Hyderabad: In a talk he delivered at the Indian Institute of Science in 1927, Mahatma Gandhi called on its faculty to pay heed to the concerns and aspirations of those who sustained them. "If we were to meet the villagers," he told them, "and explained to them how we are utilizing their money on buildings and plants that will never benefit them, but might benefit their posterity, they will not understand it. They will turn a cold shoulder. But we never take them into confidence, we take it as a matter of right, and forget that the rule 'no taxation without representation,' applies to them too, you will see that there is another side to all these appointments."
So long after he spoke, we have failed to build institutions that bring groups representing the powerful and the influential with the weak, and the marginalized, to think ideas through together, in ways that are enabling and non-intimidating to the latter. It’s always a talking down to, never a conversation that the elite have in mind, none more so than the likes of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla among several others.
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Lately, International Centers have been coming up in various cities in our country, modelled on the India International Centre in New Delhi. Good as they are, these institutions, set in prime locations, exist in exclusive sanitized bubbles of their own. None of them can boast as the Smithsonian does, that its focus is on how it engages with 'the interest and involvement of the American public.'
Our institutions of advanced study have failed to engage the larger public meaningfully on issues that affect them most – from climate change and health care, to education and GM seeds. Who has determined that the marginalized should not have more accurate information on foreign policy or defence or economics? It astonishes how much of importance the elite keep to themselves and out of sight of the marginalized.
The people of India, especially its poorest sections need to be heard without being talked down to by the policy makers, administrators and the intellectual classes. For that, they need to reinvent their institutions radically to incorporate the spare egalitarianism as well as the vision of a shared world that Mahatma Gandhi's ashrams exuded in their time - Sabarmati and Sevagram no less than Tolstoy farm.
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For the elite to merely converse amongst themselves is a mark of insufferable arrogance on their part. As Mahatma Gandhi observed in his 1927 talk at the Indian Institute of Science "I expect far more from you than from the ordinary man in the street. Don't be satisfied with the little you have done, and say 'We have done what we could, now let us play tennis and billiards."
The writer teaches at IISc- Bengaluru
