FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK
Trade-off of Values in Real Politics
I
t has been historically true that a significant section of the
population, particularly the youth, has been pliant to the
communal and ethnically oppressive and narrow agenda
that is taken on board by socio-religious forces in order to serve
their particular political interests. The young people lend them-
selves to manipulation by the politicians, who can seek and trap
them into the vortex of communal violence, which is made to irrupt
periodically in order to favour one party or the other. The recent
communal mobilisation in Maharashtra and Uttarakhand proves
the social tendency of such mobilisation towards violence, and
it does have the youth as a major component who contribute to
it, either directly or indirectly, by spreading fake, distorted
news through a rather gross misuse of various social media
platforms. We need to employ a certain kind of framework of
moral values within which both those who use these youths and
those who lend themselves to such manipulation can be evalu-
ated. Those who lend themselves to such manipulation do have
value inasmuch as they are willing to be utilised by prospective
forces who have enormous power and resources to decide the
value of those employed for communal mobilisation.
It is needless to mention that the politics of manipulation for com-
munal mobilisation is based on the exchange of values that have an
instrumental character. The intrinsic values such as dignity and self-
respect, arguably, do have a fixed quantum of force. In fact, it is
constant; it can neither be minimised nor maximised. For example,
intrinsic values such as self-respect or dignity based on conviction
are arguably constant. Put differently, it would be absurd to say that
one is enjoying self-respect in degrees or in percentages. Instrumen-
tal value, on the other hand, is flexible, and hence can be maximised
or minimised. Both the material price which has a bearing on the
usefulness of a person depends on the varied scale. Thus, the instru-
mental hierarchy that one finds in terms of closeness and distance
from a particular political personality with an impressive clout is
suggestive of the flexible nature of instrumental value.
The external property of their action, such as anchoring, sharing
fake news, indulging in bad speech and action, corresponds to the
worth of those who have been allegedly hiring these people. The
high moral value in a decent democracy corresponds to the commit-
ment to constitutional morality, rule of law, toleration of dissent,
and constructive deliberation. But political parties and politicians
who engage in communal mobilisation find the instrumental
value of the stormtroopers as coefficient with the instrumental
Economic & Political Weekly EPW JUNE 17, 2023 vol lViii no 24
value with which these parties practise their politics, which is
obviously against the democratic ethos. Thus, in a negative
sense, there is a value correspondence between the object of
manipulation and those who control the value of the former.
On a fair note, although some people lend themselves to be used
by others, they are sucked into the vitiating logic of instrumental
politics, which finds its social basis in the “propitiating” condition
of cumulative unemployment leading to desperation that tempo-
rarily helps some to avoid frustration, but ultimately denies them
their sense of authentic self-worth. Thus, mobilisation through
manipulation propelled by instrumental values does not stand in
an important causal relationship to overall good consequences,
both for individuals’ self-respect as well as respect for democratic
norms and constitutional morality. Such individuals have to first
kill their own sense of self-respect in order to kill the other.
However, it is not suggested that those who are lost to the force
of instrumental values can never have an inherent value such as
self-respect. They do cherish and harness intrinsic values but such
values and their instantiation depend on the social conditions,
and not just on the capacity to, for example, work for a particular
party. Intrinsic values that can prevent a person from sliding into
instrumentality make sense in the context where people are able
to enjoy their autonomy to make choices in every growing oppor-
tunity sphere, failing which it will create only an army of the un-
employed people who then are forced to enter the trade-off
between choosing themselves and their favoured politician.
Prioritising intrinsic values over the extrinsic or the instrumen-
tal depends on the conditions such as adequate opportunities on
the one hand and the need to be receptive to the idea of dignity and
self-respect on the other. Unfortunately, the infiltration of such
ideas, particularly among those who have been susceptible to
manipulative politics, has become increasingly difficult, if not
impossible. It has become difficult due to the cultic and hence
emotive politics which finds its sustenance especially from the
skewed reading of history that has anyway been reduced to its
24×7 re-theorisation. Such “barricades” against critical responsi-
bility towards transformative ideas, in effect, tend to overwhelm
the possibility of awareness about the causal relationship between
intrinsic worth and the democratic condition that make people’s
capacity to act a worthwhile project.
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