When you repeatedly and habitually consume your favourite food for over a week, you are certainly bound to discontinue the consumption. The reason: insipidity, tediousness or boredom.
Initially, your utility would be high. Over a period of time, it will become marginal. There is no cause of exception here. It is a genuine feature and one cannot undo this natural law.
Applying the same axiom to comprehend the aesthetic value of diversity, it is coherent to conclude that the health of a democracy is dependent upon the acknowledgement of diversity and multiplication of dissent. Suppression begets a culture of boredom, tediousness, insipidity and possibly stupidity, leading to the establishment of dictatorship, fascism and tyranny, in our society.
Observing the anti-dissent trend in our so-called largest democracy, in today’s epoch, can one dare to positively justify the systematic decline of India’s rank on ‘free speech’ global index? She ranked 136 in the year 2014, falling down to 140 (in the year 2019); after experiencing the killings of ‘anti-national’ journalists, minorities and sponsored recruitment of the sedition charges against the ‘urban naxals,’ RTI activists, NGOs, environmentalists, social media ‘slacktivists’ and anti-establishment media personnel.
A rudimentary logic, in political science studies, convinces us that the role of the ‘democratic’ government should be that of a custodian, standing against the maximisation of statism and in favour of the advancement of liberty. But, unfortunately, a recent Pew Research Centre survey (2017) hints at this death knell; most of the Indians prefer one-man autocracy over the 72 years of democracy. This survey report should not be taken for granted. It indirectly hints at the rise of incoherent socialisation, which is occurring at the cost of liberal outlook.
Agreed, India’s democracy has flaws and errors, but the solution should not be autocracy or a one-man dictatorship. A simple historical research of our ‘anarchic’ global system can speak a lot louder about the implications of fascist ideologies. A nation does not prosper when democracy is disowned. It grows when the nation is democratically constituted with the qualitative protection of liberty, property rights and consent.
These qualitative features add more value to the health of dissent voices and democracy. No other cognition, except democracy, can vouch for the calibre of diversity and dissent. On one side, some politicians take pride in India’s ‘diversity’ in their global ‘political speech’ tours. On the other hand, the domestic structure of political establishment has been showing ‘wrong’ signs.
This crescendo against the dissent voices is directly or indirectly an assault on the character of tolerance, diversity and plural values. When any ‘free thinker’ or ‘opposite voice’ is beaten or jailed, it is just not their issue. It is a common problem that can take place tomorrow against anyone else (including you), if not tackled today.
A renowned scientist CV Seshadri once said, “Radicalism lives in the world of hyperboles but dissent unravels itself through ordinary language. Yet it is out of this everydayness of language that it invents the dreams of alternatives. Dissent seeks to articulate the difference, celebrate plurality and attain a sense of diversity. The dissenter, unlike the ideologist or the radical, claims the whole truth. He is a custodian, a trustee of truths which are being lost in mainstream or majority debates. A dissenter is thus a representative of differences of marginal truths and in articulating this role becomes a custodian for the imagination of democracies. A dissenter thus protects or argues for ideas which belong to the margins, the minority, to what might be condemned as heretic or merely eccentric. He is a custodian of abandoned memories and an advocate of defeated ideas which are still life-giving.”
The above premise hints that dissent not only challenges the hegemony of expertise but also the dominant construction of knowledge itself. Thus, dissent’s place is always in opposition, regardless of who comes to power.
Tolerating the voices we dislike is a sign of mature and strong democracy. Providing the platform to dissent is a sign of respect towards diversity and plural identities. All these factors, when amalgamated, help the nation to counter and overcome the catallaxy of chaos. If India’s democracy or any other democratic nation cannot furnish a strong and sound ambience to its diversity and dissent, then, “in the long run we are all dead.”