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Before we move on with this episode of the scene in the unseen do check out another awesome podcast from IVM podcast
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Cyrus says hosted by my old buddy Cyrus Brocha
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The 2019 general elections are upon us and it's a good time to ask
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What do our political parties believe in?
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Most parties espouse principles only as a matter of positioning in the political marketplace
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They will say anything and do anything that gets them votes
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They are immoral and sociopathic you vote for them on the basis of what you want in that political marketplace
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And how credibly they can deliver that but there is one political party in India that is clearly different
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the BJP does seem to have certain core beliefs and because they are the biggest political player around and because beliefs have
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Consequences it is worth examining their philosophy. What is this Hindutva thing?
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What is this Hindu Rashtra that so many people aspire to?
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What does it mean for our nation that the BJP's idea of India is so exclusionary
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So full of resentments from the past so dependent on identity and most importantly, what are its intellectual foundations?
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Welcome to the scene and the unseen our weekly podcast on economics politics and behavioral science
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Welcome to the scene and the unseen
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Our weekly podcast on economics politics and behavioral science. Please welcome your host Amit Bhatma
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Welcome to the scene and the unseen. My guest today is Aakar Patel a journalist and columnist whose work
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I have been reading since the 1990s who is often provocative usually insightful and always worth reading
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I asked Aakar to come on the show as a guest in the expectation of nothing other than a stimulating conversation
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And I didn't have a subject in mind for him
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Then Aakar mentioned that he's writing a book called our Hindu Rashtra, which will be released by Westland later this year
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It made perfect sense to talk about that
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Especially with these ongoing elections to take a closer look at what is fast becoming an idea of India that has gained
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Immense traction in the last few years. What is Hindutva exactly?
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Why has it become so popular recently? What are its intellectual foundations?
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I got the stimulating conversation I wanted and you're invited to listen in but first a quick commercial break
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Akar welcome to the scene and the unseen. Thank you. Akar before we get going talking about the book that you're writing and the subject at hand
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Tell me a little bit about yourself. You've been a journalist right since the early 90s and now you had amnesty in India
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What's that journey been like? Sure. I'm from Surat and I moved to Bombay in 94 at the end of 94
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looking for work and the
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Easiest work one could find with not much qualification was in journalism then I think the case is the same now and
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2005 I ran a business for a few years after that and then I retired and
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Five years after that. I got a job in a non-profit, which is where I am now
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And you've kind of been a prolific columnist even now and you know as someone who is also a columnist one of the things
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I'm how will that is how much how prolific you are how many columns you actually get so there is a
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A tradition in the language papers of South Asia whether they are in Gujarati in the Marathi
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Urdu where you have somebody who is
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like an auto-diad act not a specialist and a regular writer, so any newspaper in Pakistan or in Bangladesh or
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In Surat will have such people who work for newspapers who write three four times a week
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So I think I've come from that a tradition. So writing is easy and it gets easier
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When you do it more and more and you had a deep interest in Urdu also
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I believe you started learning it in the 1990s. You've written a lot about it
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Tell me about that interest and how it's kind of I worked in a newspaper that also had a
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Murdo edition which sort of fascinated me and I
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I thought I should try and learn the script and then the series of Maulvis came home
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this was in early 2000 and
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They taught me how to read it and at some point I figured out that this was just the Hindi that I knew from
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Bollywood written a different way
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So the mystery and the romance left at that point, but I knew the language sufficiently to be able to do some
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And you also translated one toes works. Yes, so he's quite an interesting writer. He was
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Didn't pass out of college and wrote very simply
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I think he wrote the kind of language that you and I would recognize as being in the he would call it would do
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So it wasn't that difficult the upper so Arabic content
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Which tends to define would do in our time was fairly low in his writing
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In fact just this issue itself about how there was this common sort of Basha called Hindustani and then out of that you had
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This movement to separate Urdu and Hindi and then you know
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It also speaks to a bit about what we're talking about today doesn't it is that part of the nationalism indeed indeed
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I think you're dead, right? I think with both with the movement that happened in the heartland
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Bhartendu Harish Chandra and so on in the 19th century
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And whatever happened with Urdu after 1947 in Pakistan and here
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Is part of that narrative that you try to hold on to your nationalism through through the script and the language then?
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Changes Pakistan is that I know think that Bollywood is
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Is actually their language
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Urdu and when I ask them what they think in these they would say something like it's what Bajpai ji speaks
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You know, whereas we would listen to
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Jio TV or one of the Pakistani stations and it would not be that easy for us to pick it out
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I think the vocabulary has changed a bit across the border
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The grammar of course remains the same and one of the things that I can't often figure out is that when Modi gives many of
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His speeches like his addresses to the nation and chooses to speak in Hindi
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He's not actually speaking in the regular colloquial Hindi in which you and I might converse
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But a should form of it using those should Hindi terms
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And I've always wondered that if if he is trying to spread his thing as a national leader
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Isn't that strategically unwise or does that in itself imply some kind of message in positioning? That's a good question
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I think there are many in these and I think the one that he uses I would say is less
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What we would call Hindustani than a lot of other people. I think watch by G
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Much more Sanskritized form of the language. Mr. Modi comes out of a tradition where in Gujarati
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It's been a language which has had access to
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Arabic and Farsi for a very long time and the modern Gujarati
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Vocabulary is not dependent on
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For instance English to be able to have sophisticated communication in commerce
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So we have words like say hundi or havala which are bad words. Otherwise outside of Gujarat
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But for a Gujarati, they would purely be these are both
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Words from our Arabia would just be purely words that would represent transactions. So I think he would be using a lot of
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Farsi words, you know, we call a door a darwajo, which is actually a Persian word
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Otherwise I and and so on so I don't think that it's as stripped as
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But it is as you say fairly
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Sanskritized in many ways like yes, sir use of the word mitro and I could be wrong here
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But it seems to me that mitro is not something people would use in normal conversation. It's a tosto or yarrow or whatever
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Yeah, he has a bit of a style to him. So I think he he's quite studied in the way that he
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Public image quite seriously and he would have given a great deal of thought to how to
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Present himself and what what should the catchphrases be? He's the kind of guy who spends a lot of time thinking about this
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So before we kind of get to your book, you know, we are recording this on March 28th
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The episode comes out on April 8. What do you think is, you know, it's gonna happen in these elections. What's your
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My sense is that we'll have a hung Parliament
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And I my sense is that it will be more hung than people think it's going to be
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And I think that's a good thing, I think that
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The the more parties that have access to the pie in Delhi the more levers you have for civil society
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Us, you know NGO allies, we don't have that much
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To hold on to when there is a single party that rules Delhi. There's absolutely nobody that listens to you
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Particularly on the difficult subjects and I think that the more divided the share of power is the better
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The share of power is the better it is for this country. The more voices are heard the more the deeper the
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representation so my my hope at least if not my
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Studied sort of you know analysis is that there will be a hung Parliament and it will be more hung than people think it will
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Be no and it's a great thing for another reason in the sense that you automatically then have more checks and balances and at a time
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When institutions are being eroded anyway, that you know might be a useful
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Well the counter to what you're saying and I completely agree with you
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But the counter to what you're saying might well be the fact that okay
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Look at say you be it to when you have a weak center and when you don't have a central figure of
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Authority then the the periphery and the ministries do you know, whatever they they want to and so it's sort of you know
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Double-edged but I on the whole thing that South Asia generally is better off when
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Power at the center is split and it's not unified in the form of either a person
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Definitely not in the form of a person or a party
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So let's let's talk about your book now your book is about the Hindu Rashtra, right?
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And you've been writing about this for donkey's ears. What made you interested in the subject?
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I mean over time how have your thoughts on this about I well coming from Surat
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I had this sort of a traditional
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middle-class upbringing very Hindu where the
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Diversity was fairly low. You you did have say Muslims in your class
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but because it was a school that was middle-class and
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English there wasn't as much representation of the society that you would be in and once you left school
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Suraj fairly ghettoized. So it's it's a very old city
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The Brits came there in 1608, but it was already a big city then Tolstoy wrote a short story called the coffee house of Surat
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where he says that a lot of people from around the world, you know, Chinese people and
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Armenians and all gather and talk about life and and it's true that it was a port city
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Till the 18th century was both globalized and ghettoized. It was both globalized and ghettoized very very true
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It had access because of its port it it has a very sheltered port or it did actually now
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It's a silted over but the port is inland from the sea
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So you could have fairly large ships come into or the Arabian Sea and then come into a Surat and but then be
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I'll be on a river the tapi which which cuts India in half
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So it had access to the Portuguese and the Dutch and the English and so on
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Much before the rest of India did it was the primary port of the Mughal Empire
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so it was where Hajj left from and
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this city and is this city which was
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Segregated in terms of caste so you had something called a sherry
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Which is a lane with a single mouth and you've got homes on both sides, you know sharing walls of one caste
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So my mom grew up in a place called Siddh Matani sherry
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Which is the the neighborhood of the of this goddess called Siddh Mata and it was full of party that home
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so when I go back to Surat a lot of the neighbors there are still from the same caste and it's sort of remained that way and
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How did that shape the young man you were?
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Difference between me and a lot of the other people from my background was the fact that I went to a school there
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English so Surat at that point had four schools
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It was a city of about 25 or 30 lakh people, but there were only four schools that taught
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English three of them set up by
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The missionaries and one by the Parsis Hindus who were 90% of the school's population had not built a single one
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But that access to the language gave one access then two books
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There was there was one bookstore in Surat then like a very large city
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But whatever I could get my hands on I would read and that sort of opened up the world in a way that would not have
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Had I been like the rest of my cousins and so on
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not in an English school and
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How was it that you know?
