Rajendran Narayanan

No ‘Labharthi’, Citizen Must be Seen as a Verb

No matter what one’s political persuasion is, it must worry us all that the kind of politics brandished by the current BJP regime is a dangerous precedent from the perspective of imagining citizens as a verb by systemic impoverishment of our mental and physical capabilities.

In a recent conversation with Mohan (name changed), a 22-year-old Dalit youth from Bihar, I learned that by the time he reached class 12, he had already worked in 6 different places as a migrant worker across states from Assam to Haryana.

The examination centre for his class 12 board exams was in a town 50 kms from his village. He had to relocate to the town for the duration of his exams because commuting daily for his exams meant spending 5 hours on the road. But, relocation meant incurring additional costs for food and renting a room. With no savings or financial support, two months before his exams, he migrated again to West Bengal to work as a daily wage labourer earning Rs 350 a day. With these earnings, not only did he have to sustain himself during his stint in West Bengal but he had to also save to support himself to write his board exams.

Mohan – and millions like him – serve as extraordinary examples of dogged resilience. However, his struggles spawn several haunting, uncomfortable questions. Why should certain segments of the population be disproportionately subject to a stress test of resilience? What is the role of the government in this ? What are the implications of these to citizenship at large?

By putting an individual’s well-being at the centre, Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argued that the government can play a pivotal role in expanding human capabilities so that each person is able to ‘be’ and ‘do’ what they value. Being well-nourished, not having to work as a child, having access to quality education, not being discriminated against and having equal access to justice are vital for this. When these conditions are not adequately met, an individual is deprived of physical and analytical capabilities to actively participate as a citizen. In India, citizenship is at least premised on having liberty of thought, worship and action, equality in status, opportunities and access to justice. When the pre-conditions among individuals owing to accidents of birth are so varied, there is extra onus on elected governments to create an enabling ecosystem ensuring that such essential ingredients of citizenship are honoured. As such, we need to understand poverty as lacking human freedoms, to engage as a citizen.

The black American writer and comedian, Baratunde Thurston, runs a podcast called ‘How to citizen’ where a citizen is reimagined as a verb instead of a noun. In such an interpretation of citizen as a verb, ‘to citizen is (a) to participate, (b) to invest in relationships (c) to understand power and (d) to value the collective.’

Such a reframing of citizenship can help us go beyond the putative, to develop more actionable barometers of enfranchisement. In other words, are citizens able to go beyond survival and engage? Being economically secure is a necessary condition for ‘doing’ citizenship and needs to be thought of as one of the inputs in a bouquet of non-negotiable basic rights for democratic engagement. Baratunde’s framing of ‘doing’ citizenship is premised on the state being able to deliver the platform for citizens to ‘be’ and ‘do’. Any political regime’s performance review must involve interrogation by its polity on whether citizens are actionable agents to ‘do’ or are being rendered passive. As a caveat, ‘doing citizenship’ must not violate the constitutional values of liberty, fraternity, dignity and equality.

Where does India stand today on all this?

On the economic front, we are experiencing damaging levels of wage stagnation and inequality. Based on an analysis of government’s National Sample Survey data from 2012 and Periodic Labour Force Survey data up to 2022-23, a report titled ‘Ten Years of NDA · A Guarantee Check’ by the civil society platform, Bahutva Karnataka, observes that 30 crore workers in India earn less than the recommended national minimum wage of Rs 375 per day.

Not just individual income, but even the entire household income of at least 1 in 3 households, nationally, is less than Rs 375 per day. In Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the household income of more than half the households are less than this while nearly half the households in Madhya Pradesh and Bihar are earning less than these threshold daily wages.

A committee of experts on wages, called the Anoop Satpathy Committee, at the behest of the BJP government in 2019, had made these minimum wage recommendations using the amount of money needed for a daily balanced diet. However, the recommendations have been ignored without any rationale.

Bahutva’s report also demonstrates that wages across all types of employment categories have been stagnant since 2012 and women workers across the spectrum are at the bottom of this earnings pyramid. Effectively, owing to their economic situation, a significant majority are deprived of building their capabilities and are rendered to be in a situation where they can’t ‘do’ as a citizen.

Contrast this with the fact that the nominal per capita GDP has increased by 60% between 2012 and 2023. Another recent paper authored by Thomas Pikkety, Lucas Chancel, Nitin Bharti and Anmol Somanchi of the World Inequality Lab demonstrates historic levels of wealth inequality in India with the top 1% holding 40% of the national wealth. What are the implications of such high levels of wealth inequality from the standpoint of power, citizenship and capabilities?

On power, paraphrasing Eric Liu, Baratunde says that ‘it is the ability to have others do what we want.’ Owing to high concentration of wealth among the few, the wealthy elite in India will inevitably bend political parties for favours with contracts and tax cuts in lieu of quid pro quo like political funding. This is precisely what the electoral bonds scam has revealed. When a few are able to wield such extraordinary pull with political parties, it bodes disaster for India as it can lead to mass disenfranchisement.

For others to exercise power, as conceived by Baratunde, it is imperative that the poor have an equal say as the elite. But the playing field is highly uneven. To mitigate this, the annual budget, seen as a moral signal of the government’s priorities, needs to create a level playing field. However, from the budget allocations, the government’s continued tilt towards the elite becomes obvious.

The budget allocation for health, education, and employment are all one-third or one-fourth of what they should be. In conjunction with low incomes, worsening quality of public education and expensive privatised healthcare pushes the poor to be under-nourished, run helter-skelter for good education, face discrimination and remain stuck in a cycle of debt trap. In summary, the poor are left to scavenge the crumbs of crony capitalism. Such a structural deprivation of human freedoms further marginalises the poor. When plagued with such hazardous levels of asymmetry and lopsided abilities to influence the political class, how will those from socio-economically marginalised backgrounds ever be able to exercise power in the way Baratunde has laid out?

Citizenship has also been a vital plank for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to garner Hindu votes by targeting Muslims. There is a wealth of evidence to suggest that under the BJP regime, there is State sanction in subjugating Indian Muslims. Documenting the cruel callisthenics of power, Amnesty International observed that just between April and June 2022, there were a total of 128 demolitions, robbing numerous Muslims – and only Muslims – of their basic rights by rendering them homeless. Recently, the government has announced the formulation of rules for the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). It cannot be mistaken that, seen along with the National Register of Citizens, the CAA is an obvious attempt to legalise religious discrimination and a mechanism to further strip the ability of Muslim citizens ‘to be’ and ‘to do.’

