Group 1

The Supreme Court ruling on Section 377 furthers the frontiers of

personal freedom

The stirring message from the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment

decriminalising gay sex is that social morality cannot trump constitutional
morality. It is a reaffirmation of the right to love. In a 5-0 verdict, a
Constitution Bench has corrected the flagrant judicial error committed by a
two-member Bench in Suresh Kumar Koushal (2013), in overturning a
reasoned judgment of the Delhi High Court reading down Section 377 of
the IPC. The 2013 decision meant that the LGBTQ community’s belatedly
recognised right to equal protection of the law was withdrawn on specious
grounds: that there was nothing wrong in the law treating people having
sex “against the order of nature” differently from those who abide by
“nature”, and that it was up to Parliament to act if it wanted to change the
law against unnatural sex. The court has overruled Koushal and upheld
homosexuals’ right to have intimate relations with people of their choice,
their inherent right to privacy and dignity and the freedom to live without
fear. The outcome was not unexpected. When the courts considered
Section 377 earlier, the litigation was initiated by voluntary organisations.
When those affected by the 2013 verdict approached the Supreme Court, it
was referred to a larger Bench to reconsider Koushal.
In the intervening years, two landmark judgments took forward the law on sexual
orientation and privacy and formed the jurisprudential basis for the latest
judgment. In National Legal Services Authority (2014), a case concerning the
rights of transgender people, the court ruled that there could be no discrimination
on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. In Justice K.S.
Puttaswamy (2017), or the ‘privacy case’, a nine-judge Bench ruled that sexual
orientation is a facet of privacy, and constitutionally protected. Chief Justice of
India Dipak Misra’s opinion lays emphasis on transformative constitutionalism,
that is, treating the Constitution as a dynamic document that progressively realises
various rights. In particular, he invokes the doctrine of non-retrogression, which
means that once a right is recognised, it cannot be reversed. Taken together, the
four opinions have furthered the frontiers of personal freedom and liberated the
idea of individual rights from the pressure of public opinion. Constitutional
morality trumps any imposition of a particular view of social morality, says Justice
R.H. Nariman, while Justice D.Y. Chandrachud underscores the “unbridgeable
divide” between the moral values on which Section 377 is based and the values of
the Constitution. Justice Indu Malhotra strikes a poignant note when she says
history owes an apology to the LGBTQ community for the delay in providing the
redress. The dilution of Section 377 marks a welcome departure from centuries of
heteronormative thinking. This is a verdict that will, to borrow a phrase from
Justice Chandrachud, help sexual minorities ‘confront the closet’ and realize their
rights.

Group 2

The Opposition must harness the diversity of India to

decentralise its challenge to the regime

Sociologists have often commented that outsiders have a more clear-

sighted view of everydayness than us. Recently, I was ranting against the
communalism of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) when a European friend
of mine, a philosopher, observed that the categories of left and right were
grossly overdrawn in India. They emphasised a world of deep dualisms, or
even a richness of traditional thought, that does not exist in India. India, he
said, cannot claim a Gramsci or a Rosa Luxemburg. Worse, our rightist
parties have no sense of the creative traditions of conservatism. An Indian
Edmund Burke is unthinkable. Beyond its corrosive communalism, the
BJP has no idea of the right as a systematic ideology. The Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh’s idea of capitalism is adequate. Mohandas Gandhi
and Rabindranath Tagore were more creative nationalists than Veer
Savarkar or K.B. Hedgewar.

My friend noted that Indian parties were more vehicles for modernity, and
it is as exponents of modernity that they make sense. One has to explore
how these parties use time, history, linearity as modernising forces. It is as
vehicles of modernity that parties come to power.

Surrogate moderniser
When the Congress lost its modernising impetus, the BJP became the
surrogate moderniser. It is in terms of its claims to modernity that the BJP
has to be assessed. The BJP’s attitude to time has always intrigued me. So
far, it has been dealt with eclectically. If the left saw economics as a
classic force, history was always the collective impetus for the BJP. Its
obsession with history confuses myth and the rationality of logos. At one
level, it contemporarises the ancients by creating equivalences to current
achievements in ancient times. The examples range from test-tube babies
and plastic surgery to biotechnology. India is seen as one fluid continuity
from the Vedic Age to now. While ancient history is rendered current, it
rewrites the history of the last 500 years, unable to accept defeat. It
desperately wants Maharana Pratap to win the Battle of Haldighati, and it
insists Ram was a historical figure. It is perpetually encouraging people to
rectify history at every stage, where even murder becomes an act of
rectification, for instance of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri in 2015 or
Afrazul Khan in Rajsamand in 2017.

Often the BJP’s use of time is more strategic and complex. It fetishes
2019, which it sees as the end of Congress history and the beginning of
Ram Rajya. Everything focusses on 2019, and BJP president Amit Shah is
the time-keeper, the impresario of 2019 as the beginning of a Congress
Mukt Bharat. This is not just an electoral strategy. The BJP genuinely
believes that a millennial moment it has prophesied is coming.
Attitude to time
Oddly, for all its fetishisation of 2019, the BJP is one party that has no
systemic idea of the future. It might borrow a few glib ideas such as smart
cities, yet it has no sense of the future as a set of strategies. The
fetishisation of 2019 has to be understood in this context — 2019 is its end
of history thesis. It has no sense of the future except of the NRI who
combines modern consumerism with ancient history. The future is 2019
repeated.

