In his recent op-ed, Dr. Dinsha Mistree argues that it is not SIPEC, but Stanford, that is failing “more than 450 students [who] are Indian citizens; many more [who] are of Indian origin or are simply curious about one of the largest countries on earth.” Mistree contends that intellectual diversity is best achieved “not by demanding that any single student group represent the full diversity on a given issue, but by allowing a plurality of groups to each pursue their own perspectives.” This argument is troubling for several reasons.
First, in attempting to account for the multiplicity of Indian representation at Stanford, Mistree collapses the blatantly bigoted speakers platformed by SIPEC onto the same ledger as organizations such as the Stanford Indo-Pak Dosti Forum. While the latter is hardly beyond critique for its platforming of technocratic figures, it remains far more capacious in its political imagination and constituencies. In doing so, the article falls into what Professor Usha Iyer, faculty director of the Center for South Asia, has described as a “bothsidesism that often functions as a fig leaf for making room for speech that is harmful to marginalized communities.”
SIPEC’s roster requires little elaboration. While Dhananjay Balakrishnan has already documented many of these concerns in his piece, noting that “five out of nine speakers in the 2026 conference alone have strong ties to the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) networks,” organisations rooted in fascist thought, it bears mentioning that the issue here is not merely that these figures hold controversial views. It is that their platforming is repeatedly defended through appeals to intellectual diversity that obscure the asymmetries of power through which such speech operates, treating majoritarian nationalist projects and the communities most vulnerable to their effects as though they entered the conversation on equal terms.
Equally troubling is the assumption that intellectual diversity follows automatically from organizational diversity. While no single student group should be expected to represent all Indians, the visions of India most frequently institutionalized at Stanford often emerge from remarkably similar social and ideological locations. In a student organization that purports to represent India, the relative absence of Muslim, Dalit and Bahujan voices is striking. What passes as “India” in these spaces is often a highly specific demographic formation: upper-caste, technocratic, economically privileged and fluent in the language of entrepreneurship and policy. Such a vision mirrors the aspirations cultivated within elite institutions like Stanford, where many international Indian students are encouraged to imagine themselves as future founders, investors and policymakers. Questions of caste, religious marginalization, labor and structural inequality are too often relegated to the periphery, producing a vision of India unburdened by the sociopolitical realities confronting millions.
In doing so, this framework reproduces one of the neoliberal academy’s defining contradictions: privileged Stanford students are encouraged to see themselves as agents of national transformation while remaining insulated from the communities most affected by the policies they champion. The issue, therefore, is not merely representation, but the ease with which elite institutions confer authority on those least likely to be burdened by asymmetries that structure everyday life across the subcontinent.
Mistree’s argument also assumes that Stanford’s engagement with India is inadequate because contemporary Indian politics and political economy remain underrepresented. Yet it is worth asking why these domains are so often treated as the primary measures of engagement with the region. Historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and other South Asianists at Stanford have long demonstrated that India is also encountered through caste, religion, labor, aesthetics, language and everyday social life. The question, then, is not whether contemporary India deserves greater attention, but why certain ways of knowing India are repeatedly imagined as more urgent than others.
Such an assertion overlooks the many spaces at Stanford where students already engage with India through more humanistic lenses. The Center for South Asia, the Stanford Humanities Center’s Caste, Culture, and Aesthetics Workshop, and the South Asia Working Group, among others, have long fostered rigorous conversations that include but ultimately exceed the confines of policy discourse. Yet as a student of Film & Media Studies and Anthropology, I often find these modes of engagement less visible within undergraduate discussions of South Asia, which—partly as a result of student groups—are frequently organized around questions of governance, foreign policy, economic growth and technological development. Far less attention is paid to how histories are remembered through literature, film and art; how communities narrate belonging and difference; how caste shapes aesthetic form; and how everyday forms of social life can illuminate dimensions of the region that policy frameworks alone cannot fully capture.
The issue is not merely one of disciplinary preference. When students are encouraged to understand India primarily through policy frameworks, they are often insulated from humanistic discourses of violence and structures of oppression that make those policies meaningful in the first place. Policy discourse detached from the social worlds it seeks to govern risks becoming toothless: a language of solutions that has never fully reckoned with the conditions that produced the problem, a tendency further reinforced by Stanford’s broader culture of solutionism. More troublingly, it encourages students to subsume distinct histories of power beneath imprecise categories of marginalization. Humanistic inquiry demands a more relational mode of thinking: one that synthesises without flattening. For instance, it asks how Critical Caste Studies might sit alongside Islamic Studies at Stanford, so that students can examine the coalitional solidarities and tensions between Dalit and Muslim communities without collapsing their histories into a singular narrative of exclusion. It foregrounds the complexity that policy-oriented spaces often flatten in their pursuit of legibility.
Finally, at a moment when India’s hegemonic presence over discourse about the South Asian subcontinent is already difficult to ignore, the call for an explicitly India-focused center risks reproducing the very asymmetries that the Center for South Asia works hard to remedy. Such a framework threatens to further consolidate India’s epistemic centrality within the region, marginalizing Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Maldives, Bhutan, Afghanistan and the many intra-national communities whose histories, cultures and political struggles are too often rendered marginal in discussions of South Asia. Dr. Lalita du Perron, associate director of the Center for South Asia, noted her disappointment that CSA’s work was absent from Mistree’s account, “especially as one criticism we often and not unfairly hear is that we focus too much on India, and not the other countries of the region.” Moreover, the institutions Mistree cites as models—UChicago, Berkeley and Penn—complement their India centers with robust departmental commitments to South Asian Studies. In contrast, at Stanford, South Asian Studies is lacking: it is a subfield within Global Studies and can only be pursued as a minor.
The question, then, is not whether Stanford needs more engagement with India. It undoubtedly does. The question is what kind of engagement it wishes to cultivate. Contemporary politics and political economy are indispensable to understanding the region, but they constitute only one among many ways of knowing South Asia. Any expansion of policy-oriented inquiry should therefore be situated within a broader intellectual ecosystem that includes history, anthropology, literature, film, religious studies and the arts, and that remains accountable to scholarly standards rather than abstract appeals to intellectual diversity.
As Professor Usha Iyer argues, the task is to sustain “a capacious, generous, and critical vision that studies the history, politics, and culture of a staggeringly diverse region, without giving primacy to only one religious group or one country, based on its current economic hegemony.” Such a vision not only resists reducing South Asia to India, but also insists that political questions be understood through the social, cultural and historical worlds that render them meaningful. Rather than investing further in frameworks that reinforce national primacy, the university should help strengthen the myriad of already-existing spaces honed by faculty and graduate students; ones that allow students to encounter the region in all its complexities and contradictions.