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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Death of a young man-Prabhat Patnaik

Death of a young man-Prabhat Patnaik

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published Published on Apr 23, 2013   modified Modified on Apr 23, 2013
-The Telegraph


Since I belong to the Left, I know I am likely to be prejudiced against Mamata Banerjee. I try to guard against this prejudice. I try not to let my overall political stance colour my judgment of particular events associated with her.

For the last several days, therefore, I have tried to ignore the attacks on Communist Party of India (Marxist) offices in West Bengal in the wake of the Left demonstrators' manhandling of Amit Mitra in Delhi. Violence, I have dutifully told myself, begets violence; one should not weigh the violence perpetrated by one side against that perpetrated by the other; and one should not fret about who started it all. I have, in the manner of most newspaper editorials, tried to maintain an equidistance from both sides on the specifics of the situation.

There is, however, one point at which I come upon an insurmountable hurdle. On this point I cannot forgive Mamata Banerjee; on this point I believe that no CPI(M) leader in government would do what she has done (nor for that matter would even David Cameron or anyone like him do what she has done); indeed, to remain quiet about this point is a crime. And this point is her description of the death of a 22-year-old student in police custody as a "small and petty matter".

It is a tragic fact of our daily existence that lots of idealistic young men and women dreaming of creating a better world - whose only crime, indeed, is to dream of creating a better world - get killed either by State repression, or by goons of the ruling party or by goons owing personal allegiance to some local satrap belonging to the ruling party. From Asu Majumdar, to Chandrashekhar, to Safdar Hashmi, to Sudipto Gupta, we have had a string of such martyrs, even if we do not count those who have picked up the gun themselves to achieve their vision.

Every such death is a colossal tragedy, a mind-numbing loss, of the kind of person that a country should cherish, a person who wants to devote his or her life to changing the world, rather than to squeezing out the maximum personal material gain from it. To describe such a loss as "a small and petty matter" shows a degree of insensitivity that a society must consider unacceptable. Otherwise it is endangering its own moral foundations.

One may disagree with the vision that the young student held dear. One may even consider his death a genuine accident for which the police, in whose custody he died, are not responsible. One may even consider this fact of it being an accident so well-established that one sees no necessity for a proper inquiry into the matter. But one simply cannot call it a "small and petty matter". Doing so amounts to a violation of elementary humaneness. And if leading political figures in the country so blatantly violate elementary humaneness, with nobody raising a word against such transgressions, then we are plunging into a horrible abyss.

But once we stumble at this point in our effort to be equidistant, we can no longer be equidistant. This stumbling, in other words, necessarily pushes us to a different dialectic. If I feel so outraged by the description of Sudipto's death as a "small and petty matter", then I have to accept that his comrades, fellow students, indeed students and contemporaries in general, must be feeling even more intensely outraged. Then I have to accept the legitimacy of their anger. Then I also cannot but feel the intense provocation that some of them, holding a demonstration against Sudipto's death, must have felt when the person responsible for that inhumane remark makes it a point deliberately to march in front of them, ignoring police suggestion for using a different route, and mocking them with the choice: if you misbehave with me you are doomed by being labelled violent, and if you do not misbehave with me you are doomed by being labelled impotent.

True, they should have refrained from misbehaving; they should have had the maturity to understand that self-discipline is not impotence. I do not wish to condone their behaviour. But while not condoning their behaviour I cannot close my eyes to the extenuating circumstances, as so many alas have done. How many of them, I wonder, can put their hands on their hearts and claim that in their own youths they had not engaged, while demonstrating in what they considered a just cause, in acts that were far more violent than shouting "Hai hai" to Mamata Banerjee and jostling Amit Mitra, who should not have left the police cordon at all, to cause a tear in his shirt (which did not inconvenience him enough into skipping the Planning Commission meeting).

I for one certainly cannot claim such non-violent purity, having shouted far more offensive slogans than "Hai hai" against Enoch Powell when he visited Oxford, and having given, together with several fellow students, the mock Nazi salute to Tony Benn, who was then a minister in Harold Wilson's government and was visiting Nuffield College, in protest against the Labour government's support for the Vietnam war. (The Nazi salute, I need hardly add, was far more insulting to Tony Benn than a tear in the shirt to Amit Mitra.)

I do believe that the people's political representatives need to be treated with far greater respect than is usually accorded to them by the media and the emerging middle class. I dislike the sneering contempt with which much of the intelligentsia and professional classes treat politicians. Indeed, I object to the very use of the term "political class", with its implicit suggestion that the political representatives of the people constitute a coterie that is not to be trusted with decision-making, which should rather be left to the "experts" (who are not elected by anybody and are not accountable to anybody). I consider this sneering contempt an abrogation of democracy and a substitution of the sovereignty of the people by the cult of the expert.

At the same time however, the political representatives of the people owe it to society not to transgress the fundamental humane values that constitute its foundation. Criticisms of such specific transgressions must be made even more vehemently in their case, precisely because of the importance they rightfully enjoy. In the present case, alas, there has been no such criticism of Mamata Banerjee's inhumane remark, and certainly not by those who profess to being so upset by the behaviour of the Delhi demonstrators.

But why is there this silence? The two big political formations, eyeing the next elections and the prospects of relying on Trinamul Congress support for forming the next government are silent for opportunistic reasons which are understandable but not excusable. But what about prominent members of the civil society?

I find such silence not just morally, but also politically disturbing for at least three reasons. First, it contributes to strengthening the view that students should not engage in politics and should not hold demonstrations, that they should rather become conformists engaged in cultivating an intellect no superior to that of a photocopier.

Secondly, since many of those who give greater importance to the tearing of a shirt than to an utterly inhumane remark, do so because of animosity towards the Left, such silence implicitly condones this animosity, which has serious consequences for the functioning of our democracy. It implicitly condones an inhumane attitude towards a young student because he was Left. Contrast, for instance, the reaction to this remark with the outrage over Ajit Pawar's tasteless comment over the Maharashtra drought. The latter, of course, needed to be condemned; but so, most certainly, did the former.

Thirdly, the debunking of student activism, the debunking of the Left, the concern over Amit Mitra's shirt, may all be part of a conservative conformist position. But in the silence over it I cannot help sniffing at least a whiff of the same sneering contempt for political representatives: "we do not have to spell it out, but you know how crazy she is and how pathetic they all are." Silence over Mamata Banerjee's inhumane remark helps of course in showing Left demonstrators in a poor light, but it also conveys a-wink-and-a-nudge contempt for her. Remaining silent over someone's misdemeanor amounts after all to not taking that person seriously.

What we have here is a combination of an explicit debunking of the Left with a silent pooh-poohing of Mamata Banerjee; and together it amounts to a debunking of representative politics in general. Anyone seriously committed to electoral democracy, therefore, must not flinch from explicitly repudiating Mamata Banerjee's inhumane remark.

The author is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

The Telegraph, 23 April, 2013, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1130423/jsp/opinion/story_16807485.jsp#.UXYxyErcinh


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