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Was there a time when you began to feel that you were apart from them in the way you looked at the world?
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Because I'm assuming that in that kind of background if you grow up
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You are pretty much someone who is going to grow up a Modi supporter for example
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Yeah, so the BJP's become the party of Hindus in that state. That's why we see very
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Remarkable things like a vote share of more than 50% which is very unusual in
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Democratic politics anywhere, but particularly in this country because what happens usually in our country is that you've got
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Kanata we are in Bangalore now. You've got the Wokaliga and you've got the Lingayat
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so they would they would that there would be a kind of a
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Primary war over who would get access to the state and the goodies that the state gives so it's usually that way
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What's happened in Gujarat is that though it started out that way where the division was basically the party that community
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supporting the BJP which it does still the
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majority of all BJP cabinets that have been formed in that state since 95 have
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a comprised of the Patel community and
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The other community was the New York Shatria or what is called Thakur?
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Darbar these these words
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Which went to the Congress, but what has happened is that the split is not even
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Seats that are reserved for instance for the schedule casts and the schedule tribes tend to go to the BJP entirely
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And the Congress has stayed there in almost permanent opposition. I'm 49 years old. I
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I came into the age of voting in 1988
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every single Lok Sabha election that I have been
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I'm old enough to vote for there has been one by one BJP man
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Of course, he was denied a ticket after Mr
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Modi came to power, but Kashi Ramlana was the guy who represented Surat and
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From being somebody who was 18 or 19 to somebody who was in his 40s to have the same person represent them
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It's very unusual for a city, especially
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But that's how Gujarat has has come to be it's and as a young journalist
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I mean if you sort of look at the arc of your career at the start of your career the Hindutva or the Hindu Rashtra
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Whatever was just about exploding with Babri and all of that and now it's kind of taken over the country
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It's kind of taken over the country in a sense
#
What was your approach to it then and you know, did you see this coming? No, I didn't and
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Episode then it seemed like something which was
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extraordinary which was
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Wasn't old enough for sort of mature enough certainly to be able to understand what it had done
#
What that moment meant I had celebrated the night when the mosque was torn down
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I was with some friends and it seemed like a very
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Big moment that something something big had happened. You celebrated. I was excited
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I mean, I don't know if the word is celebrate but I was sort of I
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Wouldn't say that I was disappointed. I wasn't sad or like anything else
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That's the background that one grew up in, you know
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they were the the Muslims were them and we were the we and then we had done something big and then
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But no in the mid 90s it had not occurred to me that this is that
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One moment, but it was something that would live with us for a long time
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So sort of two related questions
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I guess when did you start to realize that it was a process and it was becoming something and when did you
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also start to change from a position of looking at the world through that we or them I think moving to Bombay
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It was still called Bombay
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That you had access to people who are much smarter than you and in the newsroom in those days
#
That was that was fairly sort of easy to come by very bright people came to work for very little money
#
People who are much better at than you and
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You worked with women. I had never worked with a woman before in my life and
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This sort of sort of opens up
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Your eyes if you are in any way open-minded in a way that very few things will because in a very brief period of time
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You are exposed to people who are smarter than you come from a different background
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Who might be from a gender that you didn't think as being you know belonging in the workplace?
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So you have you have an education drilled into you fairly fairly quickly. So I think by the mid-90s. Yeah, I
#
Was there I I also encountered some people whose writing stayed with me for a very long time and
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Like there's a man called Khalid Ahmad who writes for the Express
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Here here in India. He's he's a Lahori
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former diplomat in the Pakistani
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former or newspaper editor both in Urdu in
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English he wrote for a paper called the Frontier Post in Zia's period
#
So that that was not an easy time for journalists
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Definitely not for somebody who was a proper intellectual which which he is and he was bilingual
#
So I think that really attracted me to him
#
we what we have on the subcontinent generally and in this country in particular is that the
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intellectual narrative belongs
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To to a group of people who are more or less a monolingual that they can read
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In their own language, but they do not regularly read in it and they certainly don't write it
#
He was different in that sense. So he brought he brought up a perspective
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Which was quite unique and I would recommend to those people who are sort of listening to this to try and find some of his
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Stuff Khalid Ahmed. So how did you again come to the subject of the book the Hindu Rashtra?
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So I think we are living with it. I think what happened in
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And I was there then I had gone back to that state with the group of people that were doing a study
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And at that point it sort of occurred to me that this this was not something
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That we should treat as being episodic that we had a riot in 69 and then we arrived in 84
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And then we had a riot in 93 and then so on
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This was something different and this this was going to stay with us for a very long time
#
And it began then I think and then I started reading some of the stuff that
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That underpins the BJP and the RSS. I
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Read the stuff that the Prime Minister wrote
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And so it it didn't occur to me in that that there was a book in it
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But I think the last four and a half years
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I think a solidified the idea that there is something that is compact that can be
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Explained to people and one of the things that sort of struck me when you know
#
when we fixed up the time for this episode and I thought I should prep for it and
#
I tried to look for books on the subject of
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Hindutva and the intellectual traditions behind it and discovered a paucity of such material. There's just
#
Practically, no, yeah, there's not much there. Unfortunately, so if you look at the subcontinent if you look at religious
#
conservatism almost all of it at the
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properly intellectual level is
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Hmm al-qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood
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Their thinking is underpinned by a man who came out of Maharashtra. It wasn't called that then
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Amarangabad a man called the Modudi
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Self-taught but smart enough to look at the modern world and build a structure that
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Responded to the modern world from the perspective of his faith
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We didn't have that happen
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From the Hindu thinkers
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so that's true that the
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Response to modernity from the perspective of a faith that that holds on to itself as being true
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It did not come to the Hindus of the subcontinent as much as it came to the Muslims and that's not a bad thing
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Yeah, so, you know through the course of this episode
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We're gonna talk about, you know, the three of the foundational thinkers who you're gonna write about in your book as well
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You are writing about in your book as well
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Sawarkar, Golbarkar and Deen Devalapadhyaya, but before that just place this all of this in context for me like
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You could say that in a sense India is the only
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part of South Asia, which doesn't have something like a Hindu Rashtra
#
Yeah, you're right. So the all the states that
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Comprised South Asia except for India are in some way a majoritarian. So
#
Afghanistan Pakistan chose to have Islamic constitutions. So did the Maldives in Lanka
#
according to the Constitution Bangladesh was part obviously of the Pakistan movement, but it's
#
Foundational a direction was secular. So it was Bengali nationalism rather than anything else
#
But when they became independent, they put Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim on top of their constitution, which was then removed by the court
#
But all the nations have dabbled in it in some way Bhutan has a king who can only come from a particular
#
faith and he controls both the
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physical apparatus of the state as well as the spiritual one
#
What is called a Hindu Rashtra till 2008?
#
So of course it was limited in the sense that
#
You cannot have a Hindu Rashtra and that's what my book is also about. It's not physically possible
#
But all of these states at some point
#
Assumed that they should be in some way a majoritarian except for the largest country in South Asia
#
So we started off as being unique and we've remained unique. I think both for reasons
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That were positive in nature that the people who were writing the laws and the Constitution
#
Felt it should be that way and by default that there is no real
#
Option for us to become majoritarian and it's interesting that you say that we remain that in two ways one by you know
#
The elites who frame the Constitution obviously and the other by default because you know
#
One of the thinkers you're writing a book about Deendayal Upadhyaya
#
often complained and I chatted about this in a previous episode with Shashi Tharoor and then
#
Upadhyaya used to complain that our Constitution is again. It's been imposed on us by a bunch of
#
Elites and it doesn't reflect the real India therefore perhaps implying that we need a Constitution that
#
You know and when we sort of think about the last 70 years
#
I mean obviously elites write Constitutions everywhere elites run policy and they design the country
#
But it seems that at some sense what we see in the last five years is also that there is a sense of
#
Reassertion by people who are saying that no, this is a real India and you elites have it wrong
#
And you're completely irrelevant and obviously a side note to that is all the ranting that goes on against the elites
#
And how the word liberal has become a pejorative and so on
#
But what do you feel about something that I consider a paradox being a liberal of sorts myself that
#
You had a bunch of liberal elites imposing a liberal Constitution on an illiberal country
#
So, how can that imposition be liberal in itself? I
#
Think it's a very good question. So there are two parts to it. One is the assumption made by
#
others that in some way the Constitution represents values that are foreign or that are
#
Haven't ever found a response to what else it should be. Okay, I accept the fact that the
#
Constituent Assembly of India is basically the Congress Party debating itself. There's no particularly
#
Strong representation from what we would consider to be conservative upper caste elements
#
Exerting that sort of you know conservatism from the Hindu faith, but if there were what would they do the problem with the majoritarian?
#
Hindutva aspect is that
#
Where you can have a majoritarian Constitution that?