What we are witnessing therefore is a structural stripping away of enfranchisement on communal lines and of those from socio-economically marginalised backgrounds. While a handful can exercise a broad suite of freedoms, the majority are deprived of even basic freedoms. It makes the Mohans of the country appear to be living in a virtual reality show where they are made to run on a treadmill as the scenery around them is altered to create a make believe world of progress. This process has assumed a more expansive form as any form of dissent is being crushed. Indeed, the repeated crackdown on any kind of protests, incarcerating peaceful dissenters, curbing academic freedom and by arbitrarily shrinking the space for peaceful resistance against government actions, the regime has attempted to further reduce the essence of citizens ‘to be’ or ‘to do.’ The systematic targeting of opposition parties further narrows the space for common people for ‘doing’ citizenship. When the amendment of citizen as a verb is near completion, how will Indians lift themselves out of being passive nouns ?

No matter what one’s political persuasion is, it must worry us all that the kind of politics brandished by the BJP regime is a dangerous precedent from the perspective of imagining citizens as a verb owing to the systemic impoverishment of our mental and physical capabilities. At present, only a handful of affluent are able to disproportionately exercise their power. We need to choose what kind of citizenship we want. Do we want to be clipped of capabilities and be abstract nouns or do we want to be truly engaged in democratic nation building as active verbs? The choice is ours.

Rajendran Narayanan teaches at Azim Premji University, Bangalore and is affiliated with LibTech India. The views expressed are personal.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Laavanya Tamang for valuable feedback on an earlier draft.

What Would an X-Ray of India’s Compassion Reveal?

The politics of precarity and heightened socio-economic inequality erodes our compassion. The politics of prejudice and the treatment of minorities corrodes it.

Two recent incidents provide a rubric for us to evaluate our priorities and imaginations of India. The first is the extraordinary heroic effort in which 12 rat-hole miners rescued 41 daily wage workers who were trapped in the Silkyara tunnel in Uttarakhand for over 16 days. The second incident concerns a statement in the Parliament. On 21 September, Ramesh Bidhuri, a Member of Parliament (MP) of the BJP made derogatory communal slurs against Danish Ali of the BSP on the floor of the parliament. The comments received applause from some BJP MPs in the parliament.

The two incidents are seemingly unrelated. The thread that connects the two is the continued acceptance of precarity, indignity and discrimination faced by many in our society.

The Silkyara tunnel is part of the Union government’s much publicised Char Dham project to build roads connecting the four Hindu pilgrimage sites of Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri, and Yamunotri. While building roads are required, what needs interrogation is the rush to complete projects by ignoring environmental concerns and safeguards that puts socio-economically poor workers at the fulcrum of life and death. And, when a sitting MP gets away with derogatory speech on the floor of Parliament, it deifies resentment, legitimises prejudice and creates precedents for disharmony.

Together, these incidents demonstrate the need to pay attention to how the constitutional promises of dignity, equality and fraternity are playing out in practice.

India stands at the cusp of a historically tenuous time. Its economic structures have systematically fortified a class of people and rendered the poor to lead a fractured existence in the penumbra of our gated lives.

The bottom half of India’s population holds a mere 3% of the national wealth. When seen from this economic axis, it is the poor that constitute the numerical majority.

Splicing India along a religious axis creates a majoritarian idiom which is different from the absolute numerical majority comprising the poor.

This majority is just one economic or health shock away from slipping into utter destitution. Inadequate social safety nets and the daily grind have trapped the poor in a Sisyphean cycle of precarity. Inter-generational mobility towards economic prosperity has been sluggish pointing to a continuance of deprivation along caste lines. The economically poor are over-represented by socially marginalised communities such as Dalits and Adivasis.

In parallel to this economic disrepair, a continuous injection of resentment incites decentralised and splintered acts of discrimination and violence targeting Muslims. The tacit sanction from the government of such acts makes the force of law indistinguishable from the law of force (Hansen 2021).

The collateral damage of such politics of precarity and politics of prejudice is a steady erosion and corrosion of compassion. Erosion is a gradual, structurally mediated physical process while corrosion is akin to a biochemically induced process with lasting and even irreversible implications. The politics of precarity and heightened socio-economic inequality erodes our compassion; the politics of prejudice and the treatment of minorities corrodes it. These raise the question: what would an X-Ray of India’s compassion reveal?

Also read: ‘Because He’s Muslim?’ Asks Wife of Uttarkashi Tunnel Rescuer Whose House Was Demolished

The eroding state

Over the last decade, we observe a steady reconfiguration of the citizen-state relationship. This is an inversion from the time between 2004 and 2013 when a set of rights-based legislations such as NREGA, NFSA, and the Forest Rights Act, were imagined as attempts to improve participatory democracy and the bargaining power of the marginalised.

Today, the state steadily abdicates its responsibility of enabling citizens’ rights. It puts the onus on the citizen, as if it is the citizen’s fault and not the state’s responsibility to honour rights. For instance, not being able to get pensions owing to biometric or other technical failures is now framed as a citizen’s fault instead of seeing it as a fault with the design and principles of governance. The patronising language of terming individuals as ‘beneficiaries’ instead of ‘rights-holders’ brands and repackages the government as a philanthropic institution doling out charity and further strips the citizen of her rights.

Aided by digital technologies, the implementation of the rights-based legislations have become excessively centralised leading to a flattening of federalism and routine violations of rights (Buddha, Dhorajiwala and Narayanan, 2021), (Chaudhuri, B 2020), (Drèze, Jean, Reetika Khera, and Anmol Somanchi, 2021). Such a digitalwashing of rights raise serious apprehensions of whether we are entering a new age of digital feudalism.

These are all recipes for diluting government accountability and transfer duties – and blame – from the government to the individual. Such a model of policy and governance atomises the poor, who are left with little promise in making their rights count. They are pushed to the periphery to live a shadowed existence. Being in constant precarity means that the poor have little or no claim making in politics.

Counter-majoritarian constitutionalism

Moreover, among other things, essential services like transportation, healthcare and education are undergoing unprecedented levels of compartmentalising along class – and caste – lines. In such segregated sensual experiences of India, spaces for cross-class, cross-caste intermingling are shrinking. These in turn have further ossified the affluent and widened the blind spots towards deprivation. As Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen write in their remarkable book, India: An Uncertain Glory, India is like ‘pockets of California in sub-Saharan Africa.’ Beyond the aphoristic quality of this phrase is the quotidian acceptance of this fact.

Rising economic inequality and segregation will naturally result in a ‘social production of indifference’ towards the poor (Gupta, 2012). When there is no meaningful interaction across class, caste and religion, the deprived sections become part of a physically proximate but emotionally distant landscape. A natural fallout of such a gradual process of emotional dissonance is a structural erosion of compassion.

