The latest revelation that India has been denying research visas to an increasing numbers of Fulbright Scholars is a reminder that many sections of the state still display a pusillanimity about the free exchange of ideas, a penchant for control, and a myopia about our security priorities, that sit at odds with our claims to being an open, free and confident society. This denial of visas is not a minor episode. It is part of a pattern of the control of academic life that still persists despite our innumerable paeans to liberalisation.

Many of these measures like denying visas to foreign scholars and requiring that Indian institutions take government permission before organising international conferences were crafted in the heyday of academic Leninism during the Emergency, when a cabal of academics, in league with the security establishment, put in place a series of restrictions. When the NDA government came to power, it did not have to invent any new instruments to exercise such control as it wanted. The UPA has not liberalised this regime; if experience with visas and the proposed FCRA legislation are any indication, these restrictive tendencies are likely to continue. But why an avowedly liberal prime minister should preside over the intensification of this restrictive regime is a question begging for answers.

These restrictions should worry us for many reasons. India loses its ability to capitalise on its soft power by keeping young scholars, in the formative stages of their careers, out. For decades academic interest in contemporary India declined in the US, because supervisors could not tell potential students in good faith that they would get the kind of research access anyone devoting their life to the study of India ought to get. Good scholars had their research careers cut short, because they were denied visas. In a number of cases scholars who were doing cutting edge work in areas where India would have benefited (for instance, on patterns of migration) were denied permission to attend conferences. The same security syndrome that led us to assume most American academics were CIA plants was of a piece with our policy towards students and academics from other South Asian countries as well. What we might have gained in security terms is debatable; what we lost in terms of building long-term relationships is immeasurable. A visa policy that cannot distinguish between a bunch of well-meaning students from world class universities on the one hand and terrorists/intelligence agency operatives on the other, is truly bizarre.

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