No, I Will Not Debate You

A 5-point case against the elaborate pretence of Indian Parliamentary Debating

“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury
when substituted for insight and understanding.”
— Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

I write this in the capacity of someone who used to not only be an active Parliamentary Debater for 4 years (till circa 2015) but more importantly, one who was proud of being associated with the Indian debating circuit. I write this today because I no longer am. Today I am ashamed and angry, and I have been for a long time. This post has remained fragments in my head and rants to my friends for years, but it’s time to rock the boat. Rage has been a historically powerful feminist tool, and I am angry. So this 5-point post is to talk about the many reasons why I chose to dissociate from the exclusionary, elitist, savarna, cis-male dominated, heterosexual, performatively woke sanitized simulation of an intellectual jerk-off that the Indian debating space is and always has been. Shame.

(Every part of this post will not apply to every one of you — obviously. So don’t miss the point entirely and be that annoying guy who says “Not all debaters” in response to this. The point is that there are enough debaters who are reflected in this post for the need of this post to arise in the first place. So if you don’t personally see yourself or your society reflected here, take a golden star and go home.)

1. You Can’t Sit With Us

I’m starting from the beginning. By this I mean, the very beginning of forming an institutional debating society — debsoc selections.

Though every debsoc has its own processes in place for selections, somehow all these processes always result in a soc that is filled with people from the same broad strata of social locations — savarna, cis, het, male. Where are dalit debaters? Where are bahujan debaters? Where are gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual debaters? Where are debaters who can’t string a sentence in fluent English? Where are debaters with disabilities?

I’ll tell you where they are. They don’t make it past debsoc selections because selections are tailored to self-select a particular kind of a “good debater”. One who is confident, can speak fluent English (“manner”), and is well-read about “current issues” (“matter”) which is really just euphemism for “global north obsessed, upper caste, heterosexual issues” (more on this later).

I’ve personally heard presidents of “leading” debating societies make fun of students who make non-liberal arguments in their speeches during debsoc auditions. Needless to say, these students don’t make it through to the soc. We don’t care about actually speaking to these fellow students and engaging with the social contexts of where their argumentation is coming from and why. That is not intellectual labor worthy of the mighty likes of us. We want 18 year olds who are already liberal and progressive at the time of auditions — which translates in practice to well educated students who have had the privilege to access progressive reading material and liberal social spaces. We don’t want to engage with The Messy Real Worldᵀᴹ beyond this 0.0005% of the privileged population. We want to live in our Liberal Echo Chambersᵀᴹ and perpetuate them.

Even beyond political leanings, take something like the ability to simply speak fluent English (that matters to score speaker points) which necessitates that you could afford a private education growing up. In that context, this idea of auditions for debsoc selections has always been elitist in practice, if not in principle. The people most likely to lose out are those who are the least likely to have been trained in the art of public speaking. Because while we were intellectually masturbating over theoretical debates, “they” were living those debates through “their” lived experiences (more on this later). But we don’t want lived experiences, we want 7 minutes and 20 seconds of rude, overconfident, loud men arguing social context to a bunch of adjudicators far removed from those contexts. “They” are people whose voices have historically been absent from the Indian debating space, and whose absence in this whole facade of parliamentary debating was never questioned because “they” were never welcome in the first place.

And it’s a malicious feedback loop — when you create a space that has never seen people from underrepresented communities, that has been hostile to people from underrepresented communities (more on this later in the post), “they” are not going to come audition for soc selections. So, we will debate “identity politics” but God forbid we look around and realize that we don’t even have people in our socs who identify differently than we do. And this is a loud deafening absence, it is echoing through motions set at every debating tournament (again, more on this later in the post), but we haven’t been listening because we think we already know everything, not just cursorily, but well enough to sit at a pedestal and adjudicate it (we’ve read that one article by Ambedkar during matter prep after all).

For those of you reading this and thinking, “we’re just a debating club, debating is just an innocuous extracurricular activity like sports, so we don’t have to be inclusive,” first of all, you do. You have to be goddamn inclusive if you’re the singular officially recognized atleast-partially-funded society that conducts debate within an institution. You have the responsibility to be inclusive. Do better. (The next section tackles this conveniently depoliticised notion of “just a debating club.”)