Counterpoint to the structurally spawned apathy towards the poor is the regular mantras of prejudice towards religious minorities. (To be sure, historically marginalised communities such as Dalits and Adivasis are also targets of prejudice but in this article we focus on the communal dimension.)

The eminent scholar of jurisprudence Ronald Dworkin underscored the need to practise constitutionalism as a counter-majoritarian force for a healthy society. Reflecting on the American constitution in this regard, he wrote in Taking Rights Seriously (133): ”The constitution, and particularly the Bill of Rights, is designed to protect individual citizens and groups against certain decisions that a majority of citizens might want to make, even when the majority acts in what it takes to be the general or common interest. Such protection is rooted in the moral rights which individuals possess against the majority.”

Socio-economic policies as per the Directive Principles of State Policy of the Indian constitution should foster a more level playing field across caste and class lines.

Yet, despite our progressive constitution with built-in counter-majoritarian principles – both in fundamental rights and in institutional responsibilities – there are serious concerns. In contrast to constitutional values, the majoritarian nationalism espoused by Hindutva ideologues rests on retaining the cruel caste hierarchy and treating Muslims as evil.

Also read: The Many Dimensions of Majoritarianism Beyond Religious Discrimination

Discriminatory legalism

Majoritarianism represents a specific form of control and tyranny whose assertion in an electoral democracy is possible only when the elected government in power sets the tone and template for the everyday enactment of such tyranny. The success of such a project rests on a continuous injection of resentment maligning specific minority communities.

In his book How Fascism Works, Jason Stanely writes, “At the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition, or in a word, nation. But, in stark contrast to a version of nationalism with equality as its goal, fascist nationalism is a repudiation of the liberal democratic ideal; it is nationalism in the service of domination, with the goal of preserving, maintaining, or gaining a position at the top of a hierarchy of power and status”(97).

For the Hindutva variant of fascism, even a catastrophe like the COVID-19 pandemic was not spared. Puzzled by the evident lack of anger towards the regime during the lockdowns, Mohammad Sajjad provocatively posits if communal hatred has superseded food and livelihood insecurity amongst us. Emboldened by prejudicial speech from the top, the author notes that some television anchors during lockdowns referred to stranded Muslim pilgrims as ‘chhupey huey (hiding)’ while Hindus stuck in places like in the Vaishno Devi temple were termed as ‘phansey huey (stranded)’ (Sajjad 2022).

More recently, a fact-finding report by the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism on the violence that erupted in Nuh, Haryana, in August 2023 presents a chilling account of the ecosystem of hatred that has been created by Hindutva forces. In response to the violence, using bulldozers, the Haryana administration under the political patronage of the BJP, demolished 750 properties in Nuh alone, all belonging to Muslims. A Muslim shopkeeper whose shops were demolished said, ‘Our shops were targeted because we are Muslims. There is nothing more to the demolitions.’

Such an abuse of power in the name of law and order is what the political philosopher Jan Werner Muller refers to as ‘discriminatory legalism’ which translates to ‘for my friends everything, for others, the law.’ Such a targeted bulldozing of Muslim homes sends a strong message that the citizenship of Muslims weighs less than the citizenship of their caste Hindu neighbours. It is hardly surprising then that a remorseless Hindu policeman, Chetan Singh, will shoot and kill 3 Muslim men from a point-blank range on a train just because they are Muslims.

While the active perpetrators of violence are perhaps operating on the principle of Schadenfreude (deriving pleasure from others’ misery), it is hard to fathom the mindset of those on the fence, the bystanders. Surely, not everyone enjoys seeing destructive acts causing misery. Writing about the bystanders in Israel in the 1990s despite widespread awareness of the nature of crimes committed by Israel on Palestinian people, the criminologist and human rights activist Stanley Cohen referred to it as the sociology and culture of denial. He wrote ‘Why, when faced by knowledge of others’ suffering and pain – particularly the suffering and pain resulting from what are called “human rights violations” – does “reaction” so often take the form of denial, avoidance, passivity, indifference, rationalisation or collusion?’

Such a culture of denial continues in India and is a pathway to putrid perversion. Despite the Sangh Parivar’s clear avowal of treating Muslims with derision, from the standpoint of humanity, when so many Hindus remain bystanders to communalism and discrimination, it points to how compassion in us has been corroded. When tragedy and humanitarian crises experienced by one community, as in the genocide in Palestine, get celebrated by Hindutva groups, it is not just Islamophobia. It symbolises perverted pleasure. Islamophobia seems too mild and an inaccurate term. Islamoperversion or treating Muslims with derision might be more appropriate to describe the extent of corrosion of compassion for political gains.

In the backdrop of such continued denigration of Muslims, the government led frenzy and the loud celebration of many on the consecration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya speaks neither about nonviolent devotion nor about the government’s adherence to constitutional values. But instead, it shows how the corrosion of compassion has led to the removal of the veil of decency and respect.

Our moral core

In summary, an X-Ray of India’s compassion looks damaged.

As we embark on the Lok Sabha elections in 2024, we need to think hard about our priorities and imaginations of India. If we continue with the politics of precarity and prejudice, we will be vaccinating our society against compassion. This will result in a generation where mistrust, anxiety and prejudice would be the currency of life.

The choice is ours. Do we want an India with humanity and empathy, or do we want an India where our moral core is hollowed out leaving behind a residue of soulless automatons? In this context, the celebrated saviours, the rat-hole miners, have some important advice for us. After rescuing the trapped workers, the rat-hole miners – most of whom are Muslims and Dalits – were asked what they want, their response captures what the country really needs: ‘a pucca house for an elderly mother, village roads, love and human dignity that crosses religious and caste lines, life insurance and fair wages for all workers, and an assurance that such a collapse is not allowed to happen again.’

The views expressed are personal and do not reflect the views of the institutions I am part of.

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Sayandeb Chowdhury for feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Rajendran Narayanan teaches in Azim Premji University, Bangalore and is affiliated with LibTech India.

This article was originally published on the India Forum.

‘Dekh Li Democracy?’: What I Learned During a Few Hours in Ramban

I was part of a team that had planned a ‘Restore Democracy Yatra’ from Jammu to Srinagar last November, but we were not allowed to proceed beyond Ramban.

On August 5, 2019, the fabric of trust and consent among the people of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir was smeared in ways that might never be rectified.

While many parts of India attempt to revitalise lives and livelihoods after a virus induced lockdown, J&K continues to reel under an older lockdown.

The following account reflects how.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Ramban is a dot on the hills with the Chenab flowing below it. The small arterial road through the town was peppered with small shops, largely empty, and punctuated by army men at every 100 yards.

