This lecture was delivered as part of the History for Peace conference titled 'The Idea of Democracy' hosted at St Kabir Public School, Chandigarh on May 5 and 6, 2023.

Today we will discuss about how children think and how their minds operate. Then I’ll move on to some everyday sociology. And then in the last section, I will do a bit of what you might call following Dr Ambedkar’s physiology of society—why the blood doesn’t flow through Indian society the way it flows through a healthy body and the expectation that education will improve communication across society and up and down its vertical character, its hierarchy. Why doesn’t education fully succeed in doing that? That will be how the lecture will conclude.

I thought it is important to start with the way children think, especially in the earlier part of their school days. I think it is important to do that because our system is so burdened with the awful legacies of behaviourist psychology that it does not pay attention to the way children think. Long before we allow children to think, we eliminate the possibilities that they will think or can think on their own. That is a terrible legacy of the early 20th century behaviourist movement which has been challenged in schools, universities and almost everywhere in the world. But in our country, it continues to dominate our thinking, policies, administrative regimes, starting with kindergarten, all the way to the level at which the senior students today are.

This legacy stops us from recognizing the child’s thoughts. We tend to either not recognize it or critically respond to it and thereby suppress it. If we did recognize how little children think, then it would be easy to understand that children feel a lot more comfortable with the idea of monarchy than with the idea of democracy. The reason is very obvious. In monarchy you see somebody in charge, either the king or the queen. It’s not just a legacy of past times in history that children feel more comfortable with the idea that somebody is in charge and somebody in charge can be seen. It’s not just a legacy of past thinking but this is the way a child’s mind in the earlier part of childhood is actually capable of thinking. The child can see with their own eyes that this man, or this woman is in charge. The world is in order for a small child because the king is in place. Democracy, on the other hand, is an invisible and abstract idea. If you ask a grade-four child about how he knew that India is a democracy it won’t take much guessing that the child will say my teacher told me so, or that I learned that in my class. What does that democracy, the idea of democracy, mean to the child? Not much. But democracy is a very complex and invisible idea. How power is exercised in it is not easy to follow but how one labels democracy is even more difficult to follow. Children will probably take recourse to the good old definition of Abraham Lincoln, which gets you marks even now, after so long. Democracy is government of the people, by the people etc. What does that mean? Do people govern? And if they do, where is the state? The idea that we are all part of the state, or that we are the state, is a very difficult idea to absorb, especially when you see so many people who actually don’t have much power. In every institution it seems that one person has power. You may not call him the king but you still call him a principal or the headmaster or collector of the district, chief administrator, lieutenant governor etc.

These are ways of concrete thinking that children continue to do for quite some time in their life—following Jean Piaget and other cognitive psychologists—before the advent of the more abstract, formal capacity to think or ‘formal thinking’. A few years ago, a principal told me that two primary level children came fighting to her office. This is in one of the best schools in Delhi. These were two boys who had heard the principal’s address in the morning assembly that day in which she had said—like many principals do — ‘Children, we must make our school like heaven’. And then she had discussed some characteristics of heaven hoping to inspire them. Well, she did inspire this boy. He brought the other boy of his class who was fighting, all the way to her office. And when she asked why they were fighting, that boy who had brought the other one along said, ‘Ma’am, you said we want to make this school a heaven. What is he doing here?’ I think it’s one of the best questions you could ask if you wanted to understand India’s democracy today. That we want to yield to the temptation of an exclusive heaven. We are here. What are they doing here? They ought to have gone at the time of Partition, all of them. This way of thinking that heaven can only be exclusive is a very common idea. You see it in our colonies. Luckily, Chandigarh doesn’t have any gated colonies, but Delhi has. We don’t want riffraff to enter our gates at night or even during the day. There are colonies where maidservants need to show their badge or card to a guard standing, not at the house itself but at the gate that leads into the lane. So, this child’s question was very important because that’s what the child had already understood from life. To maintain a heaven, badly behaved people have to be kept out of it. Now, that idea is a very difficult idea to see as a pedestal, as a stepping stone to conceptualizing democracy, because that idea includes exclusion of those that you don’t feel comfortable with, or you don’t want, for whatever reason, to be with you all the time.

Along with that the idea also invokes the notion that if there is heaven, somebody has to be looking after it, somebody has to make sure there is a custodian of heaven. Now that may be true, I have no experience of heaven yet. But the idea that heavens need almost the same kind of arrangement that we have for our lives on this earth is not a very new idea. You must have heard the song ‘If there is heaven darling, then where is the parking lot?’ and so on. Heaven is where we can imagine we will have to have the kind of facilities that we are used to. One of my senior uncles who died a long time ago told his sister when he was about to pass away ‘Book a room for me but make sure that it has AC’. Is AC compatible with democracy? I sometimes wonder when I see schools fully air-conditioned. In a recent visit to one of the Indian Institutes of Management just this month, I was told by the director that the students are so used to AC in their hostels that they are now demanding AC in their corridors. I have actually just now used the washroom which was air conditioned.

The notion that if democracy is to be the ideal condition for a country, then somebody has to make sure that it is maintained. This idea actually goes back to how we became democratic, even though I know Mr. Sainath doesn’t agree with it. But the notion that elections will be held regularly started with municipalities in the later part of the 19th century and over 60-80 years elections became a part of the democratic process. This idea that democracy is essentially elections and that somebody will conduct them in a fair manner and will control others from disturbing the elections—this idea is an administrative statement today. I know the Election Commissioner himself can’t exercise much power. Otherwise, the Constitution does make the Election Commission a very powerful body because the Election Commission looks after the way an election is conducted.