The attitude to time is best caught in the complete absence of ecological

thinking. It is content with linear time and progress. It dissolves the
Planning Commission not because it was a Congress idea but because it
was a futurist notion. The party is addicted to the ideas of nation state,
progress and development pickled in the formaldehyde of the 19th
century. Its patriotism is a deep devotion to repeating these ideas in the
present. No other regime is as idolatrous of Bill Gates or Mark
Zuckerberg. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appeal to ‘Make in India’ is
an invitation to the likes of them to make India’s future because India as a
regime is clueless about it — we are being out-thought and out-fought in
every forum.

The BJP likes nationalism because it unifies time and history into a reign
of uniformity. No party dreads plurality, diversity and difference as much
as the BJP does. The Opposition has to re-read the BJP in this context. It
should worry not only about a unified opposition or a unitary opposition
but also decentralise the challenge to the regime. When the south appeals
to a different language, the BJP has no answer. It has no idea of the
vernacular. A decentralised strategy of multiple futures will be the first
step in defeating the BJP because, as Mr. Shah knows, it is only when time
is in official uniform that India marches to a single drum. The Opposition
will lose if it imitates the BJP because its motley costume ball of ideas is
no formal answer to Mr. Modi. But a set of plural strategies will confuse
the BJP because it has no sense of dialects. In fact, the minute India
responds either civilisationally or in the vernacular, the BJP is lost. It has
no answer to the Bhakti movement, to Nanak or Rahim. The BJP’s idea of
clock-time has no sense of what Raimon Panikkar called kairological time,
i.e. time with cultural meaning. Once you multiply the notion of time, the
inevitability of the BJP in linear time breaks down, and the RSS can no
longer argue that it is a party whose time has come.

The BJP’s commitment to development, nation-state, big science are all

attempts to subjugate time as history. No other party has less idea of
alternative imaginations and alternative histories. The BJP’s notion of time
is like a Tussaud’s exhibit where it wants to reduce politics to a five-year
time-frame with Vladimir Putin, Shinzo Abe, Donald Trump as perpetual
players where Mr. Modi returns in celebratory triumph after visiting them.
Once India operates with a restrictive scenario of time, its rivals know it is
predictable. In fact, desperate to be seen as well-behaved and investment-
friendly, official India now presents itself as a simple extrapolation.

One has to now read the RSS as an organisation constructed in mechanical

time. The shakha could be a creation of Frederick Winslow Taylor,
founder of scientific management, as it is anchored on replication and
repetitivity. It is frightening. Because it lives in time-linearity, the BJP is
hostile to difference and diversity. The Congress, as Rajni Kothari
showed, was built through accommodating difference, while the BJP
suppresses any kind of difference as a sign of inefficiency. No other party
is devoted to censorship of art, ideology, science as the BJP. By
suppressing time as diversity, the BJP can control disorder.

Sadly, the two thought systems it has conscripted are spirituality and
management, and both act as time-keepers to the nation. Both provide
techniques of control. There is nothing spiritual about the BJP’s idea of
yoga. It is instrumental, functional and more oriented to efficiency. It
enforces a tutorial college sense of modernity without any sense of
metaphysics or debate.

Beyond dualism
To reduce the Congress-BJP battle to the standard dualisms of left and
right will not do. One has to focus on modernity, and the BJP’s sense of
modernity is lethal and unaware as it has no critique of science or
economics. It swallows Western categories unquestioningly. When the
Indian middle class realises that what we call majoritarian democracy is a
collection of inane modernities, the BJP will find it difficult to come back.
Herein lies the challenge of 2019.

Shiv Visvanathan is an academic associated with the Compost Heap, a

group in pursuit of alternative ideas and imagination

Group 3
The plan to give select universities autonomy and create a
multi-tier academe is a crisis for our democracy

Moments of crisis often create moments for rethinking, when the basic
concepts and institutions we employ are subject to critical scrutiny. Such a
crisis haunts the idea of the nation state, the vision of democracy and, at
another level, our model of the university. Such a crisis of change also
produces a mimicry of original concepts, with mediocrity retailed as
excellence, status confused for quality, and a few narrow indicators
defining the existence of the new paradigm. Mediocrity in mimicking
excellence subverts the very essence of the institution. One witnesses such
antics masquerading as reform as one watches the struggle of the Indian
university over the autonomy issue.
The grammar of reform
Merely labelling such a process will not do. Protest must be accompanied
by scholarship which exposes in detail the logic and mechanics of the
rituals of appropriation. One witnesses three at the outset. The first
involves the attempt to appropriate the rhetoric of scholarship and to coat
it with a sheen of scientism, through the use of rankings and indicators.
Quality is now a numbers game evaluated by a separate directorate.
Second, concepts of freedom, autonomy, the public good are bowdlerised
and managerialised, transforming intellectual facts into a set of
instrumentalities. Third, the public and the private are fused without any
philosophical or ethical debate. One is opened up to privatisation under the
claim that private institutions contribute to the public good. It narrows the
notion of the public good from a democratic idea relating to welfare and
justice to a market concept. The market replaces democracy as the
grammar of this reform.