Ramban wasn’t meant to be our destination. I was part of a team that had planned a ‘Restore Democracy Yatra’ from Jammu to Srinagar in November, 2019 but we were not allowed to proceed beyond Ramban, which was midway.

Drenched in heavy rains, we were greeted by an assortment of community workers, journalists, and vendors. We stayed in darkness in a community hall that evening as there was no electricity. The next morning I went around town to talk to members of the community. After learning of the hardships that many were enduring, I walked back towards the community hall around 1 pm to find it choc-a-bloc with men in khaki.

Several officials stood obsequiously around the Station House Officer (SHO), a tall red-eyed middle-aged moustachioed man called Vijay Kotwal.

After a hurried lunch, I continued to meet more locals near the bus stand. Soon, a motley crew of 12 gathered around me. While they were discussing their ordeal of the preceding four months, the SHO and a few officers started hounding us. In a high-handed tone, the SHO rebuked, “Lecture baazi band karo (‘stop this lecturing’).”

I responded by saying, “I wasn’t lecturing but only listening to what people have to say.”

He continued, “Section 144 has been imposed. Bahas mat karo (‘don’t argue’).”

I said, “There is usually a public announcement when Section 144 is imposed but there has been no such announcement.”

Eyebrows raised, he retorted, “I made an announcement. But if you didn’t hear it, it’s not my fault, so don’t argue!”

The crowd around me looked at him uneasily. He instructed them, “All of you move away. Now!”

Pointing a finger at me, he told them, “Nobody will talk to him.” They scattered in seconds.

Also read: Excluded from Law-Making for Two Years, Kashmiris are Angry and Alienated

I continued to walk around and distribute pamphlets on who we were and what we were there for as two policemen followed me to ensure that I wasn’t assembling a crowd. Bystanders and street vendors with worry lines on their foreheads watched me, more with concern than incredulity.

I stopped in front of a roadside shoe-seller. Looking the other way, he said with pursed lips, “Please go away. The police are watching me.”

Behind him, two men who clearly looked like outsiders were selling clothes. They were from Bongaon in West Bengal. We couldn’t converse for more than a minute as the police kept their cold gaze on us. But in a brief exchange in Bangla, with their eyes hovering, they managed to convey the extent of tension and oppression that everyone was in.

People weren’t allowed to congregate. Nobody was allowed to talk about the reading down of Article 370. All businesses and modes of transportation were shut for more than three months, resulting in heavy financial losses for the entire community.

Around 3:30 pm, the SHO and several policemen told some of the travellers that we could not proceed to Srinagar. They said that there were landslides on the road. While many huddled around this conversation, farther away, an elderly gentleman was speaking eloquently about the history of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). He spoke of the repeated betrayals by the government of India. He spoke about how Kashmir had been caged and how people here have no freedom to walk or talk.

A man prays on his roof in Jammu on the first day of Ramzaan on Saturday. Photo: PTI

I started filming him with his consent. With much anguish he asked, “How can they betray us like this without asking a single person of J&K? I belong here. I have lived all my life here. How is it justified that some arbitrary person in an uniform from Madras, Bombay, or Delhi repeatedly forces me to show my identity card to him? And yet I have to. I carry a pocket full of identity cards…just to prove who I am! How is this justice?”

I stopped recording and thanked him. He wanted me to write my name and number for him. As I started writing it on a piece of paper placed on top of his identity cards, the SHO and his gang rushed angrily towards me.

The SHO pushed me, shouting, “Saale! You are instigating him and then recording him?”

Hurling abuses he asked the other policemen to arrest me. “You can’t do that. There is no question of instigating anybody. He was speaking of his own accord and I was filming him with his consent,” I said.

Angered, the SHO continued his verbal assault and began an attempt to seize my phone. At this point, Bilal, Guddi, and Abdul rushed to my rescue. Bilal grabbed my phone away, and the three pushed me into a tea shop and asked me to stay inside.

In the meantime, another senior police official, Imran, standing next to Guddi, pointed to a bespectacled portly man in a black sweater and said, “I know that you all mean well. I shouldn’t be saying this but that man is from the Intelligence Bureau and has been keeping track of all of you. There are several others keeping a close watch on you.”

Also read: One Year On, Modi’s Kashmir ‘Master Stroke’ Has Proven to Be a Massive Flop

Imran took Guddi to a nearby restaurant to talk. Seeing him go in, the SHO rushed to the restaurant as well. And so it was.

A few minutes later, with a resigned smile, Imran emerged. He told one of us that the police do not spare him as he has reservations about blindly agreeing to the government’s decisions.

By now the SHO’s project was complete. The police had scared every hotel owner and the local community. No one would give us shelter in Ramban for the night. They went around the bus stand telling bus and taxi drivers not to take us towards Srinagar. We had no option but to return to Jammu in three vehicles.

Still, a police jeep followed us till we left the Ramban district limits. Just as I was boarding a jeep to depart, Imran called me from behind. “Professor Sahab!” I turned around as he waved me goodbye with a smile while the SHO stared angrily at me.

We left in a few vehicles and stopped some 40 kilometres away for tea. Jagdeep and Javed, two J&K police personnel, had joined us for the yatra in their individual capacities. Jagdeep smiled and hugged me. Javed shook my hands and said, “What you did was absolutely right. They have crushed us.”

Javed, a heart patient, took out his phone and showed me photographs of his family. We exchanged phone numbers. Before leaving in different vehicles, Javed hugged me and said that he will ask his son to stay with me when he comes to Bangalore.

Restrictions in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir on August 5, 2020. Photo: PTI

While on August 5, 2019, Articles 370 and 35A were arbitrarily revoked, changing the constitutional edifice and reducing the state to two Union Territories, August 5, 2020, further sanctifies a loaded, muscular imagination of India. The date chosen to kickstart the temple construction ceremony at Ayodhya does not appear to be coincidental.

It symbolises an idea of India where schadenfreude has attained legal sanction when masses of people feel justified in celebrating the construction of a temple on the destroyed debris of a 400-year-old religious structure. If a few civilians like us on merely a visit to J&K had to face such hostility then the continued plight of the people of J&K makes one squirm with unpleasantness.

On my way back to Jammu, looking out of the window of the jeep, I recalled how some people were laughing while a few had blank stares during my altercation with the SHO. Minutes before departing Ramban, while I was still inside the tea shop, Bilal walked in with a beaming smile, returned my phone, and said “Dekh li democracy?”

Note: All names except the SHO Vijay Kotwal’s and Guddi’s have been changed.

Rajendran Narayanan teaches at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. Views are personal.

The Great Aadhaar Game: Don’t be Arbitrary, be Cleverly Random

The Centre, through arbitrary subversion of legalities, is turning us into random number generators.

