In January 2006, the ruler of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, visited India to be the chief guest at the Republic Day parade. One of his engagements in that four-day State visit was an event at Jamia Millia Islamia to collect an honorary doctorate.

Eleven years later, Jamia again found itself playing a bit part in the welcome extended to another visiting head of state. This time it was Turkey's president, Recep Erdogan. A special convocation was convened and another doctorate duly conferred.

We have grown so used to India's public universities dignifying foreign dignitaries with degrees that it has come to seem like a harmless ritual, rather like breaking a coconut to mark an auspicious beginning. But degrees aren't coconuts and universities aren't officiating priests, so perhaps it's time to think about the implications of this custom.

There is a sound general argument for not giving visiting heads of state degrees and several good reasons for not honouring King Abdullah and President Erdogan in particular.

The practice is wrong in principle because universities are meant to be autonomous, self-governing institutions, not ready-to-hand props for public diplomacy. To confer a degree on a distinguished writer or academic like Amartya Sen (as Jamia did some years ago) during the university's annual convocation is appropriate. The university chose to honour a person of distinction after deliberating in its councils and it honoured that person in keeping with the rhythms of its academic calendar.

The degrees given to King Abdullah and President Erdogan were, in contrast, command performances. They were conferred for reasons of State. When a university allows a peculiarly academic distinction to be absorbed into the repertoire of State patronage, it diminishes itself. Each time that it allows itself to be thus used, it publicly performs a negation of its own autonomy.

The prime mover in the erosion of the public university's autonomy is, of course, the Indian State, which sees universities as subordinate (or insubordinate) bureaucracies. This remains true regardless of the party that controls the State. King Abdullah's doctorate was orchestrated by the first UPA government. When a government headed by a distinguished university man like Manmohan Singh had no qualms in pressing a university into service to flatter a visiting autocrat, why would the present dispensation think twice about doing the same thing to honour an elected president?

But universities do, after all, honour people who have nothing to do with the academic or intellectual life: performers, philanthropists, even politicians transformed by age and superannuation into statesmen. Setting aside for a moment the image of the State as a masterful ringmaster surrounded by universities crouching obediently on stools, let us examine Abdullah's and Erdogan's credentials for this honour.

King Abdullah needn't detain us long. He was the son of Ibn Saud, the founder of the Saudi Arabian dynasty. Saudi Arabia is possibly the only State in the world that is not a nation state. It is a family enterprise where the monarch 'grants' freedoms to his subjects; even the rhetorical acknowledgment that political legitimacy is derived from popular sovereignty - the hallmark of the nation state - is missing in that curious country. It's main export, apart from oil, is a dour, life-denying fundamentalism that has helped incubate bigotry the world over. To prompt Jamia, a university founded on the rejection of Muslim Statehood and the affirmation of a pluralist nationalism, to confer a degree on King Abdullah was a sign that Manmohan Singh had finally made the transition from professor to politician.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the more interesting and complicated case. Erdogan, unlike Abdullah, is an elected ruler and, regardless of how liberals might cavil, a democrat. He founded his own political party, the Justice and Development Party, and served as prime minister of Turkey for more than a decade. As prime minister, he vastly increased the budget of the education ministry and during his tenure the number of universities in Turkey doubled. On the face of it, here was a leader who deserved to be honoured by an Indian university.

Also, Jamia Millia Islamia has a long and distinguished Turkish connection. One of Jamia's founders, M.A. Ansari, led a medical mission to Turkey during the Balkan Wars. In 1935, Jamia invited the great Halide Edib Adivar, novelist, nationalist and pioneering feminist to deliver a series of lectures and hosted her when she was persona non grata in her own country. Jamia is perhaps the only university in India that offers an honours degree in Turkish. But this is a tradition of intellectual solidarity that is diminished, not strengthened, by honouring Erdogan.

Because in the fifteen months leading up to his Indian visit, Erdogan declared open season on Turkish universities. In January 2016, 1,200 Turkish academics had signed a petition denouncing military operations in ethnic Kurdish towns in the southeast of the country. Erdogan described the signatories as treacherous, as sponsors of terrorist propaganda and as enemies of the State. "They spit out hatred of our nation's values and history on every occasion. The petition has made this clearer," he said. "Do you think you can disrupt the unity of this nation? Do you think you can continue to have a comfortable life with a salary from the state, without paying a price?"

Erdogan was as good as his word. Within days, prosecutors began formal investigations of the signatories, thirty of whom were arrested and fifteen summarily dismissed. Turkey's Science Academy described their treatment as "wrong and disturbing". After last year's controversies in Hyderabad University and JNU, Erdogan's rhetoric will sound familiar to Indian academics, but nothing the Narendra Modi government has done to Indian universities begins to approach the enormity of Erdogan's actions. Why should any Indian university honour a politician as vindictive and as intolerant of academic dissent as the Turkish president?

Since the failed military coup, Erdogan's attitude towards universities has hardened. Armed with Executive Order No. 676, Erdogan now directly appoints the rectors or the chief executives of all Turkish universities, both State and private. He cancelled the teaching licenses of thousands of teachers, forced the resignations of independent minded deans and systematically set about turning universities into instruments of the political executive's will. Erdogan's short way with insubordinate academics might make him a role model for Modi's regime but no university community should be complicit in his celebration.

Is it naïve or even disingenuous to say this in a country where public universities have always been subject to executive interference? Is the ideal of university autonomy an alien notion borrowed from the West that has no real purchase in our societies where the State owns and underwrites university education?

The answer to both questions must be no. The government of India, like all governments, must host all sorts of rulers for reasons of State. India, for example, has a very real interest in safeguarding the livelihoods of the Indian diaspora in Saudi Arabia. But that doesn't mean that India's university communities should be silent when they are used to fete authoritarians. Their protests mightn't work every time but to stop making the point that honouring the Erdogans of the world is wrong in principle would be to give up on the intellectual autonomy of a university as an ideal. And that would be a permanent defeat.

The author teaches history at Jamia Millia Islamia