Last week, Ashoka University, a Sonipat-based private initiative in higher education, announced the appointment of well-known political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta as the new Vice-Chancellor. It’s a point of departure for Mehta and administration of academic centres in India. The move shows the possibilities of private institutional space of higher learning in recognising excellence, something that public institutions failed to do for entirely non-academic considerations.

Mehta, who quit the now-defunct National Knowledge Commission in 2006 and a decade later resigned from the executive council of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in 2016, will assume his new role at Ashoka University from July 1. He is currently president of Centre for Policy Research, a Delhi-based policy think tank, which is an independent institution run by a non-profit society.

I have met him only once. In January 2010, I attended a talk he gave to a small gathering of students in Delhi. Before signing my copy of his slim book The Burden of Democracy (Penguin, 2003) and affectionately wishing me with warm words, he touched on a number of themes — including the lack of pedagogical imagination in educational policies of the country. One could easily infer that the phrase somehow also captured the core premises on which he chose to resign as member-convener of National Knowledge Commission (NKC) four years ago. He had explained it far more clearly when he put in his papers in 2006.

Led by Sam Pitroda, NKC was set up by United Progressive Alliance government in June 2005 and was mandated with advising the Prime Minister’s Office on policy related to education, research institutes and reforms needed to make India competitive in the knowledge economy.

Almost a year later, Mehta, along with sociologist Andre Beteille, took exception to Ministry of Human Resources Development (HRD)’s announcement of extending quotas to Other Backward Classes (OBC) for admission to central educational institutions.

In his resignation letter to the Prime Minister, made public by The Indian Express, he clearly stated that such policy was a step in wrong direction and so were the “the palliative measures the government is contemplating to defuse the resulting agitation, and the process employed to arrive at these measures”. Arguing against the HRD ministry’s policy announcements, he wrote:

“They violate four cardinal principles that institutions in a knowledge based society will have to follow: they are not based on assessment of effectiveness, they are incompatible with the freedom and diversity of institutions, they more thoroughly politicise the education process, and they inject an insidious poison that will harm the nation’s long-term interest.”

Emphasising that he favoured a more effective form of affirmative action, and not numerically mandated quotas in academic institutions, his long resignation letter is a piece of significant contribution to any debate on reservation policy in India.

If the myopic educational policies of HRD ministry were the key factor triggering his exit from NKC, a decade later it was the vice of bureaucratisation of academic institutions that paved the way for his decision to quit as a member of the executive council of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML). When Shakti Sinha, a retired Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer considered close to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was chosen to be Director of NMML, Mehta resigned arguing that the appointment of a bureaucrat to head an institution like NMML sends a very bad signal to the world of ideas and academic pursuits. NMML, an autonomous institution under the Ministry of Culture, is known as a seat of advanced research and social science scholarship.

In his resignation letter last year, Mehta alleged the advertisement put out for a candidate tweaked the qualifications for the post of director to include bureaucrats or administrators and in the process, the post was denied to academics with established credentials of scholarship. In doing so, Mehta highlighted a problem that isn’t confined to research institutions like NMML but quite endemic in administration of academic institutions across India. One may recall, for instance, how early this year an IAS officer was appointed as Vice-Chancellor of Rajasthan University.

However, better sense seems to have prevailed as Rajasthan government brought an amendment last month for curbing the practice of appointing IAS officers for the post when a Vice-Chancellor is removed or completes his or her tenure. It should go a step further and end the practice not only as a stopgap arrangement, but also invalidate the full-time appointment of bureaucrats as Vice-Chancellor.

Meanwhile, beyond the precincts of institutions, Mehta continues to be one of the leading public intellectuals in India, widely followed for his erudition-backed public reasoning. In times of polarised intellectual discourse, his issue-based engagement with ideas is evident in the fact that he is alternatively appropriated by the Right and the Left-liberal space.

So, while the Right rejoices when he compares Prime Minister Modi to “De Gaulle’s democratic engagement – his unique ability to both wield authority and yet personify the people”, Left-liberals nod vigorously when he berates the Prime Minister for appointing Yogi Adityanath as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. No wonder last week Open magazine described him as ‘India’s interpreter’ while naming him among 50 minds influencing how India thinks.

As he moves to Ashoka University, he must be aware of the fact that some of the fault-lines in envisaging a framework for higher education in India that he experienced in NKC may come back to haunt him. They may become the convenient red herrings for attacking private islands of excellence if they do well. So externalities of social justice, inclusiveness and affirmative action may be applied to judging these institutions, though Ashoka University believes in not refusing anyone just for want of money and its policy of being ‘need-blind’ entails that various scholarships and fellowships are offered to students.

Yet sections of the media, and perhaps social activism, have subjected it to non-academic evaluation, something Mehta can do well to steer clear of.

However, he needs to be more inclusive about widening the discourse to end the academic apartheid of inconvenient voices. When Mehta slammed the meeting of Right-wing academics in Delhi University in March this year, he was undermining the ‘liberal’ premises of his own arguments. Swadesh Singh, who teaches political science in Delhi University, ably countered that by arguing that the refusal to engage with the ideas of the gathering, thinkers like Mehta are abandoning their responsibility to understand what’s not ‘alternative’ thought system but, for all practical purposes, the ‘main discourse’.

That’s a blind spot which has been blurring Mehta’s usual clarity of intellectual insights. But, the real script may emerge from how one of our leading political scientists navigates the private aspirations of academic excellence in a small town of Haryana — right under the nose of the red-tape covered public sites that are alternatively described as ‘centres’ or ‘institutes’ of higher learning in the national capital. One hopes that he has better luck than his father VR Mehta – who was the vice-chancellor of Delhi University when I got enrolled as an undergraduate student in 1997. The years were marred by strikes and agitations — of course, for ‘social justice’.

I hope Mehta doesn’t carry the burden of such justice, it would be a grave injustice to the wonderful talent that he is.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @anandvardhan26