2. Neoliberal Depoliticization

We are not just debating clubs. Or at least, we don’t ourselves think we are just debating clubs. In the 4 years I debated, I have rarely seen actively invested debaters who didn’t assign some higher social or political purpose to this extracurricular activity. Debaters who break at tournaments and take home the trophy aren’t doing it to make their CVs look good after they graduate or to get a chance to take trips abroad with their friends.

Apart from the fact that “it’s just a debating activity ” sounds a lot like “it’s just locker room talk”, us debaters actually think we are preparing students for The Real Worldᵀᴹ by debating Real World Issuesᵀᴹ. We actually wear that badge on our sleeves with pride — pride that too often turns into a know-it-all arrogance (FYI, what us debaters think of MUNners is exactly what people outside our little debate clubs think of us). This is especially true in science and engineering institutions where debate “matter” is so far removed from the content of what we are mandated to study for our degrees. So instead of joining a political party or at the very least a university student union, we carry out this elaborate pretence of debating Real World Issuesᵀᴹ, being “woke,” and “making a difference” in times already rife with mass neoliberal depoliticization.

For example, student unions are absurdly banned under Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) which is a collegiate Public State University in Karnataka. A good number of debating societies whose members more often than not end up taking home the trophy (at least in the “South circuit”) are affiliated with VTU. In fact, most engineering universities ban student unions (reflecting this era of neoliberal depoliticization where we are asked to stay out of politics). But no debater wants to take up that fight with the State or their universities to question this. Because instead of joining a political party or a student union and asking actual questions of those in actual power, we’d much rather engage in an elaborate pretence within a caste-insulated sanitized space that in zero ways reflects the messy grime of The Real Worldᵀᴹ and its politics. For us, politics is not about actually challenging the status-quo, it’s about merely talking passionately for 7-odd minutes about challenging the status-quo.

I repeatedly call this an elaborate pretence because a quick look at what fellow debaters who graduated with me 4 years ago are doing today confirms how much of this ‘political’ training they are actually putting to use in their professional careers as well as personal everyday lives. I often get messages from debaters saying, “I am proud of the work you’re doing.” I don’t want you to be proud of me, I want you to support me, to be on the ground next to me, fighting the real battles. What use do I have for your validation and pride?

The Right to Information (Amendment) Bill, 2019. Muslim Women (Protection of Rights of Marriage) Bill, 2019. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2019. The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill, 2019. These are just some of the many fucked up amendment Bills currently being “debated” and passed in the real Indian Parliament as I write this post. There are national public consultations being held to discuss these, there are protests being organized every other week, there are planning meetings happening all around the country, there are focused working groups being formed… I have seen zero debaters in any of these spaces. What exactly are you doing about these real Parliamentary debates outside of your pretence tournament debates? Where are you?

Last year, when some of us were engaged in an intense protest that went on for months at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in response to a nation-wide crackdown by Modi upon spaces of dissent and rights of underprivileged students, when we were challenging the State, sleeping on the streets at night, sloganeering and marching by the day in the scorching sun for months at end, we had sent out calls to student bodies at universities across the country for at the very least letters of solidarity. Not more than 2 out of the possibly hundred universities with active debating societies sent us pledges of support. Where were you?

This year, while some of us have been facing police brutality, State violence, and getting arrested day after day by the police for protesting on the streets against a predatory sexual harasser heading the country’s goddamn judiciary, where were you? Where was your woke-ness when I was being roughed up by cops? Where were your passionate speeches when I was looking to be bailed out? Is The Real Worldᵀᴹ you claim to intellectually understand suddenly too unsettling outside air-conditioned auditoriums? All you debating society presidents and other meaningless office-bearers of meaningless societies — is leadership too daunting outside of an environment where you are invited to speak at a podium and entitled to 7 minutes of the crowd’s attention? Or has your make-believe politics not caught up with Real World Issuesᵀᴹ yet?

