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THE NATION:
CPR
Scholars
Spat
A sacked
faculty member of the Delhi think tank takes on his boss
By
Subhadra Menon
Think:
Can a think tank ever become a septic tank? Rarely. Though something of
that sort is happening in Delhi, where policies are not formed in think
tanks, sorry, not yet. But, suddenly, the Centre for Policy Research (CPR)
is in the news, not because of some redeeming policy it has formulated
for the benefit of the nation. The newsmaker is the policy within, and
the court has intervened. For, the Delhi High Court has issued a contempt
of court notice on the centre's founder and President Dr V.A. Pai Panandiker
for having refused to accept an earlier order of the court staying the
dismissal of a senior faculty member, Brahma Chellaney.
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| Centre
of controversy |
Apparently,
Chellaney, an expert in strategic affairs and a contributor to the op-ed
pages of The International Herald Tribune, was sacked for his words
of dissent. At the 27-year-old CPR, that should ideally not have happened.
After all, the CPR, partly funded by the Indian Council of Social Science
Research (ICSSR), is supposed to be a free forum of ideas. Then why did
Chellaney lose his freedom-and his job? According to him, his crime was
a critical newspaper article he wrote on the mismanagement of institutes
like the CPR. This from the article "Rise of the Robber Intellectual":
"India is today seeing the emergence of a new breed of academic entrepreneurs
adept at political string pulling. Some run a personal business in conjunction
with an academic business; others unabashedly fuse the two together."
Chellaney lost his job in August.
While challenging
the dismissal order through a writ petition in the Delhi High Court, Chellaney
also questioned the legal validity of Panandiker's presidentship: the
CPR chief attained the age of superannuation (65) on March 31 this year.
In Panandiker's view, though, there is no reference in the centre's constitution
to a retirement age of 65. And further, he doesn't see his action against
Chellaney as an act of victimisation: "CPR is facing a funds crunch
and we were downsizing. I asked Chellaney to look for alternatives for
himself as his main forte is defence and security-which is not one of
CPR's main priority research areas."
The Grouse:
Chellaney's petition is revealing: foreign funding of the centre has raised
some ethical questions on its autonomy; on August 14, when Chellaney arrived
at the office, "he was shocked to discover that ... the locks to
his office had been changed and he had been locked out"; another
scholar, Isher Ahluwalia, a potential successor to Panandiker, was earlier
forced to resign by the president; even the "mild-mannered"
foreign secretary Lalit Mansingh had to send a stinker to Panandiker in
response to his "outburst" against the government's refusal
to endorse one of his foreign-funded projects.
Panandiker
has so many reasons at his disposal to justify himself and his centre:
during the past two years, he has twice asked the governing board to relieve
him from the responsibility. Now he has made up his mind-he is leaving
on December 31. "The search for a new head is on," he says.
And he is not getting any words of appreciation. Says Kapil Sibal, Chellaney's
counsel: "Pai Panandiker is a corrupt man who has hijacked the whole
organisation." Panandiker won't take that: "We are an autonomous
body and the governing board (headed by the former chief justice Y.V.
Chandrachud) decides when a chief should go." For some scholars at
the centre, the current crisis is a culmination of Chellaney's campaign.
But Sibal sees it as a case of intellectual harassment: "Chellaney
is a fine academician who is unnecessarily being harassed." At the
moment, there seems to be no policy to end the war of the policy wonks.
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