I&B ministry’s new scalp: editorial board at CSD

After delaying the registration of a journal for more than a year and denying an international publishing house Sage the required Registration number, the I & B Ministry appears to have succeeded in scuttling the publication of the journal itself.

After the Trustees of Sameeksha Trust, publishers of the venerable Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) caved in earlier this year and forced the editor, Paranjoy Guhathakurta to resign, this is another instance in which editors believed to be critical of the Government or believed to be ‘Left of the Centre’ have been forced to quit. Both the editor and the managing editor of the yet to be published journal tendered their resignation last week along with the rest of the editorial team.

While CSD publishes a journal, Social Change, in English since 1971, it last year decided to publish a quarterly journal in Hindi. While Sage moved to secure the title ‘ Samajik Vimarsh’ early last year, the title was not registered by the Registrar of Newspapers of India (RNI) under the ministry of I&B till July, 2017. And when they registered the title, they would not give the registration number without which the journal cannot be circulated through post.

The research journal was to be brought out by the Council For Social Development (CSD) in existence since 1962 and founded by Durgabai Deshmukh, freedom fighter, a member of the Constituent Assembly and later of the Planning Commission. The journal was to be published by Sage, which produces a large number of international journals of repute in several countries and in association with several institutions.

But it seems the I&B ministry sat over the application for registration for a long time and demanded to see the name of writers and a sample of the content for the first issue, which was to come out in January, 2017.

Resignation letters sent to the CSD President, Prof Muchkund Dubey, hints that the ministry found some content to be problematic. Enquiries revealed that one of them was a review of a book by late Praful Bidwai. While the review was critical of the Indian Left, merely because it began with a reference to what had happened in JNU, the ministry let it be known that they had problems with the writing.

“Apparently the contents of the journal were thought to be anti-government and also the reason for the government agencies not granting the registration number or delaying it,” reads part of a long resignation letter sent in by the Editor, Prof Apoorvanand from Delhi University.

“The CSD does not have a corpus large enough to sustain itself without grants from the state agencies. I shared this concern. I explained to you that the journal was never intended to be anti-government platform. It was not a forum for people to express their political opinion. The idea was to address the lack of serious, rigorous social science scholarship in Hindi,” added the editor.

The journal was to be a peer-reviewed journal and committed to give space to diverse viewpoints, reiterated Prof Apoorvanand when contacted. But he also maintained that the ‘Government of the Day’ cannot be the sole reference point for ideas and scholarly pursuit.

The CSD President, Prof Apoorvanand told NH, candidly said he would not like to put CSD in trouble by inviting the wrath of the Government by publishing matter critical to it at this stage.

“The Government is responsible for creating an atmosphere of fear, disempowering intellectual thought and stifling scholarship, ideation and writing. I don’t blame the CSD or its administration,” he declared.

Refusing to discuss the issue further, Prof Apoorvanand offered to share his resignation letter with NH. He writes: “I understand the constraints that the present political situation has put on all academic institutions. It is perfectly understandable that they choose not to confront the government and decide to survive for better days…”