When I first read about the notice issued to Ali Khan Mahmudabad of Ashoka University by the chairperson of the Haryana State Commission for Women for his allegedly anti-women social media posts which were also published alongside, I thought it was a misunderstanding arising from insufficient familiarity with the English language. There was nothing in the posts that a Women’s Commission could possibly find objectionable; but since English is a foreign language, unfamiliarity with its nuances is hardly surprising. The conflict I thought would pass soon.

Then I read about the academic being arrested by the Haryana Police on the basis of two first information reports lodged in that state, one by the Women’s Commission chief and the other by a functionary of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The charges included endangering the country’s sovereignty and integrity, promoting enmity among different groups, and even insulting the modesty of a woman. These charges had nothing to do with what he had actually written; they represented a complete abandonment of reason. What is more, nothing he had actually written had not been said earlier by others, albeit with majority community names, even more directly and strongly.

The fact that it was not just a linguistic misunderstanding but a gratuitous recourse to unreason, that too not by some odd individuals but by senior figures in the Establishment, soon became apparent. This impression got strengthened when a letter addressed to the Supreme Court from signatories, headed by the current vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University and including several former VCs, was released just before the court’s sitting to hear Mahmudabad’s bail application. Unreason obviously had the full support of senior members of the ruling Establishment.

This is what I find most disturbing. Many have rightly seen in the action against Mahmudabad an attack on freedom of expression and on academic freedom. Some reputed national newspapers have echoed this view; but in addition to all these, it constitutes to my mind an attack on reason. It is not surprising that when the Haryana Women’s Commission chief was asked to point to any specific remark of Mahmudabad that could be construed as prima facie evidence for the charges levied against him, she was at a loss to respond; and the other plaintiff, when similarly queried, referred to a private conversation he had with Mahmudabad during which the latter had made
some allegedly culpable remarks.

The destruction of reason takes the form not of looking at what a person actually said but of jumping to imagining what he must have had in mind when he said what he did. It is therefore a fallacy, namely ad hominem reasoning that insists on finding confirmation of one’s own prejudices in the other person’s statement no matter what that statement actually is. You may make an unexceptionable remark, but owing to your name you have a certain identity and since I associate that identity with seditious tendencies, I read sedition into your blameless remark.

Georg Lukacs, the renowned Marxist philosopher, had argued long ago that the rise of fascism was invariably associated with the destruction of reason. He had traced such a destruction of reason in Germany, through an excursus into the history of German philosophy, in order to explain the rise of German fascism. The Indian case, however, illustrates that such a destruction of reason can occur quite rapidly, almost seamlessly, even without requiring any elaborate philosophical scaffolding for itself.

The Supreme Court’s granting of interim bail to Mahmudabad is extremely welcome but the disappointment is that the court did not in its judgment protest against the destruction of reason. On the contrary, both in getting the Haryana police chief to set up a Special Investigation Team to inquire into the charges against Mahmudabad and in its sundry remarks, it seems to have gone along with the ad hominem reasoning to which the opponents of reason are resorting.

Two remarks of the court in particular I find extremely distressing. The first accused Mahmudabad of seeking “cheap publicity”. By this remark, the court deprecated the motive of a sensitive academic who is distressed by the treatment being meted out by the State to citizens who are members of a minority community to which he himself belongs; his anguish is belittled as “seeking cheap publicity”, an attribution of motive without evidence, which was surely totally otiose on the part of the court. In doing so, without citing a single specific sentence in Mahmudabad’s post which it found objectionable, let alone culpable, the court seems to have resorted to the same ad hominem reasoning as the plaintiffs.

The second remark is about students protesting against the victimisation of Mahmudabad; the court threatened: “we know how to handle them also.” There is nothing more noble, more courageous, and more indicative of the innocence of a teacher than the phenomenon of students, especially students who belong to a private university with no student political organisations, coming out in large numbers in support of a teacher accused of wrongdoing. This is what the students of Ashoka University have done. Instead of appreciating this fact and taking it as a signal pointing to Mahmudabad’s innocence, the Supreme Court bench threatened to ‘deal with them’, which again indicates an abandonment of reason.

Democratic public life cannot survive the destruction of reason, the attribution without evidence of a motive to a statement. The destruction of reason is what a decade of neo-fascism, with its associated hate-mongering, has done to this country.

Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi