Address by Dr. S Muralidhar at the 9th Convocation at the BML Munjal University
Let me begin with a parable and go on to an anecdote.
Many of us have heard of the tales of Mulla Naziruddin. One such runs like this. Mulla was walking down the street and came across a bunch of six urchins quarrelling over something. Mulla stopped to enquire. One of the older boys of the group stepped forward to say that they having a tough time trying to share a loaf of bread. Will you help us, they asked Mulla. Stroking his beard, Mulla said, agreed, but first you will have to answer one question. The boys asked what. Mulla said do you want me to distribute this loaf of bread as God would have distributed it or would you have me distribute it as man would? The boys in unison said ‘as God would have distributed it’. Well, said Mulla, lifting one eyebrow, as you wish. He then proceeded to give one small chunk to one, nearly half the loaf of bread to another, two uneven portions to another two. He told the last two: sorry, nothing for you. Even while the one who got the largest piece was puzzled, the rest began badgering Mulla saying what is this? This is so unfair. Mulla said Well, I asked you how you would wish the bread to be divided. I did exactly what you wished. God doesn’t give all of us the same or equal things. Many of us have nothing. That is the eternal truth of life and you have to learn to live with it. Mulla walked on. Those urchins did learn more of life that day.
Several years ago, in the National Judicial Academy the resource team of which I was part, performed an experiment with district judges who were attending a course in constitutional law. We placed a bowl of chickpeas, channa. A fairly large bowl. Every participant had to dip both hands into the bowl and clutch at as much channa as they could. Then, with hands folded behind their backs, one participant would randomly seek out a second participant who also had his hands full of channa folded behind. The second participant had to guess which hand of the first participant held more channa. If the guess was right, the first participant would have to handover all the channa in that hand to the second participant. If wrong, the second participant had to do likewise. The game would go on for another five minutes at the end of which each of the participants was asked to count how much channa was left in their hands. Depending on the number of channa with each of them, they would be categorised into different groups. Those having 20 and above in the first, 10-20 in the second, 5-10 in the third, 1-5 in the fourth and those with nothing left in the last. Each group had to sit around earmarked tables.
We then announced that this was an experiment at determining economic disadvantage: The above 20 group were to be called the elites, 10-20 were the upper middle class, 5-10 the lower middle class, 1-5 were the vulnerable and those having none were the BPL (below poverty line). The participants knew it was only an experiment, and yet, the body language of those in the ‘elite’ group became confident and assured, that of the upper middle class somewhat relaxed, the other groups had a ‘why me’ look. One in the BPL was in fact tearful and protested that the rules of the game, which were purely based on chance and not skill, were unfair and unjust.
It brought home the point that humans are intrinsically by birth, status and opportunity, in different states of inequality. It became apparent as we discussed further that when we add further layers of caste, disability, gender, sexual orientation and age, to each of the above ‘class’ categories, the issue becomes more complicated. For instance, a member of the BPL group who happens to be a widow, a dalit and hearing impaired, could suffer an accentuated disadvantage. A middle-class farmer could, on account of acquisition of her land for a power project, face displacement and loss of livelihood and be pushed in to a lower economic class. The next stage of the experiment was to ask each group, with this awareness, to talk about the privileges that they enjoy, and the challenges facing them and how they planned to overcome the challenges.
The members of the group thus experienced, although vicariously, what it was to be placed at a disadvantage; for e.g., what it was to be been born as a street-child, as a child of a sex worker, in a dalit household, in family of ragpickers or sewer cleaners, as a visually challenged person and so on. It was a lesson in understanding why the Constitution matters and making manifest a simple truth: That many of us are where we are not by choice, but by circumstance, and that our Constitution assures us that each one of us matters.
