The Intolerance of Tolerance.
The Times of India is
to be complimented for publishing two contrasting articles today in its Monday
issue of Nov2, 2015 –one abusive of the liberals and intellectuals , the other a
balanced and objective understanding of their protest which has in turn provoked
a loud and vociferous reaction , full of anger and hate from the ruling party.
This juxtaposition of an article that spews venom on intellectuals and liberals
with an article that advocates tolerance in place of intemperance without the
editorial comment is the Times’ news neutrality and its silent endorsement of
the need to have a balance in the art of governance .
Chetan Bhagat in his anti-liberal attack has castigated all
the protesters who comprise intellectuals, writers, artists, scientists, academics
and also a couple of industrialists –
all those whom he labels as the liberals(with the exception of ‘yours truly, Chetan
Bhagat,’ -the IIT graduate, the fiction writer in English, the judge of dance reality shows, the screenplay writer of Kick and
Kai Po Che) -as pseudo
secular, pseudo –intellectual, pseudo-liberals
who have a single point agenda to remain illiberal and look down on the unfortunate
classes that do not have university education, cannot speak English with
English( or European accent), who do not possess global cultural understanding.-
in short ,lacking in knowledge, in English skills and in catholicity and
breadth of understanding. This article(
and his earlier twitter on Historians:
“What do historians do? I am genuinely curious. This happened. Then this
happened. Then this. Ok work done for the day.”) seem to be the fourth mistake
of Chetan Bhagat, the new convert to anti-liberalism.(I hope he writes a sequel
to his Three Mistakes)
And the germ of the fourth
mistake of his life is in an article he wrote three years back ‘India on the
Streets’. As a liberal literary writer, the
Uncle Cynic in him joined hands with Anna Hazara and attacked the previous
government of Man Mohan Singh and expressed his view that “India is terrible, everyone is corrupt, things don’t
work, there is no justice, power talks, equality don’t exist”. He then tarred
every elected leader with the same brush to affirm that all leaders “steal, are
incompetent and hate accountability”. Hence his clarion call to people to come
to the streets to save the country’s future. He chided the government of that
day for being arrogant (not realizing that it is weak kneed and takes knee-jerk
decisions ) and ended with a quotation from the ubiquitous Gita, “Nothing is
permanent”.
This was
when Chetan was Anna Bhagat. True to the Gita, the Anna Bhagat has now changed
into Modi Bhagat. He has had a leap of
fauth. He is angry with people(whom he sneeringly calls liberals) protesting-not
by taking to the streets, but by returning their awards and expressing their
apprehension of the rise of a new form of cultural dictatorship. He applauds
the government for its arrogant disdain of all intellectuals whose liberalism
is suspect because they are not liberal enough to accommodate the rising
intolerance and hatred that is being spread by those who have a genuine, visceral
dislike and animosity of religions that are not in the Hindutva fold.
Chetan
Bhagat who had been catapulted to the literary
sphere for his liberal views expressed in his English fiction, now sneers at
English speaking liberals and fails to read the anxiety of the creative writers
and artists who strive to show that the great threat to democracy is the
enslavement of the majority to political propaganda. This is really the
‘tyranny of the majority’ which shuts out independence of mind. “The most
successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the
one that removes the awareness of other possibilities that makes it seem
inconceivable that other ways are viable”.
The protesters whom I would call the Velvet Revolutionaries (after the
Czech writers group under Vaclav Havel which successfully downed the Russian
hegemony over Eastern Europe) are making peaceful efforts to free our minds
from such tyranny by making us cultivate reasoned thoughts in a spirit of humanity.
To discourage the tendency to reject important alternatives, to remove the
minds of timid and unreasoned thoughts, to encourage openness and freedom of
the mind is the only solution to free
democracy from the stranglehold of a
small group of vested interests who claim to speak for the majority. We need
intellectual aristocracy (that sounds anachronistic today) to enable democracy
to survive by preserving the freedom of the mind. This can be achieved through
protecting reason which is the essence of openness. Instead of joining the chorus
of his adopted fraternity of writers who make a plea to the government to be open to debate and discussions. Chetan Bhagat dissects the liberal of our
times and criticizes them that they do not offer solutions, but they look upon
themselves as the privileged class markers , sipping tea out of china cups and
visiting Disneyland , but in reality they are lost souls. Thank God, though
boastfully claiming his place among the literati, Chetan shows himself to be the last liberal in the
midst of the lost liberals.
In
contrast, Santosh Deasi cautions the ‘hate ‘reaction to the intellectuals who
seek the intervention of the ruling government to rein in hatemongers. He does
not question the rightness or wrongness of the act of award ‘wapsi’ but he says
the return of the awards with no specific personal demands in turn except for
restoration of freedom of expression, for the enhancement of the Constitutional
right to live as one wants and for ending the eerie fear of what will happen in the
future if intolerance is allowed a free run all through the country, citing in
particular the Tamilnadu government’s arrest of Kovan who gave poetic
expression to anti-liquor campaign. The rising anger against protesters and the
personal attacks on them by different
voices from within the government (with a silent and unobtrusive encouragement
from all those who matter today ) shows that the government does not and will
not tolerate criticism and is not concerned to redress the cause of such
criticism.
Chetan
Bhagat’s attack on liberals is founded on anti liberalism. Santosh Desai’s
defence of intellectuals is founded on liberalism that advocates freedom of the
individual and protection of civil liberties and individual rights and peaceful
reforms to ensure continued social and individual progress.
I received
this wonderful maxim from one of my close well wishers : " ‘Variety leads to evolution and homogeneity leads to
extinction.’ India's greatest asset is the variety it has in virtually
every area. We have to learn to respect this variety through action, if we do
not want the country to become a religious autocracy.”
I am sure
the wise men in the ruling party will be liberal enough to permit liberal intellectuals
their say in matters that are vital to the survival and sustenance of
democracy.