#
discriminates against the minorities and you do have that in a lot of places including in
#
Pakistan problem with a
#
Hindutva Constitution the way that I have understood it based on what I've read is
#
That it will discriminate against most Hindus
#
If we look at the caste system, there are two things that any state can do when it
#
majoritarian from the faith
#
One is that it tries to impose the articles of its faith
#
The other is that it discriminates
#
We've got the latter and we've had it for a long time. I don't think that it's the BJP that has done
#
Bad things by itself and the people that came before it were in some way different
#
They were different in minor ways, but I think that for the most part. It's not
#
That we were going through a kind of halcyon phase and then it's it suddenly become hell
#
That's that's that's not the way that I see it. The problem is on the other side
#
Pakistan can say through its constitution and it has that no
#
Non-muslim can become the president and they can't
#
Because that's what the law says
#
How is it that we are going to impose the Hindu faith on a population? That's 85% Hindu
#
Third of that population is Dalit and Adivasi about 50% is from the community
#
I come from which is Shudhara based on the Smritis
#
As is Modi himself as is Modi himself
#
the imposing the articles of faith would lead to wholesale discrimination
#
Against the majority of Hindus and so it's not physically possible for us to have
#
Hindu Rashtra in this country. I think if I may take a stab at answering the rhetorical question
#
One of the things that our constitution aims to do and doesn't do well enough in my opinion in the sense that it's not liberal enough
#
Therefore is focused on protecting individual rights, which it doesn't do completely enough
#
But it does to enough of an extent that you can call it a liberal constitution and you know
#
As you pointed out in the notes that you sent me from your book about this that this was something specifically that not in the context of the constitution
#
But in terms of what a Hindu Rashtra should look like that Goldwal Kerr felt that there should be no focus on individual rights at all
#
That the collective took precedence over the individual
#
So if I would imagine a Hindu to a constitution and obviously I can't because I don't have the kind of knowledge that you do about it
#
Because I don't have the kind of knowledge that you do
#
But if I were to imagine it
#
I imagine one of the things that it would not do which the current constitution does partially is protect individual rights
#
Maybe that's a good way of looking at it that you would have a collective rights
#
But what would that look like in law, right?
#
Would we always act in concert as a mob in terms of would we never have a disagreement within that?
#
Specific schism that we would have whether it would be Vaishnav's or you know, whatever else
#
I guess we'd have far lesser protections for women for example to start with
#
Yeah, and I think that that's probably what what we are living through that
#
You're living through a default Hindu Rashtra that discriminates against say women going to temple because they are seen as you know
#
Yeah in in terms of a practice but that runs into law and then law says i'm sorry
#
But you know if you have a constitution that says equality
#
And I think we have a pretty
#
mediocre set of judges in our supreme court, but
#
Even there I think you would find that when the practice of sort of Hindu Rashtra runs into the constitution
#
the response is usually
#
Incoherent that it is not able to express itself because the discrimination is underneath rather than
#
rather than completely externalized like it is in Islam and
#
And one of the things that you said when we were chatting about this episode was that
#
We need to if you're talking about the Hindu Rashtra
#
We also need to talk about the Pakistan project and what happened there and how that played out
#
As an example of a majoritarian sort of state our immediate neighbor and I mean we are practically the same country until recently
#
Tell me a little bit about that
#
Pakistan can be seen in
#
a few different ways so I think the one thing that I came to learn pretty late in life was that the partition of
#
India was basically the partition of just two states Bengal and
#
Transfer of citizens was almost absolute so very few
#
Non-muslims remaining in West Punjab very few Muslims remaining in East Punjab
#
Secondly and I know this because of the work done by the the amateur sociologists and
#
Ethnographers that the Raj brought with it
#
Who were really interested in communities and they would document stuff
#
what happened in Punjab was that the
#
The conversion of the primary mercantile castes there were two of them
#
Other than the banias were very small
#
Or did not happen outside of Sikhism. So
#
99.9 percent of the people from these two communities
#
Remained Hindu or they were sick the ten Sikh gurus were khatris
#
Partition on that front was a partition also of castes because of this that you had a fairly
#
Merchants who all moved
#
And you had on the other hand a very hard-working set of
#
Who had been given access by the british to the army they
#
after the mutiny they they were the
#
And they had been given lands and so on
#
So you've got this fairly martial population in charge of a large part of pakistan more than 50 percent of what is today
#
Of pakistan and what used to be west pakistan is a punjabi speaking. So you had a dominant
#
Martial caste there in charge of the population without
#
The leaving of them of the mercantilism of the khatris and and the arora punjabis
#
To my mind that had a significant effect in the way that the country
#
Uh evolved and has continued to evolve. I think the the militaristic spirit that it shows the love of the army despite being ruled by it
#
post 1947 period speaks to that I think there is there is something about
#
There's some romance to the way that they view
#
Collapsed from the modernist point of view with the death of jinnah
#
In his person there was still some hope that they were going to some kind of
#
turkey type state which would
#
And so that that was seen as the sign of you know modernity and there were suits and they had
#
And so on and jinnah was quite sort of enamored of uh hamatha turk
#
He's he's named only two books that he's read. I translated a very short interview. He did in gujarati in the 1920s
#
And the two books that he's read one is the count of montecristo
#
And the other is a book called a gray wolf by this man called hc armstrong who had profiled
#
Were these his favorite books or do you think they were I don't think he was well read. He's a beautiful writer
#
Uh, I wish I hadn't spent as much money on the jinnah papers as I have because they're rubbish but his
#
the way that he spoke and wrote is manifestly superior to what uh people of my generation who've
#
Studied english and you know
#
We we are not there. He's he spoke and wrote it really well
#
He had a sort of felicity for for the language and he was an accomplished lawyer
#
He was a very good advocate
#
He was not a particularly good lawyer
#
And I think the difference in that is that he was very good at taking a brief and then being able to represent it
#
Before a judge rather than doing the hard work of finding the details out and so on
#
So he was seen as a phenomenal advocate, but not that good a lawyer
#
So he dies a few months after partition as does gandhi
#
and in the weeks up to partition jinnah has made statements that uh,
#
Uh suggest that the constitution of pakistan. He's careful to say that it is the work of the constituent assembly and not his own
#
But he says enough to suggest that it would have some sort of alignment with the faith
#
Just four days before partition. He gives a speech to the he speaks to the constituent assembly where he
#
Hindus will be free to go to the temples and so on and he says that the state is not likely at some point
#
In the future to look on citizens through the prism of faith that they will just be pakistanis
#
So that suggested to people later that he was trying to speak of a secular state, but he never used that word
#
secular and he left enough sort of some evidence here and there
#
He would be okay with the way that the pakistani constitution constitutions. I should say they have three of them
#
And but he dies he he he's got tb, uh just before a partition his doctor who's a parsi man from mumbai doesn't tell anybody
#
And six months after he dies the pakistani constituent assembly, which has a very large composition of bengali hindus
#
Debate they start their uh discussions on what the constitution should be
#
And uh liyaqat ali khan who's this?
#
royalty type figure sunni jinnah was a gujrati from
#
A very small community called the seven arshiya the khujas and he had actually converted out of it
#
Um liyaqat proposed uh something called the objective resolution, which
#
um was a sort of a preamble
#
and pakistan according to that uh preamble would uh
#
Be an islamic state where the sovereignty belonged to to allah
#
But it would be given in trust to the people of pakistan
#
And you would have democracy
#
You would have freedom you would have tolerance
#
You would have justice you would have all of that
#
But you would have all of these as enunciated by islam
#
And this naturally alarmed the hindus in the pakistani constituent assembly and there's a series of
#
Learned interventions that they made
#
And it's worth reading them and I I've read a lot of them
#
I've read and it's worth reading them and I I hope to reproduce
#
Much of that in my book
#
Saying that this was not what jinnah had promised that this was vague
#
They were going into a space which no other nation had gone through before
#
Pakistan and israel pretty much at the same time determined that they're going to be
#
Faith-based component in the constitution
#
So jewish state there and you've got the muslim state here
#
but these these words as
#
Enunciated by islam didn't really mean
#
right at the beginning not because of a theological dispute but because of a
#
A political dispute who should succeed
#
And so there was no real means of saying what islamic democracy was
#
The the the primary form of asset with the family was actually cattle
#
1400 years ago when women did not have much by way of rights
#
The prophet of islam said that a daughter should inherit one half of what the son gets
#
And this was great for that time, but you can't have the same law after 1400 years
#
What happened was in the interpretations that they gave these very basic sentences
#
Pakistan applied them across law. So pakistan started off and it still has the same ipc that we do
#
So they know what 420 means for example, they know what 153a means
#
Or 124a sedition is all of it. It's right there
#
Yeah, they've tweaked some of the punishments to make them harsher as you know, especially for a blasphemy
#
But so they started off with the same laws, but what but but they thought that they should islamize
#
the state in some way and one way of doing that was to try and
#
A precepts and use some some statements from from 1400 years ago
#
And try and apply them to the modern world, which which doesn't work
#
So, um, they had this constitution that came out in the 50s. Um, almost immediately
#
The army took over and kept power for for for a decade. The army had its own constitution
#
Um, the army was tough on east pakistan jinnah wanted to impose urdu on the whole
#
He didn't speak it himself couldn't read it
#
He spoke gujarati and he spoke and he spoke it really well. I've translated that
#
I've translated that interview that I told you about his writing is really
#
Polished and he he knows the language
#
I mean and i'm sure being in south bombay
#
The path that he was that that would have been the primary language even in court for for many decades after
#
a partition if you look at lawyers like chagla or whoever else a lot of the
#
Heavy weights in the indian judiciary were parsis muslims
#
Hindus who came out of the bombay high court
#
So they tried to adapt to a modern constitution
#
Things that they believe they should be doing out of a sense of piety. Nobody's doing this to persecute people
#
the fact is that when they wrote the
#
uh, the objectives resolution the muslims were
#
Confident that they were not going to produce a state that was going to in any way
#
Uh discriminate but that is what it did and they were never happy with it. The problem is with a
#
Utopian state or a or a constitution that aims to take you to a state that is in some way a utopia
#
It never works. So pakistan had to go through one constitution in the 50s another one in the 60s
#
The country broke I was talking about jinnah, uh wanting to impose this language on the bangladeshis which they didn't want
#
They were and there were more of them. In fact, there were more of them
#
Uh, and if things remain the way they are for the first time in the history of of the subcontinent
#
uh in in two or three years the bangladesh per capita income will
#
Outstrip that of pakistan, which is remarkable for a country that was thought to be a basket case only 40 years ago
#
so bangladesh secedes with with help from
#
From india and the country breaks up and there's a third constitution 1973
#
Written by the ppp under burto
#
And that's the one that's remained in some form today
#
But over time the discrimination has been written in so you've got
#
No president or prime minister can be a non-muslim
#
zia ul haq comes and uh
#
Uh extends that to rape so a woman's testimony is seen to be worth only half a man's and if a man
#
Is accused of rape by a woman. She must produce two male witnesses to the act of rape
#
And if she cannot do that, she's accused of a fornication and jailed and this is what actually happened
#
No party was able to escape it once it came on to the books once you had a written constitution that demanded
#
Uh that the faith be in some way imposed so that people could benefit from the blessings of living in a faithful country
#
It didn't stop the ppp was a liberal socialist party. They are the ones that changed the constitution in 1974
#
apostatized this community called the amadis
#
Even today pakistani passports passport holders must in writing disown
#
membership of that community
#
There was a riot in the 50s. This is a community that comes out of uh, uh panjab. There are many of them here here in india as well
#
Islam in india is being sort of very
#
but it's not really that there's lots of saints just like
#
Converted the polytheistic romans into christians by giving them saints, you know, you could go and worship whoever you wanted to
#
But but you would now call them a saint and they would they would be a sort of um
#
Intercessor between you and god
#
Islam has done the same thing
#
Pray at shrines in lahore or in or in ajmer than have ever gone to mekta
#
Um, and that's the way it is. That's the way that is the subcontinent's faith. It's very powerfully colored with
#
and the power of dead people
#
so one of these sects in a panjab one of these
#
Islam has been quite firm in its belief that
#
muhammad is the last of of the line of prophets that starts with
#
Adam that he's the first and he's the last
#
And anyone having visions then becomes a sort of threat
#
There there was some a problem with the with the it's a fairly recent community. It's not that old late 19th century. I think
#
There were some riots in pakistani panjab in the 50s on the same issue
#
and then rather than surrender the street to mobs that wanted violence on this butto just sort of
#
Did the easy thing and and rewrote the law?
