Who doesn’t like another round of Amartya Sen? So when the economist criticised the Narendra Modi government in media interviews, it was move over Shruti Seth, you’re so last week.

Modi supporters took to the internet for some ad hominem sputtering: Sen is privileged, travels first class, goes to five star hotels, doesn’t pay tax, went to Cambridge. They also slapped on some good old-fashioned labels: Congressi, Commie traitor, Western stooge, Adarsh Liberal.

Former Supreme Court justice Markandey Katju explained on his blog how the Nobel prize works: Warmongers get the peace prize, only the undeserving get the literature prize and as for economics, it has been reduced to the “mumbo jumbo” of practitioners like Sen.

This is what some others had to say.

 

 

 

August arguments all, but few people seemed interested in what exactly Sen had to say. Why is it that our debates are so often reduced to who is making the argument? The next step is to colour code arguments, giving them party affiliations. The colonisation of ideas by political codes has become oppressive. It does, however, relieve people of the responsibility of engaging with the substance of a debate.

Three reasons

Sen has given at least three reasons why, as an Indian citizen, he did not want Narendra Modi as his prime minister. First, he accused the government of undue interference in academia. He did not allege this was a novel phenomenon, but that it was happening on an unprecedented scale. It is certainly more visible, whether it is because the sympathies of the academic establishment are largely ranged against this government, leading to a clamour every time somebody is replaced, or because the number of removals and resignations have actually been high.

Sen’s decision not to continue in his position as chancellor of Nalanda University for a second term is only one instance. And whatever his record there, he had been chosen by the governing body of the institution. Not only did the Centre ignore this decision, it gave no reason for choosing not to clear the extension of his tenure, which led to the suspicion that Sen’s ouster was not directly related to his capabilities as chancellor.

Second, Sen said he was sceptical about Modi’s secularism, that he stood by the reservations he had expressed during the election campaign. In 2013, he had said that the disturbing question of the 2002 riots had not gone away. This concern that hundreds from a minority community were killed in a matter of days, while the government and state machinery allegedly stood by, is not the preserve of the Congress or the Left. In the public conversation over the riots, protests against the violence are now neatly categorised as political opposition to the Bharatiya Janata Party. It is not even the preserve of the secular.

The events of 2002, and the fact that some of the cases seem to have lost their way, should trouble everyone who feels violence in the name of religion is wrong. The leader who failed to protect minorities then may have some tough questions to answer about his prime ministership now.

Third, Sen criticised the Central spending cuts on health and education. This should not be surprising. In public perception, at least, he has always been an economist who stood for investment in health and education to improve human capabilities and, as a consequence, productivity. He has also criticised the fetishisation of growth rates.This brought him into very public conflict with his fellow economist Jagdish Bhagwati, who believes that soaring growth rates would eventually lift a population out of poverty, and that this growth would have to be led by business and industry.

No arguments

In the run up to the 2014 elections, the Sen-Bhagwati debate turned into a political spat. The BJP and its allies appropriated Bhagwati while Sen was assigned the Congress. The public imagination seems to have remained trapped in this frame of reference. So when Sen talked about the government’s policies this week, it gave rise to the same invocations of Bhagwati, the same dark theories about Sen’s dealings with “the Italian”.

Public debate now comes pre-packaged in political boxes. So it is perhaps easier to swing into partisan mode than to unpack complicated questions. But when people seek to shut out some questions altogether, we need to worry.

When the Sen-Bhagwati debate broke out, one distinguished journalist advised Sen to return to philosophical texts and revise the virtues of silence. Another wanted Sen’s Bharat Ratna taken away for saying that he did not want Modi to be prime minister. Twitter trolls this week were less delicate. Some wanted him to leave the country – they might have taken lessons from Giriraj Singh, the BJP leader who said Modi’s detractors could move to Pakistan. Others categorically did not want him alive.

This pathology – if I do not like what you have to say, you cannot say it – seems fairly new. At least, it seems at odds with the traditions that Sen himself traces in The Argumentative Indian. He imagines India as a place where heterodoxies have always thrived, where chaotic debates and dilemmas are inscribed in the epics. He examines the Bhagavad Gita, now an instrument of orthodoxy for the Hindu right, as a text that embodies an argument between two moral positions. He shows how these arguments have survived to present times.

Was he wrong, then? Because now Sen the argumentative Indian wants an argument and nobody will oblige.