A decade back when Amartya Sen reflected upon “The Argumentative Indian” and talked about his importance in preserving the secular tradition of Indian democracy, one liked the way he brought a complex narrative cogently together. But that Indian was not somebody I was missing. He might not be as coherent as before but I knew he was still around and doing his bit to keep the tradition alive and kicking. After all we had a Sikh Prime Minister and a Muslim President in 2005. Nitish Kumar had just defeated Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar elections. Arnab Goswami had not emerged as a force on national television. Of course, Osama Bin Laden was alive but Indian society was not threatened. 2015 is different for the space for dissent is shrinking and ISIS is knocking at the doors. So when Bhikhu Parekh’s “Debating India” (Oxford) emerged on the stands, it was time to approach the Lord of political thought.
“It is different from ‘The Argumentative Indian’ in various ways,” says Parekh as we settle for a conversation on a cold December morning in Delhi.
“When Sen talks about Indians, he tends to homogenise all Indians. I wanted to get away from it. I wanted to talk not about Indian but India. Sen implies that the entire Indian tradition has been argumentative. My contention is if you take religious and epistemological issues, we have been very radical and rigorous but when it comes to social and political issues, we have been rather timid. There has been no serious questioning on why some people are poor. Why are some people Dalits?” he questions and quotes Ambedkar. “‘How come no Hindu felt morally angry and outraged at the practice of untouchability.’ I wanted to show a process which can be very rigorous and radical in one area can be very timid in other.”
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Secondly, Parekh says, he agrees there is a tradition of argumentative India but there is a far more important tradition of public debate, which doesn’t exist in any other country. “A tradition where debate is a public spectacle, where in front of thousands of people two or more individuals debate big issues. The idea was to understand this unique feature of India. Imagine the debate between the Christian missionaries and Hindu pandits. The debate is chaired by the Maharaja of Banaras. Debate goes on for three weeks and the Maharaja asks the missionaries to fire the first question.”
Over the years the quality and the fruits of these public debates ceased to percolate down to the masses. “When Gandhi was at the centre of public debate, it used to,” he counters. He reminds that Gandhi was at the centre of six public debates in India. Gandhi and Savarkar, out of which, grew Hind Swaraj. Gandhi and Modernists. Then Gandhi and terrorists were in constant dialogue. Gandhi and Tagore debated on foreign cloth and finally Gandhi and Ambedkar. “I remember the Gandhi-Tagore debate. People used to wait who is going to win, who is going to come with a new argument. We saw the results on the ground. When Tagore said to Gandhi: ‘you are making a bonfire of foreign clothes. Aren’t you ashamed of burning these beautiful saris? Instead, give them away to the poor. And Gandhi responded: ‘Aren’t you ashamed of talking like that. Do you think the poor man has the resources to look after the sari? It is an insult to the poor man to give him this kind of sari. These debates shaped the consciousness of Indians. ”
After Independence, public debates moved to the formalised environment of the Parliament but unfortunately the standards began to diminish.
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“Around the 70s, the tradition began to decline. In order to have public debate there have to have big issues, there must be important differences, individuals capable of speaking and thinking and speaking in terms of memorable phrases. All these factors declined. There are orators like Narendra Modi but very few debaters. He can harangue across, but can he debate?” he muses.
This is also the time when the assertion of Hindu identity began to gather momentum. Parekh holds Jawaharlal Nehru partly responsible for it. “Nehru said if India wants to get anywhere it has to break with the past. Past has killed us. And like Thatcher in the U.K., the whole nation got hijacked into thinking there is no alternative. But 20 years after Nehru passed away, we had a slogan ‘Garv Se Kaho Hum Hindu Hain’. I think when 85 per cent of population is asked to say that they are proud to be Hindu, it means the majority community had to go through self pity because during Panditjit’s time, rightly or wrongly, they felt they have been deprived of their rights.”
Putting the debate on intolerance in context, Parekh says if you look at the symbols of our national identity 80-90 per cent of them are either Hindu or Buddhist. “That was the recognition of the Hindu face of India. Having done that kind of thing, Nehru said we will not reform the minority till it is ready but he came up with the Hindu Code Bill. Some Hindus began to feel that in Panditji’s India they had no significant role. They misunderstood what Nehru was trying to do. On his part, rather than trying to understand that Hindus were humiliated for 2000 years, he described them communal. That is the context in which slogans like ‘Garv Se Kaho Hum Hindu Hai’ emerged.”
The Padma Bhushan, at the same time, maintains that the present Hindu self assertion is misguided, “It is going to the other extreme. To talk about Ganpati as an example of plastic surgery is absurd. And if they go down this road the movement will discredit itself. I can understand if they say that India’s past be recognised. That Ramayan and Mahabharat are not just Hindu but Indian. Those sort of aspirations I can understand and debate upon, but to go much further than that to say nobody will eat cow meat that is going to an absurd degree.”
Coming to Islam, Parekh, who has served on several commissions and committees on multiculturalism and racial equality in the U.K., says Islam doesn’t have the tradition of public debating. He has created an imaginary dialogue between Gandhi and Laden in the book where Gandhi compares Laden to his extremist friends during the Freedom Movement. “Ijtihaad is there but the doors for it have been closed. The doors for reinterpretation of Quran are closed. Some people say no there is space but the question is how much space is there. The book helps you navigate your way but it also stops you from going a little further.”
Comparing the debating traditions in India and the U.K., Parekh, who holds the erstwhile masters responsible for swerving the debate in a communal direction, says, “In the U.K., even if there are differences on the surface, there is unanimity on where the country wants to go and that prevents them from pushing the differences too far. We are still in the process of creating that consensus.”
Eventually, Parekh says, his fear is that the space for dissent and disagreement, tolerance and civility is beginning to close. “Not in a big way but there are signs. In a population of 1.25 billion, two-three incidents are not a big thing. However, these incidents are not episodic. They seem to signify some kind of churning in the Hindu mind. Certain things cannot be debated any more. That worries me. If you close the debate with a bullet, like it happened in the case of murders of rationalists, it is sad.”
New arena
These days the arena of debate has shifted to television studios. “In a crude way,” remarks Parekh. “When the anchor becomes a debater, the situation is like an umpire becoming a player. Having said that I find some stuff on Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha TV, stimulating.”