THAT Indian democracy can hark back to a classical tradition of public reasoning and debate is a point powerfully demonstrated in Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian. While it is quite remarkable that these traditions of public dialogue and disputation were sustained and even encouraged by monarchs, they were clearly not central to the legitimacy of imperial rule in the way they are to a modern democracy. Some of the adjectives commonly used to describe Indian democracy – noisy, lively, vibrant, colourful – hint at that centrality, even as they disconcertingly recall the tourist literature on the Kumbh Mela or Chandni Chowk. They correctly allude to the ubiquity and intensity of political discussion in India – from the roadside dhaba to the middle class drawing room – but conceal the fact that there is a disheartening impoverishment in the quality of our public debates.

This essay is about the quality of our contemporary public discourse and the absence of a political culture of public reasoning. The briefest moment of reflection on our political debates will reveal a polarisation based on prejudice masquerading as opinion, and opinion masquerading as argument. Let us attempt a morphology of what was unquestionably the most heated of all political debates in 2006 – the debate on quotas for OBCs in institutions of higher education, and on which, we would do well to remember, there was broad consensus among political parties. The political consensus, of course, was not about the principles of egalitarianism or social justice. It is better explained in terms of a disinclination to alienate any sizeable social constituency that matters in the electoral arithmetic. The contestation on this issue thus was outside the political domain – amongst the intelligentsia and society at large.

What were the main issues of contention? The official argument offered two justifications for the proposed policy, both of which claimed that this was merely a logical extension of an already existing policy. First, while the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes have enjoyed reservations in institutions of higher education such as the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian Institutes of Management, and other premier centrally-funded institutions, the social groups classified as socially and economically backward by the Mandal Commission, have not. Hence, this initiative was intended to extend access in such institutions to hitherto excluded backward groups. Second, the government argued, this only represented the necessary completion of an incomplete project, whose first phase – of providing quotas in public employment – was undertaken by the government of Vishwanath Pratap Singh.

 

The arguments from civil society were of broadly two types: arguments about the concerned institutions and arguments about caste disadvantage. The crude version of the institutional argument claimed that there would be a dilution of merit in the institutions to which quotas were applied. The more sophisticated version of this argument highlighted the issue of the autonomy of academic institutions, proposing that instead of a uniform policy for all, different institutions be allowed to devise different ways of advancing the ideal of greater equality and diversity.

On the issue of caste disadvantage, two sets of arguments were encountered. The first of these recognised that caste positions are associated with inequalities of access and opportunity, and that public policy has a responsibility to address these. However, there were differences among those espousing this argument on the question of whether quotas are the best instrument for achieving more egalitarian outcomes, or whether alternative strategies need to be devised to ensure that the benefits of affirmative action are made available to the truly deprived, identified in terms of a range of social and economic indicators – from gender and caste to income.

 

The second set of arguments about caste inequalities was less socially sensitive. Some acknowledged that caste may be associated with disadvantage, and that the state was welcome to address this problem in any way it chose, so long as it did not reduce opportunities for others. Others held a position that could not even be described as an argument, for it was little more than a selfish grumble about the ‘general category’ (a euphemism for those not entitled to quotas of any kind) being disadvantaged by their share of an already small pie being rendered smaller. This utterly self-regarding position could be summarised as: ‘caste disadvantage is neither my fault nor my concern, my own career is.’

In both types of arguments, the more sophisticated and inclusionary versions were obviously articulated by intellectuals, while the crude ones became the rallying-cry for protest marches and rallies by students, especially in the professional colleges. Ultimately, as we know, the quotas were legislated, and plans for implementation are ongoing.

Why, it might be asked, should the quota debate not qualify as a fine example of public reasoning? This begs the question of what constitutes public reasoning. Semantically, there are two obvious components of the idea of public reasoning. The first suggests that it is about reasoning conducted in public, about public matters and in the interests of the public – which are, of course, defined by the public itself. On the governmental end of the spectrum, this requires public justification for public policies.

