BJP leader Subramanian Swamy has said U.S. academic Wendy Doniger has “opted out of fighting for her fundamental rights, as I had, and her publishers, as any good commercial entity would, cut their losses by surrendering, faced with certain defeat in the court.”
In a statement on Saturday, Dr. Swamy said: “The academics’ cry of academic freedom carries no credibility, and there is, I am convinced, no court or future Parliament in India, which will respond sympathetically to their demand. Rather most Indians will think that they have got their just dessert.”
“Selective amnesia” Dr. Swamy said the academics had forgotten that in the late 2011, the UPA government, after getting his Harvard courses deleted by a “contrived majority in the faculty meeting,” got an FIR registered under Sections 153 A and B and 295A of the IPC for an opinion article he had published in a daily.
The academics who were now demanding deletion of these sections were exhibiting their “selective amnesia.”
Dr. Swamy said he had approached the Delhi High Court, and got a permanent injunction against arrest for custodial interrogation. Till now, the Home Ministry had failed to produce any evidence against his article.