Nityānanda Miśra and Ramachandra Guha are both discovering, from very different ideological directions, what happens when one disagrees with a devoted political fan base. No intellectual is immune when they fall foul of a mob. The specific ideology is immaterial.
A healthy public culture must have room for disagreement, dissent, debate, and even fierce and sometimes contentious argument. Indeed, we have always had a long tradition of formidable public speakers and polemicists who could dismantle an opponent’s position with wit, rhetoric, and scholarship without descending into abuse. From Acharya Atre to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, from Nehru to Annadurai, from George Fernandes to Shashi Tharoor, Indian public life has been lucky to be witness to strong opinions or sharp exchanges between intellectual and oratorial giants.
What is different today is the attempt to enforce conformity through mob intimidation. When people such as Miśra and Guha express views that sections of their audiences (typically, their hard core fan base that have given them their initial impetus to stardom) dislike even in the slightest, the response is less and less counterargument and more and more trolling, personal insults, abuse, and organised outrage. The message is clear: stay in your lane. Or else.
What troubles me most is that we are talking about people whose scholarship vastly exceeds that of almost everyone criticising them.
Whether one agrees with them or not, both men have spent decades reading, researching, writing, debating, and refining their understanding of their subjects. There is a depth of study that most of us cannot hope to match. More importantly, there is something genuinely dazzling about watching first-rate intellects at work. The ease with which they summon facts, context, sources, arguments, counterarguments, and connections across disciplines can be breathtaking.
It is difficult to explain this to people who do not particularly value intellectual achievement. But I often find myself listening to people like Guha or Miśra and thinking less about whether I agree with every conclusion and more about the sheer quality of the mind at work. Even when I disagree, I learn.
And I include myself among those who are outclassed.
If you locked me in a room with Ramachandra Guha, Nityānanda Miśra, Richard Dawkins, J.K. Rowling, Arun Shourie, Devdutt Pattanaik, or any number of similarly accomplished thinkers and writers, I suspect the difference in preparation, knowledge, memory, and intellectual range would become apparent very quickly. I also suspect that most of the people who casually dismiss them online as stupid, talentless, ignorant, compromised, or irrelevant would fare no better.
That is why I find the modern habit of retrospectively invalidating a person’s entire body of work so bizarre.
J. K. Rowling says something controversial and suddenly Harry Potter is supposedly overrated. Richard Dawkins expresses an unpopular opinion and suddenly decades of writing, debate, and public engagement are waved away. Arun Shourie criticises people who once admired him and suddenly years of scholarship cease to matter. Anurag Kashyap says something politically disagreeable and people begin speaking as though Gangs of Wasseypur, Black Friday, and Dev.D were never remarkable achievements in the first place.
The disagreement is no longer with a particular argument. It expands until it consumes everything else.
But Harry Potter did not become less imaginative because Rowling expressed an opinion. Gangs of Wasseypur did not become a lesser film because Kashyap made a political statement. Ramachandra Guha’s understanding of Indian history does not evaporate because he reaches a conclusion I dislike. Nityānanda Miśra’s command of texts and sources does not disappear because I disagree with his choice of targets.
There was a time when encountering a person of extraordinary ability could be an invitation to reconsider one’s own assumptions. One could disagree, sometimes strongly, while still acknowledging that the other person had earned the right to be taken seriously. Their expertise did not compel agreement, but it commanded attention.
That seems harder to do today.
We have become remarkably eager to dismiss what we cannot refute, and to ridicule what we cannot easily answer. The result is that disagreement increasingly takes the form of denunciation rather than engagement. A lifetime of scholarship, creativity, or intellectual labour is weighed against a single unpopular opinion and found wanting.
I do not agree with everything Ramachandra Guha says. Nor with everything Nityānanda Miśra says. In fact, I disagree with both of them from time to time.
But I cannot imagine listening to either man without recognising the extraordinary scholarship they bring to the table. Nor can I imagine dismissing decades of serious intellectual work simply because I happened to dislike a particular conclusion.
The answer to an argument has always been another argument. The answer to scholarship has always been better scholarship. Everything else is merely noise.
Of course, I expect some people to respond to this by doing precisely what I am describing. Someone will ask how I can possibly place this name next to that name. Someone will declare that my list reveals my ideological impurity, intellectual dishonesty, moral cowardice, secret bias, closet racism/casteism, hidden agenda, or insufficient loyalty to whichever camp they have appointed themselves to guard. Someone will explain, with great confidence and very little patience, that the people they dislike deserve no such generosity.
And that, really, is the question. Where did this come from? When did we become so hostile to intellect that disagreement now requires contempt, expertise must be dragged down to our level before it can be answered, and the first instinct before a difficult mind is no longer to listen, think, or argue, but to reach for a stone?
To those whose hands are itching to abuse me in the comments, here’s a soothing image to look at to calm your mind. एक लम्बी गहरी सांस लीजिये। हरी बत्ती आप की ओर आ रही है!
