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If Indian liberals bore you, are you a bad person?

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Omair Ahmad
Omair AhmadAug 18, 2016 | 09:25

If Indian liberals bore you, are you a bad person?

No political philosophy seems to evoke as much disdain in India as liberalism. Sneered at by the "revolutionaries", and scorned by the conservatives, it seems that the "liberal" is a whipping boy for everybody.

This is not unique to India; the liberal cosmopolitan has been despised by everybody from Stalin, to Mao, to Hitler. In some senses, many Indian liberals wear this contempt by their contemporaries as a badge of pride – if all these people hate them, then they must be doing something good.

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This is a false argument. Horrible people hate almost everybody, and their scorn is not enough to prove an argument. This defence also, at times, allows liberals to avoid the difficult questions.

One of these was just raised by Manu Joseph, when he wrote in a provocative column, "If Dalits bore you, are you a bad person?" Since Joseph is known for writing provocative stuff (for example, he wrote a cover story a few years back that everybody was happy in Kashmir - an error of judgment whose mistake is now obvious to everyone), it has been easy to dismiss the question, but for liberals it should have been a moment for soul-searching.

Joseph argued basically one thing: newspapermen like himself had experienced the fact that their readers were not interested in Dalit issues. Thus an editor had a choice: either persevere with an unpopular topic (and go bankrupt), or focus on other things (maybe filmstars or cricketers).

The core assumption behind his argument is a liberal one: people know what they want. Either you tailor your product to their needs, or you find yourself out of a job. This is the core of the liberal view – that an individual knows her or his needs best, and if we just stopped interfering unnecessarily, the most harmonious outcome – the greatest freedom for everybody – would result.

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Try telling that to a Dalit who was chained to a truck and beaten black and blue while the police stood around and did nothing. Try to tell that to numerous women facing rape and sexual harassment who cannot register a complaint because of social pressure. Try and tell that to the tribals forced off of the land they have lived on for centuries because the police tell them they do not have the right paperwork but a new mining corporation does. Try and tell that to Kashmiris (happy ones, apparently) who have been under curfew for 40 days. Try and tell that to Kashmiri Pandits who have spent a life in exile. Try and tell that to the victims of 1984, of 2002, of the Nellie massacre, the Bombay massacres, the Bhagalpur massacres, and so on.

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The question of Dalits is not about Dalits, but about justice.

It seems, left to their own, members of Indian society do not seem to encourage freedom for everybody. A few prosper, and the many suffer. This is why revolutionaries pour scorn on liberals.

The problem is that if liberals then defend the rights, the freedoms, of these groups, they earn the wrath of conservatives, who ask, "If you are so interested in the freedoms of all of us, why the special attention to these groups?"

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More damning than the anger is the apathy. The well-off just do not care, and without their willingness to buy newspapers and thus pay for such information, media companies turn into pages and pages of advertisements featuring barely clad women, mixed with jingoist hyperbole, and a lot of shouting on TV.

This is the essential question that Manu Joseph has posed for liberals in India: do the rights of groups – especially those groups that are marginalised as groups due to socio-economic conditions – matter more than the right of free citizens in a free Republic to decide what they should do and care about?

This question has no right answer, because, in effect, it is the wrong question. The question of Dalits is not about Dalits, but about justice. The question about women, Kashmir, tribals and other marginalised groups is the same. The question to ask is this: "If justice bores you, are you a bad person?"

Obviously the vast majority of people are interested in justice, because it is in their self-interest. Nobody wishes to go to jail for a crime they did not commit. Nor do they wish for a criminal to walk away scot-free. A Republic is endangered when different people are treated differently, and yet this is what we live with. The questions of reservations, of gender justice, of the autonomy of states, of land ownership revolve primarily around the inequitable treatment of people. Nor is this a new discovery. Dr Ambedkar said it in 1950, putting it in the starkest possible terms:

"On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which is Assembly has to laboriously built up."

Here are the questions that we have been avoiding for 66 years, does justice bore us? Does equitable treatment threaten us? How long will it be before the person next to you is treated as citizen, and not just as the outcome of their social and economic privileges (or lack thereof)?

Do Indians bore you? They do not bore me.

Last updated: August 19, 2016 | 11:59
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