Initial thoughts on the Indian standards of moral evaluation

After quite a long layoff from serious blogging, I am attempting to return to this task, by recounting some of the experiences I encountered as part of my participation in Face Book (FB) activism. I have to qualify that this has been more of an arm chair variety, rather than anything seriously organizational.

Maybe, I have not noticed this in the past, or being more a recent user of FB, was not aware of the potential of FB for opinion making and activism, till I got caught with following a lot of recent political events, on FB subscriptions. The tryst with the opinion making and contesting widely circulating viewpoints on politics and current events in India, started with the Award returns or Award Waapsi controversy. I continued to be amazed and concerned at the same time, that return to power and government, of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), would trigger so much of contention in the social media circles.

I was a witness to what can be termed as a ideological divide between liberals and sympathizers of freethinking, on the one hand, and a combination of  conventional, conservative, reactionary, and middling or centrist opinions, on almost all issues and events, starting with the mob lynching of a Muslim in Dadri, UP, through Award returns, comments of the celebrity, Aamir Khan, suicide of UoH research scholar, Rohith Vemula, to unrest in the JNU and UoH campuses.

Almost all of these events and issues, were mostly seen in terms of clashes between the left/liberal camp and the others. One could also perceive an attempt, in all of these issues, to sequester left/liberal opinion into providing an explanation of their past positions and actions and also an attempt to create a false equivalence between the issues that the left/liberal has been vocal about, and the issues that they have been allegedly less vocal and activist about, whether in the past or the present.

To consider an issue on its own merits or importance, does not appear to be a quality of most conventional Indian analyses. Entangling one issue with another, even if it is unrelated to or not legitimately connected with the main issue, has been a recurring theme of these arguments and acrimony. For instance, academics who returned their literary or artistic excellence awards, as a principle of symbolic protest at their perception of prevailing political and cultural atmosphere in the country, were accused of hypocrisy, attacked as agents and/or apologists of  previous regimes, painted as viscerally hostile to the current BJP regime, and defamed as cowards for not protesting previous draconian episodes such as the emergency of 1975 or riots of 1984 and other human rights conflagrations.

Similarly, the celebrity, who expresses some nuanced opinions and concerns about how minorities feel threatened by the nature of recent violent events, and how perceptions and response of political leadership can heighten the sense of anxiety among them, is taken completely out of context, and a stray remark about considering leaving the country, is played up and the celebrity is branded a traitor, an anti national, a horrible brand ambassador, ungrateful artiste and more. Instead of condemning this kind of reactionary tirade against well-intentioned views, the artiste is pulled up for being tactless, reckless and not being mindful of  the responsibilities of a public figure.

Generally, the freethinking assessment of this kind of reaction, considers this as type of whataboutery, or tactics of deflection and distraction. That apart, I would view and term these reactions from the mainstream, as a kind of perverse ambivalence and a disguised fear of mob psychology, apart from other fallacies of judgement and bias, that most of conventional opinion suffers from.

The range of mainstream reactions to the unrest in JNU and UoH, needs more attention and critical analysis, as the ambivalence towards the authoritarian actions and the draconian tendencies of the state machinery in these cases, was masked by a pronounced distaste for and moralizing of student activism, and their proclivities for politics and party affiliations, especially of the anti-BJP variety. Most student bodies, that were part of the recent  JNU and UoH events, were presumed to be agents or tools of the ultra-left (whatever that meant), communists and Congress party. Guilt by association, as tactic of argument and polemic, was freely used against these student bodies, without any care for facts, or the acts or agents of provocation on the other side.

What alerted me to consider the "Indian standards of moral evaluation" as a possible hypothesis of ideological posturing, by most Indians, to issues that require more analytical and unbiased evaluation, is their hostility towards the discontents and disaffection of students in the campuses and academic life, dismissing or trivializing their rights of protest and dissent, framing their non-academic aspirations and ventures as a waste of tax payer money, and a misuse of subsidy or grants. What could be considered more alarming in this attitude is the conflation of student protest and the overreach of state's response, and dubiously or otherwise delegitimating the former to rationalize, if not justify the latter. In this bizarre method of 'reasoning', the students' lack of pliancy is turned into a vice that the campuses into 'hotbeds of terrorist and anti national activities' that invites state overreach. In other words, this turns out to be victim blaming by another name.

At the risk of being scornful of the lack of familiarity of the Indian mainstream opinion with trends, in contemporary knowledge and philosophy, let alone free-thought, I can hazard that this section of public opinion, does not have even a foggiest idea of intersectionality in social and political issues, even when it may not have much to do with feminism.

This opinion piece on Business Standard on what is termed as fake nationalism, triggered by the BJP-RSS's bracketing of most dissent and protest as anti national, provides a lot of perspective to readers, that are new to the on-going contentions in Indian politics.

The tentative definition of 'Indian standards of moral evaluation', that I would attempt, is that they are a set of standards for evaluation and judgment of social, ethical and political issues, which are tainted by the biases, introduced and continued by many aspects of Indian cultural and environmental conditioning, that are partial to and colored by privilege, inherently patriarchal and masculine in orientation and  inimical to the interests of contenders for equity in treatment, status and position, such as women, students, children, backward communities or other underprivileged, victimized by caste and class  privilege, minority genders, cultural minorities, and activists, whether for rationalism, environment or sustainability.  

I will try to return and explore this idea, in greater detail, and annotate my post with more links and references, shortly. But feel free to respond with your comments and suggestions, and try your best to keep them civil and meaningful.