Institutional Breakdown

The most disturbing aspect of the crisis currently plaguing IIT Bombay is that one of India’s premier institutions appears to be confronting a student’s death as a contest between opposing camps of students and faculty members.

The parents of Sahil Wakode, who died by suicide last week after he was caught cheating, have alleged caste-based harassment and institutional pressure. The Mumbai Police have registered a case against Professor Suryanarayana Doolla under provisions relating to abetment of suicide and the SC/ST Act; the Crime Branch is investigating. IIT Bombay has since removed Doolla from his position as Dean of Administrative Affairs and apologised for an earlier communication that characterised events before they had been established.

Meanwhile, even as the standoff continues, faculty members marched in support of Doolla, arguing that he had followed Senate-approved examination procedures and had himself contributed to student welfare.

An IIT cannot afford to become a miniature version of the politics outside its gates, where every dispute produces camps and every allegation becomes a battle for narrative control. The allegations against Doolla must be investigated fairly, without prejudging his guilt.

There is a danger in allowing the understandable anger surrounding a student’s death to become a substitute for institutional process.

IITs enjoy enormous prestige because India assumes that these institutions represent something more than examination success. They are expected to embody rational inquiry - the willingness to test claims against evidence, tolerate disagreement and change one’s position when facts demand it.

Yet when a crisis arrives, the familiar habits of public life can quickly take over in form of mobilisation, slogans and pressure on administrators. That has consequences far beyond one campus.

India’s academic excellence has been built over decades on institutions whose credibility rests on the belief that admission, assessment, research and discipline are governed by standards rather than influence.

The irony is that institutions of higher learning are meant to teach precisely the habits that such confrontations discard patience, evidence and intellectual humility when it comes to crunch situations.

An institution that cannot enforce examination rules, investigate misconduct or make difficult decisions without fearing a campus confrontation will eventually find its authority hollowed out.

The larger question is whether India’s premier institutions can preserve a culture in which neither students nor faculty are pressure groups, but participants in a system of rules that applies to everyone.

Every time a campus dispute is settled by mobilisation rather than due process, or authority retreats in the face of collective pressure, that confidence is weakened.

India’s IITs should be places where reason prevails when emotions run high. If the country’s premier institutes cannot maintain that standard in moments of crisis, it will only prove that India’s academic institutions are not building the institutional maturity needed to protect it.