Rights, stakes and Newspeak

In the early 1960s when I was reading philosophy-politics-economics at Oxford, linguistic philosophy was all the rage. Whatever its philosophical limitations, it did provide a training in thinking precisely about the meaning of words and taught how sloppy language was an avenue (and mask) for sloppy thinking. There are two terms that have become ubiquitous in public discourse, and not only in India, which I want to discuss in this context.

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