But if we extend this idea a little bit more, is election the best symptom of democracy? There are many countries in the world which have democracy but where democracy is in sort of perpetual doubt. This is something which philosophers, political scientists and others have always pointed out that democracy is not just a system of governance or government. Democracy is also a way of life. If the democratic way of life is to be lived, or if a democratic way of life is to be implemented, do we need a custodian to make sure that its properly done? If questions are asked like is patriarchy compatible with democracy somebody will have to maintain some control on men so that they don’t simply dominate women at least not on the streets as they do. This idea that maintenance of social order needs a strong head who can control, is neither new nor awkward for most people, especially if they are educated, they would welcome somebody who can control.

In fact, the notion of control was maintenance of law and order in the name of which you can do a number of things. Our neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh has extended that number quite a bit, for the kind of things you can do to maintain law and order. Because once law and order is the flag that you keep in front of you then a number of things can be done which are not otherwise very compatible with the idea of a democratic order. Hence the importance of control. We must control. In fact, I was a bit surprised that even Mr. Sainath used the word ‘control’ at one point. Who would control? This idea is very common that if democracy is to be maintained somebody will have to control. Control what? Control society? Yes. Control people from their own instincts? Perhaps yes. How does one do that? If control is the way that democracy is safeguarded then India does pose a very major problem—not just academic but real. Its geography, social diversity, cultural and linguistic diversity, historically constructed habits—many of these seem to make controlling difficult, if control is the way to ensure democracy. If democracy were simply a way of controlling then it will be very difficult to maintain it in our control. The state of course is described in our great books as the sovereign authority. The state is that powerful structure which maintains that control. The government acts in the name of the state.

Once I accompanied a group of 7th grade children to the Parliament. They were taken for a field experience from a progressive school. So, we went to the Parliament and we showed them the corridors of the Parliament. The corridors of the Parliament look very impressive. The outer corridors of this brown building have these tall columns—really impressive, round, tall, white-coloured columns.  

As I was walking around with these kids one of them asked me ‘Is this the state?’. Now the child’s imagination does really wonder, where is the state? Where the government is concerned, the child can see, can read, can open the internet and can open the book to find out that where the governor lives, where the collector of a district lives etc. But where does the state live? This highly powerful, sovereign authority is invisible. It’s a system of ideas that sustains the state. That is a very easy thing to say but a very difficult thing to grasp. It takes 10-12 years to grasp that, sometimes it takes much longer. Lots of people don’t grasp that at all. That the state has authority, yes, but that authority is not an authority as such, it’s the structure of ideas that permit that authority to live and that structure of ideas is what matters. Those ideas have been enshrined as they say and sometimes, we forget that it is not a very good idea to just enshrine these ideas. But we are lucky that they are at least enshrined somewhere so that when everybody forgets them, they will still be found enshrined in the Constitution. Those ideas are justice, social justice, equality, fraternity. These have been written out and so we can be assured. The Hindi poet Agyeya had once said in his old age in a short verse, “Ye do char shabd hai, inko sambhaal ke rakhna, kabhi kam ayenge” (here are a few words to keep, they might be of use in future). Some of these words like nyay (justice), loktantra (democracy), kshamta (power). These days I think about Agyeya and wonder, has their time come? Kam ayenge ajkal, inko yad rakhna zaruri hai kyunki ab yaad hi rakh sakte hain (They hold so much worth today and we should recall them—that is all we can do anyway). You often wonder about it. This notion that that these are somehow part of a doctrine and that the legal system and the judicial system ensure that this doctrine is maintained in good health—this idea is very common. These days for every little thing, even in cases involving schools or universities we run to the court hoping that if the school can’t maintain the sense of justice, the court will chastise the school. Or if the university can’t properly appoint or chose between people in a just manner, giving everybody a truly equal chance, then the court will be able to chastise the university. 

This idea is becoming more and more popular because the exercise of those values which the Constitution talks about has been sort of sliding away from institutions where they reside, at the ground level, the middle level, at every level. So just about every little case goes up, a bit of a taunt or a bit of a haunting statement, that each one of us carries that authority which - when we are together, we see represented in the state—a very complex idea to hold in the mind, except that in English or in Hindi it’s not difficult to articulate such an idea. But to conduct life, to conduct administration, to maintain institutions around this idea is an extremely challenging task in a society like ours, perhaps any society.

We look at one of the most celebrated democracies in the world, the United States. That child who said ‘If this is heaven what is he doing here?’, that’s something which the whites of America think all the time. Why do we need these 12 per cent blacks even now? We needed them once, what are they doing here now? They think more or less the way many people in India do. Whether Partition could have settled the matter of which people of what religion will live here and who all will live in Pakistan—this kind of simple idea that if democracy is the best possible way of self-governance or kind of heaven of governance, then it better be controlled in such a way that it is exclusive. So, the difficulties of such a heaven arise more sharply in our subcontinent than they arise in the United States or elsewhere because we are such a diverse country, we have such sharply defined pluralities.

