The following guest post is by Nadia Ahmad, Associate Professor at Barry University School of Law:
The National Law School of India Review solicited me to write a 2,000-word article on January 2, 2019. I responded that I would write about the Indus Waters Treaty. Yet because of my existing deadlines, teaching schedule, and other responsibilities, I said I could deliver at the end of February.
Between the time that I accepted the offer and submitted the piece, India and Pakistan verged on the brink of war. I felt it would be responsible to include an analysis of how those current events factored into the interpretation and enforcement of the Indus Waters Treaty. The journal said it would not publish my piece, because I addressed “international relations” and not legal issues. I am at my desk still shaking my head as to how an international water treaty that has been litigated in international courts does not provide “legal, jurisprudential perspectives with an inter-disciplinary focus.” I was given no opportunity to update the piece, but merely a “thanks, but no thanks.”
Here is the three-part blog post, published in Vermont Environmental Law Review’s EcoPerspectives Blog:
I chose to write about this slight now, because of the broader impact to dissent in India, which has been on the radar of Human Rights Watch:
Sadly, the fact is that there is little room for dissent in India under [Bharatiya Janata Party] BJP. Activists, journalists, lawyers, writers, teachers, actors or artists – anyone who criticizes the government or its divisive ideology – is at risk of being targeted. Either the state deploys its power by arbitrarily cutting off access to funding, ordering audits, issuing warrants for search or arrest; or the BJP’s supporters threaten violence or launch physical attacks. From deeming that to be secular is to be anti-national, or from deciding that to be anti-fascist is to be a terrorist, the heap of wild allegations is unending.
Maybe with the elections, the bigotry and hatred would pass, I reasoned. I was wrong. The rancor will only intensify.
Meanwhile, neighboring Pakistan is no stranger to silencing minorities as it removed a top Princeton economics professor from its national economic advisory board, because he was from a religious minority group. And then Saudi Arabia is executing intellectuals.
I suffer from a misapprehension that the environment matters to public health, safety, and welfare of the people and their surrounding lands. I also have a misapprehension that war is not the answer to limited natural resource scarcity, and that wars should not be fought over oil, pipelines, land, and water rights. History rarely is on my side. History is on the side of power, war, and racism, and ignores voices of resistance for peace, justice, and equality.
As the prototype academic, I write enough to raise questions, but not enough to ruffle feathers, so that I can benefit from the fruits of my research and writing toils and not face the backlash of it. It is a fine line to stay out of sight, out of trouble, and still seem like an intellectual. In 1927, French essay Julien Benda published this once famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age in La Trahison des clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals). Roger Kimball noted the depth of the intellectual treason that Benda described:
The “treason” or betrayal [Benda] sought to publish concerned the way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was “mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers.” The ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were not jettisoned altogether. It was in this sense that he castigated the “desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action.”
In its crassest but perhaps also most powerful form, this desire led to that familiar phenomenon Benda dubbed “the cult of success.” It is summed up, he writes, in “the teaching that says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt.”
The election results in India are done trickling in – a landslide for the ruling party.
When I received the rejection email from the National Law School of India Review journal editor, the 2016-2017 protests at New Dehli’s Jawaharlal Nehru University were fresh in my mind. Students who criticized the government were called “fascists” and “terrorists.” The protests started as all students protests do with grievances that the administration would refuse to acknowledge and attend to, and then snowballed from there. Under normal academic discourse, there are responses and rebuttals, but with the heavy hand of the state, the free exchange of ideas is limited. The views of this diasporic Indian/Pakistani were unwelcome. I do not know what the full dynamics were that led to the rejection, but as a grandchild of the Indian Partition, I know when things are amiss. I know how stealthily narratives and information are reined in to put forward state propaganda.
Students and academics in India under BJP rule have been met with tear gas and pellets, faced contempt charges, been arrested under colonial era sedition laws, and are even killing themselves in despair.
The land of Mahatama Gandhi deserves better.
-Nadia Ahmad
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