In light of the ‘self-deportation’ of an Indian student to Canada before she was chucked out of the US for extreme political activism, the recent purported move by the White House to ‘red list’ 41 countries—prohibiting their nationals from travelling to America—may prove to be a boon for some nations. After all, which sane country would want its impressionable youth to be exposed to America’s radical Left campus culture and then bring it back home?

The curious inclusion of Bhutan, which has around 300 students studying in the US at present—underlines this probability. And it also highlights the potential danger that India faces as some 330,000 desi youngsters are now in US universities. The red list travel ban does not apply only to students from those countries, of course, but the ramifications are implicit, although initial reports say that Bhutan’s government is “shocked" by its inclusion.

Ranjani Srinivasan, who fortuitously had a valid Canadian visa and could therefore ‘self-deport’ there instead of being sent back to India, is a case in point of academia being used as a possible base for other activities. Now 37 years old she is yet to complete her PhD at Columbia University, even 8 years after she got her Master’s degree from Harvard in urban planning, funded by not one but two prestigious scholarships, Nehru-Fulbright and Inlaks.

She got another fellowship from the Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard in 2016 for the same Master’s thesis on “continuities and transformations of caste rights within extractive economies in postcolonial India", based on her family’s stint at the Kolar Gold Fields in Karnataka. To help her along since then she was also a researcher for the West Philadelphia Landscape Project........

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