Woke mind virus has reached the IITs

Graduates of these institutions are being trained to distrust their own society's aspirations. Make in India is dismissed as 'corporate fascism.' Digital India is caricatured as 'state surveillance.' The New Education Policy 202 O is branded 'Brahminical restoration.'

- SANTISHREE DHULIPUDI PANDIT

For decades, the IITs have been held up as temples of modern India, producing some of the sharpest minds who went on to shape industry, science, and technology worldwide.

But look closer today, and a disturbing pattern is emerging. The very institutions that were meant to be the powerhouse of a confident and self-reliant Bharat are increasingly becoming laboratories for ideological experiments imported wholesale from the West. The "woke agenda" has crept into the walls of IITs along with various HEIs (higher education institutes) like IIMs and others. It has occurred often through their humanities and social sciences departments, and is slowly colonising young minds under the garb of postcolonial and social justice. At this point, one must ask: Is such scholarship or selective ideological engineering?

TROJAN HORSES IN THE IITS

The humanities departments in IITs were never meant to become ideological command centres. When these institutions were founded, humanities had a modest role, like teaching ethics, communication, and some social sciences to help humanize engineers while keeping them abreast with realities on the ground. In more recent inventions like AI, such a need for ethics is welcome and desirable. But over the last two decades, what has unfolded is a quiet transformation. Newer IITs like Gandhinagar and Indore have been champions of this new and dangerous pattern where, under the name of "interdisciplinary" programs such as MA in Society and Culture, they have inducted western concepts, only to juxtapose them with the Indian context without a thought given to culture and societal realities.