“The offence of sedition cannot be invoked to minister to the wounded vanity of the governments,” declared the judge who granted bail to 22-year-old Disha Ravi recently. Disha was arrested on charges of sedition. She was supposedly working with Greta Thunberg to undermine the Indian government! The only thing that she did which provoked the government was to support the enduring farmers’ agitation. Disha is just one among hundreds of people being victimised in India merely because they have wounded the vanity of the government. The vanity of the present Indian government comes from what psychology and philosophy call naïve realism. Naïve realism is the belief that one’s view of events is unbiased and correct and when others disagree they must be wrong. Naïve realists assume that those who disagree with them are uninformed, irrational and biased. A whole lot of politicians in the ruling party in India now seem to be naïve realists with vanities wounded by the ghosts of history.
Cerebrate and Celebrate