Nivedita Menon’s recent description of India as a “manhoos desh,” or cursed and inauspicious country, is not an isolated lapse in judgment. It is the latest expression of a pattern that has marked her public commentary for years. In a viral interview clip, the former JNU professor spoke of a protest by the Citizens for Justice and Peace as having offered Muslims a measure of relief. She suggested that after more than a decade of feeling unwelcome and under constant threat of being bulldozed, they might finally sense that even in this manhoos country there could be some place for them. The language is deliberate. It does not merely fault a government or a set of policies. It brands the nation itself as fundamentally blighted.
Such a characterisation from a scholar who spent decades in a publicly funded university demands scrutiny. Academic freedom includes the right to criticise the state, its leaders, and its laws. It does not entitle anyone to treat the country that sustains that freedom as an object of contempt. Menon has repeatedly crossed that line. Earlier controversies involved statements that many interpreted as questioning India’s territorial integrity in Kashmir, describing Hindu society as uniquely violent at its roots, and framing the Uniform Civil Code primarily as a tool to discipline Muslims rather than as a question of equal citizenship. Each episode followed a familiar sequence: a provocative formulation, selective amplification, defence of the remarks as nuanced critique, and accusations that any outrage is manufactured by the right.
The deeper problem is the consistent direction of the critique. What presents itself as opposition to the Bharatiya Janata Party or to Narendra Modi frequently expands into a broader indictment of India’s democratic choices, its majority culture, and its historical continuity. When electoral outcomes repeatedly favour a particular political formation, some intellectuals respond not by refining their arguments or examining why those outcomes occurred, but by pathologising the electorate and the civilisation that produced it. The nation becomes the problem. Its people are portrayed as perpetually majoritarian, its institutions as inherently oppressive to minorities, and its very existence as a source of suffering for those who do not fit a preferred narrative.
To the left and ‘professors’ like Menon, Indian democracy under the BJP dispensation is bad, Indians are bad, the Indian judiciary is bad, Indian infrastructure is bad, and India, as long as those who are at the helm at present are there, will be perpetually bad. The problem, moreover, is that these politically motivated educators, along with politicians and other influential persons from other walks of life, have made up their minds and decided that those who support parties, people and ideologies other than theirs are mad, bad, crass and useless. They are not ready for constructive dialogue.
This is not the same as principled dissent. Legitimate criticism targets specific policies, such as the manner of enforcing municipal laws or the rhetoric surrounding citizenship debates. It does not require declaring the country itself inauspicious. The distinction matters. Anti-BJP sentiment can be robust, evidence-based, and rooted in alternative visions of governance. Anti-India sentiment, by contrast, treats the constitutional order, the territorial unity, and the cultural self-understanding of the majority as illegitimate or cursed. When scholars repeatedly employ language that suggests the latter while claiming only the former, the claim loses credibility.
Consider the selective framing. Menon’s remarks place heavy emphasis on the alleged insecurity of one community under the current dispensation. They pay little attention to parallel concerns: the documented challenges of radicalisation in certain pockets, the demographic anxieties that arise from uneven population trends, the history of targeted violence against other groups in various regions, or the simple fact that India remains a democracy in which governments change through the ballot. An analysis that consistently elevates one set of grievances while minimising or ignoring others ceases to be analysis. It becomes advocacy dressed in academic vocabulary. Over time, this advocacy hardens into a posture that finds little of value in the country’s achievements and much to condemn in its identity.
The institutional context sharpens the issue. Jawaharlal Nehru University and similar centres have long prided themselves on fostering critical thought. Critical thought, however, requires intellectual honesty about the conditions that make criticism possible. Those conditions include a constitutional framework that protects speech, a tax base that funds universities, and a political culture that has, for all its flaws, allowed dissenting voices to occupy positions of influence. To enjoy those privileges while describing the country that provides them as manhoos is not radicalism. It is a form of free-riding that erodes public trust in the academy.
There is also a strategic dimension. By framing every disagreement with the ruling dispensation as an existential threat to minorities, certain left ideologues convert political competition into a moral drama in which one side is permanently the oppressor and the other the oppressed. This narrative has political utility. It mobilises international attention, sustains activist networks, and provides a ready explanation for electoral defeats. Yet it carries a cost. When the rhetoric escalates from policy disagreement to national denigration, it alienates large sections of the public who may share concerns about governance but refuse to accept that their country is fundamentally cursed. The result is deeper polarisation rather than productive debate.
None of this requires denying real problems. Communal tensions exist. Administrative excesses occur. Minority citizens have legitimate expectations of security and dignity. Addressing those issues is the responsibility of any serious democracy. What is not required, and what actively hinders resolution, is the routine portrayal of India as a space so hostile that even limited protest becomes a rare moment of relief for an entire community. That portrayal is not diagnostic. It is defeatist and, in its cumulative effect, anti-national.
Menon’s latest statement fits a longer trajectory in which the language of anti-BJP politics has merged with a deeper scepticism toward the Indian project itself. The two are not identical, yet in practice they have become difficult to separate. An intellectual culture that cannot distinguish between opposing a government and opposing the nation loses its claim to seriousness. It also risks confirming the very suspicions it claims to combat: that certain forms of progressive thought in India have ceased to be constructive criticism and have become a sustained exercise in cultural and national self-rejection.
A healthier public discourse would insist on clearer boundaries. Criticise policies without pathologising the country. Defend minority rights without implying that the majority identity is inherently toxic. Acknowledge electoral realities without treating democratic majorities as moral failures. Scholars who occupy platforms of influence have a particular duty to observe those boundaries. When they do not, the public is entitled to notice, to object, and to demand higher standards of intellectual responsibility. India’s imperfections are real. Declaring it manhoos does nothing to remedy them. It only reveals the poverty of the vision that produces such a judgment.
Ashish for India Latest News
Politics and Democracy
