To listen is to grant another the dignity of being real

Martin Buber's I and Thou, published in 1923, made a small grammatical observation with vast consequence. There are two basic words a human being can address to the world: 'I-It', which treats the other as object, instrument or category; and 'I-Thou', which treats the other as person, end and presence. The moment one truly listens, Buber argued, the other is transformed from 'it' to 'thou'. Indian prime-time television features twelve voices speaking simultaneously; parliament records more shouting than registering; family dinners are interrupted every nine minutes by phones (Nielsen India 2024). To listen — actually, patiently, without rehearsing one's reply — has become the smallest, hardest and most political act available to a citizen. It grants the other the dignity of being real. In a culture optimised for transmission, reception is the rarest skill.

Therapeutic listening is the most empirically validated form. Carl Rogers, in On Becoming a Person (1961), founded client-centred therapy on the radical idea that unconditional positive regard and active listening, without immediate diagnosis or advice, produce healing more reliably than expert interpretation. Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, developed from the 1960s, taught millions to listen for needs beneath complaints. The World Health Organization's Quality Rights Initiative, rolled out in India in collaboration with NIMHANS Bengaluru, has trained thousands of mental-health workers in active-listening techniques. India's helplines — iCALL (TISS Mumbai, launched 2012), Vandrevala Foundation (24x7), Sneha Chennai, KIRAN (the Ministry of Social Justice 24x7 helpline since 2020) — answer hundreds of thousands of distress calls annually. Suicide-prevention research consistently finds that the single most effective intervention is a present, unjudging listener. The 2024 National Suicide Prevention Strategy explicitly identifies trained listeners as a frontline public-health intervention.

Civic listening is older and more political. The MKSS jan sunwai or public-hearing movement that Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and Shankar Singh built in the villages of central Rajasthan in the 1990s did one revolutionary thing: it read out muster rolls in front of the people whose names appeared on them. Names of the dead listed as wage-recipients; names of the long-migrated listed as present; names of villagers who had never worked listed as having worked twenty days. The jan sunwai was public listening that became public accounting. The Right to Information Act of 2005 emerged directly from this practice. The Supreme Court's amicus-curiae tradition is a form of judicial listening — counsel appointed to bring voices that might otherwise not be heard before the bench. PRS Legislative Research's bill-by-bill analyses, available to MPs and the public since 2005, are institutional listening to draft statutes. Even the Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy of 2014, when honoured rather than evaded, is the State listening before it legislates. The Mygov.in platform, the e-Consultation portals run by various ministries, and the parliamentary committees that invite written submissions extend the channels through which the State can hear citizens.

Diplomatic listening is the longest-range form. India's Neighbourhood First doctrine, articulated formally in 2014, depends on patient listening to the anxieties of Maldives, Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka — anxieties about size asymmetry, infrastructure conditionality, river-water disputes and cultural sensitivities. The Indian Ocean Region engagements have a similar texture. India's G20 Presidency in 2023 made listening into a doctrine: the inclusion of the African Union as a permanent member on 9 September 2023 in New Delhi was preceded by months of consultations with African capitals. The BIMSTEC Charter, finalised in 2025, was the product of listening across seven member states. Voice of Global South Summits convened by India in 2023 and 2024, with 125 developing countries each time, created a listening forum that the existing multilateral architecture had not provided. Each act of listening is a deposit in the diplomatic trust account that pays dividends when crises arrive.

The counter-view is sharp. Some listening is performative. Town-halls staged for television, consultations summarised before they happen, public-hearing minutes drafted in advance — these forms of tokenistic listening can be worse than honest refusal, because they consume the speaker's hope. The Rajasthan jan sunwai succeeded precisely because the muster-roll reading produced consequences: false entries deleted, wages paid, officials suspended. Without consequence, listening becomes theatre, and theatre that pretends to be politics produces cynicism. The Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy, observed in fewer than a quarter of bills in the Seventeenth Lok Sabha, is a study in this failure. Listening must lead to changed action, or it is dishonest. The 2024 Vidhi Centre report on environmental clearance public hearings documents how rural communities found their objections recorded but rarely reflected in final decisions.

The deeper challenge is the cognitive architecture of contemporary attention. Social media platforms reward fast response, not deep reception. The economy of likes, retweets and reels is structurally hostile to the slow asymmetry of listening. A speaker who pauses to think loses the algorithm. A listener who absorbs before reacting loses the timeline. This is not merely an aesthetic problem; it is a civic one. A democracy in which citizens have lost the capacity to listen to each other across difference is structurally unable to compromise, and compromise — not victory — is the daily currency of constitutional politics.

Listening across difference is particularly difficult. Conversations between economic classes in India often fail because both sides lack vocabulary for the other's reality. Conversations across religious lines have thinned in many metros. Conversations across linguistic boundaries are work in a country of 22 scheduled languages; the BHASHINI translation stack makes much of this technically possible, though the cultural willingness to listen is the harder variable. Some reconstructive paths are visible: schools teaching dialogue rather than only debate, public broadcasters protecting long-form interviews, citizen-juries deliberating over days, family practices like phone-free dinners. The Vedic concept of shravana — first listening, then reflection (manana), then internalisation (nididhyasana) — places listening at the foundation of all serious knowledge.

Stephen Covey's seventh habit, popularised in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), reads: 'Seek first to understand, then to be understood.' To listen is to bow, momentarily, to another's humanity — to accept that one's first impression may be wrong, one's framing incomplete, one's certainty premature. The bow does not surrender; it positions for accurate response. A republic of citizens who can listen across caste, class, language, religion and region is a republic that cannot easily be torn apart, because the bonds it forms are made of attention rather than affinity. To listen is the smallest political act and one of the largest gifts. It grants the other the dignity of being real, and in granting it, makes the listener real too.