#
That's happened in a lot of places with the blasphemy law
#
So as I said pakistan's got exactly the same set of laws that we have written by a macaulay
#
In the 1860s and blasphemy was a punishable
#
By up to three years in jail almost nobody blasphemed. There were only eight cases of
#
india and pakistan combined
#
Uh for a law that's like more than 100 years old
#
So it's it's not that kind of place. I think the the veneration of faith is very high in our part
#
So it's very unlikely that you'll find it
#
Deliberately blaspheming and the judiciary was quite tolerant
#
So when you had somebody like niker in the south breaking idols of ganesha in public
#
It was seen as something that he had the right to do. We can't do it anymore. Obviously
#
In this country, but in pakistan what happened was they changed it to death
#
Immediately the number of cases
#
Of blasphemy especially against non-mongolians
#
Shot up to over a thousand. It was a tool to be used against people you didn't like for whatever reason
#
It could be reasons of faith. It could be reasons of property, which it often was
#
The anger of society and I think that that's what usually happens when you have a majoritarian state in
#
South asia that there is an undercurrent
#
Powerful and it expresses itself through violence when you turn it into law
#
So is the whole pakistan project a cautionary tale of sorts for those in india who who see the specter of a hindu rush?
#
I think so. I think that we ought to look at where
#
Majoritarianism took pakistan not just from the point of view of the constitution
#
Like I said, they are on their third constitution
#
If you really look at it the kind of mauling that zia did in the 80s and then, you know, you have people like
#
Musharraf who was there for almost a decade
#
Nothing good comes of it the the idea that
#
Our constitution is in some way foreign or the values that it talks about
#
Equality or secularism or whatever is foreign is bogus and these are not values that are owned by any one nation or any one race
#
I mean my point is even if they say originated with the enlightenment and came to us from there
#
What difference does it make now? It doesn't make a difference. You know, the greeks really respected
#
Accredited to the fact that they are the people of india
#
india a pythagoras who they a credit as being
#
The origin of the seven note scale in music and you know, we are familiar with
#
Was actually a vegetarian because he came to india and picked it up with him
#
That's what the greeks believe. This is not something that this is not a tejo mahalaya kind of thing
#
You know if you read plato and socrates and from that period
#
They had immense respect for what the east had and I don't think there is any one moment in history where
#
any one community or nation says that we've
#
You know put this up from zero
#
Democracy is just a word but i'm saying that if you are going to lead a group of people
#
There's going to be pushback from that group. They would want to stake in power. That's the way the human being is
#
We're not the sort of people who can be herded into groups and then told what to do
#
And so even though it might be seen as an external idea
#
I don't think it is I don't think the liberty is, you know, particularly the preserve of the west and certainly not
#
That that of the enlightenment
#
We'll take a quick commercial break and we'll come back to talk about the intellectual
#
Gurus of hindutva as it were
#
Hello everybody, welcome to another awesome week on the ivm podcast if you're not following us on social media
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They talk about healthy eating and nutrition and vishaka clears cyrus's confusion about the professions of nutritionist dietitian doctors and health coaches
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On mf 101 anupam talks to marish dangi co-cio debt at aditya bella sunlight mutual fund about debt mutual funds its
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And with that let's get on with your show
#
Welcome back to the scene indian scene. I'm chatting with akar patel about his forthcoming book on the hindu
#
Rashtra by which I guess in a sense you mean hindutva and that's again a term coined by
#
Vinayak saavarkar, you know the first of the thinkers we focus on. Yeah, it's a new word. I don't think it
#
It occurs in the smritis it doesn't occur in the vedas. There's no
#
there's no reference to it, but the
#
community of people who are
#
Um hindutva followers are very possessive about that word
#
saavarkar definitely was he was very keen to show that its
#
Origins were not in some way muslim in nature. I don't this might have been a debate when
#
He was writing the book in the 20s. Certainly. It's not now
#
but he felt that the hindu faith ought to own the word and the
#
The etymology of the word from sindhu and and and so on
#
So we we don't have any
#
Um references to hindutva
#
Till he writes his book in the 20s. He's he's a young man
#
at that point he's in jail and
#
This is still a pre-1947 india. So his concern is not what
#
the relationship of the state is
#
With hindutva that is not his concern. I think his primary objective is to his definition and he he's trying to
#
Which is whole which is intact and which is pure and he finds that
#
idea in the word hindu which to him means two things it means
#
the land in which the hindus live beginning at the
#
the hindus and moving east
#
And secondly what he calls the faiths that are of this land. So he includes
#
Jainism he includes a sikhism
#
He excludes islam excludes christianity
#
But includes atheists who are hindu
#
So maybe he hasn't thought it through fully, but there are some contradictions there that that remain
#
But his his idea was to develop a theory of nationhood
#
This is a period when europe's going through a lot of that sort of thinking itself
#
And he arrives at this at this construct which he calls hindutva and in fact reading his book
#
It struck me that more than half of it seemed to be about semantics and about just the term hindutva and hinduism
#
All of that and it's interesting why he objected to the term hinduism which he objects to which he says that is because you know
#
An ism means a body of beliefs and he wanted a word which would encompass a lot more
#
Yeah, you're right. He he wanted a word that was bigger than sort of hinduism and
#
And he comes to the word hindutva which he says is a word of common usage
#
Which which I find hard to believe because it's not one even now. I mean, I don't know how many people knew the word in the
#
But he's probably the best read of the hindutva writers. He's got access to a british education
#
He is a multilingual properly. He writes a pretty good english
#
I think that he would he would stand out as a writer if he wrote columns today
#
He has a sense of wordplay
#
Better read and I think a better thinker than the people who came after him
#
Right and there's an interesting quote from his book about the word hindu
#
I'll just read it out quote the reason that explains why the term hindu cannot be synonymous with bhartiya or
#
Or hindi which was used as an epithet in some senses
#
Which synonymous with bharti or hindi or mean and indian only naturally introduces us to the second essential implication of that term
#
The hindus are not merely the citizens of the indian state because they are united
#
Not only by the bonds of love they bear to a common motherland, but also by the bonds of a common blood
#
They are not only a nation but also a race slash jati the word jati derived from the root
#
Jan to produce means a brotherhood a race determined by a common origin possessing a common blood
#
All hindus claim to have in their veins the blood of the mighty race
#
Incorporated with and descended from the vedic fathers the sindhu stop quote
#
And it seemed to me in the book that while defining hindus in hindutva
#
He is relying a lot on his sense of history, which we now know today to be completely false
#
Yeah, yeah, that's it would be hard to break it to the old man. What what that through recent
#
Discoveries in I had an episode recently with tony joseph and his great books
#
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, they didn't know that then the other thing is that he's writing in the early 20s
#
And I think it's 1926 if i'm not mistaken when a mohenja daro is discovered. So india doesn't know of the existence of
#
Of indus valley civilization till the mid 20s and it's in this period that he's writing
#
So he's coming up with he's he's full of romance. You know, we are this great culture
#
wait at the traffic light while the british guy gets access first and you know, probably excluded from
#
Pubs in london. He was in london for a bit
#
So he that that would have had played fairly heavily on on him and he's he's writing with that background
#
and it should be understood that a sense of
#
Grandiosness in what he's trying to be a part of is inbuilt into that book. So yeah
#
It doesn't make for that good a read today
#
Unless you're looking at it purely from the academic point of view
#
It's not an easy read because it's it's a fairly slim work. It's about 50 pages
#
But you would finish it and ask what what's his point? But there's because there's no real point at
#
It's almost a semantic point
#
Yeah, he's one of the first guys to
#
Say that hindus are a nation something that the muslim league would say with much more vehemence later
#
But he's clear to his mind that we are a different nation from the muslims
#
And even within that one nation of hindus if you for example are atheist and have no
#
Anything that constitutes the hindu faith even then you are a respected member of that hindu nation
#
Where else how he sort of seems to define this sort of you know
#
hinduism as sort of a cultural construct or whatever and why it excludes muslim seems to be that one thing all hindus have in common
#
Hindus quote unquote is that they bear allegiance to one motherland which is
#
You know india of course doesn't exist and but
#
That sort of area and his claim is that muslims don't and therefore they're outside of it
#
Yeah, so he he says that there are three tests one is that you come from this part of the world. So
#
Hindus do and muslims do and Sikhs do and you know christians do and they all do which is fine
#
the other is bonds of blood which he says that we all share including those who are not or not hindus because we've
#
Got we come from a parentage and a mancestry that's been here for a long time
#
So that's that's fine. That's the that's the second one
#
The third one is the common culture bit which you just spoke about that hindus have a common culture according to him
#
Such things are what constitute hindu culture to his mind language food
#
Cultural aspects certain he doesn't write about them. He has no interest in them. I think this is something that that carries through
#
into hindutva thinkers there is no interest at all in what
#
Hindu high culture is or what it should be they don't care whether it exists at all
#
They don't write about it in any sense and a lot of it is very symbiotic with the islamic high culture and so on
#
You know, so yeah, the the thing is that music it's not that easy to be able to
#
Separate it by faith, you know
#
Uh, you've got in europe the high culture
#
Music which is vocal is almost entirely, uh in a language that 90 of europe doesn't speak
#
italian, uh a lot of the music is composed by a group of people who are seen as
#
Mechanical and you know the germans, but they've got mozart and they've got
#
Beethoven and so on it's not easy to say that this is this culture that we have and your culture is separate and then
#
uh, you know the only sort of
#
Intercourse that one culture has with another in the savarkar view is through war is through violence
#
That's not the way the world works, you know
#
And do you think it's not coincidental?
