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R Prasannan
R Prasannan

EVENT

Spy agency hosts a bold lecture at its HQ

R&AW, India's premier intelligence agency, made a bold statement of its own liberalism on Saturday by hosting eminent intellectual Pratap Bhanu Mehta to make a bold speech which was highly critical of rightism and ultra-nationalism.

raw-india-wiki Image source: via Commons

“Liberal democracy is facing an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy,” said Mehta, giving the 11th R.N. Kao Memorial Lecture, instituted in memory of the agency's legendary founder. “All across the world, populist and ultra-nationalist governments are coming to power.”

Mehta, who is currently heading the prominent thinktank Centre for Policy Research, also pointed out, in response to a question, that disinformation has been found to be a more effective tool in the hands of rightist forces than even censorship of the Emergency kind.

According to Mehta, in the tussle between the right to privacy and the increasing tendency of the state to surveillance, the latter is getting the upper hand. In fact, the citizen is even willing to sacrifice more and more of his own privacy.

Mehta also pointed out that instead of seeing a minimal state, we are witnessing a phenomenon of the state controlling more and more things.

“It is for the first time ....that the power and authority of all intermediate institutions within and outside the state, from legislatures to the media, from NGOs to professional bodies, is under threat. This creates the conditions for populist democracy, a democracy founded on a suspicion of all representative institutions. It is a democracy with a will to simplicity: great deference to leaders who claim to embody the will of people. It is characterised by a political style that is nationalist, centralising, authoritarians and conspiratorial.”

Mehta was also critical of the bureaucracy which has lost its capacity to be impartial. 

In the early stages of the globalisation,we believed that state was getting minimal and would get embedded in the markets. But today, we find and demand the state to increasingly control the markets.

The function was presided over by the R&AW chief A.K. Dhasmana, and attended by a specially invited audience of senior officers of the government, serving intelligence and police officers, and prominent intellectuals.

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Topics : #RAW

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