New Delhi: At its weekly press briefing on Thursday, the Ministry of External Affairs denied allegations that successive Indian high commissioners had interfered in the running of the Australia-India Institute in Melbourne.
As The Wire has reported, 13 fellows of the institute had resigned together, citing interference from the Indian High Commission to Australia and shrinking academic space as a consequence. They alleged that the high commission has repeatedly interfered with the institute’s work and research. Views that are “unflattering” to India’s image have repeatedly been junked, they said.
When asked about these resignations on Thursday, MEA spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said these reports were “not accurate”.
“I would like to highlight that the Institute was set up by the Australian government, in partnership with the University of Melbourne. It is funded entirely by the Australian Government and Australian institutions. I think the state of Victoria as well as the University of Melbourne are among the funding institutions. Let me stress that the government of India does not fund the institute in any way. Nor does the government of India have any say in the decision making of this institute, the Australia India institute,” Bagchi said.
“So the report that we saw dragging India or our High Commissioner to Australia into this is actually very unjustified. Now, insofar as there were media reports, where talks about academic freedom at the Institute are concerned, frankly, as I said, this is for the Australian authorities to respond to. I do believe that the University of Melbourne has and in fact, the officials of the Institute also have made their position clear on this. I don’t have anything to add on that,” he concluded.
However, the fellows who resigned have stuck by their claims and demands for a fair probe. One of them, Dr Ian Woolford, confirmed three instances of interference by high commissioners in an interview to The Wire. They included, first, a deliberate downgrading of a public event into a private invitation-only seminar in 2019 because this was a discussion on violence by Hindu nationalist groups against Muslims; second, the refusal of the Institute to publish an academic paper by two fellows explaining attacks on Gandhi and the decapitation of his statue; third, a podcast on “Caste and the Corporation, in India and abroad”, by the same two fellows, which the Institute refused to publish on its website.
Bagchi did not talk about these specific instances in his remark.