Political thinking has become an unattractive career choice in free India

Well, quite a number of our most talented and ambitious young people are responding to economic incentives and pursuing careers in industry, technology and business. 

Our education system smothers thinking of any kind and our political discourse has long been hostile to free thinking. It comes as no surprise to me that a free, independent India produces fewer political thinkers than Olympic medallists.

Since the late-1970s, India’s brightest have opted for careers in the private sector or government service. Careers in the humanities are still not as remunerative as in technology or business, case closed. 

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Worse, outstanding students of politics can neither enter the civil service nor electoral politics—the field just does not attract good talent. For a young person, studying engineering opens the doors to careers in industry, bureaucracy and politics more than political science does.

Several years ago, while I was helping a leading college design a master’s programme in public policy, I proposed that classes should be held as interactions among the faculty and students. 

I was shocked that the management was shocked by this because they had been told by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that subjects like history and politics were sensitive, and hence a narrative method should be adopted. Questioning was discouraged. 

Our education system thus forces students to memorise a politically-filtered curriculum in school and prevents its discussion in college. The widespread disapproval of student politics means that what little politics that does occur is merely a contestation between student wings of the major political parties.

Even before social media destroyed political discourse, the environment was long hostile to ideas that challenged the accepted wisdom in New Delhi. Proponents of free markets, for instance, were ostracised right up until the 1990s. 

You wouldn’t easily find a job or a publisher if you had views that departed from the leftist, progressive ideological envelope. In the past two decades, it has become worse. You can be beaten up or end up in jail for criticising policies, political ideologies or political figures, living or dead. 

As Yadav can testify from personal experience, political thinking in India is not for the faint hearted. I don’t have empirical evidence for this, but I would guess that most political philosophers do not want to be heroes if they can help it.

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The few who eventually end up doing political thinking do so under the shadow of three massive features in India’s intellectual landscape. The first is the academic preoccupation with Western tropes about non-Western and anti-Western ideas. This is both paradoxical and limiting. 

I do not understand why Indian political thinkers should be mainly focused on ‘subaltern’, ‘Third World’, ‘Global South’ and ‘anti-hegemonic’, and restricted to give the ‘Indian perspective’ at conferences and journals? 

Our thinkers have long attached themselves to every new Western progressive leftist fad. The right too is following suit. The funny thing is that both claim to be challenging Western thinking.

The second constraint is the colossal power of Gandhian, Ambedkarite and Nehruvian thought. Our intellectual life is conducted in the shadow of these giants. Even if we did not have a culture of veneration and hero-worship, it is hard to counter the depth, connect and popularity of the ideas of these early-20th century political geniuses. 

Just like how some scholars argue that political philosophy in ancient India dried up in the wake of Kautilya’s brilliance, it may be that we are so much in awe of the greats that fresh thinking is getting stifled.

Third, political activism in independent India is centred around redistribution, even if it is sometimes cloaked in loftier causes. The epitome of modern political thinking is the idea of a quota, a silver bullet that can address everything from social justice to national integration. 

As I wrote in my previous column, it is a shame how thinking on how to achieve social justice, the first objective in the preamble of our Constitution, has ended at the door of reservations.

Yadav is right when he argues that “reviving and reinvigorating this tradition of modern Indian political thought is a precondition to reclaiming our republic." 

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For this, we have to expand our minds beyond our particular context, and our ideas have to be relevant for the rest of the world. Adam Smith and Karl Marx were not exclusively preoccupied with the Scottish or German condition, respectively. 

The big opportunity for Indian political thinkers lies in conceptualising our deep experience with diversity and pluralism for the Information Age. But we have to first ask if Indian society wants to set its political thinkers free.