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For some of you in the audience who may wonder what this is all about, I may remind you that these explain the values of justice, equality and liberty which form the soul of our Constitution and are, therefore, stated upfront in its Preamble. It states that we the people of India gave to ourselves on 26th November 1949, justice, social, economic, and political, in that order. We gave to ourselves liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith, and worship. Again, in that order. Thirdly, and most importantly, we gave to ourselves equality of status and of opportunity. All of this was to achieve the attainment of one goal spelt out in the Preamble. It was the expectation of our Constitution makers that if we did give to each one of us, justice, liberty, and equality in the above terms it would help promote among all of us fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the nation.
While tabling the final draft before the Constituent Assembly, Dr Ambedkar reminded us that there were two glaring absences in Indian society of those times. The first was equality in the true sense of equals not being treated unequally and unequals not being treated equally. He said: “On the social plane, we have in India a society based on the principle of graded inequality by which we have a society in which there are some who have immense wealth as against many who live in abject poverty.” The second value that was absent was fraternity. He saw it as the principle which gives unity and solidarity to social life.
For him, social democracy was far too important, and if that was not achieved, there would be little purpose in economic or political democracy. He presciently noted that “democracy in India is only a top dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.” In an essentially feudal and patriarchal society, it had to be cultivated and nurtured by the people if the promises in the Constitution were to be fulfilled.
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So, the task before each of us, in this 75th year of the Indian Constitution, is this. How do we cultivate and nurture the constitutional values of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity, not just in our institutions and our workplaces but most importantly in our personal sphere? As Eleanor Roosevelt reminded us more than seven decades ago, “human rights begin in small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. They are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood she lives in; the school or college she attends; the factory, farm, or office where she works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seek equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.”
University life teaches you so many things, about yourself and about others. It introduces you to new experiences that challenge you, make you question your beliefs and shakes you up with every new disappointment. For some of you graduating today it was perhaps a time of new friendships (also some enemies?), losing friends, getting bullied by a senior (or a bunch of them?), discovering a first love (or was it a crush?), the first heartbreak, the pangs of envy and jealousy, of self-doubt, a first smoke (or was it weed?), the first drink, the first taste of the freedom to break not just taboos but the code of discipline or even the law and the thrill of not getting caught at it. Some of you may have found a hidden talent – as a speaker, as an actor, as a performing artist, a sportsman, as a nerd, as a teacher, as a good buddy.
You may have revelled in breaking norms, yet you develop a sense of justice. In other words, you are quick to sense the injustice done to you. For instance, with the same grades as you, your classmate gets a job offer and you do not. You say it is unfair. You are in the girl’s hostel which has certain additional restrictions like curfew hours that the boy’s hostel does not. You protest. Why? Because you experience unfairness. At the immigration counter in an international airport, those having European or American passports are diverted to a separate queue and South Asians to a different one where the clearance time is much longer. You sense discrimination. You also sense the injustice done to others, for no fault of theirs. When at the traffic intersection, on a cold winter’s night, a young child with a bare body comes to you begging for alms, you feel bad and mostly, helpless. And you do see the justice in providing for separate seats for women in public transport, for those who are differently abled, for the elderly. You recognise that not everyone is in a comparably similar situation and that by treating unequals equally and vice versa, we would be doing injustice.
And yet, when those of us who despite doing well in our school education are denied admission into universities or into courses of our choice because of seats being reserved for the lesser privileged castes and classes, we resent it deeply. At a personal level, when I was graduating in my BSc course 43 years ago, I too felt the same way. I felt merit was being punished and that it was unfair. It was because I enrolled into the law course that I became aware that as a school student in a metropolitan city, born in an upper caste family, I had none of the disadvantages of a student belonging to a scheduled tribe in a school in the hills, having to walk everyday at least three hours to reach the school and return home. My middle-class economic status may have helped me take special tuitions but many in an economically weaker position could not even afford the regular tuition fees in their schools. Some of them have had to grow in families that have suffered the practice of untouchability, who have, through generations, been denied access to basic facilities like drinking water from wells, bathing places and even places of worship. I realised by imagining that I was placed no different from that student, and that we both ought not to be treated differently, I was making a huge mistake – it was like chalk and cheese. However, it is unfortunate that with every new generation of students, the numbers of those resenting reservations have only grown. Hopefully, a greater exposure to social and economic realities, more co-mingling with persons of different backgrounds, in a congenial environment that encourages debate and dissent without resort to violence, might help the privileged student overcome the resentment.
