Kalburgi, Pansare, Dabholkar and the Threat to Reason

Newsclick interviewed D. Raghunandan, Former President, All India Peoples Science Network, on the murder of the rationalist Dr. M. M. Kalburgi.  Raghu explained that the murder is similar to that of Pansare and Dabholkar and is in continuous with the systematic attack on rational and scientific temperament. Kalburgi extensively wrote against idol worship and propagated that the Lingayat Community was never part of Hinduism. Raghu explained that this adversely affected the electoral position of right wing elements and hence the need to have him murdered.  According to Raghu, right wing forces in the country are trying their best to polarize the society and make it unscientific. Hence, the struggle should be against orthodox values and the threat to reason.

Rough Transcript:

Nakul Singh Sawhney - Hello and welcome to Newsclick. Recently, Professor M.M. Kalburgi, former Vice Chancellor of Hampi University, a rationalist and a Sahitya Akademi Award winner was short point blank at his house by unknown assailants. To discuss this issue with us today, we have D Raghunandan, former President of All India People's Science Network. Raghu, this comes as a quite shock. Two unknown assailants came, knocking at Prof M.M. Kalburgi's door, called him outside and shot him point blank. Why do you think this attack on such a reputed person like Mr Kalburgi happened?

D Raghunandan - Well, of course the police are conducting their enquirers, so one cannot go too far in speculation. However the modus operandi is eerily similar to what happened with Dabholkar and then what happened with comrade Pansare. Very similar modus operandi in both cases, and just like in those two cases, here also Professor Kalburgi has had a long history of antagonism by right wing Hindutwa groups in Karnataka, as well as from conservative elements within his own Lingayat community because of the iconoclastic views that Prof Kalburgi expressed. So it looks as if unless there are new facts that comes to light, it looks as if this is going to be one more in the serious of attacks one has seen from far right Hindutva extremist groups on figures who espoused rationalist views who are academics and scholars and who espoused views, which the Hindu right does not like.

NS - So what you are technically saying that the attacks are not just limited to people who question the Brahmanical Hindutva narrative but also people who essentially are working towards promoting scientific temper in the society, Prof Dabholkar for example who was the rationalist and was leading a rationalist movement in Maharashtra and also Prof M.M. Kalburgi and Comrade Govind Pansare. Now I think what is common in all these murders is that somehow they challenged the dominant narrative of the current government. Where do you see this going ? I think one of the bigger concern now is that, this kind of rationalist movement, where do you see that going in this country? Because on the one hand you have a Prime Minister who at the inauguration of a private hospital of an industrialist Ambani's hospital; at the inauguration of that hospital, he went to all these. He made a speech saying stuff has absurd as how India had plastic surgery way back and even Ganesh's head was transplanted through a plastic surgery and so on?

DR - See, I will put it like this. I think these are not just attacks on rationalism and they are not just attacks on a contrarian view of religion. They are fundamentally attacks against any one who espouses a view point which these extremist forces do not like. It could be anything. It could be a commentary on religion, it could be commentary on mythology, it could be commentary on contemporary culture. If a young boy and young girl are going together, they also attract the ire of the Senas, who go and pull them out of the buses and beat them up. So it is the closest thing we have in this country to the Taliban. If you want to look at parallels, this is what it is. There is some monolithic view, which is not reflected in the religious texts, which orthodox scholars will say it is not what Islamists to the Taliban or not what the Hindu text would say here either. It is the odd mixture of a supposedly religious view point, it is political religion if you like and a political cultural stand point. But I think the most important part of it is, a method of saying If we don't like what you say, we will compel you to withdraw and to subordinate yourself to our dominant view point. So the culture is a culture of intimidation of threat and in extreme cases of assassination.

NS - May be I am sort of pushing my optimism here. Say for an example, there was a similar attack on my film which was being screened recently in Delhi University. Once news of that disruption spread, what we saw was the people held nation wide protest screening against the disruptions. Do you see this kind of strong reactions among the scientific community, the rationalised organisations in the country?

DR - Scientific community has already shown signs of rebellion. However, since the large section of scientific community work in universities, research institutions, which are dependent on governmental support, their opposition to this would not be particularly vocal. We would really be looking forward to see opposition coming out on the streets in opposition to this. And I think there it is important not to get into the specifics of the particular dispute involved; whether it is what is the origin of the Lingayat community? or who said what? where and which century exactly did plastic surgery? I think these are not the important issues. The question is if you hold an opinion different from B; If A holds a different opinion from B, what is B's response to that? B's response can certainly not be " I will catch hold of your color, I will start yelling at you". It is a larger culture of tolerance, it is a culture of allowing pluralism in society. So the attack as much as attack on rationalism or scientific temper, it is an attack on democracy parse no 1 and no 2, it is an attack on critical thinking.

NS - So essentially, I mean when we have force and we have forces in power today that like you said, try to propagate a kind of monolithic understanding of religion, of culture, of how to live then clearly there is very little tolerance for differing views. What we are also seeing that, there is been this disparate attempts by this government on the one hand; of course, there is an assassination, there are physical attacks, and there is all that maligning of the social media and so on and so far. But at the same time, we are also using the police; say in the case of FTII students gone on strike. What we are also seeing this kind of indirect attack on educational institutions, and specially say IIT-Delhi. How do you see this? Lot of premiere science institutes like IIT and so on are also seeing a very strange kind of intervention by this government. Can you talk about that briefly?

DR - We must make a distinction between what the government does as government and what these forces outside the government do. There is lot of this terminology that one comes across these days is the ' fringe elements '. I am not at all sure these are all fringe elements. They are as much part of, except that you get, shall we say a range of how extreme you are. If you are less extreme, you will confine yourself  to less yelling at the other person. If you are a little more extreme, you will come to a little quasi-physical intimidation. If you are more extreme, it will be actual physical intimidation, physical assault and in the final analysis, it will be an outright murder or assassination. I think the strangeness that you referred to is there is clearly going to be a contradiction at some point. Where a government which claims it want 8-10% economic growth, it wants an affiliation with the leading economies of the world, it wants investment and foreign investment, tourism and so on; in the long run, this cannot go hand in hand with their backward looking, revenge-st culture, where you attack boys and girls or men and women on the streets and adopt a Taliban like attitude. These things will not go hand in hand. You don't see any examples of Islamist extremist movement simultaneously doing a modernisation and economic advancement drive, because these two things cannot go hand hand in. So the problem this government is going to face sooner or later is this contradiction. They seem to be hoping right now, that is sufficient chunk of middle class can be bought over by economic prosperity and will ignore these other side effects. The big question is, can economic prosperity really takes place under these circumstances? And how far will the people of this country tolerate this degree of suppression of pluralism and of a freedom to voice one's own opinion for a few pennies?

NS - I think Raghu, what you are essentially saying is somewhere this culture of intolerance, this kind of monolithic culture that they force on the people of India is not something that will not sit well with, essentially with pluralistic, heterogenic society that we are; we used to be for so many years.

DR - I think what is important is political commentators have believed that the victory of the Narendra Modi government represents and aspirational desires of the Indian middle classes. This aspirational desire does not squire with either this backward looking revengism or with a total lack of freedom and a lack of freedom to question and express your own opinion. I think therefore that a large part of this struggle, as I was saying earlier is not to do with the specifics of religion of rationality versus superstition but to do with intolerance the necessity to propagate a pluralistic culture and to resist efforts and denying this pluralism to the vast sections of our population and to impose an intolerance society in our country. I think that should be the main direction in which we go.

NS - Thank you.

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