Great. Yeah, they won't welcome everyone to this, the first session on off more than I would say South Asia seminar and thank you very much,
everyone for joining us and welcome to this seminar series. My name is Umar Brydon.
I'm department, a lecturer here at Contemporary South Asia programme Oxford School of Global Studies,
and it is my privilege to welcome and introduce our professor Sue Regards,
Bob Modi and Professor Hugo Godin's today in this seminar series for the talk titled Citizenship, Publicness and the Politics of Inclusive Democracy.
Of Bhagwati is a public sociologist and professor of sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Bombay.
He was also recently awarded New India Foundation's Fellowship to work on his book, titled Is Postcard City Possible?
And he's also author of Civility against Caste and co-editor of Civility in Crisis with Coverage.
Hugo is a senior lecturer in sociology and co-director of the Centre for South Asia Studies programme at the University of Edinburgh.
His research focuses on interplay between caste politics and Dalit movements in Tamil Nadu.
He is author of Untouchables, Citizens and Fantasy in Parliament,
as well as numerous articles and chapters on identity, violence, space, cost and politics.
Sudhakar and Hugo will discuss their recent edited volume,
titled Civility in Crisis and offer insights into the central concept of civility and the contribution of the volume.
The talk will be around 40 to 45 minutes and we will open the floor for question and comments after that.
So if you have any questions, please type them in chat box or Q&A and we will take them after the talk.
So to continue. Thank you very much once again for joining us today and over to you.
Thanks so much. And, Claire, I understand you're going to be managing slides for us.
So if you want to brilliant the magic of of film, great to see so many people here,
including several names that I recognise really showed me that it can't be that impersonal.
One of the great things about someone who is actually chatting to people after the event,
but thanks for the very kind introduction to than I have been working together for many, many years from an established double act.
But we haven't practised this, so apologies if the scenes show.
I said that I would start off and I wanted to start off largely so that I could acknowledge three accounts lead on this project.
But also, I'm going to set the scene before we move on to discussing the central concepts of the book and giving you a sense of what it covers.
The book itself comes out of a long running working relationship that started formally in 2012,
when we got a UK TV grant enabling colleagues at the University of Edinburgh and
Tata Institute every account that was to work together and share ideas and come up
with new concepts that led to one volume from the margins to the mainstream and
subsequently led to this ferry account was the driving force behind this volume,
not only in terms of organising, putting things together, getting a workshop which led into the book, but also intellectually civility and crisis.
For those of you who know his work will not be surprised to learn, it emerges out of his first book, Civility against Cost,
and we'll return to why we think the concept of stability is so central and so important and a little bit today.
What we hope to do in this talk is give you a flavour of the arguments are central to this volume and of course, trade you to go out and buy a copy.
OK, next slide, please, Clare. The starting point for the volume, as with much of our work, are the insights of DR.
The breadth. We're all familiar with his insight that, you know, we're all familiar with the line that India is the world's largest democracy,
it's trotted out time and time again in order to persuade us of such things in order to situate India in a certain political context.
But long back at the outset of the Republic, Ambedkar warned that democracy was being implanted on potentially on fertile soil from the very outset.
He pointed towards the fragility of the construct of democracy and argued that the
social dimensions of politics had to be taken into account and that if they weren't,
then the whole enterprise could collapse.
Democracy, because work shows very clearly cannot ever be merely a set of institutions or formal political arrangements.
It has to involve a sea change in social relations and values and attitudes and the quotes on the slide here.
You'll probably all be very familiar with capture their sense of the contradictions between social conservatism and political equality.
The roots of democracy from babka lie not in government, parliamentary or other institutions,
but in social relationships in the terms of associated life between the people who form a society.
And if those aspects that are central to this for you, the failure to align institutions with social norms and relations are all too evident today.
Next slide, please. And this brings us to the context of the volume and a sense of democracy increasingly in peril.
And in thinking about this for the introduction, we pointed to a number of key areas which are worthy of attention and which need to be considered,
and we can maybe return to them in the discussion.
The first is the violence of indifference, and what we mean by that is the way in which people may not intend to cause harm to any particular person.
They may not seek to inflict physical damage on anything or person, but through neglect, through a failure to consider implications.
They nevertheless result in untold harm. We feel that very clearly during the pandemic,
with the plight of casual labour laid off overnight and forced to trek thousands of miles in order to reach the safety of home.
We saw that in the horrendous suffering of Stan Swamy before he died of COVID imprisoned.
Despite many pleas for clemency, many pleas for urgent medical attention.
