Noble Laureate Amartya Sen, while recalling his brief stay (two to three weeks) at Lahore in Pakistan after the war with India and Pakistan in 1960s before returning to India to join Delhi School of Economics, said, “It was very difficult for me to sense that there has been a war between the country to which I was going as an Indian and the country where I was namely in Pakistan.” Sen said so while trying to compare the atmosphere then with the present atmosphere after the terrorist attack in Pulwama and India’s retaliation on terror camps in Pakistan.
Professor Amartya Sen was in conversation with Siddharth Varadarajan, founder Editor of The Wire and Professor Apoorvanand on “choices in the age of populism, new nationalism and new ideas of citizenship” at the first Neelabh Mishra Public Dialogue at jam-packed Jawahar Bhawan in the national capital on 27 February. The programme was organised by Adi Dharm Samaj, Aman Biradri, People’s Union for Civil Liberties, School for Democracy, Peace, United Against Hate and Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies.
On the division and animosity between the two sides, the Noble Laureate said, “So there are not such hardened foundational difficulties between India and Pakistan like that of the Israeli and Palestine situation and it is important to recognise the nature and history of this difference. There is implanting of divisions and there is nothing historical divisions. The first thing is to recognise is that something is being implanted in our minds about divisions which are not historic divisions. This is important to recognise because the historical division has a norm which we can find out from the Palestinian situation.”
Raising question on why one should learn History, he said, “The question often arises that why do we study History? We should study History not just to learn what had happened but also to see what divisions have been planted in our mind and why? Right now the planting is very closely connected in my judgment with the kind of war that is going on but the kind of divisions that the elections no doubt will produce. If we do not in many ways undermine the divisions that are part of the official thought, we are not doing justice to history.”
Sen, while replying to a question by Siddharth Varadarajan, said, “Hungary, Poland, East Germany, and parts of Italy show something which is quite new and that’s not the world was even in the 1930s. There was a different division. The interesting issue is that a phenomenon that is quite different from the phenomenon of Islamophobia that you see in America and to a great extent in much of Europe. If you have lived in a world of the 19th century and early 20th century and if you talk with an average European there is no question that Islamic civilization is regarded as far more superior than the Hindu civilization.”
According to Sen, “Identity is not just related to nationality, there can be other identities apart from nationality. The nation is not our only identity. Depending on context, one can take the liberty of being against one’s national identity in favour of other identities one holds. Simply disagreeing with the government cannot amount to sedition. He wondered how come entire institutions are able to do sedition in India; he was referring to sedition controversy in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in the recent past.
On the question of Populism in India and the world, the Noble Laureate said, Populism seems to be sweeping the world but there is a difference between the kind of populism in Europe and the United States as compared to India as we have integrated populism with our divisions of caste.