Dissenters of the past in India were great moral agitators, introducing social, intellectual and spiritual turbulence in public life. Would they have survived today?
Dissent is not only the “safety valve of democracy”, as Justice D.Y. Chandrachud reminded us, but vital for meaningful social life. Societies stultify when everyone converges on a single opinion or when official stories go unchallenged. Flaws congeal and social rot sets in. Right or wrong, pleasant or unpleasant, views must be expressed and orthodoxies challenged. For that is the only way to publicly identify and remove social, political and economic deficiencies.
Surely, it is not a hidden fact that vast numbers of destitute Adivasis and poor farmers are dispossessed of their lands by the greed of predatory corporates. And it is an open secret that when normal channels of justice are unavailable, helpless victims are pushed to taking arms. Did not every other Hindi film, not long ago, show how the merciless exploitation of innocent farmers invariably turned them into vengeful dacoits? Do we not realise that coercive violence by the state causes greater alienation among such hapless people, pushing them further and deeper into an endless cycle of reciprocal violence? Is it not the duty of every conscientious citizen to speak out against this injustice and, if necessary, to dissent from official discourse that paints them as monstrous enemies of the state? But alas, as an American judge put it some 50 years ago, “it is an eternal temptation of a government to arrest a speaker rather than correct the conditions about which he complains” — an observation that is particularly apt for those activists who are fighting for the fundamental rights of the poor and the marginalised.
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