#
but telling that a lot of these hindutva ideologues weren't actually into high culture because you imagine that people who are
#
Tuned into culture in that sense will be less likely to have such an exclusionary view of the world
#
I I hope what you're saying is right. It sounds nice. Um, I don't know if that's the case though
#
It is certainly true that you it's very difficult
#
If you've properly studied hindustani music
#
To be a bigot i'll give you an example a lot of the compositions. I used to have
#
I used to learn how to sing
#
a kirana gharana and about 90 percent of the compositions that that are sung by that gharana
#
Are the work of a man called sadharan?
#
uh who composed in the time of a mahmad shah rangila
#
Even if you've got something like raag shankara, and it's an ode to shiva
#
Written by that man and he puts his name in it
#
So and if you hear bhimsen joshi sing it there's a lovely version of his shown on doordarshan. That's that's there on youtube
#
Where he's singing a shankara and the name of the author
#
Niamat khan sadharang that's his name is there in that song all his songs he would put his name in you know
#
It's it's tough after that to be able to be very rigid in the way that one looks at either one's own faith or
#
But as I said, you would find very little interest in any form of high culture
#
What we would look at as being indian or hindu high culture
#
Within the people who tend to push hindutva whether it's food music anything dance
#
It's not there and what is savarkar's approach to caste one thing that becomes clear when one reads
#
These people is all of them are brahmin. So
#
The three names that you took are all brahmin
#
I'm not saying that there are no non-brahmin
#
Who have contributed to this i'm sure there are
#
But the corpus is primarily brahmin. And so if you look at the rss and
#
Except for one man who is a thakur who was away for a very brief period
#
All of them are a brahmin and most of them are marathi brahmins
#
built into the thinking which has continued and
#
it is entirely absent of
#
What we would look at as being
#
Multicultural indian today, which we take for granted, you know, you would have a figure like shahrukh khan or whatever and it's not really strange
#
But it was strange. I think to them in the 20s when they were thinking this up
#
The levels of sort of intercourse between them and the other was very low
#
Uh, and there are mistakes factual errors that they make in the book including savarkar because he doesn't really know
#
What he's talking about when he's when he's writing about islam
#
Right, and and what about caste like that? There's an interesting quote by savarkar, which I was unable to pass
#
But i'll just read it out for you
#
Which is quote all that the caste system has done is to regulate his noble blood on lines believed and on the whole rightly believed
#
By our saintly and patriotic lawgivers and kings to contribute most to fertilize and enrich all that was barren and poor
#
Without famishing and debasing all that was flourishing and nobly endowed
#
Stop-quote and this is both very verbose and he's not saying anything at all
#
That particular paragraph needs to be unpicked. I think so what he's saying is all of them
#
Support what is called varnashram, which is a division of society by caste. They don't have any problem with it
#
They think it's a good thing and I can we can talk about golwalkar and why he thought it was a great thing
#
Cast is beneficial and he's I think to my mind the first person to theorize this
#
He says that he has a problem with buddhism
#
India became vulnerable because buddhism took away caste from the subcontinent and
#
Afghanistan becomes muslim
#
Because it remains buddhist, but india because it reverts to
#
To hinduism and caste is able to save itself from being fully muslim. So he thinks that caste has a positive
#
contribution to make here
#
He and golwalkar both thought that
#
and that brahmins had something special which they could
#
continue having if they bred amongst themselves
#
And they could pass on if they were to sort of
#
Imprangulate the non-brahmin. That's that's what that long line always says
#
Savarkar also thought that I don't know if he thought this but he certainly wrote it
#
That caste was not fully endogamous or rigid that it was it was
#
Marry up or down and he has these Sanskritic words that he uses
#
Anulom and so on. In fact, he has a line here where he says quote a hindu marrying a hindu may lose his caste
#
but not his hindutva. Yeah, so
#
Uh, he was not a believer himself so far as I know he was not a particularly devout person
#
he was defined more by his
#
Antipathy than his faith
#
But I think he's the source of this argument that we have he and maybe vivek anand
#
That oh caste is not all bad
#
There was a period in our history when you could sort of intermarry and then that was fine
#
And then it's just a division of labor. It's not really discrimination. I think these are
#
Views that the middle class today would hold and I think they come to us in the middle class
#
Through these two men in the main
#
Outrageous view on this and it's really surprising to me that though he's referred to as being
#
the guruji of the sangh and so on these things haven't
#
Been made as a prominent as they should have been
#
Golwalkar says that caste is good because uh it
#
In the ideal caste based society
#
access to money is completely separated from access to power
#
akshatriyas deal with uh the kingdom and
#
Authority and that's great
#
So you don't have a mix like a separation of power separation of power and he adds that there is this selfless community on top of them
#
that has no skin in the game, but is able to sort of guide and
#
Advise on how to run the whole state
#
And these these are the abramians obviously and he says that this is what a good state should be like
#
And it's really strange to come up on him
#
Uh such a statement randomly in his work. He's written one book
#
called a bunch of thoughts
#
Be as old as one is and not have had known that this is what
#
the hindutva thought is
#
For such a long period to me is slightly strange. We don't have access in our schools to this kind of material, but we should
#
And you know a related question I was saving for later
#
but we'll come back to savarkar while I bring it up now is that in a lot of the rhetoric of
#
All of these guys, they actually talk about hey, we are inclusive. We are not exclusionary
#
You know, for example the rss being called the rashtriya sevaksang and not the hindu sevaksang
#
And so on and a lot of that rhetoric actually percolates
#
Down to the present day how much of that rhetoric do you think is a sort of genuine belief and how much of it is strategic?
#
I would say most of it is the latter
#
It's a strategy where you are trying to form
#
So to the rss the nation and the faith have never been separate
#
India is a nation and india is a nation of hindus and hindus are a nation
#
And so there was a debate
#
On what to call the rss and golwalkar says that at some point somebody suggested, you know hindu swayam sevaksang
#
um head giver says that no that the there is no difference between india and hindu
#
And why should we call ourselves?
#
A hindu swayam sevaksang because then we will only be one of many we don't represent hindu. He says we represent india in in total
#
And that is what that and that I think is the strategy
#
I mean, that's a sentiment you see even to the present day where if you're anti modi you're anti national
#
Um, yeah, very true. Uh, if we've been surprised by the fact that this has become so
#
Externalized now it's been there in their writing and their books for a long time
#
And there's another quote of saavarkar I picked out which reminded me so much of the present times
#
You just have to replace some words
#
Which is quote in times of conflict nations do lose their balance of mind
#
And if the persians are others once understood by the word hindu a thief or black man alone
#
Then let them remembered at the word muhammad then too was not always mentioned to denote any very enviable type of mankind by the hindus
#
Either to call a man a muslim or better still a musandha was worse than calling him a brute
#
Stop quote and it's very interesting that even in current times while he's speaking of words like hindu and muslima news
#
Respejoratives you find the same thing happening today when it comes to liberals
#
Yeah, this what you just read out is a fairly strange part of his book
#
I couldn't make sense of it and I think that in the 20s this might have been a big thing or at least a big
#
Thing in the circles that he moved around it
#
So what saavarkar is trying to do is to show that the word hindu is in some is even if it is used
#
Abuse by the muslim and I can't think of
#
Any reason why it should be?
#
We can give it back to you as well
#
How long that phase lasted in the part of the world that he was in where the word hindu was seen as a whatever
#
But it takes up too much space in that work of his yeah
#
And you're right. I think that the word liberal the word secular also in in gujarat is seen as being colored
#
in a particular way, so
#
The word secular means pro-muslim and by default it means anti-hindu
#
I mean one of the bizarre things I found was earlier the bjp would criticize the congress for being pseudo-secular
#
By which you would assume that if that is a criticism then they are criticizing the congress for not being truly truly secular
#
But being pseudo-secular, but how do you criticize?
