Attack on Nandy is dark age politics
The call for the arrest of sociologist Ashis Nandy by leaders of some caste-based parties — for remarks said to have been made by him at the Jaipur Literature Festival — is thoroughly wrong-headed and deserves to be deplored. Our politicians have grown used to throwing political tantrums at the drop of a hat in the mistaken belief that their voters would give them marks for such stupidity.
Essentially, competitive politics that exploit religious and caste identities — and presumed slights flowing from there to individuals (present or long dead), institutions or community groups — are the root cause of trouble most of the time. Thus somebody bays for a filmmaker’s blood in South India, and up North demands are made to keep out of the Jaipur jamboree writers who had read excerpts from Rushdie’s works a year ago. Is the country to be made to head to the dark ages on account of a few fanatics whose express aim is to advance a dangerous breed of politics?
The political attack on Dr Nandy might have passed unnoticed were politicians of the standing of Mayawati and Ram Vilas Paswan not foregrounding it. It is plain that dividing people along regional and communal identities for the sake of votes has left us a shrieking democracy, a less than confident one in many respects, and one so paranoid as to make the rest of the world wonder if this is a set of people that can at all hold its own on the world stage.
Anyone familiar with Dr Nandy’s approach to Indian society and its dynamics knows instinctively that the last thing the scholar in question would do is to run down the dalit and OBC communities; indeed he might be deemed to be a critic of those who have had it good but have resisted the rise of the subaltern sections. This, in fact, was precisely the argument Dr Nandy sought to make in Jaipur — as is evident from news reports and television clips — while seconding another writer’s opinion that in India corruption has emerged as a “democratising factor” which prevents traditional wielders of power from establishing a monopoly control over society, or even a “despotic” one.
Whatever one may think of such a hypothesis, there is very obviously nothing here that traduces the traditionally poorer communities of the country. To demand an intellectual’s arrest, no less, on the ground of bringing disrepute to the identity of the dalits on the basis of blatantly false evidence, is to disparage the seriousness of the law which seeks to uphold the dignity of dalits.
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