Where were you? You were sitting inside universities which throw out adivasis from their campus, while conducting tournaments inside those same four walls with motions that have the fucking audacity to say, “THW de-fund tribals who don’t follow a democratic setup.” State funding for tribals is not a fucking favour for you to “debate” (more on this in segment 4), it’s a means of reparations for historical wrongdoing against entire communities. It takes a lot of privilege to stand at a podium and talk offensively about contexts far removed from your lives with such absurdly problematic tropes. The Real Worldᵀᴹ, on the other hand, is not so caste-insulated. Sit down.

We don’t need more meaningless sanitised simulations of Parliament sessions. We need students to actively engage in the messy grime of real politics, and we need it right now. And if you are not up for that challenge, then for heaven’s sake, stop pretending like this “sport” is anything more than that — a depoliticized activity to embellish and put on your CVs for future high-flying jobs and to travel to other such make-believe spaces with your friends.

3. Selective Matter, Selective Politics

Debating about feminism at tournaments is limited to a singular feminism round that receives groans from across the room (and God forbid you try to make a feminist argument in a non-feminism-focused round — our token feminism is only valid for 7 minutes per tournament please), which is almost always about very white cis feminism or very Brahmanical feminism. There is no attempt made to set motions about Dalit feminism (except for the one motion anyone has ever bothered to set about it — THBT Dalit feminists should form a separate feminist movement; and variants around the same defecting line because the only time we can speak about Dalit feminism is when it is in relation to our savarna feminism, and even then only in terms of defecting from it), or queer feminism (except for some fucked up attempts like THS Bombay Pride over Delhi Pride whatever the fuck that means) or bahujan feminism or disability-rights-feminism, both of which are just wildly absent. There is almost never a round primarily centred around caste politics or disability rights (which has a lot to do with the privileged social locations of debaters who form societies and adj cores, as I detailed in the first segment of this post).

I know for a fact that the speakers from engineering institutions who bag best speaker awards, the debaters who win the cash prizes and the trophies, they can tell you the intricacies of every U.S. policy that Obama ever signed off on, but they would fumble to think of the most basic arguments about caste. All these high flying engineering debaters can skillfully debate Orwellian and Huxleian dystopias but almost nobody from these institutions has even as much as read the realities of Ambedkar. Seasoned debaters who form adj core at tournaments have asked me to give them the most basic Indian politics matter for their motion prep. Members of adj core have admitted to me, “Indian politics is boring.” What fucking privilege. To be so far removed from and unbothered by the very real mass oppression of an entire people that you can choose for it to not interest you.

If that isn’t already conceited enough, debaters will say anything to win a goddamn debate.We will literally just completely ignore the very real impact that Modi’s policies and tyranny has had on the lives of especially marginalized communities by defending BJP coming to power — THW vote for BJP in the 2019 elections. This is supposed to be a “debate” (more on this in the next segment) because somehow there is a way to defend this without being casteist, homophobic, transphobic, and in support of the mass oppression and lynching of entire minorities in the country while violently silencing all dissent under a surveillance state that links people’s sustenance welfare to a fucking dysfunctional piece of paper… We will defend feminism not having to be a necessarily important enough ideal for individuals to live by. Presidents of debating societies who break at international tournaments have made these arguments right in front of me. Winning is way more important to debaters than being a fucking decent human being because there are no cash prizes and shining trophies for being one. Keep your performative feminist politics to yourselves.

4. Everything is Not a Debate

“The idea that all debate is progressive comes with the idea that everything should be up for debate... [but] Not All Ideas Are Worth Debating.” — Sian Ferguson

There have been conversations around this concept of “dangerous spaces debating” (proposed by Shengwu Li) a few years ago, according to which the only criteria for setting a motion is that it be “interesting, deep, and balanced, for the vast majority of participants at a given tournament”. The idea is that if you are not comfortable debating a motion (for instance, something that could be deeply traumatic for you, such as abortion), you should be able to sit out that round, have the CA send in a swing team, and concede the points. According to this, “debating is for people willing to argue…. the darkest parts of lived experience.”

