It is by now a well-worn cliché that India is a land of many paradoxes. Among the lesser explored of these is a curious inclination to be disparaging about intellectual pursuits and, at the same time, worship the ‘intellectuals’. In the days when simplified Marxism guided protest, intellectuals were rubbished for reading too many books and sticking to their ‘petit-bourgeois’ roots. However, ever since the Left rediscovered the Italian communist icon Antonio Gramsci, intellectuals have acquired an elevated role as certifying authorities of public morality and national wisdom. Intellectuals, it has been deemed, have an autonomous standing and transcend their social origins and milieu.

A more daunting issue has, however, been left dangling. Who exactly is an intellectual? It is unlikely that the scientist working single-mindedly on isolating a less-known virus — the modern counterpart of the austere pundit in a seminary — would immediately spring to mind as the personification of the modern intellectual. No one to my mind has chosen to describe, say, either the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan or the classicist Bimal Krishna Matilal as intellectuals. They are remembered as scholars of great distinction.

The point is driven home with reference to the redoubtable Noam Chomsky. When Chomsky is invoked in the context of his seminal studies in linguistics, he is described as a scholar. However, when Chomsky puts his name to a petition demanding that the Indian state keep away from activist Teesta Setalvad, recently in the news for alleged financial impropriety, he promptly becomes an intellectual and is heard with deep reverence by the commentariat and judiciary. In an earlier time the same could have been said for Bertrand Russell the extraordinary mathematician-philosopher, and Russell the intellectual, loftily extending an unwitting helping hand to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Chomsky, of course, is a case apart. Few intellectuals have been so pressed to lend their name to causes big or small in countries familiar and unknown. In the global protest industry, he is now a big brand. He may have begun his parallel career rubbing shoulders with liberals and long-haired hippies against the Vietnam war way back in the late 1960s. However, since then he has embraced protest on an industrial scale. From Palestine and Iraq to Nandigram, Binayak Sen and Teesta Setalvad covers an awesome span. Even India’s habitual petitionists who began life as mere historians and then moved up the ladder to acquire intellectual status can’t remotely rival the sheer range of Chomsky.

It is of course noble to be an internationalist in the age of global capitalism. How many individuals located in some agreeable American surrounding have the intellectual self-confidence to pronounce his views on a case involving fudgy accounting in India? The certitudes that govern professional intellectuals such as Chomsky are astonishingly robust. But, are these judgments sound and dispassionate?

In November 2007, it was claimed by 14 intellectuals that “News travels to us that events in West Bengal have overtaken the optimism that some of us have experienced during trips to the state.” The reference was to the fracas in Nandigram and charges of CPM high-handedness in securing approval for a proposed chemical hub there. The petition, with Chomsky as the first signatory, expressed distress over “the rancour that has divided the public space (and) created… unbridgeable gaps between people who share similar values.” However, instead of roundly denouncing an over-bearing state as was the prevailing custom, Chomsky, et al, declared loftily: “The balance of forces in the world is such that it would be impetuous to split the Left… This is not the time for division…”

The assertion was revealing. For the intellectuals, the sense of outrage is invariably selective. The Left, they are clear in their minds, can’t be divided and weakened. And a situation cannot be judged in isolation but invariably linked to the “balance of forces in the world”. In plain language, the Left is a treasured friend and others the enemy.

The intellectuals are entitled to their preferences. But it would be healthy if they accompanied their pious interventions with a full and frank disclosure of their larger political agenda. Even the pretence of saintliness could do with a statutory warning to the gullible.