Police in India’s national capital, Delhi, have arrested a professor of a top private university for his social media post related to the country’s military operation in Pakistan.
Ali Khan Mahmudabad, the head of the department of political science at Ashoka University, was arrested by Haryana state police in Delhi on Sunday, following a complaint by the Haryana State Commission for Women.
The arrest of Mr Mahmudabad has sparked condemnation from across the academic community, calling it “harassment” and “attempted censorship”.
At the centre of the controversy are Mr Mahmudabad’s, a Cambridge-educated scholar’s, social media posts on 8 and 11 May, days after India launched “Operation Sindoor”, a military strike targeting nine terror camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir in retaliation for the 22 April Pahalgam attack that killed 26 civilians.
In the post, he questioned the “optics” of using female Muslim defence officers for briefings on Operation Sindoor, and raised questions over issues of incidents of mob lynching of Muslim men.
While he acknowledged the significance of women officers – Colonel Sofia Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh – leading the military briefing, he said such optics would be “hypocrisy” if not accompanied by genuine structural reforms to improve the status of women across the Armed Forces and other public institutions.
In another post, Mr Mahmudabad praised India’s military strategy but criticised war rhetoric.
In a statement before his arrest, the professor said his posts were “misread” and “misunderstood”, calling action against him “a new form of censorship and harassment, which invents issues where there are none”.
He said he had “exercised his fundamental right to freedom of thought and speech in order to promote peace and harmony and applaud the Indian armed forces for their resolute action”.
“If anything, my entire comments were about safeguarding the lives of both citizens and soldiers,” read his statement, adding that “there is nothing remotely misogynistic about my comments”.
His statement was released after he was issued a summon by the Haryana State Commission for Women.
The commission interpreted Mr Mahmudabad’s remarks as undermining the dignity of women officers and vilifying national military actions. They cited concerns including disparagement of women in uniform, misuse of terms like “genocide” and “dehumanisation”, and risking communal unrest.
An open letter signed by 1,200 people, including academics, professors, universities and civil servants, expressed support for the professor and demanded an apology from the commission for “deliberately and maliciously slandering him”.
“From a bare reading of his original posts, it is clear that Prof Khan praised the strategic restraint of the armed forces, analysed how any distinction between the terrorists or non-state actors and the Pakistani military has now collapsed..,” the letter said.
“He even applauded the Indian right wing for their support for Colonel Sofia Qureshi and invited them to also equally loudly oppose mob lynching and the bulldozing that Indian Muslims and others are frequently subjected to,” it added.
In an internal email circulated on Sunday afternoon, the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) at Ashoka University described the arrest as “a disproportionate punishment based on flimsy grounds” and condemned it as “a fundamental attack on academic freedom”, according to an The Indian Express report.
Mr Mahmudabad, a faculty member at Ashoka University since 2016, is known for his work on religious identity, political culture, and democracy in South Asia and the Middle East. A Cambridge-educated scholar, he holds a PhD on Muslim identity in North India.
The incident marks the latest incident in ongoing tensions between Ashoka University, a private liberal arts institution in Haryana, and the Narendra Modi-led Indian government, primarily over issues of academic freedom and perceived political dissent.
In 2021, it was rocked by back-to-back resignations of top faculty members after prominent scholars Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Arvind Subramanian resigned, citing a lack of academic freedom. Mr Mehta’s exit, after being deemed a “political liability” by the founders, triggered student protests and global condemnation.