We see that in the continued incarceration of our friend and colleague on a telephone day,
we see that in the routine neglect of the sufferings faced by cleaners by Safaricom and current Jaffrey across India,
the way in which deaths in manholes rarely occasioned the sort of outpouring of anger that we ought to expect.
All of them are clear examples of the violence of indifference and speak to a lack of civility,
a lack of civic engagement and sense of fraternity in the Indian Republic.
But. Exclusions and exclusionary violence are not simply the result of indifference.
Some are actively constructed through political rhetoric and through exclusionary policies such as the CAA, as we've seen recently.
And so one of the things we look at in the volume is the way in which politics are framed and discussed and the way in which policies are framed,
such that they include or exclude certain categories of people which look at the ways in which the institutions which are meant to guarantee equality.
All too often fail in that regard. One of the clearest ways in which they fail is in the arena of caste and on the fly.
There you have the picture of the young man in Gujarat who is set upon and beaten for skinning a dead cow.
Brilliant, brilliant insight into caste youth caste structures is resting on ascending scales of reverend and descending scales of contempt,
and these are all too clear today and interactions structured around caste identities.
Both his work on caste and his work on communal legislative speak for the way in which communities may be marginalised and excluded.
Back in 2005, I spoke of untouchable citizens when I was writing about Dalit movement in Tamil Nadu.
What I meant to counter by that term was the paradox the impossibility of full citizenship.
When some group, some people are still treated as lesser beings as unequal as less worthy of dignity and respect.
Majoritarian politics and politics, the volume argues,
consistently undermined the principle of social equality and the trust, which are at the heart of the project of stability,
rather than focussing on political measures and performance is therefore in this volume, we structured our analyses around this central concept.
And given that he was the intellectual lead on the concept at this point,
I'm going to pause and let my partner Sylvia talk through the key virtues of the concept.
You can move on to the next slide, please. Right.
Can you hear me? Thanks, Hugo.
So. Engaging with the idea of civility,
like you will see his own work on on on the problem of citizenship in India and the purely manifestation of this problem in marriage forms is
something that that we engage in have engaged through our work in detail and what this volume intends to kind of take this forward and civility.
As I said, concept helps us also question several of of of the problems that may emerge with the way we engage and conceptualise Indian democracy.
So before I make that case on on why civility in brief I will talk on, you know, what is civility, at least how we approach it?
So as we all know, civility itself has has had a very uneasy history and it evokes a passionate kind of reactions as well.
So because there is a long tradition of using civility to silence dissent, excluding people and issues from public discussions,
as Shadi argues, and promoting civility can close down debates, often recasting disagreements in terms of etiquette and manners.
Silencing heterodox views and turning disputes of passion and idealism in this
volume of the new civility is something that is definitely not politeness.
So the civility here, we have worked towards understanding it mainly as a social political process and also the
politics of politics that challenges lack of public ness and commitment to public life,
equality and justice in society. So as opposed to politics of civility that oppress and exclude and limit the public to private groups,
for instance, costs religion at these men heterosexual.
There are numerous projects of progressive civilities which push the boundaries and the meanings of public life towards inclusivity and universality.
Civility does not need to flow from state or courts, therefore,
and pressures for political civility often come from margins and occasionally from bottom up.
Campaigns, for instance, have been centred on the construction of new norms pertaining to human rights and have held non-reality states to account.
We begin, therefore, by engaging more with the idea of civility and what it is and what it is not,
and why civility is central to democratic governance.
Can we please move to the next? So.
The civility is generally lost in translation in non-Western contexts are limited to
its normative deliberation or scholarly engagement on civility in India is missing,
largely due to misgivings about authority, the scholarship and liberal liberal moorings attached to the very idea of civility.
It is helpful, therefore, to rescue civility, both theoretically and conceptually from some of these misgivings.
While we recognise the nature of civility and its potential misuse as a discourse of power and constructive engagement,
dominance, violence and exclusion, we make a case for the recovery of civility as a philosophical idea and as
an analytical tool to advance a deeper understanding of the problems facing.
So we recall and advance a few arguments here,
and these are laid in like four or five points to clearly point out our own argument and directions of our war.
So we suggest first, that civility is not a western or Christian idea, nor is it essentially a call into this implicit or implicit predict,
although discourses of civility were used to justify the subjugation of uncivilised populations.
Second, civility cannot be understood merely as a product of capitalism or limited to liberal society of individuals.