The second component has to do with the sense of politics as a collective enterprise, underpinned by the idea of a common good. It is based on respect for others and, following from that, respect for their opinions. If respect is not possible or forthcoming, it requires at least tolerance as a minimum condition of the civic relationship. Having established the terms of this relationship, it emphasises the importance of debate based on reason rather than on passion or prejudice. This entails a willingness to be persuaded, as to persuade; to entertain an argument on its merits rather than to assess its validity on the basis of who is making it. It implies also an understanding of the public nature of public affairs, and preferably a recognition of shared first principles. Information and the ability to make sense of it (through, for instance, a civic education), therefore, become crucial ingredients of a political culture in which public reasoning can thrive.

 

Returning to the quota debate, we find that it was not benchmarked against first principles, moral or political. Let alone moral and philosophical questions about equality, even questions about the extent and nature of our commitment to equality as a social ideal were skirted and dodged. Nor was there any reflection on the constitutional project of universal citizenship, and the ambivalent relationship of the quotas to this. Quotas can, after all, be defended as conforming to the constitutional ideal of equal citizenship as easily as they can be questioned as departures from it. And questions about the changing and changed sociology of caste, including the fuzziness of caste boundaries, were naturally left to academic sociologists to ponder over.

The justifications offered by government failed to strike a moral chord in the citizenry. In civil society, the debate degenerated into a dialogue of the deaf, with all sides holding firm to their own fixed opinions and refusing to entertain arguments to which they did not ab initio subscribe. Passion and prejudice, rather than reason, became the hallmarks of the debate. And of the willingness to persuade, and be persuaded, there was little or no evidence.

 

Of course, part of what determines the form and quality of the debate is the forum in which the debate takes place, and the way in which this is structured. Our political debates are invariably conducted in an adversarial and combative, rather than dialogic, mode. We saw this in the Lok Sabha in August 2006, when a Member of Parliament hurled a microphone at another, and vile abuses were exchanged, just short of a physical scuffle. We see it regularly on television, where of course confrontation is skilfully ‘organised’ by bringing politicians of opposing parties together on the same platform, and anchors deliberately strive to raise the temperature even as, puppeteer-like, they carefully control it to stop just short of an explosion. Whether these debates are conducted in Parliament or on the television screen, citizens remain passive consumers of these spectacles, rather than participants in them.

The media and the opposition in Parliament are of course important institutions of ensuring governmental accountability in a democratic society. But the combative mode of argument effectively erases from the public mind, if not from the minds of the participants in these debates, the sense of politics as a shared collective endeavour. The adversarial mode of course borrows from and conforms to the model of the college debating society – lacking, alas, the innocent charm of that forum.

It is important perhaps to distinguish between the decibel level of a debate and the heat generated by it, on the one hand, and the quality of political argument in that debate, on the other. On the quota question, large numbers of medical and other students took part in protest marches, and even suffered brutal assaults from the police. There were hundreds of hours of television time and thousands of columns of newsprint devoted to argumentation about the quotas. However, the point here is about the quality of the arguments rather than the number of people who were involved in the debate or the amount of airtime expended on it. It is also salutary to remember that these debates were largely restricted to urban metropolitan individuals, in a manner that is reminiscent of Professor Sen’s caveat about the dialogues of Mauryan or Mughal times being largely limited to male elites.

 

It is not surprising, of course, that our social location and the interests associated with it should most fundamentally determine the political judgements that we make. On the caste quotas, Dalit activists wrote articles arguing that only the Most Backward Classes of the OBCs should be eligible for quotas. Creamy layer OBCs argued strenuously against their own exclusion. Neither mentioned quotas for Muslims. And if any further proof was needed of the fact that we increasingly perceive the world through spectacles tinted by caste and religion, we learnt that 25% of childless couples seeking artificial insemination want to know the caste of the sperm donors, going up to 60% in the case of religion.

