The silly and gratuitous controversy about Vishwanathan Anand’s nationality tells us a bit about ourselves. Through this looking glass we see what we are and what we have become.

We know the story: The University of Hyderabad decides to confer honorary doctorates to three distinguished people, including a visiting foreign mathematician and Anand. They applied to the President, who is the university’s Visitor, through the ministry of human resources development (HRD), which has to clear all such proposals when foreigners are involved. The HRD ministry, under the enlightened Kapil Sibal, who wants to transform the education sector in this country, sat on this proposal for months. They wanted to know if Anand was indeed an Indian or a foreign national, since he lives in Spain. Inquiries were made and Anand’s wife faxed a copy of his passport to the ministry which conclusively proved he was indeed an Indian. But by the time all this was processed, it was too late and the university had to cancel the function.
Bureaucratic cussedness and ineptitude is the most obvious conclusion. In a country where the onus of proving everything is on the citizen rather than the establishment, that Aruna Vishwanathan had to fax her husband’s passport copies is par for the course. Go to any government office — indeed, go to any private sector institution — and they will tell you to get a copy of this, a copy of that to prove you are who you say you are. Try and open a new bank account or even transfer an old one when you move residence; the procedures will drive you insane.
Nor is the delay big news. The bureaucratic machine works at a sloth’s pace, partly because of the lethargy, partly the sheer number of procedures and mostly because no one wants to take a decision, lest it is held against him/her in future.
But here’s the question: Why did the university have to take permission anyway? The University of Hyderabad is not a fly by night institution, one of those degree shops going by the name of “deemed universities”. It is a place of learning that ought to have the autonomy to decide who it wants to honour. Why take the proverbial “nod” from the government?
Easier said than done. The government may have liberalised the economy but it still retains control over our intellectual life. Governmental interference in the higher education sector has grown over the years and the neta-babu nexus wields enormous clout over the universities. In Mumbai, we recently saw gross shoddiness and involvement of the government in the selection of the new vice-chancellor and the end result was hardly edifying.
An even bigger question is: Even if Vishwanathan Anand did hold a foreign passport, so what? For the past few years, we have gone out of our way to honour the so-called People of Indian Origin (PIO) and the law clearly allows anyone with a forebear upto three generations ago who was born in India. Thus V.S. Naipual, whose works on India have hardly been complimentary, is much sought after despite the fact that both he and his father were born outside India and he holds a British passport. Why, this year itself the Indian government honoured Sant Chatwal, the controversial American businessman, with a Padma Bhushan; was there a lot of checking and rechecking into his antecedents? And if the government did want to know the facts in the case of Anand, all it had to do was discreetly (and quickly) check its own records and come up with the facts.
It is naive to think that this is only the government’s stupidity on show; as a people too we have ambivalent feelings about “foreigners” and especially Indians who have moved abroad. And it shows how meekly we have begun to accept official intrusion into our lives. At a recent media conference the government refused permission to the organisers to allow participants from other South Asian countries — Pakistanis one could understand, but even Sri Lankans were barred. No one wanted to take on the government for this. Keeping a tight hold on education is just another manifestation of this — just ask the researchers who have to go through hoops to get a visa to come to India, especially if they are researching anything “controversial”.
Anand is right to feel miffed and disappointed at this and we will understand if he turns down the doctorate. He has been gracious about it by saying he wants to move on. Kapil Sibal too showed grace when he apologised to the player. But if the minister really wants to make a difference, he should begin by loosening universities from the clutches of his ministry. The government has no place in the hallowed portals of learning. It is no use talking about economic growth if our intellectual growth is being stunted and managed by Big Brother. We do not want a society where our incomes are going up and we can buy any gizmo we want while our minds are being told what to think.

The writer is a senior journalist and commentator on current affairs based in Mumbai