Ramachandra Guha: How The Right Wing Hounded Out A Gandhi Biographer

Three years ago, Ramachandra Guha, a historian and one of India's most respected public intellectuals, told an interviewer that India was "becoming a more intolerant country" than before.

A 50-year-old Muslim man had been killed in a mob lynching allegedly over rumours that his family had been storing and consuming beef at home. A beef ban had been enforced by Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. Two leading and outspoken rationalists had recently been murdered elsewhere in the country.

"It is important to recognise that there was never a golden age in our history as an independent nation of complete tolerance or freedom of speech," Guha said. "There have always been curbs and pusillanimity by politicians and governments. But we are certainly becoming more intolerant, there is more violence."

'Intolerant India': Is criticism against Modi's BJP justified?
Now Guha himself has become a target of the intolerance he spoke about.

Barely a fortnight ago, he announced that he was joining an ambitious private non-profit university in the western city of Ahmedabad as a professor of humanities. (Ahmedabad University's top leadership includes historian Patrick French, the biographer of Nobel Prize-winning writer VS Naipaul.)

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