Lecture by Prof. Gyanendra Pandey 2015 – Politics of Indifference

What is the meaning of politics and democracy at any time?  I think that these are questions that need to be asked. It is not self evident but they are being treated today as though we already know what we are talking about ... a shift from the level of policies good bad, indifferent to the question of power and privilege in our societies. I suspect it would lead us very quickly to recognise a really quite new ethos that surrounds our political and governmental discourses in the late 20th and early 21st centuries ... a politics of indifference … I suggest first that there is a politics that you can see in the politics of callousness and you can see in  bureaucratic obstacles presented all of the time, procrastination, process that will take forever sometimes. An indifference that might be called apathy, disinterest, callousness … I suggest to you that much modern governmental and political practice is marked by that. We know this perfectly well its just something we ought to remind ourselves its something that we need to mark … My second concern is with indifference to difference to the very condition of plurality of different ways of being of different ways of thinking, of different views of different practices of life.