People who speak Tamil mostly live in Tamil Nadu, people who speak Marathi mostly live in Maharashtra, they don’t necessarily communicate with each other at every level of society with ease. Look at geography. Just this morning the Hindu has explained the problems, the very special problems that Manipur has where a shoot-at-sight order has been given. The special problems arise from its geography. And what is that problem? It’s shaped like a football stadium. There is a valley in the middle where it’s easier to commute and all around it is like a stadium and the higher grounds like galleries. Now the valley has the least population but it has the greatest facilities and has more prosperity. These galleries in this stadium, the higher hills are where the poorer people live. The highways pass through those hills and therefore the difficulties that have arisen in Manipur—not for the first time but they arise all the time—are geographically constructed. Manipur is not special. We can consider that aspect in terms of our long history as well as short history.

 Much of our history as a country has been shaped by our geography, with which sometimes we feel quite uncomfortable. We will be very loyal and patriotic Indians but we don’t like its hot summer. Or be very loyal and don’t like its monsoon season. Our geography has shaped so much of our history that it is not easy to dismiss that today in various parts of the country. When we conduct the basic rituals of democracy, geography is taken into account. But then apart from geography, forces of culture, language, religion, all these make India a country where if you wanted to control—a great temptation since ancient times—you wouldn’t be able to control the whole of it. In fact, no emperor ever controlled the whole of what we today call India. Yes, we believe that both Emperor Ashoka and Emperor Akbar had more control on more territories than anyone else, but we know that their rule could not be classified as control and geographically it was not total. Not every part of India ever came under any single emperor. Hence the idea of control is to be ruled out in understanding democracy and explaining it to children. Democracy as a system of life and a system of governance. In both cases is difficult but what makes it most difficult is not the geography alone or the linguistic diversity or the religious diversity. What makes it most challenging is the vertical structure, the hierarchy.

Now here I’m going to do a little bit of everyday sociology as I had promised to you. To understand India’s hierarchy is not that hard but it is easy to miss it if you are at school from 8:00 am to 12:00 noon, when my street is abuzz with sounds. First comes the sabziwala (vegetable seller)—three of them—and they announce in their own voice, “Sabzi lelo, kaun kaun si le lo” (Take the vegetables, which ones do you want?) etc. Then comes a naliwala (plumber), because he knows that by 9:00 am many middle-class houses will have their pipes blocked, hence it is time to get them opened. Then perhaps slightly earlier comes the garbage truck, the kudewala. Till quite recently the Chandigarh municipality had a nice cassette or CD playing on, asking you to separate your machhli ki haddiyan (fish bones) from dry batteries, wrappers of medicines and vegetable peels. Nowadays they don’t do it they think we have learnt it. Actually, they have given up. Then after some time you will probably hear the phalwala (fruit seller) as well. Then come people from 10 to 12, who have microphones, mild loudspeakers fitted on their motorcycle and sometimes on their cars. I like the acharwala (pickle seller) who is selling gajar ka achar (carrot pickle), gobi ka achar (cauliflower pickle) and every possible pickle. Sometimes you will hear the call of somebody who will repair your gas chula (oven). The one I like the most is ‘gas ka chula aur pressure cooker thik karalo’ (let me fix your gas oven and pressure cooker). There is another one who offers that kind of service for silai (sewing) machine as well.

These are some six or seven calls but I have forgotten the most important ones, I was reserving it for the end because my everyday sociology came to a maturation some weeks back on a certain morning because of him. He is the doodhwala (milkman). He doesn’t say “doodh ya dahi le lo” (take the milk or curd). He has a whistle and he blows it. When he passes by, you better go out quickly because he is paddling his cycle rickshaw fast. This season, if you are late one thing you won’t get is lassi (sweetened buttermilk) because it is very popular. One morning when I did hear all the others but I did not hear the whistle, was the day when I had actually run out of everything—milk, dahi and lassi. I wondered what happened to this because I know that these products have to be sold, they can’t be stored forever. So, the idea is that there is a booth alright but somebody is going to go around the colony, the various roads and streets, and blow his whistle so people come and buy it. That day it did not happen. So, I went to the booth in the afternoon. I know the person who owns it, a very nice gentleman. I asked him what happened today? Didn’t that man come? He said that somebody was ill in his family and therefore, he didn’t come. I said then what happened to those things? He said, ‘Well I went around with my son.’ I said ‘Yes, but you didn’t blow the whistle,’ and you know what he said? He said—that’s one thing I can’t do. There was some essence of mortification in his voice that as an academic person I should understand these things and I don’t. If he were to blow a whistle his status which is that of the owner of a booth, a businessman, will suffer and that’s something which he can’t bring himself to do. I said that if you didn’t blow a whistle, how did you attract the attention of anyone? He replied that the few houses he knew to be regulars, he pressed their bells. He said that he’s sorry that he didn’t press my bell because I’m not a regular buyer.

This story reminded me of how those eight visitors to our lane were divided in terms of their backgrounds, what they offer to sell and how they are looked upon by others. Two of them are, very clearly, from the Dalit or the Scheduled Caste communities—the garbage collectors and the naliwala. You don’t need much sociology to know that. It is to be taken for granted. Even if those posts have been opened up in many states to upper castes, no one applies for these kinds of positions in the municipality. As for the naliwala, he is an entrepreneur and he carries his owns equipment and he does the job wherever its required. And then he has to enter into endless negotiations for the price that he charges. But these two are, very obviously, occupations that are associated with caste. Then you have these others, the various sabziwalas, phalwalas who are also associated with their caste but not in the sense that they can’t do anything else. In fact, my sabziwala’s son has just got into a Navodaya school and not in any reserved category. Congratulations to him! Whenever I see him, now he will feel free from his problems. He still worries about it but Navodaya is a good school and he has heard that good schools are few.