Prologue: A wise man told me this article should have appeared on April 1.

The Supreme Court’s interim order of March 13 appears incongruous to the earlier unanimous verdict on the right to privacy and is at odds with the constitutional right to equality. The deadline to link Aadhaar with bank accounts and phones have been indefinitely extended while they aren’t extended for any welfare schemes for the poor such as old age pensions and the rural job guarantee scheme, MGNREGA.

This implies that Aadhaar will be voluntary for the rich while being mandatory to access critical survival measures for the poor. In other words, sadly, right to privacy seems to crucially hinge on the class position of a citizen. In essence, it reinstates the Orwellian cliche that some of us are more equal than others.

Be that as it may, this differential access to “freedom” implies that we can happily choose to file our taxes without Aadhaar. There is a small catch though. For some inexplicable and rather bizarre reason, nobody can file their returns electronically without an Aadhaar number. The income tax returns website does not let you file your returns unless you furnish a 12-digit number. This seems to be in contravention of the March 13 interim order of the apex court. As such, even conscientious taxpayers, who do not have Aadhaar, are reportedly being forced to provide an arbitrary 12-digit number as a proxy for Aadhaar.

What does a diligent taxpayer who does not have an Aadhaar do in such a Catch 22 situation? Anecdotal evidence suggests that such taxpayers are trying out their hand at imagining a random Aadhaar number so that the system lets you submit your returns. The Centre, through arbitrary subversion of legalities, is turning us into random number generators. It is not the intention to suggest that anyone should do that, but it is in this context that it might be instructive learn about Benford’s law (also called First Digit Law). Perhaps it may help to learn how to imagine a “good” large random number? Let’s get into some mathematical melodrama to learn one way to fake randomness in situations that deal with large numbers (12 digits, for example).

So, what is Benford’s law? Benford’s law states that in many real life situations when data is observed in high magnitude, more numbers begin with the digits 1, 2, or 3, as opposed to 7,8, or 9. For example, consider a 250-page book. There are about 109 pages whose page numbers begin with the digit 1 (pages 1,11-19,100-199), 60 pages beginning with the digit 2 while only 10 pages beginning with the digit 9. As another example — consider the number of people in various age groups. As a proportion of the population, chances are there are more people with ages that start with the digit 1 than with the digit 9. At first, Benford’s law appears to be counter-intuitive because if the distribution of the first digit in datasets are truly random, then each digit between 1 and 9 have the same chance, i.e., 1 out 9 (11.1%) of being the first digit, i.e., be uniformly spread as in Figure 1.

Figure 1: If each digit had the same chance of being the first digit

However, the frequency distribution of beginning digits in many data settings indicate otherwise (see Figure 2). In particular, this holds true for datasets that grow exponentially (doubles or triples) such as bacterial colony data, populations of cities, and not to forget income tax data. It is empirically observed that, on an average, the first digit is 1 in about 30% of the cases, it is 2 in about 17.5% of the cases, and it is 3 in about 12% of the cases. The systematic pattern of the first digit being further away from 1 continues and number 9 is the first digit in only about 5% of all the data points.

Figure 2: Distribution of first digit in datasets varying in large orders of magnitude

The fact is a consequence of digits in such datasets being non-uniformly spread on the original measured scale but uniformly distributed on a logarithmic scale – used to rescale exponentially growing data where the interest is more on the number of digits. Very simply, logarithms (log) tell us the number of digits after the first digit in a number. So log 10 = 1 and log 1000 = 3. It denotes the power to which a number is to be raised to get another number.

This phenomena was first highlighted by the astronomer Simon Newcomb in 1881 when he observed that the initial pages of the logarithm tables were yellower and more smudged than the latter pages. This led him to conjecture that the logarithms of numbers beginning with the digit 1 were more prevalent than numbers beginning with higher digits. The same principle was later tested and verified across several datasets by the physicist, Frank Benford of GE Research in 1938. He tested the hypothesis by looking at surface areas of rivers, US population, numbers in Reader’s Digest magazine, street addresses of hundreds of people etc.

In the 1990s, researcher Mark Nigrini used Benford’s law to track accounting frauds by reviewing sales figures, insurance claims and reimbursement claims. For example, owing to a policy threshold of $100,000, a fraudster wrote several cheques to himself just below this threshold, i.e., with a first digit in the cheque amount being 9. This obvious departure from the expectation of 5% of numbers beginning with the digit 9 was a red signal to catch accounting fraud. Benford’s law has been similarly used to look at fudged numbers in income tax returns and is permissible as evidence for criminal cases in the US.

However, Benford’s law does not apply to data that that have been assigned. Consequently, this law will not apply to the oft-compared twin (quite incorrectly so) of Aadhaar-Social Security Numbers (SSN) in the US. The 9-digit SSN are not randomly generated but have a well-defined structure of assignation.

The questions for us is – given that Aadhaar is a 11-digit random number (the 12 is technically not), will Aadhaar numbers also follow Benford’s law? In case it does, then just to follow the Supreme Court order, and be a diligent citizen, should innocent people without Aadhaar have had to learn all this jugglery just to be “random”?

Recently, the central government/UIDAI’s lawyer claimed in the Supreme Court that Aadhaar data centres are are kept protected inside walls that are “13 feet tall and 5 feet thick”. Given such strong and exemplary data security and data protection features, would one wish to be caught just because one sprinkled equal number of ones and nines to create a make-believe 12 digit number? Isn’t it absurd that we have to fake to establish honesty? Till the crimes of the state’s arbitrariness are brought to proper punishment, the so-called misdemeanour of randomness may continue.

Moral of the story: Don’t be arbitrary like UIDAI and the current government. Be cleverly random.

Rajendran Narayanan is a faculty member at Azim Premji University, Bangalore. The views expressed are personal.

This is an updated version. The initial version of the article appeared in the Business Standard on March 31, 2018.

The ‘Pey’ and ‘Bhutam’ in India’s Technology-Fuelled Development Crusade

To evaluate the role data plays, we need to understand if data in its modern avatar is more akin to being pey – a vampire-like evil spirit – or bhutham – a friendly ghost.

To evaluate the role data plays, we need to understand if data in its modern avatar is more akin to being pey, a vampire-like evil spirit, or bhutham, a friendly ghost.