#
People for being both pseudo-secular and secular as if both things are bad
#
Yeah, that the pseudo-secular debate is gone now the one thing to be said about hindutva
#
I think that it is honest
#
And doesn't hide in the way that congress secularism did
#
In madhya pradesh in congress run or madhya pradesh. You could be charged under the nsa for
#
The allegation of cow slaughter. So it's remarkable that they've just yanked the polity
#
So quickly and and so far
#
That these things have become meaningless, you know pseudo-secular
#
But it is certainly true that in terms of terminology the
#
The bjp doesn't back away from owning any of the things that you might accuse it of being
#
They will only justify it right and many of saavarkar's intellectual influences or political influences rather
#
You know as various people have pointed out came from europe from the fascists from mussellini and from hitler
#
So almost as he was at pains to make the case that hinduism was something very small and hindutva was
#
Broader than that what it seems was that it's the other way around hindutva was a subset where he used ideas in hinduism
#
Propagate a philosophy which wasn't really indian to begin with which was actually imported from there. No, it's very true. Very true
#
So he's writing in the period just after the the unification of amitrili and he names
#
I think either madzini or garibaldi or or maybe both
#
Those that have been sent down the edges he's writing about something new he's a subject
#
Raj system with almost no power
#
Sidelined and marginalized, but a smart man and he's trying to make sense of the world
#
And he's trying to do it in a way that gives himself respect and the and the community and the people and the nation that he comes from
#
Or respect, but he does it in a way that sort of ultimately damages that same nation
#
Moving on from saavarkar now to golwalkar. Tell me a little bit about golwalkar. He's the second
#
He's the second sarasanga chalak of the rss which is formed in 1925
#
And who dies in 1940 and it is in the kind of mystical tradition
#
Which the muslims also have, you know apiro murshid
#
Which is what they call it you you tend to to anoint your
#
And the story is that golwalkar who was fairly young
#
Had translated a work into aminglish. He was reasonably
#
Bilingual. I have no record or I have no access to his language in somebody
#
It seems like he knew a fair bit of english
#
And he translates this work, which is titled we or our nationhood defined
#
Um, and that brings him into prominence for some reason. I don't know what what it is and on dying
#
To the surprise of many
#
He is made the head of the rss on the dying of the first head so this is 1940
#
Then he goes through partition. He's a fairly young man. Then he's not he's not particularly old
#
He is just in his 13 his late 30s
#
Uh, and he dies in 73 so he's headed the rss from a period
#
Which was before independence through the violence of partition
#
china and with pakistan
#
And of course the partition of pakistan later in 71 72 and then he dies the year after that. So he's seen a fair bit
#
Actually makes it a national organization. He's able to
#
reduce the idea of the shakha
#
Down to a simple form very basic activity
#
raising the flag wearing shorts if you have the shorts coming and doing
#
Your your prayers and playing kabaddi playing games with sticks and you go back after that. There's nothing else
#
There's no there's no sort of intellectual content
#
But he's figured out that that's this is an easy thing to replicate and it's true
#
It's the most it's the largest non-governmental organization in the world
#
It's the most powerful non-governmental organization or at least one of them in
#
the democratic world, I think the power that people that people ascribe to things like
#
The nra in the us the rss is much more powerful than any of those groups
#
I think that's his doing he he takes the idea of the individual marathi brahmin
#
Take up this work in parts of the country whose language he doesn't speak gujarat
#
Sets up shop there in one room doesn't marry gives himself up to this work. What is this work conducting the shakha?
#
in the morning and then
#
For the rest of the day doing work over a which is that they wish to do but making a life out of this very few
#
People can do this. They still do it. You can you have people from the rss that run
#
Across the adivasi belt where they're bringing people out of what they think as being a manimism and into a more
#
So he formulates this sort of easily replicable model and he does it so very soon
#
You've got hundreds of the shakha's opening all over the country
#
Ten years after he takes over the rss. We have a constitution
#
Two years after that, we have the first election
#
And the janasang is formed. So then he supplies material to the party in terms of carder in terms of so
#
People who can stand vajpayee is one
#
Madhwani is another who come out of that. Shekhar is a third
#
all of this running the shakha's
#
the organization is continuously built and built to
#
To the end that he thought it was right. I think the the shakha should be seen in a particular light
#
Um exercises that require training with lattes who are they training to fight?
#
Against are they going to fight the chinese at the border? No, that's not they
#
They're going to fight other indians. That's what the shakha does in a riot
#
The shakha is the locus of the violence
#
It's the one place where the neighborhood
#
Young men who've trained in the physical stuff who know one another and can bond and can trust one another
#
A collective action that the individual so-called cowardly hindu doesn't
#
And he does a very good job of it
#
the rss can overwhelm the security apparatus of the average indian city very easily as we've seen in
#
gujarat, so all the memes that are floating around after
#
Uh pulwama that you know
#
The rss should send people with their sticks to fight at the border actually misplaced because the idea is not that they're going to fight
#
Pakistan no, no, they're not. Yeah well to them. I think pakistan is just an extension of the indian muslim
#
I don't think they see it in a way that
#
Most other indians would you would see it as a foreign country
#
You wouldn't I mean you would you would sense some sort of brotherhood in terms of the food being the same and the music being
#
The same and you know for the sound of it, but it's it's as different to somebody from gujarat as
#
Tamilnadu would be or whatever. It's it's a different place and it is separated also by government
#
So it would be properly foreign for them. It's not that way. I think they would see the muslim in gulbarga
#
As being identical to the one in lahore. It's the same thing
#
It's yours. You're on my land and you don't belong in my country
#
If you do belong it is on the sufferance. I think that is that that they would say that that okay. It's fine, but
#
Whoever we is has a privilege
#
And rights that you want and the way you describe it
#
It sounds almost that golwalkar was a management and strategic genius of sorts that he figured out that this was a way to grow the organization
#
And build feeling of community and brotherhood and all of those things
#
But did these things just happen or did he actually plan them that way? I mean, i'm not sure what the
#
pre golwalkar rss looked like uh, mr. Modi in his very fawning, uh
#
a biographical sketch of golwalkar
#
Interview that golwalkar has with somebody and that and the person says why are you just calling people over and doing this?
#
you know simple childish stuff like playing games and all and golwalkar says to him that we are
#
Masters of the science of organization he uses the words in
#
English according to mr. Modi
#
And I think that certainly mr. Modi sees him in that light that he's somebody who was able to create
#
That especially in urban india was easy to replicate and which he did replicate to be fair
#
The expansion of the rss from being hundreds across india to being in the tens of thousands
#
Happened much after his death it happened in the the 80s and 90s and despite all this like you said that there wasn't much
#
Intellectual content coming from golwalkar like in your notes
#
There's a line i'll quote on golwalkar which you say where you say
#
quote he sets great store by feeling an emotion because thinking takes away from the strong sense of identity and
#
Communitarianism that is his passion stop quote. Yeah, there is no so if you think of an
#
Ideology, it would be a set of rules or principles that have something basic that is underlying that you're trying to reach at something
#
That is that is large. There's nothing like that in the writing certainly of golwalkar and in none of the hindutva
#
Am ideologues, will you find anything that even approaches an ideology? It's quite basic
#
they will talk very lightly of
#
Upadhyay says that there are that
#
modern western systems and he says that the three main ones are
#
nationalism democracy and socialism
#
Um, not whole and people in the west feel insecure because of this lack of
#
sort of wholesomeness and he says the reason is that they are not able to satisfy the four aspects of
#
Human being and he says that these four
#
Aspects are body mind intellect and soul
#
How mind is different from the intellect? He doesn't explain and what soul is he doesn't say?
#
Golwalkar talks about the fact that okay. We are quite bad at science
#
fine, but hindus are masters of the science of spirit
#
But what does that mean? What does spirit mean? Does he mean it in the sense of sort of?
#
Upadhyay, do they both mean it in the sense of the transmigration of souls and things like that?
#
You don't know because they don't really
#
Expand they just assume that the reader will nod his head and say oh, yeah, you know
#
There are four parts to the human being body mind intellect and soul and that hindus are the
#
They're the masters of the science of spirit. And and what is the justification that golwalkar gives for this? He says that well
#
And and you know ammah ammah the only met
#
Gabriel it is the hindu saints that actually saw god and
#
Witnessed god and knew about his attributes
#
But from there to have a like like an objective discussion is not easy
#
Because you're talking to somebody who believes in that sort of thing
#
So it's it's quite vacuous in many ways, you know
#
It's it's quite disappointing because if you see some of the more
#
Militaristic stuff that that the other faiths have done
#
Intellectual rigor there. There is none here. There is it's
#
Nothing that there's a lot of what seems to be the waffling you find in self-help books
#
and and also a lot of sort of the the way he
#
Us golwalkar seems to rouse his followers is not by talking about hindutva itself
#
But by the threat that it faces from outside for example, yeah, tell me a bit about that
#
Well thread mostly inside so the fact is that that that the enemy is already within us
#
So I think that is the one thing that is constant to all of these people
#
Subject that the the enemy is primarily the indian muslim who needs to be fixed needs to be put in their place
#
But there's too many of them. We don't know what to do with them, but we will show that we are not going to
#
Be the kind of nation we were a thousand years ago that we were the embodiment of the ideal spirit
#
You know caste was very good and we had these great kings and then these people came and they conquered us the idea of
#
Over a thousand years runs very strongly through this. It's there is a strong sense of belief that
#
in some way what modi represents today is
#
the breaking out from that slavery both
#
The period of direct rule by foreigners and by those that they left behind
#
And this is again a question I was saving for the end, but i'll since it's come up now
#
I'll ask it anyway and something I wonder about which is that there is a sense of grievance and the humiliation of the past
#
And so on and so forth and some of it isn't even true. It's it's just
#
Made up, but the point is that this is a sort of history that these guys invoke to rouse people to passion
#
but the common person like
#
In the india that you are where hindus are the majority and brahmins, especially have are incredibly
#
Where do they get this historic sense of humiliation from it's not that they live amid history and amid the ruins or anything like that
#
You know, why does it rouse them to such passion that a temple was broken so many years ago or
#
You know the muslims ruled us in centuries of which there is really no sign today
#
some would say that this is the narrative that the british
#
constructed and left behind that the
#
The first schools in gujarat only come in the 1850s. Uh
#
So elphinstone builds them, uh, which is only what a hundred and seventy years ago, right?
