Masters in illiberal arts Shekhar Gupta | Indian Express | August 22, 2009 Mumbai's life is at a risk !Raw visa dealBandh Culture In BengalRacism Alive and Well in US Amid all the noise made over Jaswant Singh's book and his expulsion one statement stands out. It came from Arun Jaitley, the first to be fielded to defend the expulsion. One of the more serious charges against Jaswant Singh, he said, was that he went against the "national consensus" on Sardar Patel. Now, can there ever be a national consensus on a figure, an aspect, or any chapter of history? You can have national consensus on a policy, an idea for the future, on high principles of nation-building, constitutionalism and so on. But a consensus on history? If history were to be assessed and analysed through national consensus we would make a very poor democracy. It is regimes like Kim Il-Sung's that believe in the idea of official history, officially mandated views on society, politics and philosophy. The sad truth, however, is that at least in this one area we in India are not much better than the more classic authoritarian societies. Except that instead of one personality cult, we have many, reflecting our diversity. But in essence it amounts to the same closing of the Indian mind when it comes to our past.
The BJP in 2009 mandates that you cannot hold a view on Jinnah and Patel that is at variance with its own "corporate" view. The Shiv Sena would ban anything that does not look like a hagiography entirely adhering to its own version of the "national consensus" on Shivaji. Any deviation, in fact, even before a ban, may expose you to vandalism and arson. In Bengal you would still risk your neck if you used an expression like "late" Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. The study of Sikh history brings its own challenge since it is so integral to the evolution of the faith. Nobody can say one critical thing even about Mahatma Gandhi and go unpunished. Arun Shourie had muck thrown at him (literally) for questioning Ambedkar. Nikki Bedi may have gone too far in the expression she used on her show on Star more than a decade ago, but did it really justify the filing of criminal cases against Rupert Murdoch? Now, that is an interesting example. Check the track record of the top 50 democracies around the world. How many of these in the past would have done such a thing (or are likely to in the future). You can say what you want about the Queen or her ancestors in Britain, you can say whatever about George Washington and John F. Kennedy, de Gaulle or Churchill. But how come the great Indian intellectual machine has not been able to produce a single book, if not raising questions, at least generating an honest debate over Gandhi? Which Indian commentator even today would have the courage to argue that many of Gandhi's policies were perhaps not good for India as it became independent, and are totally irrelevant? Every year on Gandhi Jayanti we pay tributes to him and then do exactly the opposite of all he stood for, for the rest of the year. But even a few unflattering references, or maybe just rumoured to be unflattering like those in the Lapierre-Collins' Freedom at Midnight, or Stanley Wolpert's Nine Hours to Rama, and we go radioactive. That is the reason why the poorest entry on our CV as a great democracy of 62 years is in contemporary history writing. The Nehru-Gandhi family has led us for most of these years, directly or indirectly, and yet there isn't a single book on one of the greatest democratic dynasties of all times that would do justice to them, our intellect, or to the great Indian tradition of debate. Richard Attenborough said, famously, that when he first talked of making the film Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru implored him to tell an honest, fair story, "warts and all". But can anybody, an academic, a journalist or even a filmmaker (forget a "Jaswant Singh" from the Congress) write a genuine biography of Nehru, Indira or Rajiv "warts and all"? The Congress is understandably thrilled at the BJP shooting itself in the foot. But what does it say for the ruling party's own intellect or liberalism when its own Gujarat unit has supported the ban? In fact we Indians are most undeserving inheritors of the liberal Gandhi-Nehru tradition as we ban more books, plays and art exhibitions than any other real democracy. Nobody is innocent here, nobody holier than thou and so nobody has any right to lecture others, whether BJP, Congress or the Left. Amartya Sen, in fact, flatters us by making us famous around the world as argumentative Indians. History is just its starkest example of this total politicisation of our study of the liberal arts. It is because our politics has been so rooted in the bitter past (although now there is a chance that we may be moving from that politics of grievance to a politics of aspiration) that history has become our most contentious social science and professional historians our most ideologically polarised academics. There is a Congress version of history set against a saffron version, with a distinct Left stream. But because we have been mostly ruled by a "pinko" Congress we have been indoctrinated with a Leftist Congress view of history. Anything else, as the BJP now describes Jaswant's views on Patel, is sacrilege. What kind of history can you write, what kind of debate can you have on these brilliantly fascinating figures from your history if you start out by either deifying or demonising them? That is why any worthwhile writing or debate on contemporary Indian history usually takes place overseas. Most of the good research is done by foreigners, or Indians safely based at foreign institutions. Our study of the liberal arts, overall, has got trapped in a vicious cycle. Because we do not tolerate healthy, robust, open debate, we do not produce better scholarship. Because we do not produce better scholarship, we cannot have better debate. Despite such a disastrous mess in our higher education, we have institutions providing degrees in engineering, management and medicine that will be respected around the world. But for a great liberal arts degree you must go to Harvard, Columbia, Wisconsin, Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, SOAS. This remarkable intolerance of debate and illiberalism has kept our study of the liberal arts and social sciences in the stone age, greatly undermining our strength as a democracy and creating shortages in intellectual capital that may not be so evident at once, but are fatal. If we fret over the fact that we produce too few engineers and doctors, think about what a shortage we are creating of historians, sociologists, philosophers, even, and perhaps most striking of all, economists? Can any democracy survive without them? [email protected]
