Welcome to closet illiberalism

 

Vidya Subrahmaniam in The Hindu

   

 

Caste might be cast in stone judging from the way the dominant discourse gets conducted in India

“Caste is the most overwhelming factor in Indian life. Those who deny it in principle also accept it in practice. Life moves within the frontiers of caste and cultured men speak in soft tones against the system of caste, while its rejection in action just does not occur to them...” Socialist thinker Ram Manohar Lohia said this in 1964 but the words might be as relevant today as they were five decades ago.

The Ashis Nandy controversy illustrates the paradox of India’s opinion makers preaching caste equality while instinctively, reflexively, articulating positions that bunch them up on one side of the caste divide, thus reinforcing the very order that they have rejected. K. Satyanarayana exposes this contradiction with devastating examples in his article in The Hindu (editorial page, “The question of casteism still remains,” February 5, 2013). Mr. Nandy’s defenders have made the untenable legal claim that he should be judged not by what he said at the Jaipur Literature Festival but by his past record and scholarship. But worse, gradually the defence, which was originally grounded in Mr. Nandy’s right to free expression, has deteriorated into a free-for-all against Dalits and Other Backward Classes (OBC) — who are presumed to have become “sacred cows” protected by “draconian” laws. If to question Mr. Nandy is intolerance, what does one call this rant?

Mr. Nandy’s initial statement was a qualified one: he said the Indian Republic was saved because the corrupt of today were from the “Scheduled castes, OBCs and now the tribals.” But the nuances went for a toss with his stunning insistence that West Bengal was free from corruption because “in the last hundred years, nobody from the OBCs, SCs and STs has come to power there. It is an absolutely clean State.” Forget the backhanded compliment to the Left Front leadership which has been deemed to be clean for being upper caste. The inescapable inference from this is that upper caste means no corruption regardless of the period of reference — today or a 100 years ago.

 

Nandy’s statement as peg

Per se this is indefensible. Yet if for no other reason than to make the caste debate meaningful, we also need to look at Mr. Nandy’s subsequent clarification — more so because contained in the clarification is an uncomfortable truth that the Indian intelligentsia has tiptoed around for too long. To quote Mr. Nandy: “What I meant was that most of the people getting caught for corruption are people from OBC, SC and ST communities, as they don’t have the means to save themselves unlike people from upper castes who can hide their corruption.” 

The Nandy episode would have been well served if this statement had become the peg on which to examine the persisting caste prejudices and double standards that allow one kind of corruption to be exposed and the other to be hidden. However, it is important to understand that exposés and blackouts happen not only because one section is smarter than the other, which surely it is, but because the dominant discourse in India – as is evident from l'affaire Nandy itself — continues to be shaped by the socially advantaged classes. The media, as surveys have established, are a classic example of this stranglehold but upper caste dominance is as much a reality in academia and other key policymaking institutions. This collective is superficially progressive. Yet at a subconscious level, its members harbour all the entrenched biases, resulting in the backward castes being censured far more severely than their “twice-born” counterparts for the same alleged crime — be it ostentation, self-promotion, a specific legal violation or patronage of a particular caste group. 

Mayawati and the Gandhis

A case in point is the differential treatment extended to Mayawati and the Nehru-Gandhis. This difference endures despite xenophobic intolerance of the First family by right-wing sections of the middle class. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief’s wealth and her self-projection — creating parks and monuments, naming projects after herself and celebrating lavish birthdays — have been obsessively written about by a media that ignored her political achievements until she compelled attention by forming in 2007 the first majority government in Uttar Pradesh in 17 years. The star of that watershed election was Ms Mayawati but the media ignored her, choosing instead to be embedded with Rahul Gandhi whose party finished last and is still stuck there. 

Compare the relentless focus on Ms Mayawati’s financial assets with the easy ride given to Robert Vadra. The Vadra real estate papers were avidly consumed in private, they had been available for years with the principal Opposition party, but the veil on the Gandhi son-in-law’s vast business empire was lifted only after Arvind Kejriwal made bold to mention the unmentionable. Today, while Ms Mayawati finds the law chasing her, there seem to be no such anxieties for Mr. Vadra. In Prime Minister Vajpayee’s time, similar deference was shown to his foster son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya.