All this has been created through a simulated politics of urgency, a crisis
inadvertently triggered by Pranab Mukherjee, then President, bemoaning
the fact that there was no Indian university listed in the top 200 in the
world. Suddenly, all India suffered from rankings envy and we decided to
vie for the Olympics of rankings. Sadly, speed became a substitute for
efficiency and mobility appropriated justice. What got projected was a
sense of decisiveness which one mistook for judgment. The hollowness
and superficiality of reform was startling.

This brings to mind two stories. The first is from the national movement.
Patrick Geddes, the sociologist, biologist and polymath, designed one
version of the ‘University of Benares’. Watching the outline unfold,
people asked him out of curiosity where the administrative department
was? He pointed to a little outhouse on the side and warned that if it got
bigger, it would swallow the university. The prescient Geddes was
warning against the bureaucratisation of the intellect and its great
institution, the university. Today, sadly it is the bureaucracy that is
defining the university, even dictating what autonomy means for us.

The second story is more apocryphal and is about the epidemic of rankings
worldwide. The story goes that Snow White’s wicked stepmother went to
consult the legendary mirror. When the queen asked, “Mirror, Mirror, on
the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” The mirror replied, “According to
QS rankings, you are fourth in the list for beauty and third for
intelligence.” The wicked queen was struck dumb with dismay and
confusion.

The bureaucratic rituals around quality and autonomy have to be read in

this context. Quality in this would get reduced to productivity. The
ordinary process of research as learning, as a craft game, with a sense of
play and experimentation is sidelined. A leading scientist once told me that
PhDs get discounted and risk-taking in terms of choice of topics comes
down. The machine produces more convergers than divergers. Dissent is at
a discount as one must adhere to textbook paradigms for guaranteeing high
scores.
State’s abdication
If excellence is marginally defined, autonomy is reduced to a market
instrument. The state seems to withdraw from education playing a
reluctant Father Christmas. Institutions have now the right to change
admission rules, charge more fees to attract more people. The idea of
university as a public space, as a commons where subsidies allowed
marginals to participate in education with dignity, is lost. The market
creates its own filters and slowly the poor lose entry to a system.

This was the much maligned and misunderstood battle the students and
faculty of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi decided to fight.
JNU as a public system represented both quality and equality. The new
rituals of autonomy, the faculty argued, would pretend to give it agency on
bureaucratic issues while denying it any real empowerment. Autonomy
here becomes the right to play a rule game as dictated by the state. The
right to plurality, dissent, critique will decrease.

There is also an illiteracy of history here as autonomy is regarded as some

new invention when autonomy was always a part of the university
tradition. The state might support a university while the rules of the craft
were always in the hands of practitioners. The word peer group reflects
solidarity, fraternity and a definition of quality in terms of collectively
debated norms. Certification had an intellectual rather than clerical quality
to it. The government`s insistence on divesting itself of its responsibility
cannot be disguised in creating a few narrow entitlements for a few
institutions. What we then face in India is a split-level world where the
majority of institutions suffer from neglect and mediocrity, while a few
parade their affluence as quality. It is an attempt to enforce a Darwinism in
education while pretending to offer freedom. The rich can create captive
institutions while the middle class watches helplessly as quality education
in democratic spaces empties out. The JNU battle is a fight to define one’s
future without having it specified to one in the name of an ersatz freedom.

Similarly, ranking is an act of fetishism where quality gets defined as a

product than a process. The university loses its ritual right to initiate a
student in terms of the rules of the craft. This world of creativity
disappears as we instrumentalise education and reduce the university to a
certification machine, a glorified tutorial college. All this is done in the
name of acceleration where India hopes to manufacture two Oxfords
without sensing the organicity or the tacit knowledges of education. Here
autonomy as limited agency loses out to justice as a right to define and
evaluate one’s situation. The academe becomes a passive receiver of
diktats in the name of freedom. What one loses here is the creative
pluralism of the university as the home of dissenting, as knowledge is
standardised in the name of market efficiency. Also, freedom here is seen
in the narrow sense of entrepreneurship. The creative tensions of the
university get mowed down in this wave of standaridisation and
managerialisation; market friendly freedom destroys many of the lesser
domains of knowledge which are custodians of the value systems of the
future.

There is another issue. The university is a place for dreaming, for

following not the logic of productivity or fame but a vision of new
possibilities, many of them which may not be majoritarian or market-
oriented. Ranking, as one professor said, allows others to dream for us.
Nothing can be more unfair.
Retaining plurality
The question is, how does a university as a plural, almost invertebrate
institution react to such a crisis? There is a sense that the battle is different
today. We must stand by the original vision, the culture of the university,
re-emphasise its sense of play, its plurality, its sense of craft which
challenges the assembly lines of knowledge. In this moment of crisis, the
university must stand strong, telling society gently that democracy without
the cultures of knowledge is doomed.

Group 4