The Battle for IITs: A Defense of Meritocracy

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This has serious legal implications and severe consequences for the IITs across India, its students, and faculty. More broadly, it impacts India's engineering education. Such concerted attacks will follow the IIT engineer and other tech professionals to their workplace anywhere in the world. Harvard University's Woke machinery is behind this attack and we need to understand the sophistication that backs it.

This book's evidence-based rebuttal gives IITians and other engineers the toolkit to tackle false accusations of being casteist bigots.

Rajiv Malhotra is a researcher and public intellectual on civiliza- tional studies, world religions, and cross- cultural encounters. He trained as a physicist, and then as a computer scientist specializing in Artificial Intelligence. After a successful corporate career, he became an entrepreneur and founded several IT companies across twenty countries. As the founder of his non-profit Infinity Foundation (Princeton, USA), he has been researching civilizations from a historical, social sciences and mind sciences perspective. He has authored several bestselling books that have impacted many leading intellectuals worldwide. Rajiv serves as chairman of the board of governors of the Center for Indic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, and on the advisory board of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla.

Vijaya Viswanathan is a mechanical engineer by training with an MBA from the Wharton Business School. After a successful corporate career, she turned her focus to education gaining deep insights into the relevance of Indic knowledge systems. Vijaya is active in initiatives that focus on curricula, pedagogy, and mentoring. As a student under Swami Dayananda Saraswati of Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, she studied Vedanta and dharmic and civilizational thought. Vijaya serves on the board of Infinity Foundation.

This book is part of a series that started with the flagship Snakes in the Ganga: Breaking India 2.0 in September 2022. The present volume focuses on the American project led by Harvard University to dismantle the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and other institutions of excellence in India, by claiming that they propagate structural casteism.

While it is beyond the scope of this book to discuss in detail Marxism, Postmodernism and other European intellectual movements of the last 150 years, the fact is that these movements have influenced what has culminated in this current battle against the IITs. Simply put, we will show that:

The IITs are under attack.

There are legal implications of this attack. It has severe consequences for the IITs, its students and faculty, India, and engineering education.

The consequences of this attack will follow the IIT engineer and other tech professionals to their workplace anywhere in the world.

Harvard's Woke machinery is behind this attack and we need to understand the sophistication that backs it.

Our evidence-based rebuttal gives IITians and other engineers the toolkit to tackle false accusations of being casteist bigots.

We end with a call to action by IITians and other stakeholders.

The dismantling of Indian educational institutions began over a decade ago with some innocent seeming work on cultural capital done by a French think tank in New Delhi in partnership with the Delhi School of Economics (DSE). Satish Deshpande, professor of sociology at the DSE, wrote a pivotal paper that was published in the Economic & Political Weekly in 2013. This provided the meta-narrative that the general category in India's reservation system is a euphemism for upper castes' category, and the need to dismantle the education system. By 2019, Ajantha Subramanian, professor of anthropology and South Asian Studies at Harvard University, became the dismantler-in-chief leading this effort.