Freedom of the fist

Freedom of the fist

The attack on Arun Shourie, a former editor and now a minister of state for disinvestment, symbolises the new mood of intolerance and belligerence that has come to inform civil society, not just in a supposedly cosmopolitan city like Mumbai but in the country as a whole. Where the freedom of the fist is valourised, there can be little hope of reasoned debate, nuanced understanding of complex issues, or even an informed acceptance of differences in perceptions and perspectives. When lathis are deployed to settle intellectual arguments, all that will ensue is the sterility of discourse and, ultimately, the silence of the grave.

This, incidentally, is the third physical attack on Shourie mounted by the supposed followers of Dr Balasaheb Ambedkar. Their anger against him stems from what they perceive as Shourie's deliberate denigration of their leader in his book, Worshipping False Gods, which was published a few years ago. They are, of course, entitled to their disagreement with Shourie's treatment of his subject in that book -- a person that not just they but the country holds in reverence -- and this is not to plead for the validity of the arguments put forward in it. But the refutation of these arguments demands scholarship, not the hysterical shouting of ``Arun Shourie murdabad, Babasaheb Ambedkar zindabad''. The meticulous citing of facts goes a far longer way than the mere flexing of muscles in establishing the correctness of an intellectual position because it convinces not just the authors of such writing, and their immediate constituency, but the general reader and citizen. Several Dalit scholars have done just that,through their own books and reviews of Shourie's work. Indeed, Ambedkar, the acknowledged architect of the Indian Constitution, would have done so himself, he who had so famously defended many a previously unarticulated position. After all, wasn't it this man who once observed, even as the new Republic was being ushered in, that ``political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognises liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life''.

One of the constituents of that ``liberty'' is the freedom of expression. But even as this is stated, there is one aspect that needs to be reiterated. Such a freedom must, in turn, be leavened by an awareness of other freedoms -- including the freedom of others to exist as equal citizens. Therefore, if a regional leader were to declare in an editorial carried in his widely-read paper that a certain section of the populace should be taught a lesson, as Bal Thackeray had done in 1992, it really constitutes an abuse of the freedom of expression. Every responsible intellectual should, therefore, even as he or she engages with ideas, events, personalities, also recognise this. It is as Ludwig Wittgenstein had once observed, `Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'.