That individualism knocks down. Community and tradition toward civility is not simply politeness or face-saving
behaviour or rule and activity that does not mean much for individuals.
Civility is not synonymous with civil society.
Violence Civil society represents the normative and association form that is essential for making procedural democracy work.
Civil society may still lack civility and the democracy by void of justice and equality.
Finally, we need civility is dialogue and seeks wider and greater.
It's not static or rigid and continues to be a universal project, despite its paradoxical nature of.
Finally. Did any legal authority are critical in making the period of civility work?
However. These are also based on the long, drawn out changes in social relations,
and so what we also need to look at ideas and we need to look at ideas and practises that.
That cultivate incivility, says witness that that's also important, therefore it's so, so, so study of civility also needs to look at incivility.
Go to the next slide, please. All right.
Of Snowden, I think the previous one. So.
So. Why civility of.
Now, one of the important motivations that did come to my own work was some of the post-colonial scholarship that suggests that,
you know, Indian democracy is radically different and therefore any any project that is universal in nature may make little sense.
In the study of Indian democracy, while the government is itself very appealing,
the idea was also to look at, you know, civility and its universal manifestations in one way,
which would help us understand the local forms of incivility and therefore localised struggles of of,
you know, universal ideals of equality, citizenship and indeed civility.
So you know, what we suggest is that democracy and its success can very often be reduced to
political institutions and procedures and beyond its formal institutional mechanisms,
whether democracy like he was suggested, has social political meanings and has.
Gary, the possibility that that majority might die might denies minorities.
Now what? We have seen over a bit of time, you know, in the last few years,
especially the coming in of Citizenship Amendment Act, the very idea of citizenship being being constructed around,
around, around religion, at least that's what it tells us is, yes,
very localised nature of citizenship that revolves around community collective identities.
But it also points to the very normalisation of of, for instance,
of the othering of Muslims demonising Muslims and which becomes part of this vernacular form of democratic project.
So the study of civility in India in has been considered, for instance,
as a lost cause by some post-modern approaches that tend to attribute most of the political ills of individualism and
instrumental rationalism to the West by locating community and political society at the heart of democracy in the East.
Besides downplaying several problems of civility that emerged within the idea of community in India,
such approaches simply demolished universal or biological possibilities of civility.
What is lost isn't going to stop understanding of democracy, which no one the important papers in our volume from the detritus thought and
the biological nature of civility that is central to any of this democracy.
The promise and prospect of equal citizenship requires an erosion of old certainties and structures and creation of new norms and institutions,
no matter where it is introduced to.
So what we see here is. Especially in the study of of of past and Indian democracy,
the idea of civility can help us engage with with what the problems and possibilities of equal citizenship.
So as as, for instance, when it comes to study of extended caste, and Lynch had argued this very strongly that for untouchables,
India in one sense remains an uncivil democracy because insofar as the promise of civil democracy is unfulfilled
and they remain uniquely victimised by the many forms of uncivil violence that have historically been deadlocked,
and we have various studies, including the recent one by Sonia Fuchs with which brings out this the very nature of Indian state,
caste, embodiment of state and what it means for my of support groups.
So civility as a concept can help us in foregrounding social political meetings of them and
also understanding incivility and how it affects the possibility of citizenship publicness.
So what this is what I had argued in my first book of Civility against caste, part of my body.
But you went all the elements of the basis, and one of the key arguments that I made was,
we have this paradox in India of a book of democracy to pursue democracy that is vibrant, that seems working.
However, it it also had in it.
It's based on, you know, the. Civility as something that is uncommon since what is the paradox of democracy and low civility?
So. So what we did here was to kind of, you know, get more scholars to engage with the problem of civility and the nature of Indian democracy.
Oh, fear and the next slide kind of bring these aspects in for discussion.
Let me go to the next slide. Yeah. She will.
Great, thanks for your time.
I think many of these issues are to the fore, as mentioned earlier in the interplay between notions of civility and the continuing executions of cost.
Indeed, I recently read a book Policing Matters by the Camorra,
which notes how the project of policing in India is wedded to notions of caste identity and caste communities.
We've known for a long time that the police are drawn from particular castes, which you know the interplay,
the ways in which caste communities are constructed around projects of policing and the policing of boundaries to a full in the free papers here.
Shamika highlights the caste exclusions built-in to project of civility.
And one of the most progressive states of India, which is Kerala.
And her chapter problem at times is the myth of a caste free association or public.
She highlights and looking at public libraries of so-called public libraries and looking at interactions between different groups.