 

Tracking the BSP

I had my first real brush with deep-seated caste attitudes in 1988 when I was in Allahabad for a Lok Sabha by-election contested by Rajiv (Gandhi) challenger V.P. Singh. His opponents were Sunil Shastri from the Congress and Kanshi Ram from the BSP. Singh was the media darling and Mr. Shastri derived his importance from being his principal opponent. The BSP faced a near media blackout, and as it turned out, the party was equally contemptuous of the “manuwadi” press. BSP volunteers blocked me off from their meetings, saying they knew what I would write. Over the years, as I tracked the BSP’s astonishing growth, I could not help but notice the unfailingly skewed media coverage of the party, whose rallies would be reported, not for their content but for the traffic chaos they caused. 

As a part-time journalism teacher in 2005, I would discover the same unconscious bias in the essays turned in by my students. Writing on Ms Mayawati’s birthday, they left out the political aspects of the event, concentrating instead on her diamonds, her “flashy” clothes and the size of the cake she cut. They would accept later that diamonds and silks were worn by other women politicians too but that somehow, these outward manifestations hit the eye more in the BSP chief’s case. There is an ironic reality here that must be understood in its proper context. What people saw as distasteful flamboyance was a political tool that Ms Mayawati consciously employed, especially in the formative years when it was important for her to raise the self-esteem of her constituency. This was explained to me by the part Hindutva, part OBC Uma Bharti. The Dalit girls in her village were forbidden from crossing the threshold into even OBC homes. But they would rebel in their own way, wearing Mayawati hair clutches and imitating her mannerisms, thereby signalling that they would not be kept down by force. The handbag, symbolising status and accomplishment, is similarly a deliberate presence in the much-criticised Mayawati statues. 

Admittedly, the showmanship can get excessive, as it did in 2010 when the then Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister wore a gigantic garland of currency notes, estimated to add up to several crores of rupees. This kind of extravagant cash display undoubtedly raises questions about source and accountability. However, in all the outrage over this incident, the media missed mentioning that Indian politicians have traditionally been weighed against coins. At election time this becomes a means of adding to the party coffers without the bother of disclosing the source. 

There is equal duplicity around the perceived caste consciousness of parties such as the BSP and the Samajwadi Party (SP). As a journalist posted in Lucknow in the late 1980s, I was witness to the transfer of power in Uttar Pradesh from the Congress’s Narain Dutt Tiwari to the Janata Dal’s Mulayam Singh Yadav (now with the SP.) The latter took charge to immediate accusations of Yadavisation of government and bureaucracy. Nobody cared to find out which castes ruled in the previous regime. In 1984, 93.8 per cent of the principal secretaries and secretaries to the U.P. government were from the upper castes and 78.6 per cent of the District Magistrates were from the upper castes, including 41 per cent of Brahmins (Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution). 

Political empowerment of the backward castes is a dramatic reality today. But social attitudes have stayed frozen. Why else would 50 per cent of all Central schemes and projects be named after the Nehru-Gandhis? Why would there be a chorus of protests over Mayawati statues but not over the renaming of the Borivali National Park after that champion of democracy, Sanjay Gandhi? In her outstanding book, The Grammar of Caste, Ashwini Deshpande cites evidence from four pioneering studies on the Indian urban labour market to conclude that employers discriminate between equally meritorious candidates on the basis of their caste identities. “Employers talk the language of merit and confess a deep faith solely in the merit of the applicant. However, they also believe that merit is distributed along lines of caste, religious and gender divisions. Nowhere do employers see this as discrimination. It is as if they were describing a neutral and unbiased state of the world.” Back to 1964 and Ram Manohar Lohia?

