Amartya Sen: Argumentative Communist Ideologue

Anyone with a figment of understanding of Indian psyche would say that the basic problem plaguing Indians is their herd mentality. Indian culture has failed to inculcate its people with the moral or intellectual strength to devise new ways of making things happen; bereft of an innovative culture, Indians prefer to follow blindly the path charted out by tradition, and if tradition does not work they let sundry religious gurus or political masters dictate for them a course of action.

Thanks to the unthinking attitude of the average Indian, even today large swaths of the country continues to be vitiated by an anti-science brahmanical culture that propagates caste system, beliefs in astrology, invocation of sundry Gods and Goddesses in face of every calamity, whether man-made or natural. So where is the argumentative tradition that Amartya Sen incessantly harps about in his much hyped book! Such a tradition is nowhere to be seen across the cultural and historical landscape of India.

Beginning his book (The Argumentative Indian, Penguin), Amartya says, ‘Prolixity is not alien to us in India. We are able to talk at some length, Krishan Menon's Record of the longest speech ever delivered at the United Nations (nine hours non-stop), established half a century ago, has not been equaled by anyone from anywhere.' What about Krishnan Menon's content? Did Krishnan Menon apply his mind while making that speech or did he blindly parrot clichés and banalities from the dialectical mirage of communism! Surely, mere verbosity does not ensure reasoned argument.

We Indians might be good at talking nonsense at length, but when it comes to making arguments on basis of reason and logic, we fail abysmally. Nowhere is this fact more in evidence than in the way we incorporated the Marxist point of view in our constitution. To delude ourselves we baptized Marxism under a new Indian name- Nehruvian Socialism. What was Nehruvian Socialism other than Marxism and Leninism packaged in a khadi rag! But again there was no argumentation in the choice of our politics, which got imposed on us by small westernized elite.