“Leave IITs for the top brains of India, people who excel in STEM and management only,” a Reddit user wrote on the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay’s community page in September. “We don’t want stupid narrative-pushing socio-drama queens on this campus anymore!”

On campus, the same sentiment is less blunt. “If someone says something woke, or socially aware, a frequent response would be ‘oh you’re being so HSS’,” said a former development studies student at IIT Madras.

HSS is short for humanities and social sciences. At India’s........

© The Ken