Can we speak the truth to power? It does not seem so in contemporary India. Dissent and the dissidents are not welcome. Every dissident is hounded and silenced. We can find this at work in several ways in our society. It is clearly visible in the charge of sedition leveled against forty-nine celebrities who wrote an open letter to the PM Modi on the evil of mob lynching that is afflicting our society. We can see MPs garlanding the mob lynching goons as well as sense a profound silence on the part of the government. The inaction on the part of the police is also glaringly visible and on top of it all in several cases, the victims have been charged with criminality. We have stepped into a new India where tolerance of violence has become amazingly limitless.
The recent address of the RSS chief on Dussehra day has also sent wrong signals when he claimed that mob lynching is a foreign word and is used to defame India. This deliberate confusion or forgetting of the crime and restricting it to mere nomenclature, deflects the issue from its heinous criminality. If these crimes are un-Indian as Mohan Bhagat may like to put, than why do we tolerate them? One cannot cover criminality just because we do not have a term to describe it in our Bharatiya Sanskriti. This masked criminal action in the name of protection of the holy cow does not absolve it from its sheer criminality. This is more so because it is using theology as a euphemism to subtract the gravity and guilt of such criminal actions. The violence that disguises violence is also a serious moral lapse and hence, we have an urgent ethical imperative to speak truth to power.
But ‘who will speak the truth?’ becomes an important question. Can the powerless victim speak? The famous question raised by Gayatri Spivak ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ becomes refined and asks ‘can the victim speak?’ How can a victim speak to power? Will such a speaking invite further violence? Is there a non-violent way of speaking truth to power? When speaking freely is silenced, how can the victim find the power of his/her voice? The issue becomes even more complex because the oppressors of the victims often speak in multiple tongues and the delivery of justice to the victims is jeopardised. In all this our remarkable silence is awe-striking. It tells us that the silent majority has gone dumb and cannot speak. This is why ‘who will bell the cat?’ becomes a million-dollar question today.
This inability to speak is not limited to victims and their defendants. It is the state of the general public as well as media which is the fourth pillar of democracy. Everyone seems to have lost their voice. The media has become the cheerleaders of the government and its ideological cronies while the general public has put their fingers on their lips and is caught in a dark night of silence. At most, people, in general, can only repeat what the tall leaders and their political as well as cultural cronies, speak. Some repeat the speech of the masters while others choose silence. Often such a silence becomes dishonesty but it does not matter. We have become hard-hearted and our conscience is dead long ago. We have become blind to the monstrosity of the lynching mobs and other forms of violence. We have lost our moral compass and have become silent bystanders as the violence of several shades is ruling the roost in our society.
Our silence can be a crime against humanity. This is why it is urgent that we hear the voice of our silence. Silence being a language, one can hear its voice speaking in our silence. But this is a paradox. It means that our silence has a voice. It speaks loudest and can be heard clearly. There is a discernable voice in our silence. It is a cry for justice. But it is a feeble cry. It just has enough strength to draw our attention to justice. But for now, we are even deaf to our own silence. We cannot hear its message. We have become hard-hearted. Our society has truly become the heart of the heartless. But our silence exceeds us. It speaks the truth about us. It takes courage to listen to this voice of silence. It is unpleasant and even frightening. We as a nation seem to be lacking this courage for now.
Our civilization has always celebrated silence. But the silence that is facing us is polluted and may be dishonest and criminal. But we cannot stay silent any longer. A silence that continues this long becomes a redoubling of injustice and is indeed criminal. The truth is in the hands of the silent multitude. But the crowd has no voice. It cannot speak the truth to power. It is left for us enlightened ones to muster the courage to speak the truth to power. The question is not so much about how to address the power. It is about the courage to speak truth to power. This power to speak the truth cannot be allowed to grow cold. We cannot allow our quest for truth and justice to languish in limbo. We have to continuously reaffirm it and ritually enact it so that every human being living in our country has a rightful space to live and belong to our country. This is so because an India that disowns some Indians is an India that disowns all Indians.
(The author is Professor of Rachol Seminary)
