Tag: protest

Free speech at the outer limits

On January 12, Peter W. Wood, president of an American organisation called the National Association of Scholars (NAS), wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal against attempts by one individual to prevent NAS from organising a conference on science’s reproducibility crisis.

As it turns out, the individual – Leonid Teytelman – has been fighting to highlight the fact that the conference is an attempt to use “the issue of scientific reproducibility as a Trojan horse to undermine trust in climate change research” (source), and that Wood’s claim to “hold to a rigorous standard of open-mindedness on controversial issues” extends only so far as upholding his own views, using the rest of his diatribe on the WSJ to slap down Teytelman’s contentions as an unfortunate byproduct of “cancel culture”.

We’ve all heard of this trope and those of us on Twitter are likely to have been part of one at some point in our lives. The reason I bring this up now is that Wood’s argument and WSJ’s willingness to offer itself as a platform together recall an important but largely unacknowledged reason tropes like this one continue to play out in public debates.

A friend recently expressed the same problem in a different conversation – that of India’s Central Civil Services (Conduct) Rules, 1964. These rules discourage government employees from commenting on government policies, schemes, etc. to the press without their supervisors’ okay or participating in political activities, and those who disobey them could be suspended from duty. However, public opposition to India’s new Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, has been so pronounced that there appears to be renewed public acknowledgment of the idea that the right to protest is a fundamental right, even if the Constitution doesn’t explicitly encode it as such.

So after the government sought to use the CCS Rules to prevent its staff from participating in protests against itself, the Tripura high court ruled that simply showing up at protests doesn’t constitute a ‘political activity’ nor does it cede sufficient ground for suspension, dismissal, arrest, etc. This was obviously heartening news – but there was a catch.

As my friend, who is also a government employee, said, “Civil servants becoming openly political is harmful for the country. Then one doesn’t even have to maintain a façade of neutrality, and the government can’t run if it is busy quelling open rebellion in offices.” That is, to maintain a democracy, its outermost borders must be organised in a non-democratic system – a loose, but not unrecognisable, analogue of the argument that free speech and the slice of freedom it stands for cannot be absolute.

To quote from Laurie Penny’s timeless essay published in 2018, “Civility” – and its logics – “will never defeat fascism” or, presumably, its precursors. Freedom has borders and they are arbitrary by design, erected to keep some actors out even if those on the inside may agitate for unlimited freedom for everyone, and aspire to change their opponents’ minds through reason and civil conduct alone. The borders prevent harm to others and keep people from instigating violence – as the first amendment to the Indian Constitution, under Article 19(2), reminds us – and they just as well entitle us to refuse to debate those who won’t play by the same rules we do.

The liberal democrat’s conceit in this regard is two-pronged: first, that all issues can be resolved through reason (not limited to or necessarily including science), debate and civil conduct alone; second (this one more of a self-imposed penance), that one is obligated to engage in debate, and more generally that to disengage – from debate or from public life – is to abdicate one’s duties as a citizen. So the option to refuse to engage in debate might offend the liberal democrat’s commitment to free speech – for herself as well as others – but this ignores the fact that free speech itself can be productive or liberating only within the borders of democracy and not beyond its outer limits, where the fascists lurk.

And unless we imbibe these limitations and accept the need to disengage or boycott when necessary, we will remain trapped in our ever-expanding but never-breaking circular arguments and argumentative circles.

In the present case, Teytelman tried to expose the NAS as a threat to public trust in climate science but failed, thanks in large part to the WSJ’s ill-founded decision to offer itself as a broadcast channel for Wood’s tantrum. Perhaps Teytelman has more fight left in him, perhaps others do too, but the time will come when the appeals to reason alone will have to cease, and more direct and pragmatic means, equipped especially to disrupt the theatre of fascistic behaviour – part of which is the conflation of ignorance and knowledge and often manifests in the press as ‘he said, she said’ – will have to assume centerstage. (I.e. The WSJ can’t solve the problem by next inviting Teytelman to write a one-sided piece.)

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop is a more pertinent example. Goop trades in specious ‘alternatives’ to treat made-up diseases. But in spite of what one professor of law and public health acknowledged to be “immediate and widespread … backlash by health-care professionals and science-advocates”, and what many science journalists celebrated as inspirational examples of good communication, the company is set to launch its own Netflix show (more of an infomercial) on January 24. Note that as of December 2019, Netflix had 158 million paying subscribers.

It’s time to stop playing nice, and to stop playing this as individuals. Instead, science communicators – especially those committed to beating back the tentacular arms of pseudoscience and organised disempowerment (à la organised religion) – should respond as a community. While one group continues to participate in debates if only to pull some of the more undecided people away from ‘evil in the guise of good’, another must demand that the video-streaming platform cancel its deal with Goop.