It is critical to understand and evaluate the role it plays, both for us as individual users, and in terms of institutions using our data to govern, regulate, and control. Credit: Reuters

In an article published last year in the journal History of Political Thought, Matthew Baxter examines the nuances of the first but incomplete Tamil translation of The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. Periyar, the pioneer of the Self-Respect Movement, published it in a serialised form in 1931. Periyar had written the introduction for this version that expanded the Marxist credo into a wider struggle for equality – not only against class but also against caste oppression. It was hence called Samadharma (equal dharma) Manifesto. The choice for an appropriate Tamil word for “spectre” found in the famous opening lines of the book is crucial. Pey and bhutham were candidate Tamil words. Pey meant a vampire-like evil spirit while bhutham was a friendly ghost. Referring to an 18th century Protestant missionary in India, Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg, who noted the divisions of supernaturals in Tamil, Baxter writes that “such Bhuta[m]s were created for the service of gods and other persons. Even though they have to do the most tedious jobs, [South Indians] do not consider them to be an affliction because they were not created for anything other than their jobs. Hence, one could not compare them to the wretched state of peys.”

The cultural-historical context meant that pey was pejorative while bhutham had a positive, transformative connotation. Consequently, the “spectre of communism” was translated as “bhutham of samadharma” in the first translation.

The pey-bhutham duality can be used as an effective lens to look at how Indian democracy is being fashioned in the age of data deluge. Various agencies, both private and public, are accessing our data, guiding our preferences, and also controlling our actions on many occasions. It is virtually impossible today to remain agnostic about the role of data in our lives. It is thus ever more critical to understand and evaluate the role it plays, both for us as individual users, and in terms of institutions using our data to govern, regulate, and control. It is in this context that we need to understand, in Periyar’s framing, if data in its modern avatar is more akin to being pey or bhutham.

The overdrive of the current coercive government to make Aadhaar mandatory has the horrific possibility of infringing on personal liberty and dignity mediated through seemingly “consensual” disclosure of data.

In other words, the potential of data playing the role of pey. The recent judgment on the ‘Right to Privacy’ (RTP) by the Supreme Court is remarkable in its import. It reinforces that not all citizens are criminals and upholds the ethic of jurisprudence of “innocent until proven guilty”. It substantiates that in a genuine democracy there is no a priori reason for the state to monitor its citizens through mandatory data contraptions like Aadhaar. It is astonishing that Ravi Shankar Prasad, a Bharatiya Janata Party minister, made a U-turn after the Supreme Court verdict that the central government always wanted to uphold the RTP. If his post-verdict comments are true, why was there a court case? While upholding the RTP is non-negotiable, we must start charting the contours of its relationship with the Right to Information (RTI) Act through which data is a potential bhutham.

RTI has been a big feather in the cap of transparency. While there is still a long way to go, it has been a powerful instrument in creating a substrate for participatory democracy. We must remember that the government is elected for the people and not the other way around and that comes with a basic set of behavioural norms for the state. It would be disastrous to conflate individual liberties, enshrined in the constitution and RTP, with the state’s mandatory disclosure of information through Section 4 of the RTI. It is thus imperative that we as citizens continue to monitor the state and its actions and ensure that the state doesn’t end up annihilating or curbing transparency as any kind of bargain for the RTP.

It brings me to another point of how data, in its pey form, can hide facts. As an example of harnessing transparency, recently in a study, using publicly available data, we were able to highlight the true extent of delays in wage payments in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). By analysing over nine million transactions across ten states, we assessed that the true payable penalty by the government to the workers for payment delays for one financial year alone was around Rs 1200 crores. Whereas, the reported amount of penalty for payment delays by the government was only Rs 519 crores. The under-reporting of penalty is a faulty, definitional sleight of hand, by the state in the NREGA Management Information System (MIS). The MIS assumes that the date of electronic invoice generation of wages in the individual states is the date on which wages are paid to the labourers. It doesn’t account for the delay in transferring wages from the Centre to the states. The Centre has thus completely abdicated responsibility for delays in funds release to the states.

This analysis was possible solely due to availability of transaction-level details in the NREGA MIS. Data, looked at this way, assumes the form of bhutham. The study will, we hope, assist the government to rectify its “mistake” and make computer systems reflect the truth. Addressing this problem to adhere to the Act is more a question of political willingness than a mere technical fix. True spirit of transparency dictates that information needs to collated and presented in a manner not so much to obfuscate facts but to increase agency and participation of the most marginalised. In NREGA alone, there are numerous examples of casting the role of data in the pey-bhutham framework.

As another example, not so long ago, I had a long conversation with an Adivasi woman, Anita Devi (name changed), in a village in Palamu district, Jharkhand. Anita Devi is not literate in the popular usage of the term. After discussing a range of topics from the functioning of NREGA to pensions and statistics to local governance, I deliberately posed a rather complicated question: “Can a machine learn democracy?”. She responded with casual elegance, saying “A computer doesn’t have a mind of its own. A computer is after all made and run by humans. If we truly want it to imbibe principles of democracy then we can teach it, isn’t it?”

This comment from the ground would likely make Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig chuckle, echoing as it does his motto “code is law”. Devi’s deep, insightful response speaks volumes about the need for compassionate information systems design to enable participatory democracy.

Transparency and accountability of the state and privacy of individuals are key pillars of a just society. We have to be mindful that none of these pillars are sacrificed at the cost of the other. As Anita Devi eloquently stated, to sustain constitutional ideals, we must incorporate democratic principles in the design and implementation of information technology, lest it become a tool of surveillance or exclusion. In this regard, much like Periyar’s coinage, data and its modern day twin, information technology, need to be well thought-out. A non-enactment of RTP may have turned data into pey and the essence of RTI has made data closer to bhutham. I say closer because there is still some distance to be covered for proactive disclosure of information to be genuinely implemented. There is much work to be done in designing and presenting public data from a bottom-up “user-friendly” perspective as opposed to a top-down “management” friendly perspective. In a hazardously unequal society like India, data can be a powerful friend if leveraged creatively for a more humane and equitable society. We need to rethink information structuring not just as MIS but as Janata Information Systems (JIS) to truly reconcile data being a bhutham.

Rajendran Narayanan teaches at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru.

Communalism Has Been Injected Even in Bread and Butter Issues of Jharkhand

In Mahuadand, a town in western Jharkhand, MNREGA contractors’ crimes are seen to stem from their religion, not from their trade.

Credit: Wikimedia

Mahuadand is a nondescript little town in the western part of Jharkhand bordering Chhattisgarh. The town is guarded by the Netarhat hills on one side and the landscape is dotted with stone quarries that employ largely adivasis on daily wages. During sunset, from far corners, one can see fumes from the quarries creating a stairway to the sky. Like most small towns in Jharkhand, the central square of this town has a sculpture of Birsa Munda, the legendary adivasi freedom fighter.

