Features
Sri Lankan scholar thrown under the bus in New Delhi
by Saman Indrajith
On 31st July 2024, senior Sri Lankan scholar Prof. Sasanka Perera left the South Asian University, New Delhi, which he had helped establish and worked for nearly 13 years. This was as a mark of protest against the mistreatment of a PhD student he was supervising and an inquiry initiated against him (Prof. Perera) over his supervisory role.
Perera was one of the founding Professors of South Asian University, its only Sri Lankan academic, the founding Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, the Founding Professor of Sociology and the university’s only non-Indian Vice President in addition to being its seniormost academic at the time he left the institution.
As reported by global media, the university issued a ‘charge sheet’ against his student for quoting in his research proposal the renowned American linguist Noam Chomsky’s criticism of the Indian Prime Minster Narendra Modi in an academic interview. Despite being a SAARC institution and co-funded by Sri Lanka, Perera was charged with violating Indian rules and the SAARC Charter for merely supervising his student and not asking him to remove the lines attributed to Prof. Chomsky.
Prof. Perera, speaking to The Island noted, “We quote people all the time, scholars, political leaders and ordinary people. This is a general practice, not just in social sciences but in other disciplines as well, to elaborate on issues in the interest of a well-rounded argument and providing perspective. But we give references to where these conversations have taken place, with whom and so on, as a means for corroboration. This quote was used with the same intent and in the same sense.” He added that if the university had had issues with any words or references in the unapproved research proposal, it should have been sent back to the student for editing as provided for by existing rules. Instead, the student was asked for explanation and Perera was subjected to an inquiry.
Perera also said that according to the legal provisions under which the university has been established, it enjoys diplomatic immunity as a SAARC institution, and therefore he cannot seek justice within the court system in India. Given this status, the SAU is an institution where anything is possible, beyond the reach of law and therefore it has carte-blanche. The incident has taken the social media space by storm and has been widely reported throughout India and abroad. It has also ignited a fierce debate on academic freedom in India.
According to Perera, against this backdrop, he requested support and intervention from the Sri Lanka High Commission in Delhi, which the latter had agreed to initially.
According to an Indian Express report on 4th August, Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner in India Kshenuka Senewiratne met the South Asian University President (VC), K.K. Aggarwal on 23rd April and expressed her “concerns” regarding “an intended inquiry” against Perera. As reported by the Indian Express, at the meeting, the High Commissioner hoped that the issue would be “resolved in a fair and amicable manner in the spirit of academic freedom safeguarding the reputation of the person and the University.” She had further observed, “the research project could be easily rejected at that juncture, as it remained a mere proposal.”
Writing to the University’s President, K. K. Aggarwal again on 12th May as the Indian Express reports, Senewiratne observed, “with Sri Lanka being a member state of the Governing Board of South Asian University, you would appreciate that as its Government representative, this situation is extremely disconcerting. I am constrained to observe that to date there has been no detailed response regarding the status of the inquiry, which is understood to have taken place. In fact, there was a paucity of information even when I originally broached the subject during the meeting [on 23 April]”
Subsequently, the High Commissioner retracted her interventions claiming in a letter to the Indian Express published on 9th August, that her communications to the SAU had been based on “the information provided by Prof. Perera to the High Commission in mid-April, which at no instance had any reference to the aforementioned interview of Mr. Chomsky.”
She further wrote to the Indian Express that “it is hereby emphasized that at the time of the representations being made by me to the University, the information of the said interview had not been divulged to the High Commission. It may be pertinent to note that the last letter from the SAU regretted the High Commission not knowing the full facts of the case, which seems in hindsight inter alia to be reference to this interview content.”
After this retraction, Prof. Perera speaking to the news website, The Wire, noted that it “makes it difficult for me to be silent, as now it is a matter of my trust in the integrity of the Sri Lankan state when it comes to protecting its citizens overseas, being dismantled”. He further told The Wire, “my interest is only about the role of the High Commissioner for throwing me under the bus, publicly disregarding my services to the nation for over twenty years and to the South Asian University for nearly thirteen years. As a representative of the Sri Lankan state, whose foremost responsibility it is to look after the welfare of the country’s citizens abroad, this is not only unfathomable but disgraceful.”
Prof. Perera told The Island, “I reiterate that the High Commissioner’s statement that I did not inform her of the Chomsky quote is an outright misrepresentation of facts. On 13th April, five days before my first meeting with her on this matter on 18th April, I had texted her on her official WhatsApp number and made the following observation about the inquiry against me: “… A formal inquiry has been instituted on the claim of violating professional code of conduct and violating laws of the host county. None of this makes any sense. In the first, it is for supervising a student whose work deals with Kashmir. There is quotation from a well-known US scholar on the Indian PM ….” She even responded to this message saying, “extremely sorry to hear of this issue. I will be out in Varnasi and back on Monday night. So earliest to meet is Tuesday ….” This correspondence has since been published in the Indian Express of 12th August.
Continuing, Perera noted that “her claim that I did not divulge the facts of the matter at hand, and therefore the contents of her letter to the Indian Express are undisputedly false.
Prof. Perera says he has kept the High Commissioner informed of all aspects of the inquiry process. He told The Island, “For instance, when I wrote to the President of SAU on what I considered to be serious lapses of the inquiry process on 21 June 2024, I forwarded that email to the High Commissioner too for information on the same day. I assumed she and the High Commission would look after my interests as a Sri Lankan citizen. Instead, surprisingly, the response was, “It is regretted that at paragraph 10 of the said communication you state that the representative of the Sri Lanka High Commission would ‘bear witness’ to the proceedings. However, you would note that the High Commission representative’s role was to ‘observe’.”
“Here was a situation where the career and the future of a Sri Lankan citizen in a foreign country was at stake without recourse to the local legal system, and instead of looking after those interests, the High Commissioner was splitting hairs over the meaning of the words ‘to bear witness’ which I had used, and ‘to observe’ with reference to the role of the High Commission representative to take note of the proceedings. In any case, the request to have a High Commission representative at the inquiry was rejected by the university and the High Commissioner did not proceed beyond that and remained silent. Again, I would have expected more from the High Commission given that I had no recourse to the law in this matter in a foreign country, as others do, in similar and routine circumstances.”
The question that remains unanswered is what the position of Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is when grave situations of this nature unfold in the global public domain concerning the welfare and interest of the country and its tax-paying citizens living overseas.