“Lived experience” is a deeply complex concept that feminists have thought and written about for decades. Your lived experience is based on your social location within a structure. But what “dangerous spaces debating” is saying is that if a motion is traumatic for you, that’s because of your “personal” lived experiences with it, heedless of the layers of structural disempowerment that are at the heart of much of this trauma. So, not only does it completely ignore the structural manifestations of lived experience, it also misses out is who is debating about whose lived experience. As I already pointed out in the beginning of this post, the Indian debating circuit is dominated by privileged persons belonging to a “creamy” layer of society. So the “vast majority of participants at a given tournament” might find motions about de-funding tribals or supporting BJP “interesting, deep, and balanced” if you argue from within ignorant, casteist, and homophobic bubbles. But nobody should have a say in (and worse still, intellectually masturbate over) someone else’s lived experience, very simplistically because you have not lived it. You don’t have to be the spokesperson for someone else’s lived experiences, just pass the damn mic. Build more inclusive societies with debaters across the social spectrum.

Does that mean you can never debate about contexts different from yours? No. It just means you need to be extra careful when you do. It means you can’t have read that one Ambedkar article and claim to understand caste enough to make statements about complex structures and “lived experiences” you know nothing about. It means you need to diversify what material you are reading and what people you are bringing into your societies. My problem with this circuit is that we do none of these things.

But if for you, debating is not about being inclusive, if it is nothing more than an interesting exercise in critical thinking, then marginalized communities (and the problematic tropes you associate with us in your motions and speeches) are not your guinea pigs for flexing your intellectual muscles. We are not your practice tests for empathy-building or critical thinking. We are not your ticket to the break rounds. We are not your ride to 81-scored speeches. We are not your winning case on Closing Opp. We are not your last-ditch lazy efforts to make decent motions for a tournament. Find muses for your playtime from your own damn ranks.

So, what then is not fair grounds for turning into a debate motion? If arguing something involves you making problematic assumptions and assertions about contexts far removed from yours, then it’s not a fair “debate”. It is only a debate in your ignorant and exclusionary echo chamber. So, it’s not enough to provide the option to say, “Oh as a bahujan or trans woman, I find this motion offensive, so I will sit this round out.” The point is that a lot of bahujan women are likely to find a motion about de-funding their communities (in an era of increasing caste-based atrocities) offensive, but bahujan women are not going to form the “vast majority of participants at a given tournament.” So, debating is not about subjective personal reactions to motions based on personal lived experiences, it’s often about debating things far removed from our personal lived experiences. And that involves a degree of power, and hence takes immense responsibility. Power and responsibility that adj cores have historically abused by setting problematic motions, and debaters have continued to silently either debate or privately sit out.

And this is not an attack on your “free speech.” Saying that some things shouldn’t be set as motions is not me “not being open-minded enough.” This is about who has the privilege to exercise free speech on whose behalf. So derailing my point by making it about the ethics of disseminating speech rather than the actual content of that speech is only a diversion tactic. You are not the wronged parties here, though holding up an “attack on free speech” placard makes you seem that way. What it ends up doing instead is stopping people from talking about the actual wronged parties who are the people who are not present in the room, or are privately sitting out the motion because it is so highly offensive to their identities. Stop being so holed up in your own little worlds. Being good at debating does not make you right. It just makes you good at debating.

5. The Spectacular Failure and Hypocrisy of #MeToo
Late last year, a lot of debaters asked me why I wasn’t engaging actively on Debate Lokpal when the #MeToo wave hit the debating circuit. While I have already published a response to this atrocious expectation earlier, I want to add this — #MeToo has so far failed as a movement in the Indian debating circuit.