If the last few years in this educational institution has not dulled that sense of inequality, of discrimination, of injustice and has helped you appreciate why as a society we need to be inclusive and caring, then this has indeed been a worthwhile time. If you have been a keen observer of your surroundings, you might have sensed what Dr Ambedkar termed as ‘graded inequality’. The matrimonial columns in our newspapers are perhaps the starkest example of how fractured our individual identity has become. People seek grooms and brides only from their own religion, castes and sub-castes. The categories of “grooms and brides wanted for’ highlighted in last week’s issue of a leading English national daily circulating in Delhi read: Agarwal, Jat, Brahmin, Tyagi, Bhumihar, Saini, Yadav, Kshatriya, Kayasth. Within SC/ST I noticed Ad-Dharmi, Jatav and Julaha, within Agarwal there was Bisa Agarwal, Bindal, Gupta, Goel, Jindal, Singla, and within Sikh there was Khatri and Ramgarhia. These are just illustrative. The divisions across India along religions - and along castes – and along castes within religions - is alarmingly mind-boggling. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether we subscribe to this as being part of our culture or tradition, or are we prepared to stop discriminating and judging the true worth of others along these lines? Has our education in these past few years helped us do that?
You witness the discomfort of some of your classmates in not feeling confident to speak in class or even in private, let alone speak in English or in your language; you sense their body language displaying diffidence, their awkwardness in being made aware of the clothes they wear, of the food they eat, of the region they come from, the language they speak and so on. Have you reached out to that person to make her or him feel comfortable? If each one of us were to ask, how many in our close circle of friends are persons not belonging to our class, caste, gender, sexual orientation, geographical region, religion, language, it would give us some indication of how truly inclusive we are.
At another level, if we ask ourselves how much do we know of the lives of those who work for us, that would tell us how caring we are. How many of us have spoken to or even smiled at the person cleaning our toilets either in our hostels or our homes? Those who sell the fruits and vegetables that you buy, those Zomato or Swiggy gig workers that toil day and night to deliver things at your doorstep. Do you know where they live? Have you shared a meal with them? Have you interacted with sewer cleaners, rag pickers and those who work in the mortuaries? With young labourers in restaurants and mechanic shops? Have you tried performing the task that they undertake? If your university stint has made you pause and take notice, has planted the seeds of caring and mindfulness, then the stint has indeed been worthwhile.
When you meet a person with a beard and a skull cap, or a girl who smokes or drinks publicly, or an obese person in the seat next to you in an aircraft, or a person with autism in a public place, do you start making assumptions unconsciously, almost as a reflex? If these years in this institution have helped you interrogate your prejudices, and attempt to overcome them, then the time spent here has been worthwhile.
Within our homes, how many of us understand what it is for a woman to be deprived of choices that are offered to men, whether in terms of future prospects of education and employment, and most importantly of marriage? How many women have the freedom to choose their own partners? How many of us would understand, one among us being differently sexually oriented? What if it is your own sibling or maybe your own parent? How many males among us understand what it is to be subjected to a male gaze, to mansplaining, to a lewd remark, to voyeurism and to stalking? The ability to understand the world through different viewpoints and from different perspectives, is the true test of maturity. If this education has helped show the way towards that maturity, then it will remain relevant for character-building.
Today’s convocation has revealed to us who among us has excelled in studies. Some of us could consider ourselves as winners and some as losers. Our educational system tends to divide students of a course into successes and failures, and that too on a relatively narrow range of life skills. Because so much of how much we succeed now, determines our entry into better courses, better degrees, jobs and professions, our educational system quite unsurprisingly makes us extremely competitive. Those who by their very nature do not subscribe to competitiveness or to being aggressive pursuit of the goalposts of ‘class topper’ and ‘university topper’ feel left behind. The hubris that could attach to those who are on the top of this game can be counter-productive to society in general in the longer run.