Again, in the recent controversy over the sealing of shops and businesses by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, there was a clear divide: between the unanimous view of traders and shopowners, on the one hand, and the equally unanimous view of the Residents’ Welfare Associations, on the other. Citizens inclined to discuss the issue from a disinterested public perspective were conspicuously missing.

 

Let us reflect then on some obstacles to genuine public debate, the first of which is indisputably the problem of expertise. Matters of science and technology always seemed abstruse and unintelligible to the average citizen. Today, with the complexity of issues relating to the WTO or the TRIPS agreement for instance, even economic matters seem unfathomable. Thus, while economic policy-making is in some ways more open today than it was a decade ago, the need for specialised knowledge makes it far from accessible to the lay citizen.

Curiously, the opposite of the expertise problem is equally an enemy of reasoned public discussion. There is a common presumption that in the matter of school textbooks, everyone is a potential expert. This is particularly true of civic education, as we saw in the controversy over the study of Indian politics since 1947 in the Political Science syllabus of the Central Board of Secondary Education. Instead of teaching children about the different interpretations of controversial issues and the bases of these differences, the attempt was to erase from the textbooks all that we cannot agree upon – whether it is the Emergency or the destruction of the Babri Masjid. An obvious alternative pedagogical strategy is surely to teach children that there are no right answers, to acquaint them with the events, to give them the intellectual training to understand and handle the complexities of interpretation, and to enable them to grow into adults capable of making informed and educated judgements about matters of public concern.

The second obstacle to informed public debate is the disturbing lack of public justifications for policy. We have already noted this lack in the way in which the quota debate was handled. Take further the issue of pension reform. We read about the opinions expressed by different political parties, but there is no attempt to educate the public, large numbers of whom will be affected by the proposed reform, about the core issues. Ordinary citizens are incapable of making informed judgements on this subject, and it appears that they are not expected to, either.

 

Finally, there is the politics of labelling, name-calling and blame-fixing. Two badges of honour – social justice and secularism – may be conferred on the politically kosher, while the worst sort of political abuse is reserved for those who do not conform to the definitions of these terms as legislated by the high churches that have arrogated to themselves the task of authoritatively defining them. There is thus only one way of subscribing to social justice, and there is only one way to be secular. The enemies of social justice are all those who are not partisans of the hegemonic definition of the term by a small clutch of political parties in North India. Citizens who are strongly committed to a broader conception of social justice, one that may not however be anchored exclusively in caste, are pariahs not worthy of participating in public discussion about how to further the project of justice in Indian society. The possibilities of dialogue cannot but be severely constrained in such a situation.

Much the same is true of that other enduring binary in our society: everyone is either secular or communal. Those who are secular will not acknowledge the importance of religious attachments in Indian society. If they did, they would seek and possibly find ways of persuading people that religious identities should be restricted to the private sphere and not be carried over into the public sphere; that inter-faith dialogue and conversation are useful ways of negotiating differences; that shared spaces – including sacred spaces such as Sufi shrines – have a potential for building a more tolerant society. Communal disharmony is at least partly the result of a lack of understanding of others, the difficulty of seeing what we share with them rather than the respects in which we are different. In a robust culture of public reasoning, the possibilities of persuasively demonstrating the value of diversity are surely somewhat higher.

 

It is an embarrassment, finally, to even mention that the most familiar violation of the fundamental principle of respect for others and their opinions, which has become a part of daily practice and has unfortunately also become an accepted feature of our institutional cultures, from the political and the bureaucratic to the academic. This is the peculiar form of partisanship that takes the form of the argument: I don’t like your policies because I don’t like you. One need hardly add that this is to simultaneously forsake reasoning and repudiate the public.

It can be nobody’s case that politics should, as Ronald Dworkin has memorably put it, be conducted as if they were a philosophy seminar. But if the quality of political debate languishes, so – in the long run – will the quality of our democracy. A democracy without a culture of public reasoning will remain a series of five-yearly battles rather than an ongoing political conversation.