At IITs, a long-brewing ‘culture war’ between engineering and humanities boils over

Submission Statement: “Leave IITs for the top brains of India, people who excel in STEM and management only,” a Reddit user wrote on the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay’s community page in September. “We don’t want stupid narrative-pushing socio-drama queens on this campus anymore!”

On campus, the same sentiment is less blunt. “If someone says something woke, or socially aware, a frequent response would be ‘oh you’re being so HSS’,” said a fo.

HSS is short for humanities and social sciences. At India’s premier engineering schools, it has become an adjective.

The latest round began at IIT Bombay. After Sahil Wakode’s death by suicide, protests swept the Powai campus, many of them led by HSS doctoral students. They centred on a professor against whom the SC/ST Act had been invoked, and ended with him losing his deanship and being sent on leave.

Off campus, protesters and humanities students came to be seen as one and the same. Online, the question was: why do the IITs have humanities students at all?

The Ken spoke with more than a dozen students and as many professors across IITs. Engineers described a “hyper-apolitical” campus where politics is the “fastest way to lose friends”.

The campus itself is split. In early October, IIT Bombay's student council distanced itself from the protests. The protestors, it said, did not represent the student community, and the demonstrations were disrupting classes, exams, and placements (note: recruiting in American English).

Humanities faculty traced the hostility to "a very myopic, shallow understanding about education". Yet some conceded that their own side had kept its distance, out of an "obsession" with "moral purity".