Shelley Walia

Professor Emeritus, English & Cultural Studies, Panjab University

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King Jr.

In the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, John Rawls A Theory of Justice had a long-lasting impact on American anti-statists and British egalitarians, as well as on the larger issues of civil disobedience, international justice and commitment of the state and citizens in capitalist welfare states. Such a political philosophy aimed to legitimise political change by appealing to public intellectuals as moral agents of reform.

This development occurred in a culture of racism, bigotry and ultra-nationalism that has dominated the democracies ever since. Plagued by the crackdown on dissent, the situation in many countries is exacerbated by uncertain employment, housing and healthcare. A prejudiced leadership, partial media and the demise of the Opposition has given rise to the increasing intrusion of the private sphere.

Varavara Rao, poet-activist with a singular voice of protest, languishes in jail. GN Saibaba, a disabled professor, remains incarcerated with no trial in sight. With baseless and flimsy evidence, their lock-up violates civil liberties and subverts the constitutional order. Some fine scholars and writers come under police and judicial harassment for standing up for the deprived and the marginalised. It becomes a matter of anguish for the nation when a citizens fundamental right to life and liberty is denied.

However, radical change is optimistically envisaged with the possibility of producing a politics of freedom and resistance, with the hope of finding solutions to the nagging issues confronting a democracy. The defence of bona fide beliefs of an individual in a democracy screams for attention in an environment of pervert rational thinking and brash exercise of Orwellian surveillance for absolute ideological control.

The last few months have been exceptionally volatile in the history of the democratic working of public institutions. Democracy and free speech are under siege. For example, Prashant Bhushan, in declining to tender an apology to the Supreme Court, has secured his dignity and his sense of responsibility to the future of Indias democracy. His is a moral act defined by affirming the inviolability of free speech, public values and truth that resonate in Vaclav Havels statement on speaking truth to power: When I speak of living within truth, I naturally do not have in mind only products of conceptual thought, such as a protest or a letter written by a group of intellectuals. It can be any means by which a person or a group revolts against manipulation. Such a stand against the depravity of the political moment is an earnest attempt to uphold the power of the powerless and the fairness of justice.

Bhushan has not shown any disrespect for the judicial system, but has peacefully redirected the attention of the nation to the quality of justice and the dignity of our public institutions. A civil, humanistic public action against the jeopardising of democratic institutions cannot be anything but ethical to the core and, unquestionably, not invite the over-reaction of criminal reprimand through a self-deprecating contempt order.

Recent social and political upheavals in the wake of sectarian violence or the increasing infringement of public space has raised questions about the future of liberty and dignity, freedom and justice, calling for a scrutiny of the working of the Reserve Bank, judiciary, police or civil services. With politics taking on the character of regressive and unabashedly unconstitutional right-wing intimidation through the misuse of public institutions, public oppression becomes acute and expectations of the institutional foundations of our democracy fail. At such critical moments, the critical-minded progressive thinkers rise to counter any form of unanimity or mindless obedience to the capricious assertions of the leadership, fighting for the survival of a culture that reflects on deeper ethical and social concerns.

It is a fact that radical social transformations have been brought about not by totalitarian means, but by peoples participation in offering resistance or critiques of the retrogressive functioning of institutions and the arbitrary suppression of any opposition. The end of debate is apparently the outcome of the end of history syndrome that has dominated the liberal democracies of the world.

The liberal recipe stands botched in ushering a new world order promised by the happy birth of a global community. History brings us face to face with the threat of despotism, provoking public intellectuals to rise up against the obsessive use of raw power. At the irreducible existential moment of economic or military crisis when the row between democracy and fascism, freedom and tyranny becomes an unrelenting political encounter, they advance an alternative vision with a global appeal of a new reinvention of participatory democracy and free thinking.

The historical necessity of the times inspires the freedom-loving people to adopt strategies of non-violent resistance and non-cooperation, thereby echoing an ethical dimension of the politics of living in truth with a sense of individual responsibility.

The lesson to be learnt from Rawls, Havel or historians like Howard Zinn is to exist in the embrace of robust forms of free speech practical and responsible enough to create an environment with a commitment to challenge the state apparatus and institutions that it undemocratically uses for its authority.

Not surprisingly, intellectuals like Arundhati Roy, Ramachandra Guha, Harsh Mander or Prashant Bhushan have opened spaces for new civil and democratic politics in India, underpinned by notions of truth, accountability and civility. They bring their adverse stand into the shaping of the world through their scrutiny of the social and political world with a belief in their sense of belongingness to the state free from any sense of alienation or antagonism.

Why then should the state feel a sense of disquiet at resistance movements hurling ideas of emancipation and justice? It is wrong to presume that autocracies can wipe out the diversity of political thought. The spectre of Marx hangs on the contemporary world and dialectical materialism remains an antidote to ideological unilateralism, a condemnation of the systems that have usurped socialism and progressive movements. Indeed, the constitutional values of liberalism cannot be ignored for long.

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Crackdown on free speech a threat to justice - The Tribune India