On May 29, 2025, the Supreme Court extended the interim bail granted to the political scientist Ali Khan Mahmudabad till the third week of July. He had been arrested on May 18, because a couple of people finding his social media posts during Operation Sindoor objectionable had filed first information reports against him.

Initially, the court had instructed him not to post any opinion related to the events preceding and during the Operation. A day ago, these restrictions were reiterated. “We do not want him to run a parallel commentary on the issues under investigation,” stated the honourable Supreme Court. 

Many learned commentaries have been published on The Wire on the legal and political implications of the arrest of Mahmudabad. It is perhaps time to ask some fundamental questions of the entire issue, because they relate to the way we think and conceive of our right to freedom, and the way it is threatened by coercive politics in the country.

Plato’s Apology – 'apologia' in Greek stands for defence speech – represents the trial of Socrates conducted in 399 B.C.E. When he is accused of practicing subversive modes of philosophy known as Socratic questioning, Socrates stands before the jury of wise men in ancient Athens raising significant philosophical issues. His accusers allege that the method ‘makes the worse argument the stronger’ and ‘corrupts the young’. Socrates asks the jurors a loaded question. What, he asks, "do I deserve to suffer or to pay because I have deliberately not led a quiet life?"

“I did not follow the path that would have made me of no use either to you or to myself, but I went to each of you privately and conferred upon him what I say is the greatest benefit, by trying to persuade him not to care for any of his belongings before caring that he himself should be as good and as wise as possible, not to care for the city’s possessions more that for the city itself, and to care for other things in the same way. What do I deserve for being such a man?” 

"What do I deserve for being a such a man?" This question can be asked by, and on behalf of Ali Khan Mahmudabad of the political science department in Ashoka University.

What has he said that any sane, rational human being will not believe in? That war is evil. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had famously said to President Vladimir Putin of Russia that this is not an era for war. May I with full respect remind the prime minister that there never can be an era for war. War devastates, it kills babies, it destroys cities and villages, it demolishes hospitals and houses, it annihilates the environment for decades to come, it is the ultimate curse that can befall a people. We just have to look at our screens to see what military aggression has done to Palestine and Ukraine, how many lives have been destroyed, how many psyches have been deranged, how many people have been denied basic goods like drinking water, food, and medicines, and how they died hungry, tired, and exhausted.

Do we really have to be told what horror has been unleashed by war? When Ali foregrounded the dangers of war in his social media post, he was warning hotheads who have been baying for blood to not defend war as it is the ultimate dreadfulness that confronts human beings.

Whose interests are served by war? 

The poet Amrita Syam scripts an imaginary conversation between Subhadra, one of the wives of the hero of Kurukshetra, Arjuna, and Krishna in the poem Kurukshetra. Fought in the name of justice, the human costs of the war were unimaginable. Generations were wiped out as two branches of a family confronted each other over property. Subhadra whose young son Abhimanyu was brutally slain asks Krishna to account for these losses:

The war was, after all, a fight for a kingdom
Of what use is a crown
all your heirs are dead
When all the young men have gone
...And who will rule this kingdom
So dearly won by blood
A handful of old men
A cluster of torn hopes and thrown away dreams.

The poem should make us think. What is society left with when the grisly play of violence is over? Yudhishtir is convulsed with grief. What he, wonders, in volume eight of the Mahabharata, is the value of power, if the path to this goal is drenched with the blood of his own people?

“This heavy grief however is sitting in my heart, that through covetousness I have caused this dreadful carnage of kinsmen”.

Ali reminded us of these costs when he spoke against war. He is a political scientist, and the task of a political scientist is to remind young people that there is a world we should strive for, a world of values, a world of humaneness, a world of solidarity, and a world without war.

This the task of the social scientist and of humanities, to teach students to think beyond the foolishness of rabid nationalism towards a world of civility and of civilisation. This is the obligation of the political scientist. And I speak as a political scientist.