Birsa, also called Dharti Aba or father of the earth, led a revolt in the late 1800s against the British government and dikus (outsiders-exploiters). The dikus were mostly non-tribal farmers and landlords brought in by the British to ‘modernise’ adivasi agrarian techniques. The dikus engaged in land grabbing from the adivasis and became a new class of landlords. During the adivasi rebellion, Birsa is said to have risen and become a quasi-prophet figure. He is believed to have asked adivasis to not be swayed by religious groups and stick to their traditional religious beliefs.

The Birsa sculpture in Mahuadand stands proudly at the intersection of two arterial roads of the town: Ranchi road and Daltongunj road. The sculpture, enclosed in a small circular space has red flags mounted on the circumference of the fence. The colour of the flags bear no allegiance to the political belief that is generally associated with red. These flags are triangular and have a picture of Hanuman along with the phrase Jai Shree Ram embossed on one side. There are posters and signs near the main market displaying fervent religiosity by Bajrang Dal, the militant youth wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). Since its inception a little over 30 years ago, the Bajrang Dal has been reportedly involved in several cases of riots and acts of vandalism, primarily against Muslims.

There is a significant Muslim community here. Zarina Begum (name changed), who lives in the region, is a committed worker with a state level organisation monitoring the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA). State accountability is of paramount significance for her. A strong desire for justice prompted her to suspend an otherwise busy schedule, to walk several kilometres with me early in the morning to a village. We set out to conduct meetings and register grievances pertaining to MNREGA wage payments, as part of my action research on transparency and accountability in MNREGA across several states.

Hindutva symbolism in every neighbourhood

Upon entering the village, one notices the big-brother-like Hanuman flags that have draped Birsa in Mahuadand towering everywhere. The in-your-face Hindutva symbolism seemed to stand guard in every adivasi tola (neighbourhood), irrespective of the fact that there were also many people of other faiths in the village. None of the other religions had prominent public displays. Birsa’s call to his followers to observe their indigenous or Sarna faith seems lost today, even though the conditions that led to his rebellion a little over a century ago don’t seem to have altered. While exact figures are unavailable, the village has about 35% Christians, 20% Hindus, 15-20% Muslims, and about 10-15% adivasis believing in the Sarna faith. The main adivasi groups here are Oraons, Nagesias, and a smattering of Birjias.

Corruption in MNREGA

In the entire block, there are about 10,000 MNREGA workers, of which around 6,200 are from adivasi households, 300 odd from Dalit households and the rest from the ‘other’ category. The main kinds of work include the construction of farm ponds, wells, road construction and land levelling.

As we started reading out the names of people who were supposed to have worked and received wages in the village, most of them cried foul saying that they never got the wages. Some of them had received partial payments while some others were given five kilograms of rice for work done under the MNREGA, supervised by private contractors. On discovering how they were being cheated, the simmering anger among the extremely poor adivasi workers was palpable. As Zarina Begum educated them about their rights and entitlements, she urged them to come forward and register their complaints against the local contractors. She knew who those contractors were but has lacked support in her endeavours to bring about justice. “Those contractors are making money in your name. You are being used by somebody else and you don’t even know that. How can you be silent?”, she said while addressing the villagers.

After several hours of meetings, we temporarily parked ourselves with a few others from the village in a Hindu adivasi household. Discussions ensued on a range of topics. Unaware of Zarina Begum’s religious affiliation, one of them said, “Yeh Musalmanon ne tang kar rakha hai yahan” (These Muslims have created trouble here) referring to one of the contractors who happened to be Muslim. Zarina Begum sat there silently, nodding in agreement with what he was saying. Sitting opposite me, Pramila Devi, a resident of the village and not affiliated with any specific group, responded saying “It doesn’t matter that they are Muslims. There are Hindu contractors too. What matters is that they are contractors in MNREGA and we should not let that happen.” Zarina Begum was quiet during this conversation. When I asked her later how she felt about the remarks about the Muslim contractor, she responded nonchalantly, “Usko kitna taqleef hua hoga woh kehne mein. Yeh thekedar log jo zulm karte hain, woh dharm nahin dekhte hain. Woh sirf dekhte hain ki kaise gareebon ko looten” (How much pain would have prompted him to say such a thing? These contractors who exploit, don’t care about the religion of the exploited. They only think about exploiting the poor).

A day later, I got a call from a friend in Delhi asking if things were alright where I was. I didn’t understand the reason for the question. She then told me about the four Muslim men who were recently lynched in another part of Jharkhand on the grounds of being child lifters. Notwithstanding that child trafficking is indeed a genuine concern in Jharkhand, the repeated stories of lynching left me shocked, upset and angry. A balance sheet of accusations drawn on religious grounds alone – when the crime is a secular one – is extremely disquieting. I worried whether one might be seeing a similar pattern emerge in Mahuadand – where contractors’ crimes are seen to stem from their religion, and not from their trade. Despite there being a salad of multiple religions here, it is only Hindutva which is visible. This is not just incongruous but also scary. I immediately wondered how Zarina Begum continues to maintain her resolve for justice in such a high strung atmosphere.

In a later conversation with Zarina Begum, I asked her if she isn’t scared of working on people’s rights in such an environment. She responded in her characteristic casual yet resilient manner – “Dar kyon hoga? Mujhe koi dar nahin. Main to bas yehi chahti hun ki logon ko unka haq mile. Haq to Hindu ya Musalman nahin hota, na? (Why should I fear? I am not scared. I just want everybody to get their rights. Rights per se are neither Hindu nor Musalaman, no?)”

While Zarina Begum battles to get rights for all, Hindutva forces appear to be injecting a slow poison where Muslims can become easy targets in the process – either when they demand their rights or when rights are being demanded against them. Do the same rights lose their importance when made against the state or Hindu contractors?

Rajendran Narayanan is a faculty member with Azim Premji University, Bangalore.

In Defence of Activism in Universities

The recent upsurge in protests across universities has led to claims that pedagogy and activism cannot overlap, but that is rarely the case.

Students protest in JNU in February 2016. Credit: Facebook

Over the last year, we have witnessed much dissent and discontent across some Indian universities. There are some who suspect that academics and universities at large are being surveilled by the state. Many, on the other hand, believe that academics should only focus on pedagogy and not get involved in any kind of activism.

Activism, as understood in a myopic, monochromatic way, has earned a pejorative reputation. These observers seem to believe that activism and pedagogy are mutually exclusive of each other.

It is important to anchor any discussion on activism on a consideration of higher education in the country, especially liberal education. The inherent subjectivity of the broad disciplinary categories along with the questions one seeks to answer in each discipline ought to inform the discussion. The goals of liberal higher education need to be understood under the condition that any pedagogical question would be rooted, paradoxically, in subjectivity. For example, suppose a student of anthropology wants to do ethnographic work on the plight of Dalit transgenders in urban India. The choice of the subject – Dalit transgenders – and the questions one seeks to understand are necessarily political choices.

