Dear Editor,
I refer once again to Abu Bakr’s letter ‘What is the definition of the Indian they wish to protect and preserve?’(SN, October 30) to raise an issue not coincidentally raised by Lincoln Lewis and Baytoram Ramharack on the same day in different newspapers in separate letters: the need for civility in our discourse, especially political discourse.
Not coincidentally, because I believe that, like myself, the above two interlocutors who have been commenting on various issues via the letters pages for over two decades, have realised the the absolute futility of engaging in disrespectful polemics.
In Mr Bakr’s missive, he claims that some (named) writers such as myself “…complain that the screech and whimper coming from the Indian side is not sustained enough…” We have engaged Mr Bakr at least since 2001when he objected to VS Naipaul being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. After 15 years, is this how he actually sees the interventions of Indian Guyanese? A “screech and whimper?”
In the past I have had occasion to remind Mr Bakr and other interlocutors about the difference between a question and answer ‘dialogue’ that we should maintain going forward and a ‘polemic’ as distinguished by Michel Foucault and which Mr Bakr insists on practising. I quote in full:
“Questions and answers depend on a game ‒ a game that is at once pleasant and difficult ‒ in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of the dialogue.
“The polemicist, on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for the truth, but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then, the game does not consist of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak, but of abolishing him, as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be, not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth, but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.
And yet, in the order of discourse, they are also ways of acting which are not without consequence. There are the sterilizing effects: has anyone ever seen a new idea come out of a polemic?”
Mr Bakr, we need new ideas; not one upmanship at this time. I would concede that on occasion I have also lapsed into Foucauldian polemics in the past, and can attest that as time runs out on our ‘three score and ten’ the sterility becomes starker every day.
Yours faithfully,
Ravi Dev