Sabziwalas belong to slightly freer caste groups. And then you have the ones who have the motorcycles fitted with a loudspeaker and somebody who has a truck to carry pickles. These are also entrepreneurs of a slightly higher order and if you examine them, you will find that they belong to a slightly higher caste in the caste hierarchy. But the case of the owner of the booth is the most interesting one. He is from the highest caste, actually a Brahmin—not a good thing to be in Punjab but still Brahmins are Brahmins. And for him, apart from that, he is also the owner of a business. He holds the franchise of Punjab’s best known milk brand ‘Verka’. And for him to blow a whistle and attract attention of people like that is somehow too embarrassing. This brief everyday sociology I have narrated, in order to put across to you the problems of democratic governance and more than that, the problems of a democratic way of life, how difficult it is to maintain it.

Dr Ambedkar was a student of John Dewey, the great educational philosopher of the United States. In 1926, Dewey’s famous book Education and Democracy was published. In this book Dewey had argued for posterity that democracy depends on communication, especially the communication of ideas. If they flow from one section of the society to another, from one part of the territory to another, then democracy will be safer. If people understand each other so much that they don’t have to ask what the other person thinks, know each other’s rights, difficulties and comforts, there will be a lot more empathy. You won’t have to demand. A woman won’t have to say that this is my right to dignity, don’t disturb it, otherwise I’ll take the matter to court. A man doesn’t know it and that is why he bothers a woman. Dewey had worked out all these issues of rights and how they can be maintained. Best if they are maintained in such a manner that everybody knows what others’ rights are, so that those others don’t have to remind you after you have violated their rights.

There were two courses which Dr Ambedkar took with Dewey. This was one big idea that Ambedkar absorbed during his studies at Columbia—that democracy depends on the free flow of ideas. Ambedkar in one of his shorter articles, and also in a letter, uses a metaphor from physiology, Biology in fact, to explain that. That our body feels healthy, any organic body feels healthy when the blood flows across the cells and that the membrane is not thick enough to stop the flow of blood. Various problems arise when blood doesn’t flow freely. Ambedkar thought that our society had ideas that does not let blood flow freely. Caste doesn’t let it happen because caste communities have been frozen for so long. They are like a tray in the colder part of a fridge. Each section has its own ice, which doesn’t flow across. Class hierarchies had also emerged by the time Ambedkar was writing but caste was something about which he was truly worried. He had himself experienced it, he knew how horrible it can be to suffer caste oppression.

‘Marginalization’ we call it today—not a very good word to communicate the violence that is involved in maintaining caste oppression. But a caste based social order is essentially a violent order. Ambedkar has said this numerous times, even before independence, that Indian democracy will not be safe, will in fact crumble if caste is not annihilated. One of his most famous lectures could not be delivered in Lahore because of its title. Organizers developed cold feet. It was called Annihilation of Caste.

The idea that democracy works best when ideas circulate resonated with Ambedkar. They circulate geographically; they circulate up and down society. How do you express that idea? Circulation of course is one way of expressing that idea. Ideas that are born—let’s say in one group, one religion, one community, one part of the country—they get to be known everywhere not just as a short WhatsApp message but as ideas. People actually understand that this is the way that people of Punjab think or the people of Bengal think in this way and so on.

That is one circulation, that is one meaning of this notion. But then there is another way and for that the best metaphor is the coffee-making machine, the percolator. What does it do? The coffee in it goes up and down and thereby good coffee carries the goodness of all the little particles of coffee. What does it mean in terms of ideas? Percolation of ideas would mean a situation where ideas would interact with each other between ideas and there will be free flow, conflict and collisions. Ideas grow when opposite ideas clash with them. Both these ideas, circulation and percolation, demand freedom from fear—the fear of expression of the idea. Howsoever disorderly it is, howsoever awkward it is, howsoever young may the person be who asked it, howsoever old may the person be who is asking that question, howsoever marginalized that person be who is asking that question. That question must be heard and it must be heard in a manner that you don’t shoot that person. Something that the democracy of the United States of America is particularly affiliated with, that if you don’t get out of the parking lot the way you are supposed to, I might shoot you. Freedom of not just expression but the capacity to listen is also very essential. In fact, I have been to various schools where the children were deeply worried when they saw the live telecast of the Indian Parliament. They say, ‘Sir if we behave like this we will be thrown out of the school. If we don’t allow somebody to speak or allow coming to the well of the classroom, as sometimes Members of Parliament come to the well of the Parliament, we will have no future in this school! So why do they show us these scenes at all?’ Truly this is the child’s question, just like the first question I started with, ’If this is heaven what is he doing here? Please make sure that such people don’t come here.’ Now a child’s question, the capacity to keep questioning no matter what grade you achieve, no matter how dull you are, how poor your marks are—that’s the capacity that education is not only supposed to nurture but safeguard. So that your ability to question, your ability to say things remains intact and you know don’t develop that fear when you have your own children or when you have a job. The fear that you might lose your job if you speak up—how can democracy live in that kind of situation?