She highlights how public spheres operate without meaningful cross caste interaction.
And she notes that sociology tends to occur within particular neighbourhoods, which are shaped,
governed and controlled by caste, and which she aptly refers to as a private public.
The spatial dimensions of spatial mapping of caste on to community and onto local,
which have long been a feature of caste life, in other words, continues and shaped for people.
You get to meet the people you get to encounter and the networks that are part of your very everyday life.
In other words, where you live,
who you interact with and how you engage with others are part and parcel of the speciality of sexual relations in India.
And Rowena Robinson, in her chapter, takes us a little bit further.
She's working mainly with Christians in Tamil Nadu,
and she points out that this affects how we define trust and just what we mean by trust in a context marked by different a marked by caste exclusion.
Her starting point is that Dalit converts are denied the dream of equality that the escape from caste promised for them.
We know this from the fact that they are excluded, for example, from the welfare provisions provided by the state.
So when we speak of Dalits, we tend to include Christian Dalits when we speak of scheduled castes expressly excluded from that formulation.
As for the library, projects discussed by Savarkar Voting notes,
how Christian educational institutions and David Moss's work shows this very clearly as well.
Typically reproduce the societal divisions of casting class, rather than creating a space where the differences could be overcome.
And in addressing this position of a minority within a minority,
Rowena draws on Ambedkar conceptualisation of fraternity fraternity in some way could be a synonym for civility in the way it's discussed,
and Rowena argues that both CA and bed fraternity in everyday engagements amongst citizens the
thoughts of everyday engagements which show worker shows tend to be confined to caste groups.
And she argues that we often see as Ambedkar driving on liberal learning from the West,
and we know that Patkar did two degrees in the US and UK, but Rowena points out that actually.
In the way in which it's formulated,
it's unshackled from its Western and Christian determinations and is repositioned as the link between national integration and social justice.
And it's basically about civility of trust and highlighting the importance of trust in
a context marked by by both by differences which lock people into particular groups.
So that is the promise of America's constitution.
That is the promise of his project of fraternity.
But sadly, severe can't work, and it's probably just as well.
I'm discussing this. Otherwise you take a whole paper himself.
Free accounts work shows that claims to universalism and cosmopolitanism made by contemporary associations actually belie the ideal of fraternity.
They mask an underlying ethic of social closure and segmentation.
They are in many ways about the caste politeness, which Sylvia has brilliantly talked about elsewhere,
rather than meaningful engagement, interaction and a widening of networks and horizons Hindu cosmopolitanism.
As he terms, it facilitates conjoined living and is allows people to live next to others, allows people to rub shoulders on the buses and investment,
but is based on an anxiety towards strangers and which fundamentally affects the possibilities of dialogical communication.
It facilitates modernity by allowing people to get on with things.
But it does not allow progress with old territory and urban social life.
So we end up with a contemporary manifestation of the caste private public.
Such savage talks about manifest in such caste associations.
So what we see here is the way in which the projects of stability run up against the clock for.
Time and again and a central project of civility is to create.
Trust between different groups, if we can move on to the next slide, please.
Then we can examine these in somewhat greater depth. Sorry, I can't.
You're right. So thank you both. So like the the last three papers and the question they race,
and Rowena makes this very strong and important point of how this idea of threat from Ambedkar is
something that would be a key book of place for us to think of the challenges that Indian faces and how,
you know, civility that fought if approached to fraternity and the problems of the making of equality in Indian democracy joins us again
brings us to the problem that that dialogue as such is difficult today and that as a volume emphasises that civility is process.
You're logical and open ended and it is.
It is this process that leads and takes us towards greater civility.
So, so the other three important chapters here.
One is by Indrajit, drawing on a distinction genesis of democracy and liberalism.
I'm going to stick imaginations of dignity in Bihar. Now what we see here is, again, you know,
a criticism of liberal liberalism inspired theories or political approach to political society centred approach to democracy,
and a case that he makes to understand how someone can make a case for appreciating agonistic
empathy of how he highlights the contentious ways in which ideas of social justice and equality
are advised civility in this reading and be rigid and firm and must be analysed by reference
to its geographical dimensions and to its taste amongst different segments of given society.
Another very important paper, which is also very contemporary and related to the question of citizenship,
especially the Citizenship Amendment Act superset, but conversion to discuss the citizenship status of no children.
Migrants from East Bengal to reveal the limitations of post partition citizenship regimes in India in highlighting
the selective nature of citizenship claims scenario shifts our understanding beyond religion and look,
its cost at the centre of Indian nationalism and associated incivility is facing most of the rest the people.