Why the intellectual is on the run

Thanks to manufactured debates on TV, there is no time for irony and nuance nor are we able to distinguish between a charlatan and an academician

Harish Khare in The Hindu

Now that the Supreme Court has provided some sort of relief against harassment to Professor Ashis Nandy, it has become incumbent upon all liberal voices to ponder over the processes and arguments that combined to ensure that an eminent scholar had to slink out of Jaipur in the middle of the night because of his so-called controversial observations at a platform that was supposed to be a celebration of ideas and imagination. Sensitive souls are quite understandably dismayed; others have deplored the creeping culture of intolerance. Some see the great sociologist as a victim of overzealousness of identity politics. All this breast-beating is fine, but we do need to ask ourselves as to what illiberal impulses and habits are curdling up the intellectual’s space. We need to try to recognise how and why Professor Nandy’s nuanced observations on a complex social problem became “controversial.” Who deemed those remarks to be “controversial?” And, these questions cannot be answered without pointing out to the larger context of the current protocol of public discourse — as also to note, regretfully, that the likes of Mr. Nandy have themselves unwittingly countenanced these illiberal manners.

After all, this is not the first time — nor will it be the last — that a sentence in a complex argument has been picked up to be thrashed out into a controversy . This is now the only way we seem able to talk and argue among ourselves. And we take pride in this descent into unreasonableness. We are now fully addicted to the new culture of controversy-manufacturing. We have gloriously succumbed to the intoxicating notion that a controversy a day keeps the republic safe and sound from the corrupt and corrosive “system.”

This happens every night. Ten or 15 words are taken out of a 3,000-word essay or speech and made the basis of accusation and denunciation, as part of our right to debate. We insistently perform these rituals of denunciation and accusation as affirmation of our democratic entitlement. Every night someone must be made to burn in the Fourth Circle of Hell. In our nightly dance of aggression and snapping, touted as the finest expression of civil society and its autonomy from the ugly state and its uglier political minions, we turn our back on irony, nuance and complexity and, instead, opt for angry bashing, respecting neither office nor reputation. We are no longer able to distinguish between a charlatan and an academician. A Mr. Nandy must be subjected to the same treatment as a Suresh Kalmadi.

 

Nandy, a collateral victim

Mr. Nandy’s discomfort is only a minor manifestation of this cultivated bullishness. And let it be said that there is nothing personal against him. He is simply a collateral victim of the new narrative genre in which a “controversy” is to be contrived as a ‘grab-the-eyeballs’ game, a game which is played out cynically and conceitedly for its own sake, with no particular regard for any democratic fairness or intellectual integrity. By now the narrative technique is very well-defined: a “story” will not go off the air till an “apology” has been extracted on camera and an “impact” is then flaunted. In this controversy-stoking culture of bogus democratic ‘debate’, Mr. Nandy just happened to be around on a slow day. Indeed it would be instructive to find out how certain individuals were instigated to invoke the law against Mr. Nandy. Perhaps the Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association needs to be applauded for having the courage to call the Nandy controversy an instance of “media violence.”

At any given time, it is the task of the intellectual to steer a society and a nation away from moral uncertainties and cultural anxieties; it is his mandate to discipline the mob, moderate its passions, disabuse it of its prejudices, instil reasonableness, argue for sobriety and inject enlightenment. It is not the intellectual’s job to give in to the mob’s clamouring.

 

‘Middle class fundamentalism’

But, unfortunately, that is what our self-designated intellectuals have reduced themselves to doing: getting overawed by television studio warriors, allowing them to set the tone and tenor of dialogue. There is now a new kind of fundamentalism — that of what is touted as the “media-enabled middle class.” For this class of society, the heroes and villains are well defined. Hence, the idea of debate is not to promote understanding nor to seek middle ground nor to reason together, but to bludgeon the reluctant into conformity. Mary McCarthy had once observed that “to be continually on the attack is to run the risk of monotony … and a greater risk is that of mechanical intolerance.”

When intellectuals and academicians like Ashis Nandy allow themselves to be recruited to these “debates,” even if they are seen to be articulating a dissenting point of view, their very presence and participation lends credibility to the kangaroo courts of intimidation.

 

Manipulated voices

The so-called debate is controlled and manipulated and manufactured by voices and groups without any democratic credentials or public accountability. It would require an extraordinary leap of faith to forget that powerful corporate interests have captured the sites of freedom of speech and expressions; it would be a great public betrayal to trust them as the sole custodians of abiding democratic values and sentiments or promoters of public interest.

