It’s an indicator of the depths to which the quality of debate in public life has sunk, that the patently anti- national proposition that north Indians should be discouraged from migrating to metropolitan Mumbai in search of employment and livelihood, has prompted the Congress-led Maharashtra government to pass an order reserving 80 percent of jobs in industry (public and private) for sons-of-the-soil, defined as people with 15 years of domicile in the state (pop. 98 million). This pernicious order is the outcome of an array of leaders and intellectuals in Maharashtra tacitly endorsing the hooliganism and illegal violence that stormtroopers of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) party led by Raj Thackeray, have mounted against citizens from other parts of the country migrating to India’s most industrialised state.
Although the history of the Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan clearly demonstrates the danger of identity politics based on religion, language or other particularisms, it’s an indicator of the intellectual poverty and self-serving myopia of this state’s opinion leaders, that they seem to harbour few compunctions about endorsing the pretentious sub-nationalism of Raj Thackeray, a common rabble-rouser who has amassed a vast fortune without any visible sources of income. Thus recently columnist-novelist Shobhaa De who for mysterious reasons is accorded the status of a sentient intellectual by the establishment, proclaimed on national television that she discerns considerable merit in Thackeray’s sub-nationalist particularism, although she doesn’t approve of his strong-arm methods of articulating it. Likewise Praful Patel, a moneyed scion of dubious antecedents and whom compulsions of coalition politics has thrust into the position of Union minister for civil aviation, expressed the viewpoint that it is understandable that Maharashtrians should feel short-changed and deprived by the “influx” of people from other parts of the country.
Yet the point to be noted by the academic and student communities is that the professed ability to see both sides of a contentious issue is not necessarily an intellectual achievement. Quite obviously, there is some merit in even the most retrograde and anti-national proposal — in this case alleged deprivation of sons-of-the-soil of employment and cultural assertion opportunities. Thus for the gullible it is possible to detect an iota of justification in the late and unlamented Adolf Hitler’s rationale for the conquest of Europe and persecution of Jews, or in Stalin’s deadly paranoia as he built the new Soviet society. Yet the intellectual’s duty to the public is not to see both sides of every issue and confer respectability to patently anti-national and illegal activities of self-serving thugs and crooks, but to unequivocally speak up for the greater good of nation and society.
The shallow musings and self-serving desire of faux intellectuals to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, must not be allowed to pass for wisdom. It should be roundly condemned as subversive and anti-national.