The chapter is titled To Be a Hindu Citizen.
It is like the title of the book, but it's very telling us of the times and the nature of Indian descent when when majority embodies the nation.
Citizenship itself is around revolving around the idea of religion and the citizenship, he argues.
How the Citizenship Amendment Act shatters Indian claims to have afforded equal citizenship to all at independence.
He reveals how citizenship myth rests on solutions while opening up possibilities of equality or some.
And another paper here is by Menangle,
who offers a positive assessment of the prospects of quality and shipping a paper on debates around gender and sexuality.
So drawing on the process of dialogue that enable queer and feminist groups to work past their differences,
she looks at the possibilities of what she calls as trans words and politics in the construction of more civil society,
most of society's borrowing from Ambedkar and more recent theories.
She emphasises the need to engage with difference by being conscious of difference and disadvantage.
So. You go your next lines.
And in many ways, we probably should have ended with that paper,
which holds out the promise of trust and a sense of how we might move beyond the intractable, intractable problems of cost exclusions.
But the two of us are old cynics. And so actually what we turn to and in the final few chapters are groups who are working towards change groups
who are engaged in processes of negotiation in order to highlight the issues that arise in these processes.
So we're very lucky to have a chapter from Amitabh Bachchan's book An Uncivil City, which Richard kindly allowed us to take in.
And it's great to have it, not least because COP26, the climate summit is on at the moment,
and this is one of the few contributions which addresses the issue of environmental change and politics in India.
And so I'm just looking at activists looking at forms of environmental politics and change.
And yet she notes how forms of engagement reproduce systematic problems of a lack of trust and an inability to speak beyond boundaries.
Ambedkar, as you will doubtless all know, famously discussed, discussed Village India as a think of localism as a den of ignorance and so urban
India as a potential means of escape from such caste bound ways of operating.
He placed his hopes in that sense in the modern city, but like other contributors, turn notes how exclusive fantasies of stability.
May be reproduced in weigh in and how activists operate.
She notes how the democratising policies of the city may often be applied in an impassioned critique of the kerbing of public spaces.
One of the few opportunities where people can meet together can work in tandem rather than seeing each other across the divide.
She argues that our collective life is diminished when we stop participating in an embodied way in something larger than ourselves.
With the current government, we've seen a steady erosion of the spaces for communal and collective action and protests.
You've seen a steady erosion of the spaces for dissent.
And yet, as we just showed so powerfully, it is these spaces where people can meet together and offer the clearest route to a more civil engagement.
Encapsulated in her work is the necessity of viewing civility as a process and reminding us,
as does the work of no alliance, that welfare may be a process of civilisation, of a process towards civility.
It is not a linear path. It is not an inevitable or seamless route towards progress, and it can at times be reversed.
We can lose the gains we've made and end up in more antagonistic formations.
James Maynard, drawing on his decades long work on fieldwork and in rural India, offers another insight here.
And he speaks about intercostal accommodations and minimal civility,
and what he's doing here is showing how there have been significant changes to social relations in India.
So you speak to activists and I've done this many times, you especially Dalit activists in India, and I'll tell you nothing's changed.
And Jim takes issue with this. And he says, Look, there have been huge changes.
There have been significant changes not seen, not least in the fact that abuses will no longer go unremarked upon.
Abuses will be challenged, they will be highlighted and they will often are seen in the picture their occupation protests.
So there have been broad shifts in processes of caste interaction across the country.
But while he notes, in fact, increasingly. Upper caste groups or dominant fruits seek to negotiate and compromise around contentious issues.
Now, on the one hand, this marks an acknowledgement of diminishing power,
the possibility of ignoring, neglecting or brushing an issue under the carpet.
So they have to come to the table, which is an advance towards a more stable social sphere.
But the process is neither perfect nor complete, and it often involves humiliations and betrayals.
The dollar activists I interviewed in Tamil Nadu were more upset than anything by their own, championing their own politicians,
those whom they had followed for decades, engaging in forms of what they saw as everyday corruption.
His gems chapter speech, therefore contested and complex process by which social life may be rendered more civil,
but it speaks to the difficulties of that process as well.
It is going to involve difficult compromises. It is going to involve uncomfortable negotiations, and it may involve a sense of betrayal along the way.
But what the process shows us is that we have moved away from the sort of rigid,
hierarchical model of some textbook for at least and are increasingly forced to engage in war and reject calls.
