The South Asian University (SAU) in India’s national capital of New Delhi is in the news for the wrong reasons once again.
This time, on February 26, students affiliated with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a students’ organization linked with India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), assaulted a female student, who is the secretary of the students’ mess committee, for not heeding their demand that no meat/fish dish should be served in the university mess that day as it was Maha Shivratri, a Hindu festival.
“Forcibly serving non-vegetarian food is not only insensitive but also ideological terrorism,” the ABVP’s Delhi state unit secretary, Sarthak Sharma, was quoted as saying in a report in the RSS mouthpiece, Organiser.
Being an international university, student politics, especially any affiliation with any Indian organization or party, is prohibited. However, the assault on the female student quickly escalated into a war of words between the Hindu rightwing ABVP and left-affiliated Students Federation of India.
According to a doctoral student who spoke to The Diplomat on condition of anonymity, the menu for each day is determined by a democratic process. “However, on Wednesday, some Hindu nationalist students tried to enforce their vegetarian preference over all students, including those who eat meat and fish,” the doctoral student said.
A one-of-its-kind initiative by the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) member countries, SAU was founded in 2010. The idea was to pool the resources of the member countries — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Bhutan, and Maldives — for creating a Center of Excellence to “provide world-class facilities and professional faculty to students and researchers drawn from every country of the SAARC region.” From framing the Rules and Regulations and the academic structure to the business plan, all university documents were prepared jointly. The university was launched as a postgraduate institution with master’s and Ph.D. programs and is aimed to build a regional community of researchers.
A Bangladeshi student said that those who joined the institution around 2018-19 were influenced by the positive reviews of “an inclusive and cosmopolitan culture” from those who studied during 2014-2017. However, things started changing in 2019-20 following the BJP government’s return to power in 2019 for a second term.
The controversy around citizenship screening following the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December 2019 started polarizing students on the campus for and against the Narendra Modi government’s policy. “It was from this time that the varsity administration started favoring the Hindutva camp,” said a student from southern India.
Several students who spoke to The Diplomat said that a left-right divide between students became clear when events were organized to protest atrocities on Hindus and attacks on temples in Bangladesh in 2021. Left- and right-wing students held separate events to protest the violence. Even Bangladeshi Hindu students were polarized, with some joining the Hindu right’s event, some the left’s. There was a similar divide among Nepali students.
Tension escalated from early 2022, when in the wake of the hijab ban controversy in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, left-leaning students from India and some other countries organized an event to discuss the freedom to dress. “The Hindutva right took a confrontational approach towards the event and, since then, the campus got sharply polarized on left and right lines,” said another SAU student.
In 2023, several students were show-caused for organizing or participating in an event protesting Israel’s war on Gaza. However, the administration allegedly turned a blind eye to a procession by Hindu nationalists inside the campus where Jai Shree Ram (Victory to Ram) slogans, a political slogan of the Hindu nationalists, were raised.
While all these developments were taking place away from the media glare, a chain of developments in the second half of 2022 brought SAU to news headlines.
First, the administration called in the police to disperse students protesting the slashing of stipends for students in M.A. courses. In protest, students resorted to hunger strikes. Several faculty members wrote to the administration, saying, “Given the international character of the university and possible negative ramifications of such action, this should be carefully avoided irrespective of contingent impulses.” However, the administration expelled two students and suspended three others.
In 2023, four students who went to seek relief for the students expelled and suspended in 2022 were themselves expelled. Subsequently, four faculty members were suspended. Students and teachers complained of increased administrative pressure against academic freedom.
The 2024 controversy was even bigger, as it revived the allegations of curtailing academic freedom.
A doctoral research proposal on Kashmir’s ethnography and politics, which cited American public intellectual Noam Chomsky’s criticism of the Modi government, not only earned the scholar a show-cause notice but also led to the initiation of a disciplinary inquiry against his supervisor, the noted Sri Lankan anthropologist Sasanka Perera. While the student apologized for hurting sentiments, Pereira, who taught at SAU for 13 years and helped found its Sociology department, resigned.
The developments at SAU came amid India’s slide on the academic freedom index over the past decade. The 2024 report of the Scholars at Risk (SAR) Academic Freedom Monitoring Project said that the most pressing threats to the academic freedom of students and scholars included “measures to exert political control and impose a Hindu nationalist agenda on universities.”
Apart from the public universities, private universities like the Asoka University also got embroiled in controversies surrounding academic freedom.
In March 2025, following the latest SAU controversy around the serving of meat, Perera observed that SAU started as “a very good idea.”
However, SAARC’s underperformance has impacted SAU. From its inception, the regional organization has been hobbled by bilateral conflicts. SAARC has been in a comatose state over the past decade; no summit has been held since the 2014 one in Kathmandu in Nepal after India decided to boycott the 2016 summit in Pakistan.
This has seemingly impacted the varsity’s fortunes. SAARC’s inherent weakness meant the organization never had any serious supervision over what was happening at SAU, Perera said in a March 2025 interview.
“Given that it is no longer a South Asian institution, this sensibility of a regional identity that we were going to create has now failed,” said Perera, who returned to Sri Lanka in 2024 following his resignation. “That is why it became very Indian,” he remarked.
Notably, in March, the Ph.D. scholar whose paper led to the 2024 controversy also quit.
Regarding SAU, India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) told the Parliament in July 2023 that India “does not exercise any direct control over the day-to-day functioning of the university.”
The ministry said that though India hosts the university, SAU is legally an international organization enjoying autonomy and being jointly managed by the eight SAARC member states through its independent institutional architecture. It added that the SAU Governing Board, which comprises two nominees from each SAARC member state and the university’s president, serves as the highest policy and decision-making body of the university.
“It is well known that due to hurdles created by one SAARC member state [although it did not name the country, India was alluding to Pakistan] all SAARC meetings, including the SAU Governing Board meeting, have not been held in recent years. This has inevitably impacted the proper functioning of the university,” the MEA said.