The Farewell of a University and the Untimely Death of Democracy

A friend and I were walking through the heart of Budapest. In front of the historic Gessam Palace, which was standing next to us, he suddenly said, “Netanyahu is here.” Hearing this, my body went cold. It was not so much the incredible fact that Netanyahu had come to Budapest, but rather the surprise that a man who is most responsible for the deaths of more than fifty thousand people and the deaths of more than fifteen thousand children in the Middle East in the past year and a half was now resting peacefully in the hotel next to us. Such a cruel reality made my heart freeze.

The visit had an impact on the entire city. Traffic was stopped for several days, because it was a state visit. By then, Hungary had decided to withdraw from the International Criminal Court — a well-planned move, because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been indicted for war crimes by several countries in the European Union. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is a long-time friend of Netanyahu, and this friendship is not only diplomatic, but also a deep strategic alliance on the political stage.

The political rise of these two leaders has followed each other like shadows. Both secured electoral victories using a strategy developed by an infamous pair of American politicians — Arthur Finkelstein and George Bairnbaum. This strategy was called “rejection voting.” It is a political strategy that uses fear, hatred and lies to shape public opinion. Finkelstein first used this strategy during Netanyahu’s 1996 election campaign. That campaign deliberately spread the idea that Shimon Peres wanted to give half of Jerusalem to the Palestinians. This lie misled voters and helped Netanyahu win the election.

 Finkelstein and Birnbaum then used the same tactic to help the leaders of Romania and Bulgaria, and later met the young Viktor Orbán. Angered by his defeat in the Hungarian elections of 2002, Orbán used this evil tactic in the next election and won in 2010. What was needed was an ideal “face of the enemy” — someone who could be used as a symbol of hatred and mislead the public. George Soros, the Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist who founded the Central European University, stepped into this role.

This university was later exiled by Orbán’s regime. I myself came to this city as a fellow at a research institute affiliated with CEU. The emptiness, loneliness, and silence of this institution reminded me of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University — once the country’s most prestigious institution, it was soon politically attacked as ‘anti-national’.

Soros founded this university to build a quality education system in Hungary after the fall of the communist regime. The university quickly gained popularity. At one point, Orbán himself even received Soros’s patronage. But later, Orbán’s neo-conservative, nationalist stance and Soros’s philosophy of free thought began to clash. Orbán gradually declared himself ‘anti-liberal’ and walked the path of a neo-communal, extreme nationalist politics.

The biggest victims of this politics are Hungarian universities. Where fees were once nominal, studying in universities is now a nightmare for most ordinary Hungarians. The Hungarian university admission rate, once the highest in Eastern Europe, is now the lowest. Orbán’s government banned the subject of ‘gender and sexuality studies’ and campaigned against the practice as ‘the promotion of homosexuality and pedophilia’. At one time, control of state universities was handed over to private foundations — run by Orbán’s inner circle.

This picture of Hungary is not unfamiliar to any reader aware of the Indian education system. Changes in university curricula along with political changes, harassment of teachers, political victimization of students, physical and mental torture — are all familiar scenes today. However, much of what Orbán has done is cloaked in a mask of legitimacy. Canadian intellectual and former CAU rector Michael Ignatieff called the process “a unique example of legal ingenuity” — a kind of ‘legal robbery’ by which a world-class university was driven out of the country.

Orbán’s move was clever — he knew that CAU had a weakness. The university was accredited in New York, but operated in Hungary. Taking advantage of this dual position, he amended the higher education law and added rules that would be almost impossible for the university to meet. The government demanded that a government contract be required to operate a foreign university — a provision that neither the United States nor Hungary had. As a result, CAU was effectively forced to relocate to Austria.

This legal maneuver teaches us how perfectly an authoritarian government can assert its power under the guise of democracy. In the Western world, where the abuse of power is not direct, but hidden in the guise of ‘legal legitimacy’ and ‘policy’, this kind of ‘legal strategy’ is the most dangerous form of dictatorship. Orbán himself is a lawyer — so this plot was well-planned.

Looking back at the Indian context, it seems that perhaps our situation is a little ‘better’. Political interference here is direct — at least unmasked. Goons enter universities, the curriculum is disrupted, students are imprisoned — but these things happen so nakedly that people at least keep their eyes open against them.

Orbán’s style of politics is becoming popular in many countries today. The rulers want an ‘internal enemy’ — someone who will help them cover up their failures. Sometimes that face is Soros, sometimes someone else. But the goal is the same — to stifle intellectual pursuits, critical thinking, and free expression. Because these three are the lifeblood of a democratic society.

 The story of the Central European University is not just a story of a university leaving its country. It is a warning — how a state can destroy all its institutions, silence the thinking of a people, and put on the mask of law. This tactic is spreading in many countries around the world — and we need the language of resistance that can unmask this silent dictatorship.