Scholarship in times of populism (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2: Social Justice
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: Civil liberties

Context

• The task of a scholar is not only to coin clever sound-bytes.
• Intellectuals have to bring a historical and comparative perspective to bear upon the present.
• Their job is to tell us what the historical processes that brought us from ‘there’ to ‘here’ are, identify political problems, and, if possible, help resolve them.
• But reflection, analysis, critique and conceptualisation need stable political contexts. We must know of what we speak when we speak of categories that allow us to tidy, challenge and remake our worlds. We must be sure of the empirical referents we address.

Threat to civil liberties

• Till the first decade of the 21st century, the political context in which scholars theorised was more or less settled.
• Today the political battleground that constitutes our worlds, which is the context for our words, is consolidated by the emergence of right-wing populists across countries.
• The empirical referrals of analysis, critique, conceptualisation and theory have rapidly changed.

Appropriation of nationalism

• Nationalism formed the anchor of our freedom struggle.
• It is also the excuse for some very unpalatable efforts to repress us.
• The concept has been deployed by governments to target minorities and immigrants, to dismiss dissent as sedition, to justify oppression, and to reduce our status from citizens to subjects.
• Nationalism has legitimised rhetoric and decisions that would have aroused widespread political protest a few years ago.
• The vulgarities of a nationalism that prevents debate, let alone dissent, bewilders; it saps energies.

The distinction between the two is overstated

• In 1923, V.D. Savarkar, the prime ideologue of the Hindu right, cast the political category of the Indian nation in the mould of the majority religion.
• The nation is Hindu because the community has a common history, common heroes, a common literature, a common art, a common law, and a common jurisprudence, common fairs and festivals, rites and rituals, ceremonies and sacraments.
• Others are outsiders. This was not the kind of nation that India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru conceptualised and dreamt of, democratic, secular and inclusive. In 1933 Nehru wrote in The Bombay Chronicle: “Whither India?
• Surely to the great human goals of social and economic equality, to the ending of all exploitation of nation by nation, and class by class, to national freedom within the framework of an international cooperative socialist world federation.”

Different notions

• Within a decade we see two incompatible notions of the nation taking shape and shaping each other. Beneath and around civic nationalism marked by citizenship rights, lurked ethnic nationalism that divided and excluded.
• Today it is precisely ethnic nationalism that has won the battle. Civic nationalism gasps for breath.
• History has warned us. The concepts and the theories we explore and expand upon might prove provisional.
• The days when political philosophers dreamt that they had resolved political dilemmas have gone.
• Politics, we have learnt is chancy, unpredictable, and contingent. How can our theories be neat, confident, and predictive?

Way forward

• We no longer know what we speak of when we speak of democracy, or accountability, or the power of citizens to hold their elected government responsible.
• The terms of the social contract are up for grabs. Life has become much more unpredictable, much more uncertain and much more frightening.
• Do we have the luxury to conduct intense intellectual debates and charged polemics? We might have to put aside, for the moment at least, some very sophisticated debates that marked academia hardly six years ago.
• We have to get back to the basics. We have once again to reiterate and defend the basic principles of constitutional democracy.

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Prelims Questions:

Q.1) With reference to Domestic Systemically Important Banks (D-SIBs), consider the following statements:
1. These are banks whose failure can disrupt the banking system and the overall economy.
2. Banks whose assets exceed 2% of GDP are considered part of this group.
3. Only public sector banks can be declared as D-SIBs.

Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
(a) 1 only
(b) 1 and 3 only
(c) 2 and 3 only
(d) 1 and 2 only

Answer: D
Mains Questions:
Q.1) In these changed times, there has to be a reiteration and defence of the basic principles of constitutional democracy. Critically analyse the statement.