The kidnapping of Sonam Wangchuk by the Delhi police throws into sharp relief the defining feature of a government Indians have elected to power in the past three elections. This government does not know the D of democratic politics. It only knows how to rule through the exercise of rank coercion, and by casting a pall of fear over citizens. The idea that elections are but the continuation of a conversation between ‘we the people’ and a representative government on, for instance, why power should be handled with care, exercised with caution, limited by institutional checks and balances, and above all by popular opinion, is completely alien to this government. It has annexed the Enforcement Directorate (ED), the Election Commission (EC), the mainstream media, and sadly, at times, the judiciary to its own project of exercising raw, unmitigated power. And if ‘we the people’ dare to criticise the incompetence of the government – it cannot even hold a competitive entrance exam adeptly – we will be whisked away at dawn as Wangchuk was. The shameful aspect of the arrest is that the police did not have the courage to take him openly. This dastardly exercise had to be covered with white sheets. The police took away a man who was fasting for a laudable cause. Let alone a dialogue, the government does not even allow its citizens to go onto a peaceful fast in a land where Gandhi had transformed fasting into a supreme act of resistance. The government has learnt from history. The British simply did not know what to do with a man who wanted nothing for himself but for others, except to arrest him. These young people in Jantar Mantar, like Gandhi, engage in the supreme act of solidarity and fraternity with all students who merely want to pursue higher studies. They should be honoured. Perhaps they will catalyse transformation in the dismal state of higher education in the country.The fall of India’s higher educationThe deterioration of universities is yet another sorry story. Higher education is meant to enable its students to think. But the government does not want its citizens to think. If we want to enter into a conversation with the government, we have to be thinking beings: reflective, argumentative and critical. The state sponsored higher education system deliberately proscribes these qualities. Today, universities known for their excellence in social science and humanities have to bear with vice chancellors who are less qualified than the faculty. Young people hoping for jobs confront selection committees whose members are less educated than the candidates. Today, faculty members and students cannot hold a seminar, invite a distinguished visiting professor to address students, or enter into discussions, unless their projects are approved of by administrative heads who hold loyalties not to academic excellence, but to those who exercise political power. We take it for granted that in most cases approval is not forthcoming. For a seminar or a lecture can spark off imaginations and critical thinking. After all, social sciences and humanities teach us how to think. As the distinguished Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton said, to ask whether humanities can disappear from universities is like asking whether there can be a bar without alcohol or Hollywood without egoism. Also read: Wit Is DissentIn an age when the effort to think differently from a government pursuing a rankly majoritarian project is counted as sedition, we need to give thought to the importance of thinking without necessarily going into the philosophical merits or demerits of Descartes’ famous aphorism ‘I think therefore I am’. Let us recollect Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that grants the right to freedom of thought, belief and worship. The right to freedom of thought is, arguably, of enormous import. Thinking about or thinking through a personal or a political predicament, reflecting on a movie we watched, a piece of music we listened to, a book we read, a conversation we had, our emotional experiences, politics, or just the minutiae of everyday life, sparks off chains of critical reflection. No matter how muddled our mind may be when we begin to think, reflection and critical impulse that form part of our psyches allow us to make our world comprehensible. We make politically moral judgements based on informed reflection and critiques of the way we live, and the way we could live.Fearing the intellectualIt is not surprising that authoritarian governments are wary of thinkers. Thinking is a profoundly subversive act. It can destabilise divine wisdom, the laws of nature and rigid social norms. The process can discipline unruly personal emotions as well as subvert political authority. Logically, there is nothing power elites dread more than a thinking being. And so they seek to submerge the act of thinking by overblown political rhetoric, drama, festivals, circuses, advertising blitzkriegs, public relations, or censorship, seductive ideologies, appeals to some ‘authentic’ tradition, and resort to coercion. This is not surprising because, 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.’Arguably, young persons who are currently defying the government at Jantar Mantar, and will continue to do so, are intellectuals. Experience has taught them to think and act. Edward Said, the intellectual has a specific role in society. She is “endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public”. The intellectual’s place is to raise publicly embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma and to be someone who cannot be equated with governments or corporations. The raison d’etre of an intellectual is “to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. The individual does so on the basis of universal principles: that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behaviour concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously”. The public stance of the intellectual has to be in tandem with her private beliefs. Then only will she acquire some standing in the public eye.This representation of the intellectual might well refer to our young people fasting, or simply sitting on the grounds of Jantar Mantar as they brave the terrible heat of Delhi in July. They follow Gandhi, who lived the life he advocated – austere, compassionate, self-denying, courageous – and who was willing to take on suffering to himself. He taught activists dedicated to the cause of freedom to fearlessly confront lathi charges by the police. And he happily accepted prison sentences that were regularly dished out by the colonial government. Today, we have our own government. Yet, it is difficult to discern the difference between the two. Both sought to stamp out the right to think. Neera Chandhoke is a former professor of Political Science, University of Delhi.