(We could also organise a large-scale boycott of Goop’s products and services but none of the buyers and sellers here seem to want to change their minds.)

Responding this way is of course much harder than simply calling for violence, and quite painful to acknowledge the grossly disproportionate amount of effort we need to dedicate relative to the amount of time Paltrow probably spent coming up with Goop’s products. And in the end, we may still not succeed, not to mention invite similar protests from members of the opposite faction to our doorsteps – but I believe this is the only way we can ever succeed at all, against Goop, NAS and anything else.

But most of all, to continue to engage in debates alone at this time would be as responsible a thing to do as playing fiddle while the world burns.

My country is burning. Why should I work?

A few days ago, I found asking myself the following question: My country is burning, why should I work? I ended up with some (admittedly inchoate) thoughts, delineated below.

I’m trying to fight off this abject helplessness I’m feeling and edit some science articles, and failing. I’m not able to justify to myself why I shouldn’t drop everything and rush to Delhi (at this time, the violence at Jamia Milia Islamia is about to peak). At the same time, deep in my heart and mind, I know there must be some reason to persevere with what one likes to do and is interested in doing instead of rushing to the frontlines at every sign of trouble.

Somewhere in this maze of thoughts, there is sure to be an illustrative story about duty and country – about the insidious diminishment of one endeavour in favour of another. Yes, we must resist the forces of tyranny and fascism, but there is less and less freedom to choose any forms of resistance other than pouring out on the streets, raising your hands and shouting slogans.

I have nothing against peaceful protest but I have everything against how other forms of protest have been rendered less useful, or entirely meaningless, largely by the same entity whose institutional violence instigated these protests in the first place. This isn’t a question of convenience but of effectiveness: If many of us are out protesting on the street, how many among us are there because other forms of resistance no longer work?

With notable exceptions, the press these days comprises organisations ranging from supine to malicious. Democratic institutions, like many lower courts, various government bodies and even the executive, have been press-ganged into the national government’s majoritarian agenda. The polarisation in many spaces has become so sharp and the political opposition so negligible that it seems nearly impossible to counter India’s extreme-right politics with anything but politics of other extremes.

In such a time, what does it mean to focus on science communication? To be clear: I don’t mean focusing on science communication (or any endeavour not apparently connected to the maintenance of a democracy) instead of protesting. I mean joining a protest in the morning and editing science articles in the evening. That is, where in your work lies the justification to do what you’re doing, simply because you’ve always liked doing it, and which empowers you the same way a resistance movement empowers its participants (at least if you believe you shouldn’t have to protest in order to express your participation and involvement in the country’s wellbeing)?

There is a terribly clichéd example from a previous era: that of starving children in Africa. But in that case, resolution was very easy to access. More recently and closer home, every time ISRO launches satellites to the Moon and Mars, some people in India complain that the country should focus on fixing smaller problems first. Here, too, the road to clarity is evident, if somewhat meandering, taking recourse through economic principles, technological opportunities and a bit of common sense.

However, going from science communication to resisting fascism seems more difficult than usual, although I refuse to admit it’s impossible. There must be a way.

A friend recently told me, “The onslaught on science and reason is part of the fascist agenda, too, and that must be resisted.” Indeed, this is an important perspective… but somehow it also seems insufficient because – again – the tunnel from ‘critical thinking’ to ‘healthy democracy’ has caved in. The one from ‘curious about the world’ to ‘healthy democracy’ is not even on the map, as if we are forgetting that the right to information is one of the foundational principles of a functional democracy, and that science since the early 20th century at least has been one of the dominant ways to obtain such information.

Sharing the ways in which science astonishes us as much as interrogating its practice well would in many ways allow us to explore modern society, its organisational principles, and our relationship(s) with reality.

At a colloquium in August last year, Raghavendra Gadagkar, the noted ecologist at IISc, Bengaluru, described two periods that background the practice of science communication: wartime, when it is deployed with uncommon urgency and specificity of purpose, often to beat back a troublesome claim or belief, and peacetime, when it narrates various kinds of stories united only broadly in theme and often in pedagogic form.

The issue a ‘burning country’, or the world for that matter, brings to the fore is with peacetime science communication and its perceived relevance. In India at least, the simplistic notions that the fascist narrative often reduces more nuanced arguments to present themselves to the typical reader in too many ways for scientists and its communicators to grapple by themselves. When they do, it’s most likely during wartime, and their – our – heightened effectiveness during these episodes of engagement, such as it is, could mislead us into believing science communication is effective and necessary, an impression bolstered by quantitative metrics.

Our effectiveness depends on two things: the circumstances and the culture. The circumstances of communication are in our hands, such as the language, topic, presentation, etc. Subversive, small-minded politics erodes the culture, reducing the extent to which good science journalism is in demand and pushing its place in the public conversation to the margins. Science communication in this scenario becomes an esoteric specialisation treated with special gloves in the newsroom and as an optional extra by the readership.