That’s not any heaven of freedom let alone let alone Tagore’s heaven.

The notion that ideas must all be available to clash with each other without the fear of violence is an essential tenet of Gandhi’s faith. This aspect of Gandhi is rarely discussed in the context of democracy. Non-violence is a condition of democracy and not just an ornamental great achievement of a Mahatma. Language is such a basic tool for democracy. It reminds us that if language stops working or language is not allowed to be used, that’s when stabbings begin or when guns become necessary. Ideas must circulate through the books we read; ideas must circulate when people are willing to listen without getting angry. When parliamentarians represent an exemplar behaviour for listening for as long as necessary. There are sessions of Parliament that can go on the whole night, where is the hurry? Because after all, it is such an important thing. When ideas are heard, answers are given that are sharp and the person who is giving the answer is not scared that this answer will arouse so much anger that I could be in trouble tomorrow or I could be told ‘behave yourself’ and so on—those are not the conditions in which democracy lives. Democracy lives when an idea is free to be expressed and when ideas clash with each other without the fear of violence. The entire society works on a communicational principal, physically exercised and not through the invisible medium that guards your invisibility, naming social media. Physically it functions in a way that nobody is scared because we know that the other person will be just as courteous in responding to you as you have been expressing yourself. That is really the heaven of democracy, that which works on ideas. Finally, why despite so much expectation and anticipation, doesn’t education help? This whole idea that we have been discussing for the last while is based on the thesis that democracy cannot be maintained by control. What it needs is coherence.

Coherence arising from people’s own understanding of each other no matter how different they are or where they live or how poor or rich they are. Education is the ideal means of creating coherence in society. It offers you a prolonged exposure of 15-16 years or more perhaps to absorb ideas through a person who doesn’t tolerate much nonsense, namely your teacher. What better than education in creating this notion that democracy depends on circulation, free circulation of ideas and percolation of ides among themselves? If we are asking, what better than education, why didn’t it do it? Why hasn’t it done it? Well with education you can’t ask many questions for the reason that education doesn’t take much time, if you believe in education. I’m sadly one of them who would say well this time hasn’t been enough, give us more time. In the meanwhile, if we lose our democracy and our freedom, then our education will be in an even worse position to help democracy because it’s high time that education helped. So we better dissect why education has not helped while it doesn’t help.

The answer lies in the way the system historically got habituated to creating exclusive heavens. That child who brought the other one to my friend’s office has given the answer. In order to maintain that heaven in this school, throw him out today, don’t let him study here. Our country doesn’t have common schools; our country has excellent schools which are maintained as exclusive heavens. You need money, you need other forms of cultural resources to be able to get into best schools. Despite laws that permit some others also to enter. These laws haven’t found an easy way in our country. We are used to maintaining exclusive heavens even in our education system.

It’s not such a bad idea on its own. Now if you add to it certain other features of exclusivity then you are compounding to your own problem. Consider language for example. If the school follows a mono medium and the other media and languages not as much, even though India is a multilingual country, a cultural country, problems begin to arise. If you have command on one language because for 16 years it was used for teaching every subject, then your command on other languages including your own mother tongue may get weaker. And those who have command on that language typically don’t have command on English. So, communication begins to thin out if not break down. Not every school can afford the kind of translations that are provided in Parliament but if you have experienced those translations in any meticulous way then you might say it’s just as well.

I remember, as a member of the 1991 committee chaired by the late Professor Yashpal which was talking about problems of burden on children and stress which leads many to suicide, etc, we had given our report. It was a short report of 32 pages. After sometime, when we had submitted it and it was approved by the Parliament, I got the copy of the Hindi version for my approval, because they knew that I am bilingual. When I read it, I had some trouble believing that was the Hindi translation of our report. ’Aisa koi kamra nahi hai jisme ye sochne ki sambhavna ho’ —this was a line from the Hindi version. So, I wondered where we wrote it. Did we mention a room, he said yes— ‘there is no room to think this way.’ The Lok Sabha translation had used kamra, because he could only think of that room. In those days there was no Google translation that is extremely common now. And the Google translator is no better than the Lok Sabha translator, in fact it is even worse. 

So now you can imagine how Ambedkar’s heaven has very little chance to flourish. People don’t know two or three languages equally well and our schools don’t prepare them for that. The Scandinavian school prepares you for five languages, learned so well that you don’t need a translator, you don’t need to study a translated copy of their literature. Many countries of the world have done far better. We are of course proud of our multilingual heritage but we haven’t done much about it.

What would it mean that ideas circulate freely and that education enhances that circulation? When it comes to percolation, I think our education system was already a bit handicapped and now it is even more so. Universities used to be places where you can assemble anywhere and just speak, raise slogans do what you want. At least up to 25 years ago many universities were free spaces. In many universities there were rooms for which you didn’t have to get permission, you would just go and have your discussion there. If you want to use room number 21—the most famous room in Delhi University campus—even for a formal speaker’s session, the file goes all the way to the Vice Chancellor, who examines the biodata of the speaker who will speak in room number 21. Room number 21 is no luxury apartment, doesn’t have good furniture. Students used to love it because they could just push it around and discuss anything there. Universities have lost their autonomous space for freedom of speech. Many universities have lost it. We should not be surprised when a man like Amartya Sen gets an eviction notice from Tagore’s university, Visva-Bharati. That’s an indicator of where universities are today. Education has not managed to safeguard its highest academic places as far as freedom of expression is concerned. Quite recently, somebody was invited to speak at our university here with which I am associated. Somebody in the committee which looks at organizations said, “Yeh to tukde tukde gang wale hai, inko hum yahan nahi invite karna chahte” (These are members of the separatist gang, we don’t want to invite them here. You know what that phrase means. It means that this fellow is from JNU and so on.

