The Delhi High Court’s refusal to reveal Prime Minister Modi’s degree transforms a simple query into a lofty philosophical puzzle. Why go after mundane facts when belief will do? In shielding university records as “personal,” the judgment elevates unverifiable claims to sacred truth, beyond the “vulgar reach” of evidence. Mundoli Narayanan, author, academic and former Vice Chancellor of Kaladi Sree Sankaracharya University, Kerala, wonders what all this – beyond facts spiritual pursuits – means for the judiciary and academia.
Beyond a shade of doubt, the Delhi High Court’s ruling that set aside the Central Information Commission’s (CIC) direction to Delhi University (DU) to disclose information on the bachelor’s degree of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a great step forward in the history of Indian law, even the history of law the world over, because it elevates the legal system to the higher levels of philosophical truth. No doubt, there will be hordes of “nattering nabobs of negativity”, as Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s Vice President, described critics of Nixon’s most upright and honest government, who will cry foul, kick and moan about the public accountability of political leaders, and raise loud laments about the denial of the citizen’s right to know. However, I would daresay that they miss the forest for the tree, and burdened by their skewed vision fail to understand the immense philosophical implications of this watershed judgment.
For those who read this with scepticism, let me explain. One of the central questions in philosophy is that of truth, and of whether it is possible for us to know it. Related to this is another major question of whether we can verify truth through our senses or through empirical, objective methods. The logical positivists steadfastly held that only those phenomena that can be verified or ascertained through objective methods can be regarded as truth. All else, such as metaphysical, ethical, or theological claims are essentially meaningless because they are not independent of our minds and cannot be confirmed with empirical evidence. They express emotions and beliefs and may even influence behavior, but they do not, and cannot, convey factual truth. This doctrine of verifiable truth was deemed untenable by the 1960s, because the principle itself could not be empirically verified and more importantly because it excluded from the province of truth vast areas of human discourse and experience that may be meaningful, but not empirically verifiable, such as statements in ethics, metaphysics, and the arts. For example, claims like “Freedom is essential to human dignity” or statements about beauty, though not scientifically testable, hold deep meaning for many, but they do not stand up to the test of verifiability. Similarly, statements in history, ethics, and religion would become meaningless because they cannot be tested through observation or experiment.
Now, the question about Mr Modi’s degree is whether the details regarding it can be disclosed; or in other words whether they can be verified. Delhi University says that they cannot be because of fiduciary obligations, which require them to keep the information confidential. The fiduciary principle dictates that a person in a position of trust must act in the best interests of the beneficiary and that fiduciaries must keep confidential any information gained through their relationship with the beneficiary. The Court has concurred with the university’s argument and ruled that the information cannot be disclosed because “it is unambiguously clear that the ‘marks obtained’, grades, and answer sheets etc. are in the nature of personal information and are protected” under Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, subject to an assessment of overriding public interest,” as Justice Sachin Datta observed.
To put the whole matter in different terms, the question that both DU and the Court had to address was, “Is it true that Modi has a real degree and can it be verified?” Let us face it, this is no ordinary matter like that of presenting one’s birth certificate to the election commission when one learns that one’s name has been deleted from the electoral roll after being on it for forty years, or assessing whether a Chief Minister has spent three months in jail on unproven charges, or even of finding and presenting evidence that you have “not been engaged” in anti-national or seditious activities after you have been arrested and put in jail on those charges. This is no such ordinary thing because Mr Modi is no ordinary being. On his own admission, he is “not biologically born” and “God has chosen me and sent me for a purpose.” It is manifestly obvious that Modi and his affairs belong to an order of things very different from the mundane and as such cannot be made subject to the vulgar practices of empirical verification. They actually belong to the same order of questions such as, “Is there a God?”, “Are there angels?”, “Did we have cosmetic surgery in India during the Vedic times?” and so on. Just as such things cannot be brought under the profane lens of empirical scrutiny, the existence of a Modi degree in “Entire Political Science,” or even parts of it, cannot be verified. Gross questions such as, “Is it fake?” or “Is it false?” do not even arise here. Either you believe it is true, or you don’t; either way, you can’t ask for proof. It is a matter of trust, of belief, of a “fiduciary” nature.
No appreciation will be enough for the Delhi High Court in coming up with such an order that shows such remarkable philosophical acuity. Indeed, constrained by the burden of having to speak in a legal language, the court could not overtly express the deep philosophical conundrums that it must have had to grapple with while considering the case, and had to make do with the metaphorical language of “personal information”. But, let no one be misled into the erroneous assumption that the judgment was occasioned by dread of those in power or because pressure was exerted on the court, but that it was moved by the most lofty considerations of higher philosophical principles.
The Court also observed that it cannot be oblivious to the reality that what may superficially appear to be an innocuous or isolated disclosure could open the floodgates of indiscriminate demands, motivated by idle curiosity or sensationalism, rather than any objective considerationsc of “public interest”. One cannot but marvel at the perspicacity of the court in anticipating such cynical questions that try to conflate the two distinct orders of truth. Just imagine! What if, under the guise of the right to information, an avalanche of questions were to be raised, such as, “Is there any evidence of Mr Modi being a tea seller in a railway station that was yet to be built?”, “Is there information about the digital camera with which Mr Modi took a digital picture of Mr Advani and transmitted it to Delhi by email in the 1970s when both were yet to be introduced to the world?”, “Is there proof of Mr Modi spending time in the Himalayas as a sanyasin, even as he was simultaneously engaged in college studies in Delhi and Gujarat?” Apart from the aspersions that such sensationalist questions seek to cast upon the pristine reputation of the honourable Prime Minister, what kind of philosophical sacrilege will that be, when everything is reduced to narrow empirical factuality? What rationalist irreverence would it be when the higher levels of cognition and functionality of the metaphysical order are totally trashed? It is only fitting that the Court put a halt to such questions which fly in the face of sublime philosophical rigour.
One only hopes that if the matter were ever to reach the Supreme Court, due to the foolhardy obstinance of some troublesome “information seekers”, the venerable judges of the apex court will also join the High Court in adhering to the highest ideals of philosophical truth. This is especially so, in the context of a nation where more and more miraculous phenomena are occurring which challenge ordinary empirical perceptions and can be understood only by an enlightened metaphysical understanding, such as hundreds of voters registered at a single address, new voters whose addresses correspond to a pre-big-bang nullity, and voters whose parents’ names follow the sequence of the alphabet on a keyboard and seem to be more like high-strength passwords.
One is, of course, comforted by the knowledge that not too long back the Supreme Court, without falling into the all too predictable positivist trap of empirical or verifiable evidence, had come to the insightful conclusion that Lord Rama was born at the exact spot that the Babri Masjid was later built because “people” believed so, and proceeded to decree that a temple could be built there. After all, our “Vishwaguru” nation that strives to offer a noble model for other lesser nations cannot lower its lofty philosophical standards, can it?