Michael Sandel, a Professor of Philosophy who teaches in Harvard University, brought out four years ago a book titled: The Tyranny of Merit, in which he argues that a relentless success ethic has permeated “the culture that those at the top deserved their place but so too did those who were left behind. They hadn’t striven as effectively. They hadn’t got a university degree and so on.” He points out how those in the top of the class at Harvard genuinely believed that they had reached that position by sheer dint of personal effort thereby attributing very little to the privileged backgrounds they came from, and which had provided them the ideal platform in which to excel. Those who have succeeded today because of your superior performance academically must understand that this is not only through your individual effort but in myriad ways on account of the support of your families, friends and society in general, and several generations of people that have made this moment possible. Likewise, those who did not perform as well as you expected should rest assured that you have learnt more than those who did, and that failure and success are but relative terms.
It is a sobering thought that many of us despite our academic brilliance may not possess basic life skills. Some of us may excel in other fields that unfortunately are not valued adequately in our kind of educational system. We tell our children, who may be highly skilled artists, that they nevertheless have to have a ‘regular’ job if they have to survive. The Covid-19 pandemic made us appreciate the value of the supposedly unskilled, low-paid work: that of the cleaner, the sweeper, the worker in mortuaries, cemeteries and cremation grounds. It should have taught us to value the dignity of work. Yet, we tend to attach disproportionately high value to certain skills (like for e.g., that of a surgeon or a scientist) and to devalue some other skills that are equally demanding if not more arduous: artisans, weavers, farmers, sanitation workers and home makers. That must change and you must help, in your own little way, to make that change happen.
This is the time to take stock of what we have learnt and what we have yet to learn. Our foremost statesman-teacher, Dr Radhakrishnan warned us: "When we think we know we cease to learn.” And when we cease to ask why and how, we fail to develop our innate sense of healthy curiosity that has produced many a thinker and philosopher in the country. There is much value in being what Professor Amartya Sen terms as an ‘argumentative Indian’. At the same time there is a concern that the present generation of students may be driven to becoming what Prof Sumana Roy terms as ‘agreementative’ Indians. The questioning mind that challenges, critiques and remains hungry for knowledge is our best hope for the future. The education system certainly prepares you to understand the value of learning, but the university is not the only place where you learn. For those willing to keep their mind open to it, life will continue to teach you about yourself and about those in whose midst you exist. While some mistakes are irreversible, many are those that let you pick yourself up and move forward with the determination not to repeat them. Every failure is a learning and every success a warning.
I wish to end by two quotes. The first is from Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore who says: “We have come to this world to accept it, not merely to know it. We may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy. The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.” And the next by Helen Keller, who as many of you know, overcame her visual and hearing impairment to become a renowned political activist, lecturer and author. Her inspiring words were: “Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.”
Our journey in life should help us discover the many other strengths that we may have and enable those strengths flourish even while we make it possible for others to realise those other strengths in themselves. Only then can we progress to a better society, to a more kind and equal world. We must strive to mitigate the harshness of the unequal world that Mulla Naziruddin reminded those young urchins about.
I hope each one of you have done what some of us did when we graduated. We thanked not just our teachers, families and friends, but thanked with a smile the persons serving in the campus – in the canteens, in the kitchens, hostels, the sweepers, cleaners and malis, the drivers, the staff, the peons and the guards who let in you in even after official hours and the shop across the road from where you surreptitiously got your cigarettes and even booze. They’ve all helped chisel you into the person you are now. Your gesture of acknowledgment means a lot to them. And as for this evening, after this boring speech, enjoy yourselves, go have a blast. You have earned it.
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The lecture was delivered on September 14, 2024.
Dr. S Muralidhar is a Senior Advocate and former Chief Justice of Orissa High Court.
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