Galgotia's Dog
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Opinion: China has never been loud-mouthed about its achievements. You only know about them when they hit the scene.
By Aditya Nigam
The Galgotia University episode at the hyped up AI Summit 2026 in Delhi isn't at all out of character with the PM’s and RSS' New India at all. Much of it fraud -- from the beginning to the end.
It is fraud through which these jokers seek to become Vishwaguru; hence, one should perhaps remind them that Swami Vivekananda whom they can't stop claiming as their spiritual ancestor, famously said "চালাকির দ্বারা কোন মহৎ কাজ হয়না" (you cannot do anything great through cunning).
It is interesting that China be at the centre of the current shameful mess created by Galgotia University, which bought a Chinese robotic dog just "off the shelf" and tried to pass it off as their own in an international conference on AI! The cheek and the brazenness of it all comes straight from their Guru. Remember, it was he who created an artificial, redeveloped, concrete riverfront with allegedly stagnant water at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad in order to show off before Xi Jingping (China, once again)?
So let's get one thing straight. While the RSS and its progenies want to fraud their way to some Vishwaguru status, the whole world is laughing at them. Look at the history their guys are taught (which will now be taught to the rest of India) where nothing unpalatable to them -- from caste oppression to the Mughals -- can be taught. The products of their school can only puzzle profoundly over where the "extra 2ab" comes from when you square a+b, but they become a laughing stock before the whole world immediately.
China, on the other hand, has never been loud-mouthed about its achievements. You only know about them when they hit the scene.
The interesting thing is that following the years of devastation of intellectual life after the Cultural Revolution, when China embarked in its journey to become the next superpower, it quietly used to send its academics to international conferences, not to blabber but to take notes silently and get themselves updated on the cutting edge knowledge in all fields. No bullshitting about how the sun shines from their…
In 2007, when I first attended a conference in Beijing, I went into a bookshop in Beijing University. All books there were in Chinese/ Mandarin but once again no nonsense about the greatness of Confucian or Daoist knowledge and how "great we are." I asked the research scholar accompanying me to translate for me the title of some books in the philosophy section and was struck by how they had translated everything from Heidegger to Deleuze and Guattari into their language. No vetting by some Institute of Marxism-Leninism!
It is true that China is an authoritarian, one-party State, but they have figured out that some degree of leeway has to be provided to intellectual activity for it to challenge the political domination of the West. There are no doubt serious problems with the whole one-party political structure that prevails there, but it seems to have realized that it has to be at the frontier of knowledge if it wants to forge ahead in whatever way it wants.
Professor Aditya Nigam is a political theorist, formerly with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. Long associated with the Left movement, he has had an abiding interest in social and political movements and theoretical and philosophical questions related to social transformation. His recent work has been concerned with the decolonization of social and political theory. Nigam is one of the founder-members of the political blog, Kafila.online where he writes on contemporary issues.
He is the author of The Insurrection of Little Selves: The Crisis of Secular Nationalism in India (2006), Power and Contestation: India Since 1989, with Nivedita Menon (2007), After Utopia: Modernity, Socialism and the Postcolony (2010), and Desire Named Development (2011), Decolonizing Theory: Thinking Across Traditions (2020), Aasman aur Bhi Hain (in Hindi, Setu Prakashan, Delhi), Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism: Untimely Encounters (2023), Protyashar Ishtehar: Degrowth o Poonjibader Porer Jeebon (in Bengali, Gronthik, Dhaka, forthcoming).