The Criminalization of Dissent

While there will be general agreement that the judgement in Binayak Sen's case represents a gross miscarriage of justice, most people will attribute it to the overzealousness of a lower judicial functionary, or, at the most, to the prevailing atmosphere in the state of Chhattisgarh. If the trial had been held elsewhere, they would argue, Binayak would not have got the verdict he did. They are probably right, just as those who attribute the bringing of sedition charges against Arundhati Roy and Syed Ali Shah Geelani to the overzealousness of certain functionaries of the Delhi police, and against Sudhir Dhawle to the overzealousness of the Maharashtra police, may well be right. But such overzealousness, whose instances are multiplying alarmingly, thrives within, and derives sustenance from, a certain ambience; and this consists in the tendency under the current neo-liberal dispensation increasingly to see any basic ideological opposition to the parameters of official policy as anti-national. The tendency in short is to criminalize ideological dissent. Of course, one must not cry wolf, but one must not ignore this tendency either; to do so will be fatal.

No less a person than the Prime Minister, while speaking to IPS probationers in the capital the other day, invoked a curious argument against the Maoists. He did not just make the usual criticism that they were attempting to overthrow the Constitutional order by violent means. He went on to add: "If we don't control Naxalism we have to say good-bye to our country's ambition to sustain a growth rate of 10-11 percent per annum" (Deccan Chronicle, Dec.25). And this, he clarified, is because central India is where the bulk of the country's mineral wealth lies. Ten or eleven percent growth rate in short is elevated to the status of a national goal. Anyone who opposes policies that seek to achieve this goal is therefore acting against the national interest, and is ipso facto anti-national.

The reification involved in this piece of reasoning, as Karl Marx would have noted, is astounding. A nation can have objectives like the eradication of poverty, or the elimination of hunger, or the removal of illiteracy, or the maintenance of full employment, or the achievement of an egalitarian order; but the mere rate of augmentation of the mass of goods and services produced can not possibly be a national objective. True, some, including the Prime Minister, would argue that this rate of augmentation holds the key to the achievement of the national goals just listed, but this is a particular ideological position; others may have a different position on the relationship between growth and poverty. To posit the growth rate as a national objective is to sanctify one particular ideological position above all others as a nationally accepted one, and hence to decry anyone who opposes it as anti-national. Decrying those who oppose a particular ideological position as being anti-national is implicitly to criminalize dissent.

The Prime Minister, let us not forget, was talking not to a group of his party functionaries but to budding police officers whose job consists precisely in identifying what constitutes criminal activity. He was in short articulating an official position. Besides, given his intellectual eminence, what he says both expresses and sets the trend for the thinking of the entire establishment. His remarks therefore have to be taken very seriously.

More than a century and half ago, John Stuart Mill, while theoretically anticipating a "stationary state" (i.e. zero growth economy), had nonetheless remained unfazed by the prospect: he had declared that he would not mind a stationary state as long as the working people were better off in it. Mill had thus implicitly advanced two propositions: first, the condition of the working people did not depend upon the rate of growth of the economy, that it could be better even in a stationary economy than in a growing one; and, second, what mattered to him, and hence by inference what should matter to society according to him, was not the rate of growth per se but the condition of the working people. Both these propositions of John Stuart Mill, a liberal, are diametrically opposed to what the official neo-liberal argument advances today and wants to elevate to a national consensus.

The fact that Mill was right, that high growth may be accompanied by increasing poverty, is amply demonstrated by the recent Indian experience itself. Indeed, the empirical evidence for absolute impoverishment in the recent period of high growth is overwhelming. Let us briefly look at this evidence. The official criterion for the identification of poverty (until it was changed recently after the Tendulkar Committee Report) has been the intake of 2400 calories or less per person per day in rural India and 2100 calories or less in urban India. By this criterion, poverty has certainly increased: direct measurement of calorie intake suggests that 74.5 percent of the rural population was "poor" in 1993-4, and 87 percent in 2004-5; the corresponding figures were 57 percent and 64 percent respectively for the urban population. (These figures, based on NSS data, are from Utsa Patnaik, Economic and Political Weekly, Jan 23-29, 2010, and their veracity can not be questioned.)

Foodgrain absorption figures confirm this conclusion. Per capita foodgrain absorption (defined as net output minus net exports minus net increase in stocks) which, in round figures, was 200 kg. per annum in "British India" at the beginning of the twentieth century declined drastically to less than 150 kg. by the time of independence. Strenuous efforts by successive governments in independent India raised it to 180 kg. by the end of the eighties; but there has been a decline thereafter, marginal at first but precipitous after the late nineties, so much so that per capita foodgrain absorption in 2008, at 156 kg. by FAO estimates was lower than in any year after 1953. The period of high growth is precisely the one associated with reduction in foodgrain absorption, and hence with significant absolute impoverishment.

But the official position apotheosizing growth as a national goal and vilifying any opposition to it as anti-national is not only a reification and a vacuity; it is also dangerous, both because it criminalizes ideological dissent, and because it implicitly justifies corporate control over the State. If ten or eleven percent growth is elevated to a national goal, then obviously the agents through whom this goal is to be achieved, especially in the neo-liberal era when the public sector and public investment are frowned upon, namely, the domestic and foreign private corporations and financial interests, must be kept happy. The State must cater to their caprices, so that their "state of confidence" is kept high, and they undertake the investments necessary for high growth.

Since the alternative approach, of taxing the corporate and financial interests and using public investment as the means of raising growth, has been eschewed, even as growth itself has been apotheosized as a national goal, the achievement of this goal necessarily requires appeasing these interests by putting the entire State machinery at their disposal. It necessarily means corporate control over the State machinery. And when the Prime Minister talks of the need to get unhindered access to the mineral wealth of central India as the means to achieve the "national goal" of 10-11 percent growth rate, he obviously means ensuring unhindered access to this wealth to corporate interests.

This is precisely what has been happening; and the series of scams that the nation has watched with stupefaction over the last few weeks are only one manifestation of the extent of this corporate control.

Such corporate control inevitably brings forth resistance. All such resistance necessarily threatens the "national goal" of growth, and hence is labelled anti-national, i.e. criminal. The criminalization of dissent is immanent therefore in the corporate control over the State machinery, and the reified view of "national goals" is a justification for such control. Many have rightly attacked the draconian laws which have been introduced into the statute books in many states and under which protesters are punished. These laws, which are often attributed to the authoritarianism of this or that political formation, really spring from the authoritarianism inherent in the corporate control over the State. The renowned economist Paul Samuelson, a political liberal, had reportedly remarked that economic liberalism can be practiced only under political authoritarianism. Contemporary India testifies to the truth of this remark.

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Prabhat Patnaik MRZINE

Prabhat Patnaik is a Marxist economist in India. This article was first published in MacroScan on 13 January 2011; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.