Right IIT Vs Left IIT
By Sandhya

Popular blog Offstumped describes itself as espousing ‘Center Right Indian Politics based on Dharma, Liberalism and Nationalism’.  To their credit, many of the discussions are intelligent, pointed and well researched. As with any such blogs, there are very forceful points of view which sometimes get heated.

How heated do the discussion get on Offstumped? Very heated when left ideologies meet right ideologies.

On Jan 27, 2010, Offstumped published an article by an IIT graduate titled ‘Why am I paying for Ashley Tellis’ salary?’ which read in part

“
As an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology system, it was distressing to see this e-mail from a member of faculty employed with IIT Hyderabad.

The IIT Hyderabad Faculty directory website has this description of Ashley Tellis’ background.

Ashley Tellis
Assistant Professor
Areas of Interest Twentieth Century Women’s Poetry (Irish, English, US, Indian),Gender Studies (especially Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Studies, Dalit Literature and Culture (especially Marathi), Postcolonial Theory/Studies, Literary Theory, Northeastern Writing and Cultures, Black British Literatures, African Literatures, Latin American Literatures.
Email ashley [at] iith.ac.in

Normally Ashley Tellis’ politics would be his business but then going by his e-mail maybe not since everything is public and nothing is private.

So what exactly is a card carrying participant in CPI-ML, AIFTU rallies who evinces interest in Lesbian and Gay studies doing at an IIT?

….
“

This Offstumped article questioned the vetting process done by IIT Hyderabad because of which Ashley Tellis managed to get a job in such an elite institution. It also published extracts from an article by Ashley Tellis which said that under some legally permissible circumstances Man boy love could be a beautiful thing.

Not surprisingly, all hell broke lose.  The commentators had a field day.  And then Ashley Tellis wrote in threatening legal action.

“
Ashley Tellis says: January 28, 2010 at 1:07 pm

Someone alerted me to this “debate” and I have to say, tiring as it is to answer a bunch of rightwing, raving, ranting, calling-to-burn-at-the stake bunch of fundamentalists which is what most of you are, save for Atanu (and thanks, Atanu, for that, even though you do agree with a lot of the crap these fundamentalists say about me, I guess you and I can have a debate about that some other time and without a chorus of idiots behind us), that I want to clarify only one or two things that have come up here.

I) At no point in my article on paedophilia (and Ot, I hope you are listening here) do I say it is okay to force anything on children. I say point a)that children have a sexuality, something Freud said over a hundred years ago and was pilloried for it and I am merely repeating it and getting pilloried for it, which shows that human society rarely grows up b) that it is okay for adults to have sex with children under a particular country’s permissible age, which, in any case, ranges across the world from 9 to 18 as I point out in my article IF IT IS BASED ON CONSENT and c) that consent IS the issue of importance, not age and that we should not infantilise children and deny them all agency by only constructing them as braindead, sublegal and stupid and incapable of agency and desire, especially as they are constantly abused under this infantilisation, especially within the family. AT NO POINT DO I SAY FORCE IS OKAY, NO POINT DO I SAY PAEDOPHILIA IS IN GENERAL GREAT OR ANY SUCH THING. The page is on LGBT sexualities; the article is part of a series on FAQs, addressing popular misconceptions around issues of sexuality and I was addressing one such issue. I have a complex set of arguments about it but none of them are assimilable to the distortions on this website and I take strong objection to the articulation of these distortions as my views and the rabble-rousing against me consequent to it.

I have contacted my lawyer and will consider filing cases of criminal offence and slander against offstumped and Ot and demand public apologies for this slander if one more slanderous comment attributed to me or about me is published here. This is the sort of stuff that breaks peoples careers and lives and it is all of you who have absolutely no morals or scruples and checks on your freedom of expression which allows you to write such poisonous and distortionate stuff about someone you do not even know and whose views you do not bother to even read (taking one paragraph out of context from my article is not a summary of my argument and will not stand up in a court of law) but distort and abuse and call for the public humiliation and sacking and hanging or whatever of.

II)IIT students are all above the age of consent so there is no question of my damaging sub-legal minds, but surely if there is anyone who needs to sue me for my views, it is them (and not any of you) if I articulate them in class and they object to them.

III) Concerned citizens can write to the Director of IIT at Hyderabad and voice their protests and call for my sacking. His mail id is publicly available on the internet. The Head of my Department is in IIT Madras, our mentoring institution, and you can write to him too questioning his wisdom in hiring me and warning him about the dangerous nature of my mind. His id is also publicly available on the IIT Hyderabad site. I hope doing this will make you feel better about how sick, pathetic and ignorant you really are. Please go ahead. I am not one to be scared or cowed down by public distortions of my work and views by frothing-at-the-mouth fundamentalists and I will have my responses, legal and otherwise, ready.

Further, just for the record, I was hired because I have a PhD from Cambridge, a Rockefeller Residency postdoctoral fellowship from the US, eight years of teaching experience in India, England and the US. IITs have Departments called Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) and at IIT Hyd it is called Department of Liberal Arts, where I teach English.

I am also a journalist, a gay rights activist, an anti-communal activist, an independent Leftist and a feminist and do all that work outside office hours, including attending Left wing dharnas protesting the killing of tribals in rural AP.

I would appreciate it if you think before you heap public abuse, views and opinions on people, especially attributing them to those very people, but if you continue to do so, you have been warned.

Dr. Ashley Tellis“

Commentators making bitchy vicious observations.  Threats of legal action.  Offstumped censored the most venomous personal attacks and then closed all comments on Jan 28, 2010.

Free speech in India is not the same as free speech in USA.  The same applies to right wing politics.