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,” it bears mentioning that the issue here is not merely that these figures hold controversial views. It is that their platforming is repeatedly defended by appeals to viewpoint diversity that obscure the unequal consequences of such speech for those most directly targeted by it.
Equally troubling is the narrow vision of India that emerges from this framework. 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 those 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, which conjures up false visions of a utopian India unburdened by the sociopolitical realities of 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 is therefore not merely representation, but the ease with which elite institutions confer authority on those least likely to be burdened by the caste, class, religious and gendered inequalities that structure everyday life across the subcontinent.
This is also why appeals to viewpoint diversity alone are insufficient. As Professor Priya Satia argued in a recent column, “as the flat-Earth example shows, not every viewpoint is intellectually valid — no matter how politically or culturally appealing it may be. It is a disservice to the public to treat different sides of an issue as equally viable if one has been debunked according to the standards of the profession.” At a moment when historians, anthropologists, political scientists and other South Asianists have extensively documented the BJP’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies, calls for greater “balance” risk functioning as refusals to reckon with scholarly consensus rather than as commitments to intellectual pluralism. In such cases, viewpoint diversity ceases to serve the common good: it instead grants exclusionary and illiberal politics a veneer of legitimacy.
More fundamentally, however, the problem is not confined to SIPEC alone. It reflects a broader tendency within Stanford’s engagement with India to privilege policy expertise over alternate ways of knowing the region. I am therefore also concerned by the policy-centered approach to India advocated by many student groups, regardless of their political affiliations.
Such an approach overlooks the many spaces at Stanford where students already engage with India through sociocultural, historical and aesthetic 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 exceed the narrow confines of policy discourse. As a student of Film & Media Studies and Anthropology, I often find my own engagement with South Asia isolating within the undergraduate population because discussions of India are so frequently reduced to questions of governance, foreign policy, economic growth and geopolitical strategy. Far less attention is paid to the humanistic questions that illuminate how power is realised and contested in everyday life — through caste, religion, labor, language and social difference.
This imbalance is evident in the relative lack of undergraduates whose engagement with South Asia is rooted in its cultural and aesthetic worlds rather than primarily in questions of governance and public policy. 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 peripheral 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. As 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 stands in stark contrast to the nation-centered framework that undergirds much of the current debate.
Stanford, as an institution, does not suffer from a lack of engagement with India. It suffers from an inability to imagine India beyond the nation-state — and South Asia beyond India. Rather than investing further in frameworks that reinforce national primacy, the university should 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.