#
So before that you don't have any form of organized
#
So when do you come into group think when do you have a sense of your nationhood?
#
as a gujrati i'd say that my own sense of bigotry and the prejudice comes out of
#
of four volumes written by a k.m munci on somnath and
#
Even though you might not know much about histories particularly
#
In the sense of dates and such things you will have had a sense of somnath in gujarat
#
purely through these four fairly recent
#
and I think that a lot of it might be that that
#
A the fact that it's a fairly recently educated nation
#
At the turn of the 20th century four percent of india was illiterate. I mean, it's it's quite remarkable to think of that
#
It's it's not that long ago
#
119 years and secondly that you're living cheek by jowl with a very large community
#
Pillars of your own faith, you know vegetarianism or whatever else. So yeah, it's
#
But I don't know for sure
#
I haven't thought about that. This is the first time that i'm actually
#
Confronted why do they feel this? I I really don't know because it also strikes me that you know
#
A lot of people who are born hindu aren't reading these books. For example, the ones you pointed about somnath
#
They're not surrounded by signs of that humiliation
#
So part of the reason that these histories persist or these grievances persist
#
must be not only because it they're being brainwashed into it, but because
#
They need these to validate something else
#
Maybe there's an innate bigotry and they need to build this backstory to validate that is that possible?
#
I know for sure that the
#
To the monopolization of power by the hindus under congress is not seen
#
Sympathetically at all by most hindus. So for us when we are
#
A hindutva minded then the congress got conned or they were part of the game itself, but the idea that there was a legitimate claim
#
To a share in power is not seen sympathetically today. You could give data to the average indian
#
Middle-class person and say that
#
Who was elected to the loksaba?
#
Came in 1985 and this is a community that has produced premji that has produced khuraki wala that has produced jinnah
#
Ahmed patel last one in 85 not a single person from the
#
Today has no muslim in the loksaba
#
The bjp of the 1100 or 1200
#
Legislators they have nationally have four muslims
#
Does this make people uncomfortable I I would say no they're okay with it but in such a society
#
Easy to see why you can demonize
#
And feel no sympathy for it and have no empathy for the fact that you've
#
Marginalized them totally from power and any demand that they might make to share power
#
Would be seen in negative terms, you know that you're trying to break up my country or like whatever else
#
I think there is a so I don't know what the
#
What the wellspring is where it comes from for people in the 20s, but certainly after 47
#
Partition would be one great trigger
#
for this hatred and you know a tangential question here, which is that
#
That if we look at all the other parties like the congress and so on it's easy to say that they are basically election winning machines and
#
There's no core philosophy to them and at least when it comes to the bjp
#
There is some kind of however badly formulated. There's there are some core philosophical beliefs, but where um,
#
Seems to come under challenge is when you look at how they won 2014 for example
#
Someone I had on my show a few months ago was prashan jahu wrote the book about how the bjp won
#
And he points out about how amit shah went along building those sort of caste coalitions
#
And so very early on in up for example, they figure out okay
#
We are not getting the muslim vote
#
So obviously they will nominate someone there, but then among the obc's they know that there are
#
Resentments among the non-yadav obc's so they bring them in among the non-jat of dalits against mayawati
#
So they try to bring them into the fold and he tries to bring a coalition like that
#
And at a certain point jai in his book quotes the dalit scholar as saying that bjp in some places is actually the dalit party
#
Because they're not only getting dalit office bearers, but they're building dalit temples and so on and actually investing
#
Uh in the community and my question here is not of how genuine that is or whatever is obviously driven by political imperatives
#
But then with the bjp there is again
#
And i'm just thinking aloud that there is then that dissonance between what seems to be a guiding philosophy
#
Which is not an inclusive guiding philosophy on one hand and on the other hand the imperatives of winning elections
#
Which typically would make parties sociopathic in the sense that they don't really then have any core beliefs
#
They'll just do whatever it takes to win votes the the the sort of
#
Some interesting thing about the bjp's attitude to caste is that it has not
#
Allowed to any large extent what its ideologues have written
#
Um, as long as you are vaguely okay with the fact that they felt that caste was a good thing and so on
#
It doesn't really matter that you are not yourself a brahmin
#
You can become the leader of india if you're not a brahmin, but you have to be brahminical. I think that's what
#
The the rules say so so mr
#
Modi comes from a community that is a meat-eating but then sabarkar and gold worker would use that to say that see inclusive
#
We mean hinduism is a way of life and notice indeed. Yeah
#
that they have that space they also have
#
There is a brotherhood there is a sense that when two
#
Two swayam sevaks meet that there is a shared idea of this country. There is a shared idea of who the enemy is
#
There's a shared idea of what what the problems are
#
Um, and I think that has held them together and given them a kind of network which uh, no other party has
#
and no other party can have
#
Abiradari networks that that most parties run on in the north
#
For example, the bjp has a kind of underlying layer, especially in towns and cities which holds the whole project together
#
Going back to golwalkar now, you know as you pointed out a few years after he becomes the head of the rss
#
You have partition and all of that and I noticed one interesting fact about golwalkar was that he used to make sanskrit the national language
#
Much as you know urdu became the national language there to what extent is the pakistan project actually a model or an inspiration?
#
Leading thinkers to to do a hindu version of that
#
Do a hindu version of that?
#
Uh pakistan's origins are fairly
#
From the modernist point of view. They are not a manti diluvian. So the person who coined the word pakistan was in london
#
Allama iqbal who thought of this kind of utopia in northwest india where people would um reformulate
#
Of islam and make it modern was not
#
A traditionalist at all. So you would think of them as being extreme
#
They were very very advanced in the way that they were thinking that's not
#
the hindutva project the the
#
Hindutva project is most comfortable
#
Looking back rather than looking in front
#
that the stronger emotions are about the the defeats of the past and
#
And so on so I don't know
#
Uh, whether it was a model. I do know that he wanted sanskrit in some sense to be elevated
#
But he also felt that till such time as everybody learned it. It was okay to use hindi
#
then of course it ran into trouble because of the revolution in the south and
#
the rebellion I should say and uh, and then he he would have
#
You know withdrawn that the avihamans
#
But for most of the 60s and 70s the rss had very little power
#
the previous version of the bjp had about two and a half percent of the vote in
#
Uh gujarat for most of the 70s till till babri happens. They are they are a very marginal power
#
So even though they might have felt it strongly
#
and even if they might have
#
Externalized things like we should make sanskrit the language of the country. They had very little
#
power or means to be able to
#
Uh, either amplify their view or certainly to be able to impose it
#
So was babri something that was inevitable as a trigger of a change that was coming or was it?
#
An episode that just happened to make this whole thing explode and it won't have otherwise. I would recommend a book
#
Written by two men called both called jha. I think uh to your listeners on the babri issue
#
Uh, it was festering. So it its history predates of independence the
#
uh controversy, uh, and that it's given fresh life in the 80s, but I believe that hindutva would have found
#
Its sureness of foot elsewhere if it had not been for babri
#
Babri was very important. It gave them a momentum as a
#
Political party which they would never have been able to find, you know, otherwise
#
but we should also remember that the
#
A momentum and the expansion of the party happens primarily also through civic violence
#
Participates in some way in the murder of the muslims of this country. It is able to expand
#
itself in in the recent
#
Phase the the full-blown
#
You know, uh riot has been replaced with a series of sort of episodes
#
you know things like uh
#
It is not just the symbolic aspect of the movement. I think the campaign is also built on mobilizing people
#
Validating the violence that they that they perpetrate and they have no shame in being able to accept that fact
#
I've taken up a lot of your time
#
So I think we'll skip talking about upadaya and i'll just recommend my listeners to read your book when it comes out
#
out but some few a few broader questions now the term hindu rashtra obviously as you pointed out was
#
Coined by hektevar like he met savarkar in 25 and later that he formed the rss and instead of hindutva
#
He used the term hindu rashtra. I mean
#
Whether he coined it or not
#
Now we are talking about the hindu rashtra today and you're right writing this book because of political events
#
What has happened since 2014 and the the the new dominance of the bjp sort of as a central pole of indian politics
#
But my question is does the hindu rashtra exist outside of politics?
#
Is it primarily a culture thing and is the politics just one necessary, you know one inevitable outcrop of that?
#
I think politics amplifies it a lot. It does exist outside of politics
#
Maybe it's not as pronounced as it is. Maybe if it were not
#
Molested by a politics it would remain
#
Domine dormant it it does exist. It is there. I think that the idea
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If it were not it would not be the case that we are the only country in south asia
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That is not majoritarian by law or has tried to be at some point
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It is there is something about this part of the world
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where if you where might is right if there's more of you than
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The other or the people that you think of as being the other but also the fact that we didn't give into
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Majoritarianism could be a combination of circumstance that we had the people we had framing the constitution and inertia
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Maybe yeah, that's a good that's a good explanation
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But I think that we would struggle even more than the muslims of pakistan in trying to find what that
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A projection of faith onto laws it would be very difficult
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So i'll ask you to expand on that now you said at the start of the episode that there can be no such thing as a hindu
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To a constitution. Why you know after?
