New Climate Of Fear In India

Professor Amartya sen again attack on Modi Govt

According the ET, Economist and Harvard University professor Amartya Sen sat down for a conversation a few hours after the passing away of Kenneth Arrow, whose pioneering work was a great influence on him. As an expanded edition of Sen's 1970 book Collective Choice and Social Welfare comes out, he recalled how the first edition was very much in the Arrowian line. Arrow, he said, had gone through the manuscript and suggested improvements.
In an interview with Charmy Harikrishnan , Sen, 83, spoke about a new climate of fear in India, how the government got someone "connected with the Hindutva school" as the chancellor of the Nalanda University, why universities are under threat and why the stifling of free speech needs to be collectively resisted. Edited excerpts:
The world has changed a lot since your book Collective Choice and Social Welfare came out in 1970. How do you look at the age of Donald Trump?
In terms of what my book is concerned with, particularly the issue of arriving at social assessments and social policies on the basis of the views, concerns and judgments of the people, perhaps the most worrying aspect of the changes going on right now is the decline in the quality and reach of public reasoning. Public reasoning can be both about factual matters, about getting the information right, and about judgmental matters, clearing one's mind by comparing the assessments of different people and putting these assessments through critical scrutiny.
Factual information has suffered a lot through the championing of what has come to be called 'alternative facts'. Clarity of discussion has also often gone down. Some of the things on which Trump fought the elections, including the alleged dire state of the US economy and worsening unemployment, were not true. There were systematic distortions that many people came to believe. Something similar also happened in Britain at the time of the referendum on rexit. In India, too, a lot of non-truths have been cultivated. That worries me. But I am also worried that people are feeling less free and less confident to express their points of view. That decline has been quite prominent in India.