This in turn is why if science journalism, or journalism of any sort, is to be effective during wartime, it must be kept up during peacetime as well. All science writers, reporters, editors and communicators should help in the fight against rhetoric that would reduce a multifaceted issue into a unidimensional one, that would flatten the necessary features of scientific progress into technological questions.

We need to preserve the value of good science journalism in peacetime as well, but thanks to the unfortunate sensationalist tendencies of journalism, often (but not always) motivated by commerce, such resistance will require more strength and imagination than is apparent.

One battle at a time.

Irrespective of whether you have joined the protests, you must at all other times – through your work, actions and words – keep authoritarian and/or reductive narratives at bay. It’s because this and other similar modes of resistance have been annulled that a physical protest, one of whose strengths lies in numbers, has become the most viable and thus the dominant display of opposition. It needn’t be.

Standing in this moment and looking back at the last few years, some of us (depending on where our ideological, political and moral axes intersect) see a landscape mutilated by the slow violence of right-wing nationalism, and the Citizenship Amendment Act as the absolute last straw. I, a science journalist, am protesting every day – beyond the protests themselves – by reviving the formerly straightforward connections from curiosity and critical thinking to a plural, equitable, just and secular democracy.

To understand #NotInMyName

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Shivam Vij published this on June 27. Excerpt:

[Liberals] still romanticise their days at the JNU campus in the ’80s – what an innocent time it was. The still think their marches and slogans will Bring Down Fascism. The people who will march today, feeling self-important about fighting the good fight, don’t understand they are actually helping Hindutva. The more you make a campaign out of Hindutva obsessions – cows, meat, Muslims – these keywords become the central agenda of politics.

Liberals think they can take on Hindutva on its turf and defeat it. That this is not possible should be obvious after the experience since Babri. The only way Hindutva could be defeated is to change the keywords of political discourse from the ones Hindutva wants – cows, meat, Muslims – to the ones it is more apologetic about, such as violence against Dalits, farmers’ agitations, the distress faced by small traders due to demonetisation and GST.

Ashley Tellis rebutted with this on June 28. Excerpt:

[Vij] contradicts himself right off the bat by pointing to the rise of attacks on Muslims since the BJP came to power and then spends the rest of the article telling us that we should not use the word Muslim at all as that is rising to the click-baiting of the BJP. He teaches us that we must give up the words ‘cows, meat and Muslims’ and replace them with ‘Dalit, farmer, small trader.’ It is the stupidest piece of advice ever given by a journalist to anyone. But then, journalists like Vij tend to be the stupidest people around. So perhaps he should take this advice himself and not write articles about protests that according to him have nothing to do with Dalits, farmers and small traders.

I’m coming into this issue as someone who’s not ignorant as much as has embarrassing trouble understanding the syntax and language of such issues. Earlier yesterday, I’d had my doubts about #NotInMyName and asked a friend about them. At first he seemed dismissive (calling my concerns “wooly”) but after some badgering, he answered them one by one (I had nine questions). By not attacking my observations and explaining to me where I was wrong, he has gained an ally (irrespective of how much that means to him or his causes). But how Tellis has replied to Vij I think will make it harder for anyone who is simply looking for answers to take a stronger position in public debates, and to approach him with their doubts.

I realise that Tellis is fully within his rights to call Vij ‘stupid’, as well as that the fight against Hindutva fascists is as sensitive as it is crucial and in which no one will spare anyone else any inches (either in newspaper columns or political estate). I also realise that Vij is an experienced journalist and whose views should have been debated as such (instead of by disparaging all journalistic commentary). For example, by discussing why he sees it fit to make an overly specialised point about strategies when #NotInMyName is really about concerned citizens speaking out against a particularly insidious motivation for murder, as well as the murders themselves, as a collective for the first time. However, a very important intra-communal unity is at stake here: the more vicious public debates we have, the more it will seem like a ‘conversation’ cordoned off to those masses for whom an awareness of social and political issues is only just budding. It places quite the cost on being uninformed (not being ignorant) that those who would like to be informed might not deserve (and it can’t be that everyone’s undeserving of it!). And when this cost is already so high, when the specialised language of the social sciences is already so hard to decipher for an outsider, Tellis’s – and Vij’s and others’ – level of incivility only makes things worse. This isn’t to say Vij wasn’t saying disagreeable things – but only that there’s a way to dismiss them, and how Tellis did it seemed less that and more… spectacle.