Universities have actually suffered much more than schools in the last two-three decades. If universities were the spaces where these ideas which are so central to democracy, so crucial for democracy’s health were safe - but it is not so today. Thank you.

Question and Answer Session

Audience member 1: Good afternoon, sir, you talked about JNU and what happened in that university briefly but Article 19 of the Indian Constitution talks about the right to freedom of speech and expression. Clause 2 talks about reasonable restrictions to it. I don’t think what happened in JNU was suitable for our country’s democracy. The statements which were made there were pretty anti-national.

KK: Would you like to tell me what those statements were?

Audience member 1:  One was I think about the Indian army—I actually have that in my phone but there were statements which were signed by the security people of the university campus itself. The document was given to them by the University and it was signed by the security people, like these were some statements made by the university students there.

KK: So, you take it as a matter of trust?

Audience member 1: No, but in a way, it causes discrepancy in the country, because many statements disregard the Indian army as well as the nationalist sentiments of people.

KK: I would like to know at least one statement which you would like to quote in order to make this conversation a little more substantial. Otherwise, I have to go by saying we go by trust in what you are saying and you are going by trust in the security. The security is going by trust in the university authority and so on. It is sort of a chain of trust.

Audience member 1: I think it was something like Maqbool Bhatt zindabad (Long live Maqbool Bhatt), who was actually a terrorist and there were a couple of more.

KK: Now supposing somebody in your school and in your class says that, what would one of your good teachers or any teacher do?

Audience member 1: She would obviously tell that student that it is not okay and you as a citizen of a nation should respect the nation.

KK: I agree but what would the teacher do?

Audience member 1: She would simply tell the child to not say it.

KK: If you think that is education—to shut up somebody just because what he is saying is unacceptable—then I am afraid we must talk sometime about what education is.

Audience member 1: The teacher wouldn’t tell the child to shut up, she would try to inculcate the value of what this is.

KK: I agree but how do you inculcate that value? By listening to that slogan howsoever awful it is and sitting down and talking about what the qualities are you that would praise in that person. And I’ll tell you what things are wrong with that person and that teacher will perhaps engage with that child or perhaps with that whole class. Ask everybody to join in to say, why is this person saying this? Just maintaining silence over that is hardly an educational response to what you believe happened in JNU. As an institution of eminence, its responsibility is to listen, explain and engage, and not be threatened by one person’s voice. Let people talk about it. That person has gone up to the university level, surely has some capacities to think and some capacity to listen. If that person engages the conversation with a teacher there or friends in an atmosphere where any idea can be discussed, then there is a slight chance that that the person might change his mind, if that is what you feel ought to have happened in that case. But if you don’t let that person speak, or break his head, or you completely throw out the possibility of that kind of thing we heard, you only encourage that. Ambedkar’s idea, which I was referring to you earlier, is precisely that. That idea has to be expressed and heard no matter how odious it is. His idea of annihilation of caste was so odious that he wasn’t even allowed to lecture and he was such a great leader even at that time. And what happened to that idea, that idea has made Ambedkar immortal. It was suppressed in Lahore but that paper is still read. That’s what happens if you follow the instinct that JNU had or its authority or the security has. The instinct which you seem to endorse. That we shouldn’t listen to ideas that we label as anti-national. Even those ideas need to be heard. If you want to develop a nation, don’t feel threatened by one person’s idea.

Audience member 2: I’d like to just take off from the point that you are making about democracy to answer perhaps as a journalist. Because I just heard the question asked about a news related event. Let’s just take the farmers protest which went on for a year in Delhi. How reliable is the news that you are given? Professor Krishna Kumar detailed very briefly for you as well. The bills were passed in the Parliament without any opposition. It was made into a law a year later. Farmers sat in protest a month after that and that protest went on for a year. But news media, largely set in the corporate sector which would largely benefit from those farm laws, made sure that the news that each one of us received in our daily newspapers and on television only told us a part of the story. It told us for example that the farmers protest was being held by rich farmers of Punjab and Haryana who were protesting against the MSP (Minimum Support Price) being taken away. So, the entire story about the farmers was calibrated for us and everyone one of us received that news on WhatsApp, newspaper and television. While in fact the entire country’s farmers where marching to Delhi or marching in their areas or protesting. None of your news carried it, there was no television coverage of it, the newspapers suppressed it. The story that was given to you, the narrative that was spun for you is that the rich farmers of Punjab and Haryana are protesting against it. So, I just want to say this that it is very important to be responsible consumers of news. To question the news that you are given and to not accept it from one source. To ask a question that sir said, who signed this? Was the security guard told that you’ll lose your job if you don’t sign the paper and that is the person a verifiable source? Why are dissent and discussion not allowed in a university and a classroom? What are we so scared of? What was the government so scared of that they put barricades on roads for farmers who, in rotation, are coming and sitting on the outskirts of Delhi. Thank you.

