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HOW a regime reacts to criticism – of performance, policy design or intent – is usually a good guide to its levels of self-confidence. By this index, the intensity with which economist Jean Dreze has attracted the ire of hate trolls does not augur well for the BJP. Even though the current outpouring has more to do with his wife, Bela Bhatia’s, activities in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh, for both exposing the human rights violations by the state administration and police forces and extending support to the victims of state malfeasance, Dreze has for long unerringly managed to generate significant unease in our rarified policy making circles for their approach to social development.

Dreze’s work over the last three decades, often in association with Amartya Sen at one level and groups/networks of activists at another, on issues ranging from hunger and public distribution of food, employment programmes, to basic education – to list a few, has not just helped shape policy and programmes but also immensely enriched our public discourse. And while he has never been a BJP supporter, hardly surprising given its ‘regressive’ social policies and anti-minority attitude, he has as frequently and with equal forthrightness criticized the shortcomings in the UPA regime’s social policies and programmes, including those relating to the Right to Information, MGNREGA or the public distribution of foodgrains that he has helped foster. That is why efforts to marginalize him by accusing him of being a motivated foreigner out to derail the ‘India story’ are particularly galling.

Now, it so happens that Jean, unlike many of us is an Indian citizen by choice, granted Indian citizenship well over a decade back. Equally, while those in the professional circles are aware of his many theoretical contributions, testimony to both his analytical skills and methodological rigour, far fewer know of his unusual familiarity with ground level reality. Not too many scholars, Indian or otherwise, have done a padyatra from Rajasthan to Jharkhand through some of out most socially troubled regions to gain first-hand experience of how the bottom half of our populace lives. One may, or not, agree with his policy recommendations or his reading of the situation, but to dismiss him as ‘uninformed’ or ‘motivated’ tells us more about those using these appellations than him.

Like Jean Dreze, Dutch social anthropologist, Jan Breman, too has spent decades researching the condition of the labouring underclass. From his 1974 classic, Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India to the most recent, On Pauperism in Present and Past (2016), Breman is possibly among the most insightful of researchers/writers concerned with the problems of labour. And while most of his fieldwork has been in western India, it probably holds true for large parts of the country.

Over the decades, what began as a village based investigation of rural livelihood has, over time, broadened to also cover the full gamut of casualized labour trying to establish a foothold in the city. But unlike conventional slum studies, Breman’s investigations centre around the class of labouring poor driven out of the countryside because of shrinking livelihood in agriculture, trying to enter and settle down in urban spaces with varying degrees of success, and now increasingly, given the precarity of urban survival, becoming a permanently transitory workforce moving incessantly between different types of rural and urban habitations. The implications – economic, social and political – of living in a permanent half-way house can be well imagined.

Much of Breman’s early work helped enrich the somewhat sterile debate on the formal and informal labour markets, later going on the inform the recommendations of the Arjun Sengupta Committee on national social security initiatives. His latest work on pauperism takes a decisively more radical edge. By distinguishing between poverty and pauperism, Breman foregrounds the regime of exploitation and domination to which the poor are subjected in both rural and urban settings. The focus shifts from a focus on the lack of goods and services to the exercise of differential power in the making of policies and programmes ostensibly designed to alleviate the problem. But, above all, Breman talks about an elite social mindset governing social choice and public discourse in which the poor are nothing but a nuisance, preferably dispensable.

Rather than decry Jean Dreze or Jan Breman, as unfortunately far too many of us are prone to, we should be relieved that despite facing hostility, both scholars, driven by their love for India, continue to labour on. In this era of perverse, hyper-nationalism, any critique of our collective self is bound to be deeply discomfiting. But, if we shut out voices of critical engagement, the chances are that we will become precisely that which we so resist being labelled as – insecure and intolerant.

Harsh Sethi