A university without the humanities [and social sciences] wrote the celebrated Marxist literary critic, Terry Eagleton, is like a bar without beer. Without these two academic components, we will not have universities, we will have technical training institutes. Ali was writing as a political scientist, but above all as an Indian citizen who was concerned about the effect of warmongering on our society and our country. Listen to the message, do not shoot the messenger.

Is our country so fragile?

One of the two cases filed against Ali by a BJP functionary is on the basis of his post in which he urged his fellow citizens to also feel for minorities who have been lynched. So, one Yogesh Jatheri complained that Ali’s post promoted hatred, was prejudicial to national integration, and endangered the sovereignty of the country. Really? The sovereignty of a great country like India is going to be compromised by a social media post? The mind boggles. Is our country so fragile?

I would request professional filers of complaints against this or that sane and eminently reasonable academic, to remember our history and understand what our constitution is about.

Even as independence came to India drenched in blood spilled by the Partition, the Constituent Assembly, which had met in December 1946, was drafting a constitution for the country. The Partition raised fresh challenges to the project of social and political transformation. Cavalcades of Hindus left from what had become Pakistan for India. Caravans of Muslims left India for a newly minted Pakistan. A substantial number stayed behind in the home of their ancestors. 

Also read: The Lost Art of Thinking in an Age of Manufactured Outrage

Consider the mammoth task confronting the assembly. Indians who had been divided along the lines of politicised religion had now to accept each other as fellow citizens in a democratic political community that was being fashioned by the Constitution. They had descended to the lowest level of humanity during the Partition of the country. Utter chaos in northern and eastern India had begun to resemble Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature; war of all against all. But the solution that Hobbes proposed in his 1651 Leviathan, a powerful state, was simply not enough. Society had to be transformed and social relations had to reworked and strengthened. 

The makers of the constitution had to introduce a modicum of sanity in a society that had been wracked by insanity. A new society had to be created out of the wreckage of the old, it had to cluster around norms that were as far removed from religious mobilisation and enmity that marked pre-partition and partition days of the 1940s, as possible. The political community had to be reinvented. 

 Seeking to lay down principles that could serve as the fulcrum of a democratic political .community, the makers of the constitution institutionalised the normative precepts of political theory-freedom, equality, justice, and fraternity or solidarity. These principles had to bring Indians together on issues that concerned themselves and their fellow citizens. And progressive poets tried their best to further this project. In 1961, Sahir Ludhianvi, writing the lyrics for B.R Chopra’s Dharamputra (1961) which was directed by Yash Chopra, and in which N. Dutta gave the musical score, asked a significant and shattering question in: ‘Yeh kiska lahu hai, kaun mara?’. Whose blood is this? Who died? The moment we ask this question we realise the promise of fraternity in the Preamble of the constitution.

The makers of the constitution, many of whom were well versed in political liberalism  were aware that democracy falters if people do not care about others, about their ill health or poverty, or who do not raise their voices if a particular community is subjected to rampant injustice and the rest are indifferent. Without fraternity we remain a mere bunch of individualised  self-interested rights bearers. Without fraternity, we continue to live in Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature, isolated and cut off from civic virtues that complete us as human beings. Fraternity enables us to come together in networks of shared concerns and establishes a dialogical relationship with our fellow citizens so that we can think out the distinction between what is and what can be. This is what Ali was reminding us of. He reminded us of the Preamble of the constitution. Was he therefore arrested for upholding the constitution?

Let me end by returning to Socrates’ defence.

“Perhaps someone might say: But Socrates, if you leave us will you not be able to live quietly, without talking?” Socrates’ reply is memorable. “Now this is the most difficult point on which to convince some of you” he said. “If I say that it is impossible for me to keep quiet because this means disobeying the god, you will not believe me and will think I am being ironical. On the other hand, if I say that is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men, you will believe me even less."

But examining our lives means that we must learn to think. We however live in an environment that dissuades and discourages thinking. This is perhaps understandable from the perspective of the ruling class. For as Julius Caesar remarked in Shakespeare’s immortal play bearing the same name:

"Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o’ nights: Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”

Ali has been penalised because our society has been taught to distrust intellectuals. It should realise that intellectuals are the lifeblood of our society because they advocate the thinking human being.

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