R. E. S. P. E. C. T. (Just a Little Bit)

This post may come off as a rant. I do not intend it as such, though.

India’s public culture is doomed (A little dramatic, I admit). It is impossible for you and me to walk or talk without treading on someone or the other’s toes. Right from remarkably silly denunciations of Shashi Tharoor’s interlocutor comment (which, I somehow tried in vain to justify as just an embarrassingly bad grasp of the English language (how snooty am I?)) to ‘clearing’ the film involving Sonia Gandhi with the Congress Party (who can say anything against our Soniaji?) to removing (just yesterday) ‘objectionable’ parts of Ram Gopal Verma’s new film because it, apparently, had some not nice things to say about NTR (aiyo!), India’s political class (as opposed to the government. I hope you are one for fine distinctions) has become a quasi-fascist suppressor of free speech. Oh, and let us not forget about the Shiv Sena and the removal of Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey from Mumbai University ‘s BA in English syllabus (Jai Maratha! Jai Thackeray! Jai Dabbawalla!).

Now you may think that this is not new. The Indian State has actively suppressed or has at least been complicit in the suppression of free speech for a long, long time. Most spectacularly in recent memory is (I am told) what has been happening with newspapers in Kashmir. In fact, I don’t believe much has changed from the British Raj. Whatever (if any) gains had been made have begun to dissipate. But I will focus on something specific. It is the rather capacious character of what is held to be sacred in our public culture.

Some of you might think it important to see what the Supreme Court has had to say about free speech. I disagree. In fact, heading to the judiciary for every problem speaks volumes about the ineptitude of our political class, our collapsing political process and debate, and our terrible habit of harking back to our (con)founding fathers (beautifully put by Upendra Baxi) and the Constitution they made and ‘we’ apparently adopted. (I am in deep trouble already, aren’t I?) No one, not you, not me and most definitely, not our Hon’ble MPs/MLAs etc. have the fortitude and courage to make the right decision themselves. This is for another post though.

A rant? Surely! On to the meat of the issue then! (My most sincere apologies to vegetarians/vegans and other persons of the ethical sort)

What does it mean for something to be sacred? Does it (at least, in one sense) mean that you or I have not right to publicly criticize or denounce something that is considered so? From the examples above, it surely does seem so. Now someone, who is of the same ‘liberal’ ilk as me, could go in two directions. You could either say, that people should consider only certain things sacred, and the rest are subject to criticism. (FYI, the Supreme Court has made an analogous monumental mistake in relation to the right to freedom of religion in the Constitution). Or you could say, the fact that you deem something sacred doesn’t mean much to me. I prefer the latter. I am just simply not someone who likes going around telling people what their sacred beliefs should or should not be.

So, we must then turn to the issue of respect. Irrespective of what you believe and the strength thereof, do I have a duty to show you respect? And what does respect consist in? You may think Hitler was a cool guy, the earth is flat, that Martians are among us, that Hinduism is the only way of life or that Sonia Gandhi is the new ‘mother’. Am I bound to respect your views? One way to go about solving this problem is to discern what you ‘rightly’ or reasonably believe and respect only that. I think that is a mistake, although at the limit I do believe there are cases, which are quite uncontroversially false (Thinking the earth is flat, I am afraid, qualifies you as a certified loony). For the most part, it is the same mistake I spoke of above.

I am no political philosopher. Respect is a difficult term. It might mean benign tolerance to admiration all the way up to extreme reverence and deference. It is surely context dependent. But there is another problem. The famous Cambridge Philosopher, Simon Blackburn, puts the matter rather nicely when he talks of “respect creep” – the gradual movement of respect for something from the former (benign tolerance) to the latter (reverence and deference) and finally to being able to control your mind and life. This is surely the sort of movement that we are witnessing, and I believe this is an enormous blight on India’s (obvious) claims to be a modern (totalitarian), forward-looking (aggressive) democracy (no RTI for you, bro!).

For our purposes here, we can say that to respect something sacred is to be barred from criticizing it, either in public or in private. What is it about your belief that I should not criticize it? Is it just the fact that you hold it dear? Is it the fact that it is constitutive of your life plans and activities? Or is it just because if I criticize it, I am criticizing you as a human being, of worth as end in itself in a characteristically Kantian mode? Surely, none of these qualifies to stop me from ‘criticizing’ you. It might be a problem if my criticism expresses or causes discrimination, which is a distinct normative harm. But criticism per se does not qualify as evidence of discrimination. But is there anything else that justifies shutting me up? I think not.

Part of the problem surely lies in the fact that India has begun to take the wrong things seriously. The fact that we are unable to poke jokes or laugh about important things is symptomatic of ruined arena of public debate. We do, although, find some relief like in the Cyrus Broacha show on NDTV. But that is still an urban, middle-class and elite, viewership. A class in which people couldn’t give two hoots about politics, and who possibly never have. What about those who do? What about those who take offence when someone says not so nice things about NTR? What about those who take the claims of Jai Maratha so seriously that they are willing to resort to violence? What about those who took to violence after the publication Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses? What do we say to them?

The constitution has molly-coddled us far too much. Our own experiments in multi-culturalism (I wish this wasn’t appropriated by the west) are failing. Parochial identities have become the centre-piece of politics. They have become the markers of the new India. People are ready to take offence and act upon it with impunity more easily than they should and have. Worse still, there are people who respect it.