Narayanan was at least the third person to resign in the preceding few months. On 7 October, Adil Mushtaq Shah and Saurav Goswami, both senior administrative staffers working with the YIF, announced their resignations to the programme’s fellows, via emails. The first YIF fellow told me that both Shah and Goswami had cited personal reasons as the cause for their departure. An email sent to me on behalf of Sachin Sharma, the registrar of Ashoka, said that Narayanan resigned of his own accord as well.
The YIF fellows I spoke to told me that, after the administrative staffers resigned, fellows from the program approached the university’s administration to seek explanations. According to the Indian Express report, on 9 October, 168 of the programme’s fellows wrote an email to Mukherjee, requesting a meeting with the governing body. A YIF fellow who later attended the meeting told me it was scheduled to be held on 13 October. That morning, the Indian Express report was published. “The report made the management dodgy towards us, they felt that we were in the wrong for sharing information that they believed only members of the Ashoka community should be privy to,” the fellow who attended the meeting told me. The fellow added at the meeting—at which Mukherjee was not present—the governing body members claimed that the issue of the resignations was “not as simplistic,” and that Shah and Goswami did, in fact, have personal reasons for resigning. According to the attendee, the administrators said that the two staffers would be taking on positions at the Vedica Scholars Programme for Women. According to its website, Vedica is a multidisciplinary programme exclusively for women, aimed at working as an alternative to an MBA. The programme’s founders include Anuradha Das Mathur, a founder of the media company 9.9 Media. Pramath Raj Sinha, who founded 9.9 Media with Mathur, is also a founder of Vedica. Sinha is a founder and trustee at Ashoka University as well, and a member of its governing body. I sent an email to the address listed on Vedica’s website and to Sinha, asking if they could confirm whether Shah and Goswami were employed there, but I did not receive a response. I also received no responses from Ashoka University’s administration regarding the reason behind this alleged move.
Read more: https://caravanmagazine.in/vantage/ashoka-university-staffer-resign-liberal