On Ashis Nandy's predicament and ours: From Kafila
January 30, 2013  13:42
Shuddhabrata Sengupta writes in kafila.org about his 'profound sense of disappointment and anger with which I heard Prof. Ashis Nandy, a man I consider to be a great teacher, friend and in possession of one of the finest minds of our time, commit himself in public to a flippant and vulgar position when speaking of the relationship between caste and corruption at the Jaipur Literary Festival'. 

'To say that 'most of the corrupt are Dalits or come from backward communities' is to say something as nonsensical as 'most terrorists are Muslim', or, 'most people in the top echelons of right wing Hindu groups are Chitpavan Brahmins' or ,'most of the financiers and speculators in global Capitalism are Jewish', or 'most of the people who were carriers of the HIV virus in the early days of the AIDS epidemic were homosexuals', Dasgupta writes, even as he hopes 'that sense prevails, that Ashis Nandy is not sent to prison, so that we can roundly and thoroughly criticise him on intellectual grounds. Should the powers that be decide that a spell in prison is the only way their meagre imaginations can deal with this situation, I call upon everyone, regardless of whether they agree or disagree with Nandy to denounce such a move in the strongest, harshest terms because of its inherent authoritarianism.'   

Read the full article here.
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