Pedagogy and activism

The noted philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell is an example of being an academic who engaged in political activism. Right from the time of the First World War, Russell had a conscientious objection to war; he went against the grind of the patriotic project of warfare in Britain and opposed it for moral and political reasons. In 1915, he wrote in The Cambridge Review,

“Behind the rulers, in whom pride has destroyed humanity, stand the patient populations, who suffer and die. To them, the folly of war and the failure of governments are becoming evident as never before. To their humanity and collective wisdom we must appeal if civilisation is not to perish utterly in suicidal delirium.”

These words ring as true a hundred years later.

A year later, in 1916, Russell authored a pamphlet speaking out openly against the manner in which the conscription law was enforced during the First World War. He was subsequently convicted and dismissed from lecturership at Trinity College, only to be reinstated later. These events didn’t deter Russell’s continued work as an activist.

The remarkable ‘Russell-Einstein Manifesto‘ released in 1955 became the bedrock of the first Pugwash Conference in 1957. It was written in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War when a large section of the world was shell-shocked by the potential armageddon that nuclear warfare portended. An international conference was called to assess the dangers to humanity due to use of such weapons of mass destruction. Some notable signatories of this manifesto included reputed scientists Max Born and Linus Pauling in addition to Russell and Albert Einstein. All four were Nobel laureates. In the press conference when this manifesto was released, Russell started with a worrying alert, “I am bringing the warning pronounced by the signatories to the notice of all the powerful governments of the world in the earnest hope that they may agree to allow their citizens to survive.”

This statement clearly situates the political positions of the signatories against regimes that were furthering their agenda.

Continuing in the activist tradition of Russell, Pauling questioned the role of the US government and nuclear warfare. The now popular nationalist and anti-nationalist binary had played out against Pauling in the early 1950s. From having contributed to the US efforts during the war, Pauling adopted a path of social activism for peace following the consequences of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His fearless critique of the state during the McCarthy era prompted the US government to deny him a passport to visit England for a conference. The official reason given was, “Not in the best interest of the United States”.

Science and politics aren’t exclusive of each other

It took a Nobel prize in chemistry for the state to revert its position. Pauling relentlessly wrote about the potential hazards of nuclear wars and condemned the role of the US in the Vietnam war through several speeches and signatures in protest letters. He holds a rare distinction of having won unshared Nobel prizes in two different areas – chemistry and peace. And throughout, he held positions in various universities alongside his continued social activism.

The examples of Russell and Pauling bring to light the artificial boundaries of intellectual and moral engagement some departments in universities have done and continue to do.

Consider an example from the world of science. Hydraulic fracture (fracking) is a popular paradigm put forth by some scientists for oil exploration and as a means to alleviate the impending energy crisis. While a group of scientists are strong advocates of this technique, another group of scientists are working to highlight how the soil geometry would get deformed using this technique, leading to underground water contamination among other potential hazards. The contrarian stance assumed by the latter group is indeed a political position and one could spot some of them in protest marches advocating the stoppage of fracking. The rigour of science isn’t compromised in questioning the status quo and questioning the positions of “going with the flow”.

Thanks to the open source and free software movement, alternate computing paradigms have been created challenging corporate hegemony in technology. For example, the free software R, has become the gold standard among the community of academic statisticians. The birth and the proliferation of this software (and other open source tools) had their origins in questioning the status quo of proprietary software. They were necessarily alternate positions challenging the power structures of the market and questioning the very nature and methods of knowledge production. The sustained efforts of the open source community, which includes several academics guilty of technological activism, have altered the imagination of knowledge production and consumption today.

Evidently, the distinctions between pedagogy and activism seem not only artificial but also pernicious.

Free speech

A close comrade of activism and pedagogy is the right to free speech.

Robert Faurisson was a French academic who famously, or perhaps infamously, published two letters in 1979 in the French daily, Le Monde, claiming that the gas chambers used by the Nazis against Jews didn’t exist. In fact, he has gone on record stating that “Hitler never ordered nor permitted that anyone be killed by reason of his race or religion”. He had also called The Diary of Anne Frank a “forgery.” He was naturally subject to much controversy, public scrutiny and received death threats, for, what are, unarguably, historically fallacious views.

Naom Chomsky. Credit: Andrew Rusk/Flickr CC BY 2.0

A petition, written by the socialist scholar Serge Thion asked the authorities for Faurisson’s “safety and the free exercise of his legal rights”. The petition didn’t contain material about Faurisson’s scholarship. A line in the petition was “Since he began making his findings public, Professor Faurisson has been subject to…”. The word ‘findings’ was misconstrued and misrepresented as ‘conclusions’ and earned the wrath of being “scandalous”.

The petition was signed by around 600 people including Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Chomsky was given inglorious epithets of being anti-semitic and had perhaps put an entire nation at risk when, apparently, accusations were hurled that the US was indistinguishable from Nazi Germany. Chomsky responded to the accusations with a landmark article titled ‘Some Elementary Comments on The Rights of Freedom of Expression’. Chomsky’s response was premised on the idea that the right of free expression is not confined to a codified set of approved notions and, in fact, the right of free speech must be defended precisely when the notions are most offensive. The true test of free speech is only when multiple parties disagree with the content and yet the speakers find it safe to voice their opinions. A genuine democracy should have certain fundamental civil liberties and the freedom of speech without any fear of backlash from the state.

Faurisson’s articles were later published in a book and Chomsky’s brilliant essay on free speech was the preface of this book that contained articles openly denying the Holocaust.

This isn’t just an anecdote. It is a reminder that the same article by Chomsky assumed different avatars at different points in time. The signing of the petition and the publication of the essay in 1980 was activism, and the subsequent reading and interpretation of it by later scholars and students has been an act of pedagogy. One cannot and should not create silos of activism and pedagogy.

Several modern day departments in top universities, by their very construction, encourage activism. Take, for instance, the departments of gender studies or women’s studies. In this manifest madness of separating activism and pedagogy, we may be committing a major blunder because dissent is the essence of examining ideas and creation of knowledge. The few examples illustrated in here barely skim the surface of the need to create spaces for a dialogue between intellectual rigour and articulating public engagement to hopefully create a society that holds the state accountable for its actions. Critical pedagogy and liberal education crucially hinges on being unafraid to ask questions and fearlessly tread the path of discomfort. It is important to inculcate the true spirit of scientific inquiry, not merely to scholastic pursuits but also in the pursuit of a better society – one where democracy and equity aren’t compromised and put in artificially labelled boxes of pedagogy and activism.

This article originally appeared in E-QUALNEWS, Volume 3, Issue 6, November 2016.