was interested in just tracing the continuity. And the continuity appears to be this—and this is also based on the work of many scholars—that the attempt is to assimilate the non-Brahminical into the Brahminical fold. Different kinds of Gods are incorporated by building these familial relationships. Somebody is made into somebody’s wife, somebody is made into somebody’s child. So, assimilation is one way, from the Puranas onwards. Marginalisation is another way. Extermination is another way.

When they talk about ghar wapsi, there is no wapsi. Wapsi means you are going back. What you are doing is converting Adivasis into Hinduism, and resisting their conversion into any other religion, calling any other conversion false. So, when I say multiple minorities, that is what I mean: there is no Hindu majority in this country. We are a country of multiple minorities, and that’s a good thing. Brahminical Hinduism has its place. Please believe in it if you want. That’s up to you. But everybody doesn’t have a place there. Dalits don’t have a place there. Most women don’t—look at Uttarakhand Civil Code. It shows us the place of women, the place of minorities.

Members of the ABVP raise slogans during a protest over the police lathi charge on students in Barabanki, at the Gandhi statue, in Lucknow on September 4, 2025. Hindu, Nivedita says, is not the point—Hindutva and RSS are the point. | Photo Credit: ANI

This claim of decolonisation being a cover for recolonisation—could you expand on that?

Hindutva started, for a while using, this idea of the decolonial imagination. And they are using an idea that comes from a very different space. So, decoloniality, terms like decoloniality, decolonising come from an anti ethno nationalist space. It comes from Latin America. It comes from a very different space. When they use the term decolonisation, when the Hindu right and the right wing globally are using the idea of decolonising, they say they are attacking Western hegemony and replacing it with an indigenous idea. But Brahminism is not the indigenous idea of this land. So what they’re doing is actually—it’s a de-Westernising project. Superficially, it’s not entirely de-Westernising because the idea of the nation is Western. The idea of the nuclear bomb is Western. A lot of this kind of ethnonationalism is very Western. But there’s a superficial de-Westernising project and an attempt to replace it with the Brahminical elite. So it’s a replacement of Western elite ideas with a Brahminical idea.

So when they say ‘Indian knowledge system’, for example, it should be Indian knowledge systems. But even when they talk about that, they are really talking about Brahminical ideas. Sanskrit, Sanskrit, Sanskrit. That’s all they talk about. They allow some idea of Buddhism, but they don’t at all take into account the fact that this is a heterogeneous space with heterogeneous multiple knowledge systems. And with all their claims to Indian knowledge systems, what are they doing to, for example, the people of the Nicobar? The indigenous people of Nicobar, their language, and their knowledge of ecology are not Indian knowledge. So it’s very obvious that what they’re really doing is using the notion of decolonising—they’re recolonising. It’s a recolonising Brahminical move. That’s what I’m trying to say.

But internationally, Modi and his government were in favour of the United States in every way possible. How does this marry with the decolonising project?

It shows up the hypocrisy of the so-called decolonising project because you are basically ready to be the little, the littlest, least powerful junior partner to Trump. Where does your decolonising go then? Welcoming him at this big Ahmedabad stadium—it exposes the hypocrisy completely.

Where do you see India going in the next five years? The trends are very clear—the complete marginalisation of institutions, the judiciary to some extent, the Election Commission, universities, and government institutions. Everybody has fallen in line, more or less. There is some resistance, some YouTube journalism, people writing who are willing to stick their necks out. But the BJP and RSS are pretty good at holding on to power and implementing their agenda.

They are good in the way that fascist regimes are good. That is, they use the coercive apparatus of the state. They buy over—Saam Daam Dand Bhed [negotiation, bribery, force, trickery], right? They use all four to take over institutions. But what I see in the next five years is people’s resistance. And that’s what I see every single day now. Whether that resistance will add up, whether that resistance will succeed—all that is not very clear, obviously. But look at what happened with the Aravallis, right? Look at the massive resistance. Look at the farmers’ resistance. Look at the resistance to [Kuldeep Sagar] Sengar, the rapist, about to be released. And the Supreme Court cited public dissent when that was rethought.

I actually see resistance. The resistance may or may not be at the level of institutions. It may or may not succeed at the level of institutions, but it is certainly there at every level. And we will have to see where the resistance goes. But it’s not going to be easy for them. They’re being mocked on social media. Their Ministers are being mocked. The Ministers speak with such arrogance. That man, the BJP Minister who talked about the Aravallis, and he said, “Humare teen pahad hain: Modiji, Yogiji, aur Amit Shahji. Aur rehe Aravalli ki baat? Usko hum cement kar denge. Gareebon ka kaam aayega.” (We have three mountains: Modi, Yogi [Adityanath] and Amit Shah. As for the Aravallis? We will make it into cement. It will be of use to the poor.) This was what he said. And this is circulating on social media, where he’s being mocked, and there’s so much anger. There’s also a huge level of exposure at a different level.

But they keep winning elections.

I will say three letters—ECI. That is it.

So you think the election system has been subverted?

Absolutely. And there is a process of mass disenfranchisement. That is very clear. They keep winning elections, which shows that they have sewn the system up tight. It does not reflect their popularity.