We saw a lot of women courageously coming forth and sharing their testimonies during this wave. In response, seemingly progressive debsocs immediately began banning people from their societies and taking away previously granted awards from those who had been called out. Seems so great so far, except that this wild support for the survivor was offered largely when the survivor was from their own institutions and the perpetrator from a different institution. The institutions which were quick to come to the aid of current debaters who voiced out complaints during #MeToo are also the same institutions which have protected alumni perpetrators when the survivor has been from a different institution and the perpetrator from their own. Where is your sense of justice when the wrongdoer is one among you? So, please, drop this pretence of caring about survivors, when all you goddamn care about is the reputation of your meaningless debsoc. #MeToo could have really been a success in this space, but the only success you really care about is your own. Even this is a fucking competition to you. You disgust me.

Last month, I had this above conversation with a debsoc that has till date not dissociated from their alumni for the allegations that have been made against him (since before #MeToo), but have come out in large vocal support of a survivor among them. And their response was, “We’ve made a lot of gradual changes in our soc in the past 5 years, we’re doing the best we can.” Well, of course you should be making changes across 5 entire fucking years —you’re supposed to improve with time — now you want a cookie for being decent human beings and doing the bare minimum? Raise the fucking standards you set for yourselves and do better, damnit.

None of us were born feminist, and I think at some point we’ve all been guilty of believing and supporting the wrong side. I know I have. And I regret those choices. I regret not burning those bridges sooner. To anyone I may have hurt through the sides I chose, I am sorry. There are no excuses.

There is limited change you can bring about by banning individuals when the problem was never about individuals, but a culture that has allowed these individuals to rise up and stay in power. A culture of abuse. A culture of personality-driven debating. A culture of A-teams. A culture of exclusion. A culture of elitism. But when you make the narrative about particular individuals being held accountable, it feels like the movement has been a success, and you get to give yourself a golden star for being a good feminist.

Well, then maybe I’m a bad feminist because I want to demand bigger changes. We’ll never hear the stories and experiences and testimonies of invisible lesser privileged women within debating circles who don’t have the privilege to call out their abusers publicly because if they do, they’ll be dead (if they aren’t already). How are we helping these women within this larger personality-centered culture of abuse? So, yes, the #MeToo wave did benefit some survivors by holding some perpetrators accountable to their abusive actions. Nothing is taking away from those success stories. But if we claim movements to be successes after receiving the bare minimum, I am incredibly concerned. Plugging a few individual success stories within a larger broken system and refusing to work towards a better system simply because “it was worse before” is the antithesis of progress.

Back in 2015, when I organized the first Indian Women’s Debating Championship, our goal was to fix this system. To make it more inclusive. But even while organizing it, male debaters who held immense power within the circuit constantly disrupted our efforts. They spammed our Facebook page. They left abusive comments under our announcement posts. They continually reported my posts and got my Facebook account deactivated so I couldn’t run the tournament smoothly. Fast forward 4 years, as of last month, when I received a bunch of death and rape threats from Men’s Rights Activists on Twitter, one among these same male debaters managed to track down my Twitter handle and “like” all the abusive tweets I had received. I have screenshots of your likes under tweets by men asking me to drop down dead.

Back in 2012, a senior from my debsoc called me a “Barbie” and told me I only win tournaments because I was Debater X’s girlfriend (I have heard this so many times, I have lost count). Fast forward to 2019, and the debating society which used to be so eager to do matter prep sessions with me when I was dating their soc’s former President Y, now shun me because said former President Y dropped me to date a debater 5 years younger to me. I have grown secure enough about myself to know that this is not a reflection upon me. This is a reflection upon your fucked up societies. It is a reflection of the fact that no matter how independently successful I may be in the real world, my value in this make-believe space has and always will remain only that of a popular male debater’s “muse”, ready to be replaced by a younger “muse” when one comes along. With all your sexism and ageism… this space hasn’t changed a bit in the past 4 years, what “gradual changes” have you been making?!

This is why I actively resist using the phrase “debating community” — we are not a community. Communities share a social commitment to try to understand each other, they have a recognition of humanity, an understanding of each other’s contexts, and the potential for connection. You’re all just pieces in a debating circuit, trying to break and replace each other.