Intellectuals have connived with a culture of intolerance, accusation and controversy-stoking that creates hysteria as an extreme form of conformity. Every night with metronomic regularity our discourse-overlords slap people with parking tickets.

And a controversy itself becomes a rationale for political response. Let us recall how L.K. Advani was hounded out of the BJP leadership portals because a “controversy” was created over his Jinnah speech. And, that “controversy” was manufactured even before the text of the former deputy prime minister’s Karachi remarks were available in India. Nor should we forget how Jaswant Singh’s book on Jinnah was banned by the Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, even before it was published because our newly designated national saviour had anticipated that a “controversy” would get created.

The Nandy ordeal should also caution against the current itch to demand “stringent” laws as a magical solution to all our complex social and political ills like corruption. It would be sobering to keep in mind that Mr. Nandy has been sought to be prosecuted under a stringent law based on the formula of instant complaint, instant cognisance and instant arrest. Mr. Nandy is lucky enough to have respected scholars give him certificates of good conduct, testify that he is not a “casteist” and that he is not against “reservation.” Lesser intellectuals may not be that fortunate. We must learn to be a little wary of our own good intentions and guard against righteous preachers.

If we insist on manufacturing controversy every day, all in the name of giving vent to “anger”, it is only a matter of time before some sections of society will be upset, angry and resort to violence. If we find nothing wrong in manufacturing hysteria against Pakistan, or making wild allegations against this or that public functionary, how can we object to some group accusing Mr. Nandy of bias? When we do not invoke our power of disapproval over Sushma Swaraj’s chillingly brutal demand for “10 heads” of Pakistani soldiers, who will listen to us when we seek to disapprove Mayawati’s demand for action against Mr. Nandy?

Just as the Delhi gang rape forced us to question and contest the traditional complacency and conventions, the Ashis Nandy business will be worth the trouble if it helps us wise up to the danger of culture of bullishness and accusation. Unless we set out to reclaim the idea of civilised dialogue, the intellectuals will continue to find themselves on the run.

 

(Harish Khare is a veteran commentator and political analyst, and former media adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh)

No room for nuance in this fragile republic

By Harsh Sethi

In the rush to condemn Ashis Nandy and demand that he be jailed, no one bothered to understand what exactly he had said about corruption and caste

It is symptomatic of the times we live in, of the climate of political discourse that we have contributed to, that even relatively innocuous statements can get so easily misrepresented and twisted to convey a meaning that is diametrically opposite to what was said and meant. The Jaipur Literature Festival 2013, which until the morning of Republic Day had managed to successfully steer clear of any controversy, was suddenly rocked by angry protests based upon (and this must be stressed) a total misreading of remarks made by Ashis Nandy.

The panel discussion on “The Republic of Ideas,” featuring IBN7 Managing Editor Ashutosh, author and Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal, historian Patrick French, philosopher Richard Sorabji, and social psychologist Ashis Nandy, was moderated by the author and publisher, Urvashi Butalia. Following a fascinating exchange on the “promise” of the Indian Republic and Constitution, the discussion turned to the theme of corruption and the significance of the anti-corruption protests led by Anna Hazare.

Making a passionate plea to deconstruct the sociology of corruption, Tarun Tejpal argued that we need to understand the “corruption” of the poor and the marginalised as a necessary strategy to break through the stifling nature of our rules, regulations and laws. Characterising Indian society as deeply stratified, hierarchical and oppressive, our laws and rules, he claimed, are mostly designed to “keep out” the erstwhile excluded strata from having their say. The corruption of “people like us” — an elite which has both the resources and power to subvert the system — often goes unnoticed, and if discovered, rarely results in prosecution. The misdemeanours of the “others,” in contrast, not only get caught, but also generate outrage, in part because they do not have the necessary skills to successfully cover up their corruption.

