Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Chennai Law College violence: Much Less To Be Condemned


I watched the Chennai Law College violence and no doubt, it was damn shocking and cruel. Especially the guy who deliberately and meditatively kept hitting the legs of a fallen student.

The intellect cringes and recoils in abomination while emotions rage in condemning the violence.
Few days later and after the effect has cooled down, I realize there is much less to be condemned.

Our reaction to this violence is not unlike our canned reaction to anything so shocking - including to reported violent episodes of ragging in colleges. Our solution is always the extreme - stop ragging altogether in the latter case, and stop political muddling altogether in law colleges.

The solution to reduce road accidents is not to stop driving altogether but to educate and enforce safe driving practices.

Why do I think political muddling is so essential to law students? Or for that matter, to any student whose study and practice involves understanding, shaping and enforcing public policy, such as political science?

A complicated country like ours with a feudal,multi-layered society fraught with prejudices and disparities can not afford to educate it's public policy students on a purely intellectual level, insulated and isolated from the socio-political realities of it's immediate society.

Such students need to learn to come to terms with, navigate and shape the socio-political complex, from both within the curriculum and out of it - right during their education.

It's not like our engineering ( or medical) education, where the totally one-dimensional education that is insulated from the realities of the immediate society, enables the students to conveniently move to US to pursue higher studies and take great pride in becoming an assistant-secretary in a US administration or reaping moolah in the Silicon Valley, with no ripple effect on the society of origin. More than a fair share of the top IITs and IIMs are situated in the most socially,economically backward regions of this country.

But the inevitable question arises: is violence an acceptable form of coming to terms with the socio-political complex, in this case, caste-politics? No, but it is a knee-jerk,intermediary step in the process of learning - of coming to terms with a disparity and prejudice that is so real and in front of us, like a mad dog gnawing it's teeth.

That is the first step in the process of intellectual,emotional sublimation -  all those students whose ugly part of the soul has been put on public display, can be reasonably expected to analyze and refine their approach to negotiating the socio-political complex. 

The police, who were only meters away, watching over this incident haplessly was another positive high-light of this incident. That clearly brought out the power-relation dynamics that exist between the police and the lawyers, in general, prevaling in Tamil Nadu ( not sure of the rest of India). 

In a developing country, where human rights violations by the police can, as a rule, be taken for granted, the lawyers having an upper-hand is a good situation to be in, even in a bad case.

Neglecting the social dimension of a public policy education can only make the education itself very ineffective and insular. Perhaps there is a way to tone down on the violence.

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