Towards civilised conversation  

“Dissent is the safety valve of democracy. If dissent is not allowed, then the pressure cooker may burst," Justice DY Chandrachud, part of a three-judge Supreme Court bench, reportedly averred last year highlighting the importance of dissent in a democracy.


If dissent is the safety valve, a debate can be considered as the mechanism through which such a process is enabled. It is the hallmark of any ‘civilised’ society. 


What is ‘debateable’ then? It means something that is in doubt, something which has to be sorted out by arguments on one side or the other, Robert Rogers, Clerk of Legislation in the United Kingdom’s House of Commons noted, discussing the importance of debates.


Debates can be two parties or more deliberating over issues, partially agreeable or violently disagreeable, and can take place anywhere. This is the essence of debate, Rogers argued, adding that a good debate is actually civilised conversation. It involves not only the formal debate that occurs in a formal political setting, say a parliament, or debating activities in academic or other institutional circles, but encompasses any deliberation on issues. 


However, in a rapidly changing contemporary political climate, often question is asked whether a healthy debate is a misnomer.  The word itself has come to be associated with ‘shouting games’ on the prime time television or other mediums; unfortunately, often involving politicians and political parties as well as ‘experts’ on various issues. The partisan anchor or host, habitually, nudging the participants gleefully in the slugging ‘jamboree’ of rhetoric and hubris in guise of debate. 


Debate is the activity that brings the art of reading, thinking and speaking together in one place goes a University of Washington’s Department of Communication note on the subject. When medieval scholars set out to establish the curriculum of the world’s first universities, it added, they considered three liberal arts essential for leadership and promotion of the best ideas: grammar, logic, and rhetoric (reading, thinking, speaking). Regretfully, rhetoric itself has undergone a drastic transformation in the topical political climate.   


In a world in which incorrect information and unjustified ideas are abundant, participation in debates enables one to become less narrow- minded, to look at all sides of an argument, to provide scope and structure to one’s work and in practice, goes another note by Universities of Oxford’s memo. 


For Robert Rogers, debate is about opposition-testing things so that challenge and criticism makes them sounder ideas then they were in the first place.  This entails not only having a well prepared good case with own point of view but also readiness to accept that one is not the epitome of all knowledge, or subject matter being discussed. 


However, tendency to interact with only those who “share and reconfirms” one’s view is the current zeitgeist; the echo chamber, accentuated by plethora of information on social media engulfing the participants in a vicious cycle.


‘It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it,’ goes a cryptic quote attributed to Classical Greek philosopher Aristotle.  Nelson Mandela was more direct when he argued: ‘A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don’t have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial, and uninformed.”


Indians are argumentative. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen once wrote a book reflecting on its healthy tradition of debate and pluralism. This tradition is suddenly become a rarity in the world of hyper nationalism and Hashtags, Twitter trends and trolls.


Are these traits are verifiable in the Naga society at present? This is a question necessitating serious contemplation and debate.