Ivoried Glass Houses

Dear 2022 Me: On Idealism, Institutions, and What You Couldn’t See 

In 2022, you wrote about The Kashmir Files and the reactions it provoked. You were careful. Measured. You spoke of humanity over religion, empathy over aggression, pluralism over polarization. You believed the problem was division and that balance was the cure. You were not wrong. But you were not complete. 

Back then, you wrote from outside the gates of Jawaharlal Nehru University. You defended an idea of the institution, not its lived texture. You defended pluralism because you believed it was under attack. You believed criticism of JNU was politically motivated, exaggerated, perhaps even malicious. You thought those calling it ideologically skewed were weaponizing narrative. You had not yet seen what sustained narrative power looks like from inside. You wrote that movies should unite, not divide. That communal colours such as saffron or green should not flood public spaces. You argued that empathy must be universal. 

Today, one question lingers: universal empathy for whom, and selective outrage against whom? 

You were disturbed by sloganeering in theatres. But you were not yet disturbed by sloganeering normalized within academic spaces. You worried about majoritarian aggression, but did not question whether certain ideological majorities operate invisibly under the cloak of intellectual legitimacy. You asked whether empathy translated into policy for Kashmiri Pandits. That was a fair question. But another question went unasked. Why was even the acknowledgment of their suffering resisted in some circles? Why did discomfort arise not at the tragedy, but at its narration? 

From outside, JNU appears as a bastion of dissent, critical thinking, and constitutional morality. From inside, the picture is more complicated. There is brilliance. There is scholarship. There are deeply committed minds. But there is also intellectual conformity disguised as critical thought. There are narratives that circulate unquestioned and others that are treated as morally suspect before they are analytically examined. There are positions that are automatically progressive and others that must justify their very right to exist. And there is something more unsettling. There is an atmosphere that often feels hostile rather than dialogic. Constant parading. Rehearsed sloganeering. Public refrains targeting Brahmins and Banias, warning them to leave the campus as though the university were not their space to live, learn, and belong. Identity is invoked not as context but as indictment. One is addressed first as caste location and only later, if at all, as scholar. 

Ideological disagreement here does not always remain ideological. It slips quickly into the personal. It attaches itself to ancestry. It presumes motive. It converts debate into suspicion. And what is perhaps most disheartening is the institutional silence that frequently greets such selective targeting. When slogans that single out a particular class pass without administrative censure, when hostility is normalised under the vocabulary of resistance, confidence in institutional neutrality begins to erode. Trust does not collapse in a single moment. It thins gradually. It thins each time identity precedes merit. It thins when students observe that some forms of prejudice are loudly condemned while others are contextualised or ignored. It thins when those who speak of inclusion appear indifferent to exclusion, provided the exclusion is ideologically convenient. 

In 2020, you warned against labeling an entire institution as schismatic. You were right to resist caricature. Institutions are not harmed by scrutiny. They are harmed by myth making. The JNU you defended was plural, accommodative, fearless. The JNU now encountered is layered, politically charged, and not immune to its own blind spots. You feared saffronisation. You did not consider intellectual monochromatism. You believed balance meant standing equidistant from right and left.

Experience has revealed that equidistance is not neutrality when one pole dominates the moral vocabulary of the space. What changed was not propaganda. It was proximity. It was listening to how certain issues are framed and how others are dismissed. It was noticing which historical griefs are amplified and which are problematised. It was realising that pluralism is not merely about including religions but about including uncomfortable narratives and protecting individuals from targeted hostility, regardless of their identity. This is not a renunciation of pluralism. It is a demand that pluralism be consistent. You were sincere. You were compassionate. You were idealistic. You simply had not yet lived inside the institution. And sometimes, experience rearranges theory.

The past few years have offered lessons no syllabus advertised. That institutions can speak fluently about justice while practising it unevenly. That solidarity is often conditional. That identity can be invoked as argument before an argument is even made. That slogans are easy, but fairness is administrative work. That trauma, when it arrives quietly and repeatedly, does not always shout. It clarifies. There was a time when trust in the institution felt instinctive, almost filial. Today it is measured. Earned, not assumed. The historian in me has learned to treat even beloved spaces as archives to be examined, not temples to be defended. Reverence has given way to record. Myth has given way to evidence. If there is satire in this education, it lies in the irony that a campus devoted to critique has taught the sharpest lessons through its silences. If there is poetry in it, it is this: that disillusionment need not destroy conviction. It can refine it. Experience has not made me less committed to humanity. It has made me more attentive to where humanity falters. And that, perhaps, is the most rigorous education of all.

Note: This is a reconsideration of an essay written in 2022 under the title No Offence. It is now 2026, and I revisit that piece from a position altered by time and encounter, when the offence I once analysed from a distance arrived at my own door. Here is the link to the older essay- https://ohdryasdustreally.blogspot.com/2022/03/no-offense.html