Whither Social Sciences?

As social scientists (researcher or teachers of social sciences), perhaps all of us are aware of a sense of unease, a kind of foreboding and a feeling of impending catastrophe prevalent in the corridors of departments of social sciences in the universities and colleges. It would be unrealistic to argue that this feeling of a hovering crisis is misplaced or unfounded. Social scientists across the country have been experiencing this anxiety since the mid-1990s itself for a variety of reasons. One of the most discernible reasons is the economic, namely, the increasing fund-cuts for universities and most alarmingly in the budget allocated for social science education, including research and teaching. Another cause is the state's increasing political intervention in the institutions of higher education in general and institutions of social sciences in particular. This has been particularly evident from the attempts on the part of the present government to curb the autonomy of these institutions as well as attack the intellectual freedom of practitioners of what we call 'liberal arts', social sciences and humanities. I would start with a recent event of attack on the social scientists who raised their voice against rising intolerance (though this binary of tolerance and intolerance itself is an incorrigibly liberal one and highly problematic as it performs a liberal displacement of the fundamental political and ideological debate/struggle; in the words of Gilles Deleuze, it is a 'dysjunctive synthesis') in the country since the rise of Modi-led NDA to power.