Your fucked up idols still have so many awards from all the tournaments they won from back when I used to still debate. Do we wait for someone to put themselves at risk and issue a public #MeToo statement against any of these individuals to hold them accountable? #MeToo is not supposed to be a solution to gender-based violence. It is a symptom that reflects just how fucked up we are as a society. It is a revolution, and such revolutionary phenomenon need to happen in the world every now and then to shake things up. So I’m glad it happened here, but I would not advocate for it to happen again — it’s not how we solve this crisis, because this crisis is not about specific individuals whom we can call out, it’s about systemic violences. #MeToo is where it starts, not ends. It’s the means to change, it’s not the change itself. We need a culture and checks and balances in place which don’t allow people to accumulate the kind of masculine power they currently do in this space, that doesn’t necessitate women to put themselves in dangerous positions by calling out their abusers. Why and how is this abuse happening here in the first place? Why are there so many powerful men here whose contribution to the world and basis for being worshipped in the circuit is a decent 7 minute speech?

So, that is why I did not engage with #MeToo in the circuit. It is disillusioning to watch people who have abused me hold some immense God-like power in the circuit and lead the vocal brigade against other perpetrators. Fuck your performative male allyship.

To the debater who held down my mouth and raped me at a tournament’s accommodation while a fellow debater was sleeping in the same bed next to me — fuck you.

To the debater who took a razor and coercively shaved my pubic hair because you didn’t like hairy women in bed — fuck you.

To the debater whose bed I ended up in on a drunk night and who responded by sliding his hand into my underpants — fuck you.

To the debater whose accommodation room at a tournament I had to run away from in fear, half-clothed, in the middle of the night, and ask a friend to get me out of there — fuck you.

To the debater who mentally and emotionally broke me, from within an intimate, trusting, private space…where do I even begin to describe incidents, and what do I even begin to say to you? I still wake up feeling broken and cheated and scared and struggling to form trusting meaningful human connections, and that is a deep thing to feel and suffer for so long while you’ve moved on from it in life, so fuck especially you.

Every one of the above has either been a debsoc president or has been on multiple adj cores or has an international break to his name. So, lastly, to all the debaters who continue to worship these idols you have created — fuck you. Fuck all of you and your personality cults of performatively woke men. You can defend your actions, you can dig hard in your pasts and find things to counter-accuse me of in return (you think I don’t face the likes of you on a daily basis just while doing my job?), but all your heroes are dead to me.

So there is only one reason there are no individual names mentioned in this post — this conversation is larger than all the individuals that I can name and implicate combined. This is not about individuals. This is about a broken system protecting these and many more individuals. So I have no intention of ever going public with people’s names, the people involved have been made aware of their actions (irrespective of whether they take responsibility for it or not), and I have had my own personal processes in place for confronting them and embarking upon justice-seeking and healing in capacities that my mental health permits me. But don’t for a split second consider my silence on publicly naming to mean that I am scared. I have named, shamed, and taken perpetrators to court all my life, since much before #MeToo was an available recourse. So trust me when I say this — I will not hesitate to edit this post to name individuals and drag you to court if I face any kind of violent retaliation in response to this. If you have already been blocked on any channel from my end, it means I do not care for your response. If you were ever a part of my life, and you find yourself reflected in the things I call out in this post, it means I do not care for your response. The ship of two-way conversations has sailed 4 years ago for me. This is a witch-hunt, and I will burn you down and all your idols if I need to.

So, with that… “Ladies and gentlemen… Mister Speaker,” this is why I won’t debate you. I have never been more proud to oppose.

Satrangi salaam.

EDIT: Posting screenshots below of abusive comments I have received in response to this post so far.

The first set of comments below are from an anonymous fake Medium profile under the name “Raging Ally” which has no other content associated with the profile.
UPDATE 1: This commenter has deleted their comment as well as their (fake) Medium account since I posted these screenshots.

UPDATE 2: When I decided to file an FIR against the above commenter and made a statement about the same on a closed debating Facebook group, I received the following comment in response from a Medium account under the name “Sudeshna Trilok”.

UPDATE 3: Further abuse. All abusive comments that mention names of individuals will be deleted. My post uses no names deliberately.