Gurugram University canceled the talk on ‘Palestinian Struggle for Equal Rights: India & Global Response’ by Zoya Hasan from the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) at the last minute.
The talk, initiated by the Department of Political Science and Public Policy of Gurugram University, was scheduled for November 12. However, on November 10, Hasan received a call from the organizers informing her that the talk had been canceled without a new date for rescheduling.
Hasan had been approached by the university faculty, who had initially shown interest in organizing the discussion.
“I readily accepted the invitation to deliver the talk on Palestine, though fully aware and apprehensive that it might actually not happen,” The Wire quoted Hasan as saying.
The talk at the university was to be chaired by Professor Dinesh Kumar, the vice chancellor of the university and also the chief patron.
This is not the first incident where a talk on Palestine has been canceled at an Indian institution.
Earlier in October, the seminars organised by the Centre for West Asian Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University were canceled due to “unavoidable circumstances.”
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay also canceled Professor’s Achin Vanaik’s proposed talk on the “Israel-Palestine: The historic context.”
Ironically, these incidents come just after India’s ranking on the Academic Freedom Index (AFI) plummeted to its lowest point since the mid-1940s, according to the Free to Think 2024 report, published on 8 October 2024 by the Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project (SAR), a network of 665 universities worldwide.
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