Through big lies, doublespeak, etc., the woke-jihadi academic complex seeks to capture the minds of young Indians.
The recent initiative under the Trump 2.0 administration in the US to dismantle the Department of Education and defund prominent higher education institutions was an aggressive but deliberate step to counter the deeply entrenched woke-jihadi complex in academia. These ideological networks have long dominated research institutions and elite universities in the West, spreading divisive ideas that even reach into the scientific and engineering domains. Alarmingly, this same complex has now found fertile ground in India’s premier institutions, including IITs, IISERs, NITs, and several private universities.
This ideological shift poses a grave threat to India’s aspirations for Viksit Bharat 2047 and the realization of Amrit Kaal. Forces hostile to India’s civilizational ethos are not only rewriting history by whitewashing the plunder, forced conversions, and cultural erasures committed against Hindus but are also now redirecting promising young researchers into academic projects that subtly or explicitly serve their anti-Bharat agenda. If the Government of India and the Education Ministry fail to act swiftly, we risk nurturing a generation of intellectuals, scientists, and bureaucrats who are ideologically compromised and disconnected from India’s Dharmic civilizational values.
India’s leading HEIs are training young minds to grow alienated from this Dharmic civilization and the values it upholds: diversity, democracy, difference, debate, and dissent. Ironically, these are the very values these institutions claim to champion. Without the foundation of Vedic knowledge or lessons from the Upanishads in our curricula, we are enabling our best minds to be indoctrinated against all that is authentically Bharatiya. The failure is also ours, for despite a decade in power, the establishment has yet to effectively identify and uproot this insidious network. Granted, it is not easy since these actors are highly smart and operate through strategic doublespeak and institutional capture.
Nowhere is this more evident than in how these actors have exploited the government’s increased focus on investing in IITs, IISERs, and NITs. The Humanities and Social Science departments in these institutions are now saturated with individuals committed to undermining India from within. Why are we continuing to fund this intellectual subversion? Have we even fully acknowledged the depth of the problem? It is imperative that we recognize this problem, challenge its legitimacy, and develop alternative narratives grounded in India’s civilizational ethos. After all, narratives are not just stories—they are instruments of political power.
Today, these groups are influencing research in critical sectors like AI and technological developments. While the tools themselves may be neutral, the minds behind them are increasingly shaped by ideologies that oppose the idea of Bharat. The danger lies not just in what they believe but in how they are organized—deeply networked with international actors who support and sustain their efforts. The opposition is united and determined, while the alternative voices remain fragmented and occasionally reactive.
Evidence of this ideological takeover is already apparent in many humanities departments of IITs. These departments were conceived initially as support systems to help engineers develop a humanitarian and socially grounded outlook. Inspired by early Western models such as the Max Planck Institute and the Frankfurt School, these departments at prestigious institutions like IIT Kharagpur and IIT Bombay sought to integrate philosophy, literature, economics, and social thought into the technical curriculum. However, since the late 2000s, these departments have evolved into ideological hubs dominated by outdated Marxist paradigms.
Post-2008/10, this degeneration accelerated, especially as the newer IITs—Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, Indore, Ropar, and Jodhpur—sought to establish themselves academically. Initially, the inclusion of promising young humanities scholars was seen as a move toward intellectual diversity and interdisciplinary research. However, between 2011 and 2018, a distinct shift occurred. Faculty with strong ideological leanings began to fill these positions, introducing programs such as the MA in Society and Culture, launched at IIT Gandhinagar in 2014. Unlike IIT Madras, which had offered focused MA degrees in English, Economics, and Development Studies, this program introduced a broader, explicitly Marxist framework under the guise of interdisciplinarity.
The hidden motive behind these programs is not educational advancement but ideological re-engineering. The anti-India rhetoric embedded in course content gradually undermines national pride and erodes the Bharatiya traditions. Research scholars and BTech students alike are being drawn into a network that prioritizes globalist and leftist narratives over national interest. Academic politics in these institutions has now reached a point where merit and scholarly integrity are sidelined by an opaque culture of nepotism, ideological conformity, and even personal manipulation.
There are disturbing reports of unethical practices being normalized—personal relationships used for career advancement, favouritism in hiring, and even alleged incidents of coercion and honey-trapping among faculty and students. Such examples illustrate a larger pattern where personal networks supersede institutional ethics and academic merit. The personal is political and in their Doublespeak is AI is not Artificial Intelligence but Ayatollah’s Intellect and Deepsake to Deepfake and now Deepfaith.
Even more concerning is the informal but growing dominance of identity groups. It comes in various forms like linguistic (Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam) or religious (Christian and Islamic networks), all common in how they strategically position themselves within institutional hierarchies. Their aim is not scholarly excellence but subversion and ideological control. Many of them seek to subvert existing research agendas, replace faculty with ideologically aligned individuals, and convert HEIs into platforms for their political activism.
Is this not a case of misused autonomy? It appears so. Conversations with students reveal disturbing patterns wherein faculty are often married to colleagues, thus forming insular social clusters that eventually resist scrutiny and foster echo chambers. The “ghettoization” of intellectual life is seeping into engineering departments as well, gradually infecting them with the same ideological rigidity.
What began as intellectual subversion has now taken a more dangerous turn: our premier institutions are slowly becoming havens for urban Naxal sympathizers and radical activists who use academic platforms to spread their views while silencing alternative voices. These institutions had the potential to contribute meaningfully to studies in digital media, Indian culture, scientific-religious dialogue, and the global knowledge economy. But instead, they are producing research that parrots globalist narratives and diminishes Indian contributions. Through big lies, doublespeak, cherry-picking facts, branding dissenters, and repeating falsehoods ad nauseam, the woke-jihadi academic complex seeks to capture the minds of young Indians. Backed by international networks and protected by institutional opacity, they have grown confident and aggressive in their mission.
The way forward is not to dismantle our institutions but to reclaim them by building alternative intellectual ecosystems, reforming recruitment and promotion mechanisms, and ensuring that Bharatiya civilizational values are not excluded from academic inquiry. The battle is not merely administrative or academic, instead it’s civilizational. The enemies within are more dangerous than those outside because they wear the garb of intellectual respectability while undermining the nation’s very soul. Let us recognize the scale of this challenge, and let’s respond with urgency, unity, and clarity to bring excellence while retaining the elements of our civilizational ethos of diversity and inclusivity as enshrined in our Constitution as well.
* Prof. Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit is the Vice Chancellor of JNU.