As my friend Akhil told me, “To me, the tone and argument of Shivam Vij’s article seems more problematic than Tellis’s response. Of course Tellis could have countered it better than firing off a rant, but who encourages Tellis’s style of writing and who benefits from it explains why such messy debates exist and there’s little we can do about it. Vij wrote a piece lacking substance, but controversial enough to generate traffic, saying things just for the sake of saying things. I’m not sure he wanted a meaningful debate in the first place.And I’m sure Tellis didn’t want a scholarly debate at all because he found the very premise of the arguments ridiculous.” All this also prompts the consideration: Tellis v. Vij, and Tellis v. Rajamani (salvo, return), both played out on the pages of journalism websites (Huffington Post, News Minute and Sify). Should these websites, or any others for that matter, have also been responsible for first introducing the issue (not just as a staid news report like Business Standard did but also in the form of a very important debate playing out between scholars – Vij may not have been one but Rajesh Rajamani  and Tellis both are), through which readers could be appraised not just of the overarching narrative of fascists v. liberals but also that of how scholars are choosing to frame – or not frame – their relationship with #NotInMyName? I think so.

More Akhil: “Either we can enjoy lengthy theoretical debates on the internet or physically make our presence felt. A healthy cultural of debate is always desirable, but when the intent is malicious and counterproductive to actual efforts to make things better in such desperate times, it’s difficult to hold back angst in the interest of civility. The onus is of course on the editors of the websites to present the debate in such a manner that serves a more important purpose (to give the audience diverse perspectives) rather than to run clickbait rant that eventually leaves little space for critical engagement.”

My friend’s answers, in case anyone’s interested:

1. Who is the campaign for? Whose attention will the attendees be clamouring for?

For the bulk of Indians (or Hindus, more precisely), whose silence in the face of the BJP’s majoritarianism is providing space for the lynchers and killers.

2. How will (anyone) participating in #NotInMyName help the oppressed minorities?

Oppressed minorities will feel hugely relieved and reassured by a good turnout across the country. I would say the overall size is what will reassure them more than individual names or faces.

3. Doesn’t the name ‘#NotInMyName’ feel more like an abdication than a protest?

The crimes are being committed in the name of ‘nation’, ‘Hinduism’, ‘Bharat mata’, ‘Indian values’, etc., so it is important for people to say, “Sorry, you don’t have exclusive rights to define what is Indian, what is Hindu, what are Hindu values, etc.”

4. Saba Dewan, the filmmaker whose Facebook post snowballed into the #NotInMyName protests, told Business Standard, “We want to convey that whatever is happening in the society is not happening in our name; I do not approve of it.” Why do we presume those who are perpetrating the lynchings care what the urban, upper-class, upper-caste observers think?

Those who are perpetrating may not care but the puppet masters who have created a culture of impunity, who control the police and whose own statements have encouraged the lynch mentality, DO CARE – especially about what the urban, upper-class-upper-caste thinks.

5. Are the campaign’s organisers making any efforts to actively involve minorities in a meaningful way? And is there a way to do this without turning it into a spectacle?

I think the idea is really to ensure Hindus turn out in the largest possible numbers. I suspect people are sending the call to Muslim friends as a kind of solidarity message but to Hindu friends in order to ensure they turn up.

6. The protests are set to be held in 11 cities: New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Trivandrum, Kochi, Patna, Lucknow, London, Toronto. According to an IndiaSpend analysis, cows-related violence since 2014 hasn’t happened in any of these cities but in usually rural areas outside them.

This is a solidarity event so it doesn’t matter where cow-related violence took place.

7. What does the ‘name’ in #NotInMyName stand for? If it denotes religious orders and/or caste, then why does it appear to be an exclusively upper-caste mobilisation?

The Indian upper middle class is largely upper caste so it may appear that this is an upper caste mobilisation, in the same way rallies for LGBTQIA+, FoE, media freedom, etc. issues do.

8. Isn’t there a difference between Muslims using the phrase ‘Not In My Name’ to speak out against ISIS’s brand of Islam, or Americans using it to speak out against their government using their money to fund the War Against Terrorism, and privileged people marching under the banner to decry lynchings perpetrated in the name of preserving the same socio-religious order whose benefits they enjoy?

All of these cases are different. The anti-ISIS protests come from genuine Muslim revulsion against ISIS but also the pressure in Western society for the participants to dissociate from Islamic extremism.

Americans against War on Terror is similar to the Indian protest today, where people in whose name bad things are done (war on terror, attacks on minorities) tell the rulers to STFU. Sure, the rulers can say, “You STFU, you are enjoying the privileges of being American (cheap oil, etc.)” – or Hindu – but that is neither here nor there as an argument.

9. To the people saying “not in my name”: what do you usually lend your name to?

The answer is obvious: just look at the petitions we have carried on The Wire over the past two years by pretty much the same set of folks doing today’s mobilisation: justice for Rohith Vemula, Akhlaq, Pehlu Khan, support of FoE, etc. etc.

Featured image credit: OpenClipart-Vectors/pixabay.