Remember the war against Franco?

That’s the kind where each of us belongs.

Though he may have won all the battles,

We had all the good songs!

—Tom Lehrer, American folk singer.

Winning a Nobel Prize is no small achievement. Over the years, it has also come to be regarded as a national achievement. It is, therefore, entirely in order that the award of the Nobel Prize for economics to Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, now a professor in the US, has been accompanied by an explosion of pride, particularly in his home town Kolkata. Banerjee joins the long list of people beginning from Rabindranath Tagore and extending to Mother Teresa and Amartya Sen who have secured this important international recognition for both the city and West Bengal. Being a rooted Bengali, Banerjee’s achievement is also great solace to a community that, over the years, nurtures a feeling of having been bypassed. This week, Kolkata resonates with the elation, sometimes verging on smugness, that when it comes to matters of the mind, Bengalis are world class.

Every event, however, has unintended consequences. Since Banerjee was associated with the formulation of the Congress Party’s NYAY commitment in the 2019 general election — a commitment that some feel was singularly responsible for driving the middle classes away from Gandhi family-led outfit — the Swedish award has also been taken to be a snub to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Certainly, the fact that Banerjee read for his master’s degree in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, an institution the saffron ecosystem places high on its list of pet hates, is being accorded significance. Along with Amartya Sen who has never concealed his disagreements with Modi and the BJP, Banerjee has now been elevated to the pantheon of towering intellectuals raising their voices against the supposed desecration of the Idea of India since 2014.

The belief that India is being run by a cluster of cretins blessed with bigotry, narrow-mindedness and a lack of education is a recurrent belief among the dissidents. Many of them believe they are waging the good fight for liberalism, Enlightenment values and the ‘scientific temper’, not to mention secularism.

The belief that lofty principles are involved in otherwise mundane competitive politics has often served to keep intellectuals in the ring. This is more so when the fight is perceived to be against the populist rabble, often driven by xenophobia. In the US, the East and West coast establishments and the campuses are outraged that Donald Trump is in the White House. They are also aesthetically offended that he enjoys large public support. Likewise in Britain, there is a fierce determination in the establishment to ensure that the verdict of the 2016 referendum is set aside and Brexit subverted. In both cases, intellectual activism is governed by the feeling that the people are gripped by what Marxists call ‘false consciousness’ and must be guided to the right path, even if it means puncturing the popular will.

This sense of entitlement — once the hallmark of the feudal order — is often compounded by sneering contempt for the other side. Sen and Banerjee, for example, are economists — notorious for routinely getting it all wrong. Their prescriptions for tackling poverty are essentially welfarist. This approach has been marked by both failure and modest success, just as the dependence on the market and belief in entrepreneurship has. Some economists advocate high personal taxes to sustain a welfare state, while others feel that giving individuals and families more money to either accumulate or spend generates productive forces. These are divergent approaches, as are multiple strategies of fostering community and nationhood. Exercising political choices doesn’t make the other side either more enlightened or philistine.

The belief in different paths to dharma and salvation has defined Hindu traditions. This world view has nurtured modesty and is so unlike the certitudes that govern some Western thought. Unfortunately, it is the latter — embellished with ‘group think’ — that is moulding contemporary intellectual discourse. What we are witnessing in the guise of liberalism are intellectuals who are not only convinced of their own infallibility but make a virtue of debunking those they disagree with, both for being wrong and for being culturally challenged. Ironically for scholars who explore the dynamics of poverty and accord weight to the experiences of people at the bottom of the pile, there is a marked tendency to debunk the preferences of ordinary voters as being uninformed. This amounts to condescension, if not arrogance.

The Nobel Prize winners aren’t guilty of these transgressions; their cheerleaders are.