Who will speak truth to unfreedom?

Mains Paper: 2 | Social Justice
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: To control research and prevent academics from protesting will kill the spirit of critical inquiry

Introduction

•  After their father’s death, five young women are forced to live in a barricaded house of mourning for eight years.

•  The doors are latched, windows are curtained with thick black fabric, and every nook and cranny closed.

•  The consequences of living in claustrophobic spaces without men are tragic.

•  The sisters repeatedly attack each other in grotesque performances of frustrated desire.

•  Bernarda, the mother, is the poster-girl of fascism.

•  One of her daughters dares to wear make-up, Bernarda snatches the make-up and viciously smears it on the face of the young woman.

•  Beyond the barred room, we catch tantalising glimpses of sunlight.

•  Within the house we encounter pitifully deformed psyches and disturbed minds. Lorca authored a formidable play.

Costs of subjugation

•  Open societies encourage us to accept and welcome different ideas and practices. They liberate and expand our imaginations and our commitments.

•  When societies turn inwards, they construct barricades between themselves and the outside world.

•  At some point members transfer the notion of the outsider to parts of the collective self. Political subjugation carries heavy costs.

But where will these sane voices come from?

•  The party in power has identified and cracked down on three sites of debate and dissent, the media, civil society and the public university.

•  Incalculable damage has been done. Public universities are accessible and affordable.

•  They provide training in skills, but more importantly, they expose young minds to nuanced debates in the social sciences and the humanities.

•  The objective is to fine-tune sensibilities and push back horizons, familiarise young people with the best in literature, philosophy, political science, history, sociology, aesthetics and psychology, and keep alive the spirit of critical inquiry.

Power of the humanities

•  The imaginatively designed courses in the humanities and social sciences lie at the heart of any university worth its name.

•  They encourage students to challenge and interrogate, even as they explore the past and the present.

•  Teachers inspire students to understand the complexities of the human condition, to know what should be done for human beings, and what should not be done to them.

•  Above all the students are introduced to categories that allow them to think, reflect, and critically engage with people, places and things.

Can we have a university without the humanities?

•  It would be like a bar without alcohol!

•  If history and philosophy vanish from academic life, they may be replaced by a technical training facility or corporate research institute, he wrote.

•  This will not be a university in the classic sense of the term.

•  Without critical disciplines, universities are no more than teaching shops, producing so much unthinking labour for the market.

Just court history

•  The policy strikes at the very idea of a public university that embodies the spirit of critical inquiry.

•  Now no academic can ask her students to reflect on the shortcomings of economic policies that reproduce inequality.

•  The social practices that foster gender and caste discrimination, on the politics of intolerance, on historical inquiry, or on cultural practices that disable rights in the name of tradition.

•  Academic research has been reduced to court history.

Way forward

•  It is clear that holders of power and their academic courtiers have extracted retribution and punished those who have dared to speak back to unfreedom.
•  The ruling party and compliant Vice-Chancellors have shot themselves in the foot.
•  A society is known ultimately by the knowledge its universities and research centres produce, by the excellence of the faculty and by the curiosity of the students.
•  Today, knowledge has been replaced with trite information. Mediocrity rules, and eminent academics are crudely harassed.
•  Above all, the order demeans reputed academics the precise way in which Bernarda, the mother in Lorca’s play, humiliated her daughter.
•  The difference is that now the censor board will gag analytical and insightful scholarship. Instead of strengthening the public university, which was meant to be a training ground for citizenship.
•  The government has deliberately weakened an academic structure that has great potential to chart a route to opportunity and social justice.

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General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Prelims Questions:

Q.1) Consider the following statements with reference to the idea of liberalism in the context of Indian Constitution:
1. Indian liberalism gives primacy to the rights of the individuals over the rights of community.
2. Reservations for SC/ST community in constitution is an example of Indian liberalism.

Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
(a) 1 only
(b) 2 only
(c) 1 and 2 only
(d) Neither 1 nor 2
Answer: B

Mains Questions:
Q.1) Who will speak truth to unfreedom?