We Are Intellectuals

A senior law officer argued in the Supreme Court that "intellectuals" could be more dangerous than "ground-level terrorists"

- Harish Khare

WE live in strange times and we have been made to get accustomed to new slogans and strange shibboleths; but we are still surprised—no, rather scandalised—to learn that a senior law officer can argue in the Supreme Court of India that “intellectuals” could be more dangerous than “ground-level terrorists”.

The formulation was made the other day by the Additional Solicitor General of India, S. V. Raju, opposing bail for Sharjeel Imam, a co-accused in the Umar Khalid case. That case, it needs to be noted, has brought no glory to the Indian judiciary and is increasingly beginning to look like a milder version of the infamous Moscow trials during the Stalin era in the Soviet Union.

For a prosecutor, it was clever of Raju to add spice to his argument by bringing in the matter of a few doctors allegedly involved in what has come to be called the “Red Fort terror incident”. But surely the Additional Solicitor General could not mean that all doctors, or engineers, ipso facto, get to be called potentially dangerous “intellectuals”. Just think if the entire faculty at the AIIMS in Delhi gets dabbed with the stigma of being godfathers of the “Umar Khalids”.

Admittedly, various news outlets reported the good solicitor’s exact formulations differently, but all did manage to convey the disapproving tone the prosecutor used for “intellectuals”, as if he was talking about a dirty and undesirable category. We do not know what meaning and insinuation the law officer had in mind when speaking of dangerous “intellectuals”. He certainly could not be referring to the vastly accepted definition, attributed to sociologist Edward Shils, who described a group of thinkers/men of learning who exhibit “an unusual sensitivity to the sacred, an uncommon reflectiveness about the nature of their universe, and the rules which govern their society”.