The agonistic of democracy. Next slide, please.
And. What these papers show is that, you know, these are contested processes.
And we felt that it was important to raise questions,
we felt that it was important to stress that we didn't see this volume as the last word on the subject by any means.
And so we invited Sylvia Collins colleague Ramesh Bevvy,
who was excellent work on Drummond's and is part of a current trend of studying the privilege, which I think is long overdue.
And Ramesh engages critically with the volume and raises questions for further
research and question for us to reflect on in a really productive and constructive,
engaged engagement with the contributions in the volume.
And she says it begins by asking, OK, what does civility bring to the table?
And engages with the ideas that we can't have just talked us through.
And he encourages us to think through the substance of civility, which I think we fail to bring out in the initial introduction,
but which I think we've seen in the talk here and in engaging with Ramesh.
I think it becomes clear that what we have is a sense of fraternity and better sense as the bedrock of civility in the Indian context.
So engaging not just with the concept of civility, but with the concept of fraternity.
And it's also an encouragement to think about the relationship between civility and larger resource issues.
How does this map onto welfare and resource distribution?
And I think that here the work of Jim meinem and others is critical because what general discussion of processes of negotiation,
interaction and political exchange shows is a population who refuses the apathy
that may have characterised them in the past and will demand access to services.
It's telling that Jim's work for clearly shows the National Rural Employment Guarantee
Act and rigour worked best in those states where it was monitored by Civic Act,
which was monitored by activists who would make sure that it was delivered on time and that the pay was distributed.
So the process of stability can, we believe, ultimately lead to greater, better,
more accountable and transparent welfare and resource distribution, too?
But again, we're not here to bang the civility drum in and of itself.
We we agree with Ramesh that we need to bring it into conversation with other approaches.
We think that the lens of civility allows us to look at the ways in which these issues of a lack of trust,
these issues of exclusionary communities and the move towards a more equal a democratic polity.
We think this reality brings an insight into these processes that others do not, but we do not and considerably approach.
And so we welcome people engaging with this work and look forward to your comments.
So to conclude, I'll hand over to survey a condom if we could up the next slide, please.
I thought that was the last last legs. So, so, so basically, you know, kind of summary of what we have been been discussing here is just the while.
While the aspiration towards larger or greater civility is something that drives this volume and the contributions,
it is definitely not in a delectably process.
But inevitably, what we need to understand is and this is something that has come through my own research with the way Gostin do,
no associations in Bombay that.
That the making of individual subjectivity or modern kind of subjectivity is in urban areas, lack of lack of any adventure.
Are they are constantly kind of concerned with with the cost as one of the important pieces of the making of this urban citizenship.
So what we need to also look at and understand is that this persists where simply these constant and it it is is has to be at least biological,
and it is also an evidence to process.
We need to also distinguish, first of all, we need to recognise that a top down approach is also civilising mission.
It's much about it.
For instance, is it's an interesting scheme of the government of India, which in one sense demands practise of civility from below.
If you listen to some of the speeches of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Did they carry a lot of quality agenda, but in one of his advertisements on on this, but you might a point here is that,
you know, no power in the world can make India dirty if Indians decide to keep it clean.
So, so and of course, we have seen a lot of this kind of demands from public, even in times of crisis.
But as it's not always met, but you know. A compassionate response from speech.
So, so the what what we see is we need to look at civility more broadly, how it flows on top,
but how the demands of civility from below really are very important in making of this fraternity
distrust across communities and lived kind of emancipatory citizenship possible in one sense.
So very important again to to move beyond politeness,
but also study politeness as something that hinders civility and not confuse politeness for civility.
So, so we will conclude here. I think you also ran out of time.
So. Thank you so much. You go unless you want to add something.
No, I think that's going to be a thanks very much. And, you know,
I think those points are illustrated in the two photos of Modi picking up a broom and pretending to be civilised have opposed to the Askar,
who say that the sky country and the land who say, actually, we're going to burn the baskets, which are the marker of our trade.
And as we said at the outset, actually the move towards civility is often advanced more by grassroots movements such as S.K. than top down processes,
which may pay lip service to the concept without actually engaging in it in any meaningful detail.
But yes, we look forward to your questions. Look forward to any comments. Look forward to your engagement.
Thank you very much.
So we can thank you for this excellent talk and opening up this discussion on the complex relationship between civility, citizenship and democracy.
We will now open for question and answer session, and please do raise your hand to ask a question or type your question in the chat box.
As as people are gathering, their thoughts can very quickly ask a.