Why Public Intellectuals Matter in Present-Day India

When the Intellectuals Go Quiet, Who Speaks? In

1890s France, a Jewish army officer named Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason. What made the case historic was not only his eventual exoneration, but who came to his defence: writers, poets and teachers who had no personal stake in his fate but recognised an injustice worth naming publicly. History remembers them as the first "public intellectuals"

• a term for people who use reasoned argument to hold power accountable, simply because someone has to.

A Tradition With Deep Roots

India has never lacked such figures. From the Buddha's questioning of ritual orthodoxy to B.R. Ambedkar's dismantling of caste hegemony, the subcontinent has produced thinkers willing to challenge the dominant common sense of their time, often at real personal cost.

Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist thinker, captured the underlying ethic in 1917: indifference, he argued, is itself a moral failure, because everyone "carries out the role that life ordained." To stay silent while claiming neutrality is, on this view, already a choice - and not an innocent one.

A Present

Marked by Silence The essay's central claim is that this tradition has thinned considerably in contemporary India. University teachers - trained precisely to develop the critical faculties a public intellectual needs - have largely withdrawn from public debate on the questions that matter most: the weakening of institutions, the criminalisation of dissent and the blurring of history into unverified WhatsApp narratives.

Scientists, too, have retreated into narrow specialisation, reluctant to connect their expertise to the wider society. What was once democracy's most vocal internal check has, on this account, gone quiet at precisely the moment its voice was needed most.

The Unexpected Substitute

Into this vacuum, the essay argues, has stepped an unlikely group: the students who protested nationwide over irregularities in the NEET-UG examination. Many of these young people had no personal stake in the specific exam cycle under scrutiny, yet they organised, persisted and forced a national conversation about accountability in how examinations are conducted - a demand rooted in the same basic democratic principle that animated Dreyfus's defenders: that power must answer for its failures, publicly and specifically.

The comparison is instructive precisely because the two groups are so different. Dreyfus's defenders were credentialed intellectuals using their platforms deliberately. NEET protesters were, for the most part, ordinary young people with no institutional standing at all.

What connects them is not expertise but willingness - the decision to take a side rather than stay comfortably indifferent.

What This Suggests

If trained intellectuals have receded from public argument, the essay's implicit warning is that democracies do not simply lose a voice - they discover, sometimes with relief and sometimes with unease, that the role does not disappear.

It migrates. Today, it appears to have migrated toward the young people whose political consciousness institutions consistently underestimated. Whether that migration is a healthy sign of democratic vitality or evidence of institutional failure is the real question the essay leaves open.