Grounded in earlier remarks

Subsequent remarks made by Ashis Nandy need to be read and understood in the context of what Tarun Tejpal said speaking before Nandy did. Agreeing with Tejpal, Nandy went on to argue that such “corruption” of the excluded — the Dalits, tribals, Other Backward Classes (OBC) and minorities — is inevitable if they are to break out from the bonds of an oppressive web of rules and regulations. He went on to say, referring to both himself and Richard Sorabji, that if they “arranged” to get fellowships for their children at Harvard or Oxford, as part of a trade in mutual and selective favours, none will comment about that, as if it is axiomatic that the fellowship was awarded on the basis of merit. Politicians or leaders of the oppressed strata, being new to the game and relatively untutored in the skills of manipulation, are unlikely to seek academic fellowships as a form of graft, and are more likely to covet and corner licences to operate petrol pumps. These pumps are publicly noticeable and can provoke outrage. Their licensees are linked to their “corrupt” benefactors, who are then condemned by the chattering classes in metropolitan cities.

So far so good. Nandy then went on to more provocatively stretch the argument, asserting that it is precisely this kind of “corruption” that has “saved” the Republic and democracy by enabling a degree of social and economic mobility and pluralising the composition of India’s elite. Furthermore, he argued, that it is most likely the list of “corrupt” could be inordinately dominated by Dalits, tribals, minorities and OBCs. Despite his prefacing his last remarks, saying that what he was about to say may shock many people, and that he nevertheless wished to stress the point about how we understand corruption, many in the audience (and one on the panel) completely missed Nandy’s point, and immediately accused him of casteist bias, calling upon him to withdraw his remarks and tender an apology. Some in the audience demanded that he should be charged under the Protection of Civil Rights Act for hurting the sentiments of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.

Competitive outrage follows

Nandy’s protestations that what he said and meant was completely the opposite of what he was being charged with were not persuasive once the atmosphere was charged with heightened emotions. Competitive outrage, taking on the familiar form favoured by some overly strident and aggressive TV anchors, evidently gives no quarter to nuanced arguments, any irony, or even black humour. When Nandy characterised the former Chief Minister of Jharkhand, Madhu Koda (now in jail), as India’s first dollar billionaire, he was hardly extolling the virtues of corruption or turning a blind eye to the “perfidies” of upper caste politicians. At best, in an underhand and sly way, he was expressing admiration for the abilities of a tribal leader in matching up to what has hitherto been an exclusive preserve of India’s upper caste elite.

Accusations of Nandy of being anti-Dalit/tribal/minority groups, the calls for registering a FIR against him, and demanding that he should be arrested would, in our better days, have been dismissed as an irrelevant, if not comic, aside. Such innocent days have faded, unfortunately, into a distant past. So quick are we now to take offence and demand immediate retributory action against alleged offenders that we almost never take a moment to pause, to ascertain the facts, understand what was said and meant, in what context, and to what ends. All we want is action, and now!

Signals shrinking discourse

Subsequent demands by the Bahujan Samaj Party leader, Mayawati, by the chairman of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes P.L. Punia, and others, to arrest Ashis Nandy, even though none of them was present during the discussion, illustrates the danger of a growing kind of prickliness and intolerance. Worse still, such occasions are used by politicians to signal their commitment to their constituencies and shore up their images. In the process we are left with a diminished public discourse. Even liberals, usually quick to defend “freedom of speech,” advocate caution and temperance in the expression of reactions to intemperate allegations of the kind made against Nandy. Is this stance, one wonders, a compensatory guilt, marking what is politically correct, an obverse privileging of the erstwhile dispossessed?

Ashis Nandy’s choice of words, phrases, and examples can be questioned. He is not an organised and scintillating public speaker. One can also differ with his argument and analysis, for instance, his failure to distinguish between “corruption of the poor” and the “corruption of their leaders,” whose subversion of rules often results in them robbing the very poor who are also their constituents. Nevertheless, Nandy’s argument that the “rules of the game” have been set by an elite class to which he belongs, which remains a privileged lot, and therefore, that the deliberate subversion of those rules is an inevitable strategy for those striving for survival and upward mobility, certainly has merit. Clamping down on nuanced utterances and elliptical statements of the kind Nandy made will only make us a poorer democracy and Republic.