Politics is a very gutsy affair

Amartya Sen
(An eminent Indian economist, Professor, philosopher and Nobel Laureate.
He has been called "the Conscience and the Mother Teresa of Economics" for
his work on famine, human development theory, welfare economics, the
underlying mechanisms of poverty, gender inequality, and political
liberalism. )

It is not so much about delivering justice to a particular person. That’s a legal matter. That language would be legal language. But how do you ensure that we enhance justice rather than reduce it in context of dealing with terrorism. you know, obviously in so far as terrorism gives some reasonable grounds for restrictions on free speech that would be very serious conflict one has to look at. In so far as according to some, it gives reason to torture and other ways for extraction of information, those are some other kinds of issues. The position that I have argued for is that there is no case for torture in any circumstances, even in those of terrorism. That is partly because it is a very bad way of pursuing information; secondly you also do not get much information that way. It is ineffective. Studies of torture across the world over the centuries have shown that people under torture would give any answer that they thought would be pleasing to the interrogator. So you do not get very much information. I know that there have been things like of water-boarding and other issues that have come up in public discussions. The ideologues are few in number but they rely on a huge infrastructure of a number of other people. The chap who goes and shoots is one guy but the chap who gives shelter to the one person and says okay, I won’t mention to anyone, but you go past here, I can understand your calls etc. For every X number of terrorists there is a probably a 100 X number of people who provide some kind of quiet acceptance of it. The very dedicated naxalite and the very dedicated terrorists, you might not be able to have any impact on them through discussion. Dedicated terrorists survive on the basis of very large number of people who are compliant in some sense. The person is going around waving a gun in his pocket; it may be a risk to your security. But I have not met any naxalite in my life and therefore to say that they will not listen to any amount of reasoning is not right either. If you take a broad kind of them, they have been through terrible torture in the past. The question to ask what Gandhiji and Mandela had asked. Is if this is the right way of dealing with it, the most effective way? After you have decapitated a couple of landlords would it would that provide the extra income, extra jobs that these people would need, and the dignity and the lack of humiliation? That is what politics is all about. By using reasonableness you are making it a very saintly affair. Politics is a very gutsy affair. Public reasoning is a gutsy affair too. In the Gujarat thing, the main issue is that secularism is a dialogue that can help deal with communalism in a way. I loved that breadth, and also the fact that in interpreting Indian civilization itself, its cultural diversity was much emphasized. By pointing to the extensive heterogeneity in India's cultural background and richly diverse history, Tagore argued that the "idea of India" itself militated against a culturally separatist view, "against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one's own people from others." My own interests gradually shifted from the pure theory of social choice to more "practical" problems. But I could not have taken them on without having some confidence that the practical exercises to be undertaken were also foundationally secure (rather than implicitly harbouring incongruities and impossibilities that could be exposed on deeper analytical probing). The progress of the pure theory of social choice with an expanded informational base was, in this sense, quite crucial for my applied work as well.