At a time when ‘scientific temper’ — that well-worn phrase made popular by India’s first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru — feels like a forgotten footnote in the Indian Constitution, a recent event at the Constitution Club in New Delhi has ignited a firestorm of engagement.

The debate, titled ‘Does God Exist?’, between celebrated poet-lyricist Javed Akhtar and Islamic scholar Mufti Shamail Nadwi, was not an academic indulgence, as some public intellectuals would have us believe; it was an act of reclaiming public space for critical thought.

There is a section of the intelligentsia and civil society that argues this was not the time for such a discussion. With unemployment, inflation and communal violence tearing at the social fabric, questioning the existence of God is a luxury, they argue. My question is: when is the ‘right’ time?

Organised by the newly formed Academic Dialogue Forum and the Wahyain Foundation, the event has inspired hundreds of video reels and shorts, dissecting the arguments that have lain dormant in the Indian public sphere for way too long. Even the fact that these short videos of the debate have garnered millions of views is some kind of validation of its salience in an era when ‘virality’ has top billing.

For a civil society often told that there are “more pressing........

© National Herald