When governments begin to lose the intellectual argument, they tend to attack those who are perceived to be winning it. Totalitarian governments from Stalin’s Soviet Union to Mao’s Communist China targeted intellectuals. Stalin sent political opponents and writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the gulag, Maoist China attacked intellectuals and ‘reactionary academics’ during the Cultural Revolution. In some cases, brainwashed Maoist children often killed their own parents for ‘disloyalty’ to Mao.

In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered the educated. Nazi book burning campaigns in the 1930s consigned to flames all so called communist and ‘un-German’ books. In the Lok Sabha recently BJP MP Kirron Kher turned her ire against intellectuals and jholawallahs, saying they are politically motivated and only returning awards to embarrass the Modi government. BJP’s Meenakshi Lekhi asked why intellectuals did not return awards after the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. On social media, loyalists of the government daily pour scorn on intellectuals as Congress agents and some TV debates set up intellectuals as Public Enemy No 1. Historian Ram Guha reacted last week by accusing this government of being the most anti-intellectual government India has ever had.

Is it fair to target India’s long tradition of secular modernist intellectuals, many of whom themselves sharply questioned the orthodoxies of political secularism? Last week author Amitav Ghosh edited a special edition of the Times of India on climate change. Ghosh has not only produced a majestic body of work but also taken the lead in bringing climate change into focus in India, bringing intellectual leadership on an urgent yet neglected cause.

Many intellectuals have done the same. Social and religious reform or government excesses, India’s intellectuals have been at the forefront of change. In fact, Ghosh himself has written a trenchant critique of the 1984 riots. Should Ghosh’s oeuvre be ignored and should he be pigeon-holed as someone who is politically motivated against the government, simply because he may have once voiced critical views on religious majoritarianism?

Amartya Sen and Arundhati Roy may be critical of this government but does that make them anti-national? Sociologist Ashis Nandy has written some of the finest books on contemporary India but has had a sedition case filed against him by the Gujarat government. Nayantara Sahgal has written over a dozen novels, Krishna Sobti blazed a trail in Hindi literature, yet both are seen today as part of a ‘manufactured protest’.

Should a Nobel laureate like Sen, a lyrical writer like Roy who won the Booker prize through stiff competition, a leading historian like Guha who has produced several quality works of history, all only be judged on whether they are ‘anti-Modi’? Guha, in fact, has been a fierce critic of dynasty politics too. Instead of branding all thinkers as ‘leftist’, ‘politically motivated’, their views should be debated and intellectually answered in a verbal duel, instead of resorting to name calling as members of the ruling party do.

One person’s name was conspicuous by its absence in the intolerance debate in Parliament and that was Wendy Doniger, author of a monumental work on Hinduism. There is no legal case against Doniger, her book is not banned and nor was a single copy pulped by the publisher. If there are no legal restrictions on Doniger why does she still not feel safe enough to come to India? This is because the government has never unequivocally and publicly stated that it will defend her safety or that of Salman Rushdie. Instead, the prevailing feeling is that if ‘Hindu’ hoodlums attack Doniger, the government may well simply invoke the action-reaction theory and proclaim itself helpless against goon power.

If the government is serious about demonstrating its tolerance then why not accept P Chidambaram’s apology that it was wrong to ban Satanic Verses in 1988 and publicly declare that the government will do its utmost to protect both Doniger and Rushdie? Tolerance is crucial but tolerance is not enough; instead there is need to publicly demonstrate respect for scholars, however much we may disagree with their views.

Nazi book burnings and Khmer Rouge’s massacre of intellectuals should be a talisman for governments who do not stand by the literati. An intellectual argument and solid well-reasoned campaign to for example take the words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ out of the Constitution is a far more democratic argument and far less ludicrous than setting up the violent thugs in Dadri as the binary intellectual opposite of Amartya Sen and Arundhati Roy.

In his oft quoted work, Intellectuals, the conservative writer Paul Johnson may have warned against the ‘tyranny of ideas’ that intellectuals create but he also stated that the rise of the secular intellectual has been key to shaping the modern world. Modern India’s intellectuals, in every corner of the land, in every language, have indeed shaped the nation. Sure, perhaps many do need to reach out to a wider, younger audience and prevent their ideas from becoming what Johnson called destructive and irrational orthodoxies; yet intellectuals have been sentinels of freedom in India.

Governments which rubbish intellectuals are only demonstrating their own weakness when it comes to standing up to a dialectical challenge. When you attack the literate class, it means you have no counter argument. The pen is mightier than the sword precisely because the sword often does not have a solid case against the pen. Instead of calling critical intellectuals ‘anti-national’ and ‘anti-Modi’, the BJP government should not repeat the mistakes of the Congress which failed to protect M F Husain or Rushdie. By contrast the Modi government should demonstrate its commitment to intellectual freedom by guaranteeing the safe visit of Wendy Doniger.