Logic in a Traffic Jam

There is a 13 minute long video of a speech made by Vivek Agnihotri, the director of the film “Buddha in a Traffic Jam”. It was made this Friday evening at Jadavpur University, probably minutes before the precipitous furor which seemed to engulf the entire campus. The whole city, and now increasingly people from different parts of the country, seem to be divided on the rights and wrongs of this entire episode. This is pretty much reflected across the social media platforms like Facebook & Twitter, where daggers have been drawn across lines of ideology for the past 48 hours. I have personally experienced this dagger, having been part of a couple of pretty small debates between a few acquaintances on the nuances of the entire incident.

Interestingly when I was reading comments made as rebuttals to my points and probably a few other articles written on the internet e-zines on the same issue, I found a common catch-phrase of ‘intellectual tyranny’ and in some cases ‘intellectual terrorism’ which seemed to have emanated right from the mouths of this rather now controversial and en vogue director. I was however taken aback by a few of the assertions that this man made during his speech, which were also applauded by the people listening to him.

Mr. Agnihotri says that India is a land which has given birth to great political thinkers such as Chanakya, Ashoka, and Krishna (let us for a few minutes avoid the fact vs fiction debate on the Mahabharata here), Mahatma Gandhi, Subhash Chandra Bose, Vallabhai Patel and the likes. He then went on to assert that in the presence of such rich history the need to import ideologies from China is futile, and expressed his amazement at “Mao yahaan kya kar rahe hain?” This was met with a lot of cheer but there is a problem in this. Here he has drawn a national boundary on the acceptability of ideas. I remember having read a series of essays by Tagore on Nationalism where he invokes a few of his experiences from Japan to define a pathway of what India needs to do in order to become a great civilization. The problem with imposing national boundaries on intellect is that it is not a purely national commodity and he has once again epitomized the effort of trying to install borders against the flow of ideas. As a student of Economics, I am intrigued by the primacy of the free market system. Free trade is built on the fact that there are economies which don’t possess some things and there are some that do. You cannot possess everything for if you did, you’d not be in a mortal realm but in the Garden of Eden. There is no plausible reason to pass a value judgement on the import of ideologies or ideas from another country. Human society developed through this. I cannot imagine what would have happened if the Wright Brothers and their successors in America decided to keep their designs as solely American ones purely because they originated there. That in fact is not the motive of intellectual advancement but runs only counter to it.

The world was built by a free exchange of ideas. None of the things that I have studied in my undergraduate syllabus in Economics can be defined as purely Indian. Perhaps it is time to think “This is India. What is a British Mathematician cum Economist, JM Keynes doing in our textbooks instead of Naoroji ? Why should we be taught Hegel or Marx ? Why Aristotle or Plato ? Why Differential Calculus ?” If countries started to think this way, the world would be where it was in the form a feudalistic primitive economy. Neither would be able to use the internet, nor would I get to type an article on a dell laptop to publish online. One never knows, in the absence of free trade and maximum liquidity of ideas, probably these things would only remain idle dreams. The point of this thinking is to realize that we as human beings living in a society are driven by “Social responsibility” and “Social Welfare”. Today when you talk of society it is not just your local communes but also a global dimension of welfare that we must take into account. Ideas like poverty, conflict, malnutrition, state of labour, corruption, financialization are not national ideas. They are meant to be social engines of debate, discussion and evolution. You cannot say that Amartya Sen wrote a treatise on Social choice at Harvard and hence we won’t accept it. You can’t say that Angus Deaton is an outcast because he is a Western Economist even though portion of his work is based on India. By that logic, we can’t even have Raghuram Rajan as RBI Chief and gloat over the fact that he called the crisis of 2008 — just because he did not do it in the borders of the Indian state.

The second thing which he says in his defense is that this not a quarrel of the Left vs the Right but instead of those who want to Make something out of India vs those who want to break India. This is largely problematic because the barb of trying to break India is made at people who critique not only the government but also the people in power at different levels. From the recent JNU debacle, it is again quite clear that this barb was indeed directed towards the Left leaning student organizations because the right (lo and behold) is driven by the motive of a united Indian subcontinent to make a greater India. If you discount the Right here, you are then only left with the Left who have been anything but cordial on this ground. Hence anyone today who tries to not speak in goodwill of the establishment is anti-state, anti-national and anti-India. Ergo, he implies that should you dissent on governance and ideology you are breaking this country. Intellectual critique and dissent is not akin to cutting a country into pieces. Having read a bit of Marx during my lifetime till date, I realize that a large piece of Marx’s literature is based on pointing out the flaws and inherent rent-seeking tendencies in a Capitalist society which would form casus belli for a class struggle and revolution int the future. This is critique and is definitely not akin to destroying Capitalism. In the same way, today as a society if we are fed up of the VVIP Culture, the problem of caste, the problem of corruption across party-lines and the tendency to draw every aspect of governance into a religious binary, this is not akin to destroying the country that we live in. It would only be so when you accept that these systemic maladies are enshrined in the politico-economic DNA of our country, thus bringing into doubt this man’s very idea of what India as a nation has to offer. As a nation founded on democracy we must realize that a democracy offers us healthy space for debate and discussion on various issues.

