In a recent episode of his primetime show on NDTV India, Ravish Kumar asked his viewers whether they too talked to their friends and family members in the same way as the anchors and panelists of certain TV debates talked to each other. Did they also begin their conversations by abusing each other at the outset? Did they have to shout in order to be heard? The events of the past few weeks in India should make us all – who watch in glee night after night as anchors and party spokespersons batter each other with torrents of abuse – pause to ponder these questions.
We ought to do so, if not for the love of our country, then at least for our own sakes, because the violence has now spilled out of television studios and onto the street. Today, as our public spaces are overrun by hooligans and vandals, we may choose to enjoy the spectacle from the safety of our homes. But what shall we do when this violence reaches our doorsteps, as it surely will?
All those who see the Jawaharlal Nehru University episode as merely an issue relating to freedom of expression have misdiagnosed the nature and seriousness of the underlying malaise. The prescription of an American-style unlimited freedom of expression as the panacea for the ills of the Indian public sphere actually impoverishes our understanding of the issue by advocating a deeply imitative brand of liberalism. The proponents of such a view fail to appreciate a basic insight, which the founders of this country saw quite clearly – that the roots of violence lie in speech. While it is undeniable that in order to function properly, the formal institutions of a democracy must be embedded within a public sphere where opinions can be exchanged freely, it also bears reminding that the freedom of expression is only one aspect of the democratic public sphere. Equally necessary is an ethic of public discourse.
Ancients knew better
Indian tradition, more generally, seems to have been acutely aware of this fact. “Vak prabaddho hi samsarah (The world is held together by speech),” the Mahabharata tells us. Language carries within itself, woven into its very fabric, an ethics of conversation. And on those ethics is founded the very possibility of a genuine social ethos, of co-existence between people of very different persuasions in a society. When we learn to converse with another person, we cultivate a disposition of open-mindedness towards them. While it is true that we begin every conversation with our pre-conceived notions, it is not a conversation unless we are willing to rethink our position in light of what our interlocutor has to say. Only if we leave the door open, however narrow, for the possibility that what the other person says might genuinely change our mind, are we really conversing. Otherwise, we are only talking past each other. Or worse still, talking at each other, which is actually a kind of violence. For those who have turned upon their interlocutors, the Mahabharata tell us, words acquire the character of arrows. And from such an exchange, no one can come away without being wounded.
The seeds of violence are sown whenever this ethic of conversation is perverted. The ethic is ripped apart every night in that televised orgy of abusive wrangling, sometimes mistakenly called a debate, on prime time shows beamed across the country. But more generally, the openness of a conversation is also challenged every time we refuse to listen to the other person’s point of view. That is why a snub is often regarded as a particularly hurtful kind of effrontery. What begins with a snub often ends in abuse. And when dialogue degenerates into vitriolic name calling (fascist! traitor!), it is only a matter of time before we come down to blows. The only way to defuse this escalating spiral of confrontation is by once again learning to address and engage our adversary in conversation.
Thus, in the absence of an ethics of discourse, freedom to voice one’s opinions is an empty freedom, and often deeply destructive. If we are to really make sense of the disfigurement of our public sphere, it is essential that we break out of this one-sided framework and construe the issue more expansively. The real question that confronts us today is not merely one about the limits of the freedom of expression. But rather: Why we, as a democratic society, have failed so utterly in developing a genuine culture of civic discourse.
The art of conversation
To listen to others, and to be heard in turn, is the most ethical of dispositions that human beings are capable of. And such a disposition is an indispensable element of the political culture of a democracy such as ours, marked as it is by deep diversities of language, culture, religion, and ideology. However, wherever one looks today this ethic of conversation between political adversaries appears to be in a state of deep crisis. But we shall delude ourselves if we see in the recent excesses of the Sangh Parivar either something anomalous or something unprecedented. The strategy of not letting your opponent speak was not invented by Hindutva groups – groups across the political spectrum have been committed to this idea for a while. In fact, what we are witnessing is the unfolding of a logic of competitive muscle-flexing that has long since displaced any remnants of the culture of dialogue and debate that might have persisted from the time of the freedom struggle.
One of the most salient features of the national movement, which has been all but forgotten today, is its deeply discursive nature. The freedom struggle had to respond politically to the British challenge that India had never been, and could never be, a nation – that it was merely a constellation of diverse communities, perpetually at arms against each other. Given the fact that it took shape in a climate where the threat of widespread violence was very real, the Indian movement was all the more remarkable in its response to the British challenge. Over a period of several decades, it tied together very different ideological strands with the thread of conversation.
Vocabulary of violence
Politics, of course, is not an academic seminar. Sometimes, one has to shout in order to be heard. But if our response to a shout is only to shout harder, then we have already condemned ourselves to a course, at the end of which lies only violence, never co-existence. One has only to consider the situation in Haryana, where a community felt the need to go on a rampage – burning its own homes, hospitals and schools – just to make its voice heard. When violence becomes the sole vocabulary of political negotiation, we all must eventually burn.
The irreversible derangement of the political vocabulary, perhaps the single most destructive legacy of the Jawaharlal Nehru University episode is merely a symptom of something deeper – the degeneration of the very grammar of political discourse. This, in a sense, is the single biggest political challenge of our time. Any movement that seeks to break new ground within Indian politics, must address this lacuna in a way that is both ethically sound and politically potent.