How does it benefit India?
Amartya Sen is the much admired Indian intellectual today. His latest book, The Idea of Justice, is just now released.
He was in India and gave several interviews and talks promoting his book.
We have already posted our review on our weblog (www.isvarmurti.com) and twitter/isvarmurti). Here we publish the same for our readers to go through the same and make a judgment for themselves.
The point is that Sen spoke on current politics and development issues and social and equity issues. Each aspect of his view of justice needs deep study and analysis.
The point is while Sen’s book is dense with close arguments, his language is still academic and at places quite jargon-ridden. So, there may not be many to read him fully and more so understand him in the true spirit.
Sen’s arguments are brilliant but at many places his arguments seem evasive or not to the point, so to say. He laid much stress on public argument and public discussion. But he hasn’t shed much light on how to t attain political justice, economic justice and social justice etc. Simple questions are not answered directly at least in conclusion.
And also he sounded a bit diplomatic; he says he is still on the Left but as people might like to ask him: what about his own state, West Bengal riddled with contradictions, the Left government in a quandary on many aspects of governance.
And yet he is still on the Left which is characterised with a violent approach to enforcing its ideology, a man who explains justice to call himself as a Leftist? It is basically contradictory.
And Sen would really like to have much public discussion (his definition of democracy) and public reasoning (his idea of a basic Indian tradition of India being an argumentative nation. But what we find? A nation of evasive arguments to justify much that is unjustifiable, half the population of children doesn’t receive their child protection immunisation etc. So much corruption and yet the country carries on, we talk of democracy but there is basic violations in our very functioning of the polity.
Anyway, we hope Sen himself would appreciate such questions and criticisms!