It is not uncommon to read a new media piece every few months where someone rediscovers the same supposed malady that ails the Indian universities: Indian universities are failing because they are too political. If only the campus could be disinfected of politics, the argument goes, “human knowledge” would finally flourish. A recent column, offering this old beaten-to-death story, begins with global league tables (Times Higher Education rankings) and laments India’s absence from the top rungs, and then continues to propose a cure: revive greatness through either a strong state or a new class of philanthropists. Along the way, the piece treats reservations and democratic contestation as the primary reasons universities “lost their lead”.This is not an entirely uncommon set of arguments. What is uncommon is how clearly it reveals the ideological core beneath the “minor hints” – the belief that knowledge is a technocratic enterprise, best produced in enclaves protected from politics.Let us not lose sight of the fact that there indeed is a crisis. The despair on campuses is real. The stagnation in many institutions is real. What is wrong is the fantasy that universities become great by becoming less democratic.The idea that a university exists to “advance human knowledge” is an incomplete one. Universities have always been institutions where knowledge is produced through social life, not outside it. A university is a civic form. It is a community of teachers and students, a culture of argument, a discipline of evidence, and a space of disagreement. The pursuit of truth is protected by building norms and institutions that keep power from monopolising truth. That protection has been fought for – against kings, churches, markets, states, and sometimes against the university itself. If you strip away contestation in the name of “knowledge,” you simply get obedience. And obedient institutions are rarely original.So the first move in the “depoliticise to improve” script is already suspect because university’s politics – the struggle over who gets to speak, what counts as legitimate knowledge, what the public owes the institution, and what the institution owes the public – is part of its very definition.Rankings as simply an alibiRankings have become the favourite instrument of this supposedly novel diagnosis because clean numbers seductively imply that academic quality is quantifiable, quite like GDP. In both cases, it is not. Such rankings are treated like a report card that proves Indian universities are broken.But rankings are not neutral descriptors. They reward particular kinds of output and visibility, often privileging wealth, English-language publishing ecosystems, citation networks, and older reputational hierarchies – all potentially disastrous governing philosophies.Also read: ‘Indianisation’ of Syllabi is Hollowing Out Knowledge in Our UniversitiesMost importantly, rankings talk allows policymakers and commentators to skirt harder questions about academic freedom, appointment of faculty, and curricula development. You can blame student politics forever and still not answer why universities are being made structurally incapable of intellectual risk-taking.Campus autonomy under siegeOne possible way to describe India’s higher education predicament is this: public universities are being asked to do a lot more with a lot less, even as their autonomy gets narrowed in the name of standardisation and discipline.The emerging governance architecture centralises control over universities through appointment mechanisms, regulatory redesign, curricula frameworks, and the quiet normalisation of state interference in campus life. Instances like guest lectures being cancelled for being politically inconvenient, film screenings being blocked, and faculty facing targetted campaigns have become a part of the regular functioning of the university space, particularly the public ones. In this environment, students learn very quickly which questions attract scrutiny thereby creating a climate that teaches caution as professional survival.This is where the “privatisation-as-cure” argument collapses in on itself, because private universities exist in the same political environment, under the same regulatory state, amid the same informal pressures. If you doubt that, simply recall what happened at Ashoka University earlier this year. The university space in India is one where society’s inequalities, anxieties, and conflicts get negotiated. More so in the case of public universities. The current sorry state of affairs is precisely because the state increasingly treats that negotiation as a problem to be managed instead of a democratic function that ought to be protected.Gatekeeping knowledgeOne of the most telling moves in the depoliticisation script is how it narrates reservations, especially caste based. Caste is not an external “social problem” that unfortunately intrudes into the serene space of knowledge. Caste is a system that has historically regulated access to learning. If universities are one of the few institutions capable of breaking that inheritance, they will necessarily become arenas of conflict. That conflict is precisely what democratisation looks like when the past is not dead.You do not get a great university by returning to an imagined pre-reservation meritocracy. You get a great university by building intellectual excellence through inclusion. When debates about caste discrimination surface on campuses, the university’s unfinished transformation from an elite institution into a public one gets revealed. The greatest irony here is that the people most invested in a “politics-free” campus are often perfectly comfortable with the politics of exclusion that silently reproducing hierarchy while calling it quality.Limits of the “privatisation” solutionThe privatisation cure rests on a deceptively simple idea that private universities can be protected from the dysfunctions and idiosyncrasies of the public sector and therefore they can focus on excellence. But what does “protected” mean in practice? If it means protected from interference, private universities have not demonstrated that protection. If it means protected from democratic claims, then the model becomes about creating educational enclaves where inequality gets designed into the institution. And if it means protected from politics altogether, then it misunderstands politics. Money is political. Philanthropy is political. Donor-driven universities simply relocate ideology by becoming less accountable to society and more accountable to funders. Also read: Cash Crunch, Research Void and Guest Faculty Surge: The Collapse of Social Sciences in IndiaTreating privatisation as the route to greatness is quite like treating gated colonies as the route to urban reform. You can build comfort for some, but you cannot solve the civic crisis.What would it take to fix Indian universitiesIf we stop treating democratic contestation as the enemy, we can finally talk about real reform. A serious agenda for Indian universities could begin with the following four commitments:First, fund the public university like a public good. Second, protect academic freedom as a core governance principle. It also means building internal university processes that defend due process and intellectual pluralism. Third, treat inclusion as part of academic quality, not its rival. Fourth, stop using “world-class” rhetoric to justify shrinking civic space. India needs freer campuses with stronger institutions where dissent is not a policing problem, where students are not treated as potential criminals, where teachers do not fear that a lecture can become a scandal, and where “quality” does not mean ideological conformity. A university becomes great when it is trusted enough to be free, funded enough to be ambitious, and public enough to matter. If Indian universities feel far from greatness today, it is because the political imagination around them has shrunk. And, if you want to look at the kind of politics ailing the state of universities in India today, look here because this is the one politics that will reliably kill a university. Rishabh Kachroo is an independent researcher. His X profile is @MBHRishabh.