Audience member 3: The same was the case of OROP (One Rank One Pension) and we don’t hear any coverage from press, if you look at it. There are protests that are still going on. But we are shown the other side of the picture that everybody has gone home, everybody is very comfortable and defence people are basically a burden to the government. What we don’t understand is that it is their salary which they earned throughout their life and which they are getting back in terms of pension. They are not a burden. Tomorrow if we don’t have soldiers to fight for us then what are we going to do? So, we should always look at the news from different perspectives, not what we are being given by some source and only one source.

Audience member 4: You said democracy is a way of life. Could you explain this particular statement with some particular examples?

KK: The easiest way to answer this would be in the context of rights. Now, in the context of rights, think about everybody’s right to a life of dignity. If you want this right to have some substance or some meaning then you don’t wait for the violation of this right before you do something. Imagine a woman saying please stop yourself, that means the right has already been violated. Therefore, she has to protest, the protest doesn’t restore the right, doesn’t heal her. It simply is an outcry that somebody has treated her badly and abused her. The idea that democracy is a way of life means that you already know what the other person’s rights are. Therefore, you don’t behave in a way in which she has to protest. So, in that sense, the notion of a consensus about these rights—which are basic aspect of democracy—is essential and that’s when it becomes a way of life. You will not trespass somebody’s dignity. Talking courteously, allowing people to annoy you and yet remaining courteous. Something that our young friend was worried about just now, that why did that person raise that slogan. Could others be just courteous to him? It is exactly the same question that child had asked,’ What is he doing here, in this heaven?’—that encapsulates the idea of democracy. That democracy is not an exclusive heaven and if everybody has to live in it, then everybody has to tolerate no matter how odious their thoughts are. There has to be a culture of responding to those thoughts. That culture which is based on certain basic agreements on courtesy. This would be a reasonable example to show democracy is not simply a way of governance but a way of life. Because if this way of life is violated, then there will be too much burden on the government. As you can see right now, crores of cases, many of them of this nature, are waiting in the courts. Just think about hate speech cases. So many that have now been registered because the court has intervened. How can hate speech be compatible with democracy? As a way of life, you have to assume that somebody else cannot mobilize others to hate you. That assumption is where democracy lives. As a way of life democracy has to be maintained. You won’t wait for the court or police to take up the case and stop that person. Obviously that person who is indulging in hate speech doesn’t believe in the idea of democracy.

Audience member 5: A few days ago, my father expressed a thought that I would like your opinion on. He said the vocabulary of the famous phrase—of the people, for the people and by the people—has changed. It is not ‘by’ the people anymore, it is ‘buy’ the people. I thought it was an excellent thought and I wanted to ask your opinion on it.

KK: Let me add to it a tutorial which a taxi driver gave me in Calcutta a week ago. It’s a long ride from IIM Calcutta to the airport and I got the tutorial from a taxi driver from Bihar who works in Calcutta. I asked him the question because he was saying exactly what you are saying that if on the night before the election somebody offers you liquor, you vote for him. What if others offer you liquor too and his answer was whoever offers you more gets the vote. So, the distortions even in the procedures of democracy now are also so glaring that a lecture like this can even be charged of being completely beside the point. You are talking about ideas of democracy; we are talking about procedures of democracy. Even procedures can’t be safeguarded that you will allow people to vote without having faced the temptation of being given a bottle of liquor in a poor country. These are procedural aspects of democracy. They can be controlled; they can be maintained by better governance. Whereas ideas which are so basic, or you can say at the heart of it, are more difficult to maintain because you require a very vibrant system of education. With institutions like the one that has been so bitterly criticized—JNU and others— Mr. Sainath who spoke earlier was in fact a student of JNU. All the teachers he named from Romila Thapar to Bipan Chandra are famous professors of JNU. If the security guard of JNU can shake our trust in JNU, then we certainly are in a midnight moment of democracy or close to it.

Audience member 6: I would love your opinion on a teacher’s role in a democracy.

KK: I am so glad you asked that question because it allows me to share something with you and the others. Something very germinal to the idea of teaching. What is teaching? Surely it is not just transmission of knowledge or skills or completion of the syllabus or preparation of the examination. All of these are, or can be, aspects of teaching. But at its core teaching is a relational activity. No matter what the subject is, as a teacher one relates through that subject to a person lot younger than yourself, whose ideas are being formed in a different world, in a different ethos from the one in which your ideas were formed. The difference in the age of a teacher and that of a student can be anything from five years, ten years to sixty years. The teacher is trying to overcome that age gap and arouse the imagination and thinking of somebody so much younger and, therefore, somebody who has lived, has been brought up in a different ethos and a different world all together.

Now maintaining that relationship or enhancing that relational aspect of teaching makes the world neutral, a bit tepid. So, neutrality is a concept that arises from, basically, politics and sometimes law—that you maintain a middle stance - you can go this way, you can go that way. In the middle of a polarized dialogue, the neutral person sometimes is in good position to be a judge. I will listen to both of you then I will give my verdict. Judges are supposed to be the ideal of neutrality. It’s an interesting idea to think how a judge’s job is different from that of a teacher.