Mr. Agnihotri cites the example of the United States where a Pro-Osama speech would land you in an undisclosed location within minutes. However the point is we are not America. We don’t have the Patriots Act hanging down our throats every single moment of our lives. The comparison between unequals here is nothing but a blatant fallacy in logic arising out of sheer convenience to prove one’s point. Living in India, we must realize that our very existence as a nation is based on dissent from colonial rule. As a nation then we stood up for the depravity inflicted on us, and as a nation we must have the liberty and the right to stand up for ourselves when we feel that we are being deprived of the basic liberties that we are guaranteed in our constitution. American Democracy (apart from it’s similarity with India in it’s colonial origins) is far different from the Indian democracy and there is no point comparing the two.

He brings out the issue of whether everything that is said for the benefit of the small town middle class Indian needs to be refuted and countered upon. My problem with this is primarily Economic. I voted for economic growth. I am a middle class Indian who expects the fruits of Economic growth. I did not get so for the past two years. If I did get anything, it was an underperforming internet connection from a public telecom company which promised to improve performance and increase bandwidth. I did not vote for droughts in this country, which by the way are mostly in the smaller towns of this country. I voted for Economic growth and got Make in India in return which probably won’t serve much of the economic needs of our country. I did not vote for Nehru’s names to be removed from the textbooks for children in school or for universities to begin deciding which areas should I be pursuing my PhDs in. As a democratic citizen it is therefore my duty to speak up when I start getting things I did not vote for, instead of getting things I actually voted for. People across the country are exercising this democratic right and pointing out day in and day out where the government needs to improve. If that is akin to breaking a nation, I wonder which side of this binary is actually displaying the tyranny that people have now made a hullabaloo about.

Mr. Agnihotri tells me that my fight should be against people who are inefficient, regressive and unproductive — basically 90% of the political class of the country. He doesn’t realize that he justifies the very same movements which he is criticizing when he gives his audience these three categories of people that we should fight against. A fight against these three categories is not something that I personally require to hold an ideological dream of utopia for. To improve governmental machinery and bureaucracy one does not need to be living in a dreamland of marxist utopia or in the hope of a benevolent dictator arriving who will maximize the welfare of the people in the economy. You need to start providing solutions to the same and the solutions have to come from somewhere. One solution came in digitizing governmental interactions and self-attestation to stop leakages and bribery in these two areas. Other solutions are needed with regard to accountability and efficiency of work of bureaucracy at every level in the country. We citizens are stakeholders in this economy as well. Naturally if things do go wrong we have a right to point it out. We carry our rights out in this regard. The fire is stoked when this is labelled as something which is harmful to not only status quo but also the very basic functioning of the mechanisms of our country. As citizens and intellectuals, is criticism given it’s space or accepted with open arms ? If that were the case, people would not have to distort claims and sensationalize our demands just to grab attention and coerce the space that we asked for. It is not a fashion statement for the majority to criticize the country. If no one could criticize the country on any ground, it would imply perfection. We as a country are far from perfect. There is no point homogenizing an entire sphere of beliefs on the basis of the select few who may actually do it for political gains. A generation filled with frustration is not built by people seeking TRPs. This coercion is called anti-national and the whole purpose stands to be defeated, we all end up playing a negative-sum game.

Who is an intellectual ? Mr. Aghnihotri evades this question and tells you who isn’t an intellectual. People who dissent and critique are not intellectuals. People who try to propagate their ideas are not intellectuals. People who abuse the workings of the country are not intellectuals. This is rather absurd because according to his yarsticks, Martin Luther King Jr. couldn’t be called an intellectual, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi couldn’t be called intellectuals and neither could Subhash Chandra Bose. The common thread among all of them is that they dissented, critiqued and criticized status quo. A liberal society would hail them as intellectuals in their own right but people now defines their own society (unfortunately).

We, as a society and a nation, are apparently standing at the crossroads of a make or break situation for India. This is far from the reality. A democracy is built on healthy dissent and criticism. This is what distinguishes it from Autocracy and Oligarchy. India holds it’s democracy dear and whoever believes that democracy involves a one-way traffic of communication could not be farther from the reality. I only wonder as to whether the people clapping at every statement made in the video, even gave it an iota of thought when these statements were being made in front of them. Faith is a good thing. Faith driven by ideology is an even better thing. However blind faith isn’t. I saw a mass of people who believed that everything in India is good and nothing could possibly go wrong.They would meet criticism with the phrase “How dare you ?”. Of course today is mother’s day and I am lucky enough to have a mother who accepts criticism when she serves me food just in case the food is overcooked or there is a tinge of extra salt. I am thankful to her for the food she makes but it is a healthy democracy where I can fearlessly tell her “Maa, noon ta ektu beshi pore giyechhe”. I have till date been lucky to have not been met by “How dare you criticize the work of the person who cooks food for you ?” Perhaps that is the difference between people of blind faith and us — they live to deify and we live to improve. It is a conscientious call for society (after examining the nuances of different angles to various social discourses) to make on who unleashes the tyranny at what point of time and in what context. To paraphrase Arun Jaitley, democracy can never imply the tyranny of the majority. Who is the majority here is for us to decide.