VP Hamid Ansari's Lohia Memorial lecture in Gwalior on dissent holds mirror to Indian govts, present and past

After recently delving into the concerns of minorities — which he has probably discussed rarely in public since his 2006-07 stint as National Commission for Minorities chairman — Vice-President Hamid Ansari has made a foray into a topic gaining a lot of momentum these days: The idea of dissent. At the First Ram Manohar Lohia Memorial National Lecture at ITM University in Gwalior on Wednesday, Ansari took the opportunity to speak about the principle of dissent in democracy ‘that Dr Lohia personified’. “The right of dissent also becomes the duty of dissent since tactics to suppress dissent tend to diminish the democratic essence,” he added. [caption id=“attachment_2444496” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File photo of Vice-President Hamid Ansari. PTI[/caption] The Economic Times reports that the vice-president’s remarks could be a thinly-veiled critique of the trend of hounding foreign-funded NGOs that has persisted from the days of the UPA regime to the present day. Ansari referred to a 2012 interview with then-prime minister Manmohan Singh conducted by Science magazine, where the former premier spoke of how India’s atomic energy programme had run into difficulties because of ‘NGOs, often funded from the United States and Scandinavian countries’ — thereby re-invoking the spectre of the ‘foreign hand’. In the days after Singh’s interview, an opinion piece in The Indian Express warned that “(the) space of ideas and protest is represented as presumptively subversive, and anti-national. This is deeply revealing of what we think of dissent”. The vice-president in fact, alluded to this very piece in his speech and quoted a few lines including the poignant reminder that “(once) we have impugned the source, we don’t have to pay attention to the contents of the claim… The idea that anyone who disagrees with my views must be the carrier of someone else’s subversive agenda is, in some ways, deeply anti-democratic”. This phenomenon, as we are witnessing, has major implications for dissent in this country. Here’s a sample (and it’s not limited to the government): -Senior journalist Rajdeep Sardesai being branded a ‘leftist’ by Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis for expressing his dissent. -The Maharashtra government’s 27 August circular that greatly widened the definition of ‘sedition’, and was slammed by the Bombay High Court. -The murders of rationalists Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and most recently MM Kalburbi , whose contrary views saw them dubbed anti-Hindu. The cadres of forever-outraged internet vigilantes — presumably already furrowing their brows in a vain attempt to balance their daily game of Sabse Bada Deshbhakt Kaun with wrapping their minds around what agenda Ansari is pushing — would do well to temporarily set aside their playbooks of two or three tried-and-tested retorts, and reflect on the vice-president’s words. “Every citizen of the Republic has the right and the duty to judge. Herein lies the indispensability of dissent," Ansari concluded, giving his audience, and hopefully the country plenty to ponder.