The Politics of Knowledge Production: Democratic Backsliding, Epistemic Suppression, and the Erosion of Academic Freedom in India

Between 2014 and 2024, India's Academic Freedom Index score collapsed from 0.58 to 0.16, placing it among the bottom 15 percent of 179 countries assessed by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project. The decline is as steep as those recorded in states undergoing outright authoritarian consolidation. Yet, India has not experienced a formal regime transition and remains, at least nominally, an electoral democracy. This paper asks how functionally authoritarian epistemic environments can be produced through ostensibly democratic and procedural means, and what this reveals about the boundary between democratic backsliding and authoritarianism in comparative politics. Existing academic freedom scholarship has concentrated disproportionately on fully autocratic contexts, where suppression operates through direct coercion in the form of closures, dismissals, and overt censorship. India offers a theoretically distinct case, in which a democratically elected government closely regulates the conditions of knowledge production through restructuring appointments, selectively defunding critical disciplines, and criminalising dissent, while preserving the formal architecture of academic institutions. This paper argues that such procedural capture constitutes a functionally authoritarian environment for scholars even where the surrounding regime retains democratic form. It further argues that treating ‘authoritarian environment’ as a regime-type variable, rather than a lived condition that can be locally produced within hybrid or backsliding polities, obscures this convergence. Thus, authoritarian environments should be understood as conditions of governance rather than properties of entire regimes. The analysis draws on process tracing across four critical episodes of institutional transformation in Indian higher education since 2014, namely amendments to the University Grants Commission (UGC) Act restructuring institutional autonomy, amendments to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA) imposing restrictions that curtail independent research institutions, changes to vice-chancellor and faculty appointment procedures, and the regulation and criminalisation of campus dissent. Reconstructing the causal pathways through which political pressure in each episode is translated into epistemic outcomes, the paper triangulates evidence from policy documents, parliamentary records, legal proceedings, and wider public discourse, with attention to how caste and religious identity shape the targeting and framing of these institutional interventions. The paper's contribution is twofold. Theoretically, it extends the study of ‘authoritarian environments’ beyond formally authoritarian states to show how equivalent conditions of epistemic closure can be manufactured within nominally democratic institutions, thereby challenging the assumption that such environments are confined to authoritarian regimes. Empirically, by examining how postcolonial dynamics, specifically caste and religion, inflect the design and targeting of procedural capture, it addresses a dimension of differential vulnerability that existing frameworks, developed primarily in the global North, do not adequately capture.