Now, in my original story the principal was going to be the judge who must decide whether this other boy must also live in heaven. Even though right now he is so awkward that his friend doesn’t accept him. Now, if the principal was a judge between those two little boys of the third grade, then the principal has to listen to both of them, and establish a sense of warmth for both of them so that she gets in a position to tell the exclusive heaven supporter that, look you have understood my idea of heaven a bit wrongly or differently. What I meant by heaven this morning, was that people who fight with you can also live here. You learn to live with them etc. A teacher’s job therefore will not be tilted in advance but a teacher must exercise her own right to think in a liberal, open manner so that she is able to relate to both sides even though she knows that somebody who is determined to muzzle somebody else’s fame doesn’t win.

So, it’s a judge who does have some pre-disposition, some kind of proclivity. In case of India’s judges or anybody, the Constitution provides us that pre-disposition. The Constitution says that if you don’t believe in social justice, then it’s your problem you have to resolve it. The Constitution cannot be changed for you. If you don’t believe in fraternity, if you believe in hate speech, then the Constitution cannot be changed for your sake. You are the one who has to change. This degree of pre-disposition I think is an important element of what you might call the value content of education. If the Constitution is such a resource for our values, then a teacher’s task cannot stop with neutrality, it begins with neutrality. So that everybody feels that the teacher is accessible. I will also be heard even though I am so awkward. Awkwardness is not necessarily a wrong thing and I am so glad that Sant Kabir has a child who did say something which I difficult for somebody like me to believe. Somebody can go buy the security guard of JNU, not the professor.

If that idea is being expressed, it means that we are in a good school. But that doesn’t mean that we will accept that idea. That means that we will follow this essential fundamental pre-disposition that India’s democracy, its Constitution, its great leaders like Gandhi and others have given us. They have given us a pre-disposition - this is the way we shall think. No matter how much you force us to abandon these ideas now. So, I don’t know if I have sufficiently addressed your question. The teacher’s job is to establish a relationship. A teacher’s job is to uphold a certain pre-disposition which is fundamental in social sciences. In fact, the very idea that I am calling it a social science itself means that we will allow every idea to be investigated. That is the meaning of science, systematic enquiry into any idea. If you and I are social science teachers then it is our job to safeguard the condition in which our subject can protect its scientific nature. Whether its political science or economics or sociology or history or geography it must maintain its scientific nature which means its freedom.

Audience member 7: As an educator I would like to ask, how do we need to convince our students in our present scenario what the future of democracy in India is right now?

KK: You convince by offering sufficient examples of pockets where democracy continues to vibrate. If you are very sick and you go to a very good hospital, the doctor will look for the organs which are still functioning instead of just declaring you a hopeless case and asking you to leave. For example, he might say that your liver is not working well but what about your pancreas? Maybe that works fine, maybe your lungs are okay too and I would say the same about the body politic of today. Consider the fact that despite all that makes it inconvenient to speak out or give dissent, as our journalist friends have articulated so well, there are journalists who still are speaking. Yes, India has come down in the list of press freedom hierarchy. Yesterday was the press Freedom Day and India was reported to be at 161st place—not a great place to be. It sort of reminds us that a great deal has been lost but it does not have to be lost forever. It can be regained. In medicine, there is such a principle called healing.

Healing, curing recovering—they are possible. There are parts of the country where you speak more freely. Why is that so? I was just in Calcutta where this conference had been conceived. Calcutta conceives many good things. I am not a Bengali but, in my generation, people used to say: What Bengal thinks today, the nation thinks tomorrow. This is a personal feeling that when you are speaking in Calcutta you feel more free. You give better examples because you know you will be heard—not that Bengalis are always famous for listening silently, but you will be heard. That means that there are pockets today. You can visit number of states in the country and within a state you can visit a number of districts where you will be heard where you will feel that some health of democracy is okay here for whatever reason. India is such a diverse country, you can’t just abandon it on the basis of a generalization and take the next flight to Cyprus where you think life is better. I find it amazing that students go to Cyprus from Chandigarh to study. When I meet them, I wonder if I need to get examined or they need to be examined. Doing medicine in Russia also amazes me but all these things need to be understood and heard.

In the context of Indian democracy, I think we are facing a certain amount of crisis, and a great deal of anguish and this anguish proves our health. Consider the fact that girls did not speak at all some 40 years ago when I started teaching in university. Very few used to speak. Today many more speak and for that reason they are chastised and face violence. Now that shows that something good must have happened to girls’ lives and freedoms for them to come to a point where others feel angry with them. A recent film called Mrs. Chatterjee vs Norway had this dialogue at the very end. She said when I was in school my parents told me to take science when I finished my parents told me to do B.Sc., when I finished, they thought I should get married and they found a boy and I got married Then that boy said you must go to Norway to work and I went. Now I am not going to listen to anyone. Time has come for me to live my own life finally. Her in-laws had called goons to throw her out and she had lost her children because of Norway’s horrible bureaucracy.

Her dialogue in the end tells you that maybe on many fronts we have done badly. But on the gender front I think we have done something important. It is not that we need to be proud of such small achievements, but India was supposed to make herself proud if you stood up to the values of India. India was not a nation that ever liked to compare herself with anyone. When we used to compare in older times—my school days I am telling you, if somebody said you have to be like America our teacher used to stop us. America, what do you mean? It is such a terrible country! We were not comparable but today we compare ourselves with Singapore. We send our teachers to Singapore to learn how to teach. Whereas Singapore used to send teachers to NCERT. During my term I received two delegations. They wanted to understand how are we excelling in IT, so on and so forth. I think we have lost a lot of our confidence - we have certainly lost a great number of values that are essential to democracy - but we haven’t lost everything.