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Ram comes back from ayodhya
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There there is that there is
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A turmoil in the court and there is a brahmin who comes to him with his son who's dead
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It turns and this this son is flawless. He's not done a thing wrong in his life. He's i'm only 14
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and the court tries to figure out why he's died and the
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The high priests say that it's because of an evil in the world. And what is this evil? It is that a shudra
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is performing penance by trying to
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Uh can't be the word read because he can't read but he's speaking out words from the veda, which he's not supposed to
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Ram goes and beheads him
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This is the the name of the shudra is the shambuka. This is in the valmika namayan. That's what the
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Faith the basis of the faith is cast
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You might say no it is an innovation
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it's not the case, but if you
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Open your eyes and look at the society
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The distinction between dalit and brahmin is quite clear
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The access is quite clear the history of india the modern history of india in terms of access to temples is not that old
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What is it that we use from that faith to be able to make india a proper hindu rastra
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We can discriminate against minorities. That's what most of these states in south asia have sort of ended up doing
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But what part of the faith can we actually implement to make it a hindu rastra for hindus?
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You can you can have a hindu rastra for muslims. You know, you can't you can't stand for
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PM pakistan discriminated through law. We've done it through a practice
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It's impossible to conceive of a muslim becoming the p.m. Of this country
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Maybe in a coalition, but even that would be difficult
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What part of the hindu faith can we reduce?
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And say that this is something that is applicable to modernity that's missing right now that will make us more pious
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I think that fundamentally that is the question
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For the pakistanis it became things like riba. So jesus
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says that he chucks the
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The money changers they're called out of the temple and usury becomes a bad word in
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Asymmetric faiths. So for centuries the jews have
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On access to capital. They are the only ones who can charge you no interest
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Islam is much closer to judaism than it is to a christianity and it brings it to a
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Christianity and it brings back indeed into the
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Semitic faiths the ideas of circumcision and you know pork and things like that
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From a christianity they take the idea that usury is a sin
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The problem is that there's no modern banking system in the seventh century
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But all three of pakistan's constitutions have has the same writing that the state shall try to eliminate riba
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So what happens is that the supreme court
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Abolished interest it passed an order saying interest henceforth is you know abolished but the modern economy will collapse
#
There is no there is no replacement. What is the justification that if we do this?
#
Barkat we'll get the blessings from god because we are doing this pious thing. That's not how modern states work
#
Uh pakistan there are five pillars of islam
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Uh shahada som sala zakat haj
#
Let's take fasting in dubai like in many of the gulf states in ramzan
#
They shut the you know restaurants have to be shut in the period of ramzan in you know till till dusk
#
And that that maybe makes the state a little more pious. You can actually implement that
#
You're trying to enforce your faith onto law. That's one way of doing it
#
You can do that with pakistan try to do that with zakat. So that is alms, uh, or or some or attacks
#
So under zia what they say is okay on the first of ramzan
#
We will deduct two and a half percent from all the bank deposits that are there
#
So because the shia have their own clergy and they give their own money to them and so on
#
What started happening was sunni started declaring themselves. She had not have the money deducted from their
#
Uh accounts and then it there to water down that which shows humans will game anything even religion indeed
#
i'm saying it's not possible to take a set of
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philosophical ideas constructs precepts faith belief type thing and apply it to the modern world in the
#
Misplaced thinking that this will in some way improve your country and therefore hindu rastra for it to become hindu and non-discriminatory
#
I can completely understand the fact that when we say hindu rastra, we'll say we'll kick the muslims out
#
They can go to pakistan. They can't eat beef. They have to give us their mosque
#
They have to give us their a constitutional
#
Autonomy in kashmir. They have to surrender their personal law. All that is fine
#
What does hindu rastra offer hindus? I think that is the problem
#
The question is that it doesn't have anything inside the faith that can be imposed
#
And that's a good thing in the way that islam was able to impose say prayer or fasting or you know
#
the abolition of interest
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That's what makes it impossible, but that also
#
Brings the focus entirely onto minorities and discrimination. The only way that hindutva can express itself is in negative terms
#
It cannot express itself in positive terms the three primary demands of
#
of a political hindutva is you know
#
surrender your personal law surrender your
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constitutional autonomy in
#
Kashmir there is there is nothing positive that it demands that will create
#
A new or a vibrant nation and yet it has such momentum in our electoral politics and in our culture
#
So is it that people are then so full of hate and bigotry that this is so appealing to them?
#
I think to be well two things I think that
#
We should examine what you've just said
#
If you feel disturbed and I feel disturbed and many of us feel disturbed with the way that
#
The the the beef lynching is a new phenomenon. We have introduced it to our to our country. It didn't exist
#
Just like the blasphemy lynchings did not exist in Pakistan until the law came to be
#
um, haryana did not act on the law in late 2014 in uh,
#
2015 and the pm had not
#
Expressed himself strongly. We did not have the phenomenon of
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The issue of beef this is new
#
We have gifted it to ourselves and I think that we should ask ourselves
#
Why don't more indians recoil from this?
#
I don't know the answer to it
#
but having said that it is also the case that the bjp is a normal political party in india with a base that
#
Is based on caste uh and based on divisions at the local level and not particularly on any kind of you know ideology
#
So i'm again thinking aloud here
#
Trying to think about possibilities for why we don't recoil from this
#
And one thing that i've kind of believed is that look all of us contain multitudes and therefore just as
#
As the hindu guy who's a bigot and who supports this narrative and who you know
#
Wants to see a hindu rashtra, but there are other facets of him beyond this bigotry
#
He also wants to be prosperous. He will also want to go to a concert
#
He also wants to do whatever and there just aren't enough narratives
#
Appealing to the better angels of the nature
#
As you might say so is it then the case that this is?
#
Is also a cultural failure on the part of others to create those narratives and a political failure on the part of other political
#
Parties to come up with appealing narratives that can counter the hindu narrative
#
I don't know, but I think that you are onto something when you say
#
What you just did that there is an absence of narrative
#
To the side of the the kind of faith-based hate-based stuff that is
#
Appealing to large numbers of people. I I certainly don't see it. Maybe it's there and I don't see it
#
You know, you could be you could be in india and be reading the newspaper and not seeing many things, you know
#
And that's normally it's a large. It's a very large place
#
But to the extent that there is a non-hate based narrative even that seems to me to be controlled by the bjp the idea of
#
modernity through nationalism the idea of non-dynastic politics the idea of
#
of honesty in politics, you know a lot of that seems to be owned by
#
the bjp, especially since uh modi, uh, and
#
It might well be that it's a failure
#
of the other side to put forward something that is
#
Appealing but but I find it disturbing that more people are not
#
Upset by the morning newspaper. It seems to me to be strange
#
On that note i've i've taken enough of your time. I'll ask you one final question, which I usually ask my guests on whatever the
#
Subject we're talking about is
#
Uh, which is I ask them what makes them hope and what makes them despair, but i'll be a little more specific
#
I'll say that number one. What is at stake in these elections and number two
#
Uh within a 10-year window of time the next 10 years
#
What is your best case scenario for india and what is your worst case scenario?
#
Worst case scenario, you know, there's this there's this funny line. There's this old
#
Who's who's asked, you know, okay
#
Our fear is not that we will deteriorate into something worse
#
But the fact that we are okay with how bad it is now
#
Um that what has been normalized now would be the worst case scenario indeed indeed
#
This is a weird country. You've got violence in kashmir including the deaths of the armed forces
#
Deterrence or to claim a hard military posture
#
in the face of data to me is
#
You slapped me and I kicked you
#
But the damage here done to me and my own is real
#
But it doesn't seem to really affect the narrative
#
In the larger media space we are seen as being doing some some great things, you know, so
#
It's bad enough as it is. I hope it doesn't get worse. I think we have enough within
#
Uh the within our societies and I think that we have more than one
#
to offer resistance, I don't think that we are all the same as
#
A gujarat. I think gujarat is special
#
In many ways in really bad ones
#
But I don't think that the rest of the country is like that at all
#
So what makes you despair is that it's more of the same
#
Yeah, I think it's not going away. I think that we have to live with this for a very long time
#
It doesn't matter who wins
#
in 2019 I think the idea that uh, we have normalized violence against uh,
#
individuals who are vulnerable
#
The idea that we can marginalize people entirely
#
A community which has what a hundred and say 60 70 million people
#
Out of our legislatures and it's okay
#
Uh, to me that is unacceptable, but it seems to be fine for for
#
Um, most of us and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon
#
On that hopeful note akar. Thanks so much for coming on the scene. You were really insightful. I learned a lot
#
If you enjoyed listening to the show
#
Do go directly to the source and read the books akar and I spoke about by saavarkar golwalkar and dindya lupadhyay
#
Which are linked from the show notes
#
Both akar and I could be biased against hindutva. So please do make up your own mind
#
You can follow akar's columns online by putting a google alert for him or just searching for his name on google news
#
He isn't too active on social media, which is a smart decision
#
You can follow me on twitter at amit varma
#
The scene in the unseen is supported by the takshashila institution an independent center for research and education and public policy
#
You can browse all our past episodes at scene unseen dot i n and think prahgati.com. Thank you for listening
#
Hey, this is shiladitya and i'm ahmed doshi and we host shunya one
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