Selective Intellectualism

The word “intellectual”, as used in India, never came across as a positive term to me. It never seemed to mean people who think, analyze, look at historical successes and failures of different approaches and the why’s behind different actions. It just seemed to mean a left-leaning world-view, not necessarily communist, but definitely socialist and never capitalist.

Here is Julian Sanchez’s take as to why that might be the case world-wide:

“One thing to bear in mind is that even informed and intelligent people do not typically arrive at their political views by an in-depth review of the evidence in each particular policy area. Most of us can only be really expert in one or two spheres, and in others must rely heavily on those who possess greater expertise and seem to share our basic values.”

Or perhaps, as Sanchez says, intellectuals are people who genuinely believe in the power of words and advice as guidance to governments:

“If the best solutions to social problems are generally governmental or political, then in a democratic society, doing the work of a wordsmith intellectual is a way of making an essential contribution to addressing those problems.”

But if, as Sanchez says, achieving development via their skills of “advocacy, argument and persuasion” was the intent, then Indian intellectuals have been a shameless lot, says this article:

“Time and again, these Indian intellectuals would go out, cry rivers on the state of affairs and then happily accept reward from a government minister.”

Besides, these intellectuals show no consistency. In fact, at times, their blatant inconsistency is glaring:

“Ms. Nayantara Sehgal chose to accept the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1986, from a government that only 2 years earlier had perpetrated the worst massacre in India since Independence. A Kashmiri Pandit by birth, her blood didn’t boil at the exodus of those poor people from the valley. There was no conscionable return of the award then.”

After citing the lack of any protest to previous riots when non-BJP governments were in power, the article asks:

“Surely, each riot and incident of communal violence is an attack on the liberal, tolerant ethos of the nation. And the fact that it happened, reflects poorly on the government of the day. Why then were there no protests against previous governments?...Why this selective intellectualism?”