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Magazine
`Aye' to political correctness
ANIL DHARKER
A society with enforced political correctness perhaps eliminates prejudices in future generations.
POLITICAL correctness has become such a joke that it's difficult to say anything nice about it. You can't call anyone short; you have to say they are vertically challenged. You can't call anyone fat; you have to say they are size enhanced. The blind are visually challenged, the handicapped, differently enabled. There's some virtue in the last one, because "handicapped" is a negative word, but the new substitutes just don't make any sense when the original word (like "blind") is neutral.
Yet there's much to be said for political correctness in one particular field. And that field, oddly enough, is politics.
Let's go to the land of PC, the U.S. of A. Race relations has always been its trickiest public issue. For a long time, it was ok to say "Negro" because it was seen as an anthropological term (its derogatory form, "nigger", was of course taboo in polite conversation). "Negro" gave away to "Black" and "Black" to "Afro-American". In each case, there was a striving to strip the word of any possible negative connotation.
But real political correctness goes further, and far beyond just racial terminology. In the United States, a White man cannot say, "They (meaning Afro-Americans) are criminals." That's a clear racial slur. He cannot even say, "Afro-Americans make up a disproportionate number of the criminal class," even though this may be statistically correct. That's because a sweeping generalisation like this, based purely on racial stereotyping, disregards, historical and sociological factors.
A similar protective shield surrounds Native Americans (the former Red Indians), so that anyone damning the race on the basis of either individual incidents or even comprehensive statistics will be called a bigot.
What PCness has done in the developed world over the last few years is to make people watch what they say. An Englishman will be careful about any remarks which could be misconstrued about English citizens of Indian, Pakistani or West Indian origin. In the strictest sense, this may be a form of hypocrisy (after all, this particular Englishman may have a whole collection of racial prejudices), but the fact that you cannot say aloud racist remarks reduces the slurs that are in general circulation. And the fact that you cannot say certain things, reduces the chances over time that you will even say them to yourself. Which means that, ultimately, you may even stop thinking them. An even more vital part of Pcness has to do with children. Children, all over the world, start with a clean slate. It's on that clean slate that racial stereotyping, racial slurs and racial prejudices are written by older people, generally parents. But if a school ticks off a student because of a politically incorrect remark, that reprimand will reach his parents, who will try the next time to keep their own mouths shut. Without handed-down prejudices, children will behave in a spirit of complete even-handedness. Which means that a society, with enforced PCness, is eliminating prejudices in future generations.
Something like that happened in India even before the phrase "Political Correctness" was invented. Just think of what Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru did. Gandhi single-handedly eliminated the word "untouchables" from our vocabulary by substituting it with "Harijan". He and Nehru also imposed a kind of PCness in the Hindu vocabulary for Muslims. After Gandhi's death, Nehru's sheer force of personality, his complete belief in secularism and his own personal example, made it impossible for an educated, middle-class Indian to communally stereotype a Muslim. The average citizen's own prejudices may have run deep, but he didn't dare speak them out in polite society. What is happening in American society today was, in fact, taking place in our country 50 years ago. And Nehru's example — and his legacy — carried our form of Pcness through his successors. Given time, improvement in literacy and greater economic prosperity, communal prejudices and long harboured resentments might just have gone out.
And then came Lal Krishna Advani and the Rath Yatra, the beginning of the end for communal harmony in India. What Advani did was to overthrow Nehru's legacy.
What Advani did was to make it acceptable for the bigots in our society to come out into the open. Their stridency resulted in the general "outing" of the worst kind of communal prejudices from even the respectable middle class. Gandhi and Nehru's dream ended. Gujarat began.
It's not going to be easy to take things back where they were. We cannot even try because our political leadership has now kicked Political Correctness out the door. What can we do? Kick our political leadership out the same way.
Anil Dharker is a noted journalist, media critic and writer.
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