Lewis and Lall 24

The decolonial movement was meant to increase debate and liberate the world from the conceptual limitations that remain as entrenched legacies of colonial practices. This is not anti-Westernist, but rather anti-EurocentristFootnote11. Decolonialism encourages deep self-reflection on the architectures and structures of knowledge, to break through the filters on our perception of global inequalities and promote non-Western knowledge producers, particularly from minority backgrounds. However, as we have shown, the co-opted version of decolonialism is superficially anti-Western, wherein complex decolonial scholarship is stripped of intellectual complexity and realigned with nationalist positions for the sake of creating new hegemonies at a national level. Rather than encouraging critical thinking on the parasitic nature of knowledge hierarchies, when decolonial principles are co-opted by nationalist agendas, they are used to promote exclusionary structures, elevating a singular national identity and its political needs at the expense of plural-versality and minority representation. In India and Russia, de-linking is used to cut off engagement with Western academic discourse and reject “Western-influenced” critiques of development, inequality, and authoritarianism. This is done to protect national ways of being based upon state conceptions of traditional values, paradoxically erasing minority voices that do not fit neatly into the unified national narrative as well as silencing critics. The debate in higher education reflects the current key questions on the nature of the Indian and Russian nations—both under respective nationalist governments. When universities are seen as Western or critical of local traditions and schools of thought, the space for critical thinking and democratic debate is ultimately removed, leaving those who oppose Putin and Modi with no safe way to engage with political discourse. With Western Europe and North America aligning themselves narratively with so-called “universal principles” of human rights, freedom of expression, and democracy, Putin and Modi have capitalised on anti-Western turns in Russian and Indian scholarship to reject all calls for increased liberalisation as the slow creep of unwanted alien concepts into national spaces that must be protected from these destabilising ideas. In both cases, anti-Westernism, legitimated through exploitation of well-founded concerns about the problematic neocolonial perpetuation of Western hegemony, has become a convenient justification for increased repression and authoritarianism.