#
Before we move on with this episode of The Scene in the Unseen, do check out another
#
awesome podcast from IVM Podcast, Cyrus Says, hosted by my old buddy Cyrus Brocha.
#
The 2019 general elections in India just got over and it's fair to ask what exactly happened
#
The bare facts are clear, Narendra Modi and the BJP won a resounding majority.
#
But try to look deep into why this happened and the picture becomes much more complex.
#
One narrative is that India is illiberal and bigoted and the bigots voted for Modi.
#
Other narratives though are less condescending and less keen to blame voters.
#
It is clear that many voters voted for Modi because they felt the BJP had improved the
#
last mile delivery of welfare schemes in the last five years.
#
There is a muscular nationalism narrative as well, aided by Pulwama and Balakot.
#
There is the aspirational narrative that Modi embodied of the chaiwala who rose to BPM.
#
There is anger at the sanctimonious elites, a narrative that Modi milked with all his
#
talk of Lutyens, Delhi and Khan market liberals.
#
And there were many local narratives such as in Bengal where there was widespread anger
#
at Mamata Banerjee for a variety of, again, complex reasons.
#
So a simple narrative is hard to come by and if our country had a profile page on Facebook,
#
its relationship status would undoubtedly read, it's complicated.
#
Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Padma.
#
Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
#
Sadanand Dhumay is an old friend of mine and a columnist I've always enjoyed reading.
#
And when I saw on social media that he happened to be in India, I wrote to him to ask if he'd
#
be passing through Mumbai and would like to be a guest on my podcast.
#
Well, we are recording this on Sunday, May 26th and it turned out that he was passing
#
One flight landed here at 5.35 in the evening and another takes off in a few hours time,
#
giving him a narrow window in which he said he'd be happy to record with me.
#
So my partners at IVM and I planned a crafty operation.
#
We opened up a studio, even though it was a Sunday, and the plan was that I would head
#
on over to the airport with my producer Abbas.
#
We'd pick up Sadanand to save the time of his getting an Uber, etc. and we would speak
#
Now, if an action film is ever made on my life, let me tell you that the car chase scene
#
No one was chasing us today, but we were racing against time and no one races in Mumbai better
#
I'm the greatest driver in the history of Mumbai and I overtook a plane that was about
#
to take off, hit the highway, changed lanes furiously, took unknown shortcuts and bypasses
#
that even locals don't know about and got to the studio in record time.
#
We even encountered a cow in the middle of the road.
#
And to avoid the cow, I was going at 100 miles an hour, I used a nearby handcart as a ramp
#
to take my car up in the air and over the cow, determined that Sadanand Abbas and I
#
may expire, but the cow should not perspire.
#
We received the good karma for our action immediately and survived the landing.
#
And here we are now, luxuriating in the elite air conditioning of the finest recording studio
#
Before we begin our conversation though, I think we need a break to catch our breath.
#
This episode of The Scene and the Unseen is brought to you by Storytel.
#
It's an audiobook platform which you can listen to on your Android or iOS app.
#
They have thousands of audiobooks that you can listen to on your mobile, including hundreds
#
in local languages like Hindi and Marathi.
#
An unlimited monthly subscription costs only Rs 2.99 per month.
#
And you can also get a 30-day free trial if you hop on over to sroydytel.com slash IBM.
#
I actually use Storytel myself regularly, so as long as I sponsor this show, I'm going
#
to recommend one book a week that I love.
#
The book I want to recommend today is Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker.
#
Steven was also a guest on my show in episode 99, and the book we spoke about in that episode
#
And remember, you get a 30-day free trial only at sroytel.com slash IBM.
#
Sadanand, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
Now that you've got here safely.
#
Before we start talking about the 2019 elections, tell me a little bit more about yourself.
#
You know, all my listeners presumably know that, you know, you work at the American Enterprise
#
You write columns for the World Street Journal.
#
But how did you get here?
#
What sort of your journey, and who were your formative intellectual influences?
#
So you know, I wear a couple of hats.
#
My main hat is at the American Enterprise Institute, as you said, where I'm the South
#
I cover this part of the world.
#
I look at economic policy, foreign policy.
#
And then I also wear two hats as a columnist.
#
I've had a column with the Wall Street Journal now since 2010.
#
That is twice a month, and twice a month I look at—I try to keep it news based, so
#
I focus on what I think is the most important thing that's happened in this part of the
#
world over the past two weeks.
#
And then every four weeks, I also write a column for the Times of India.
#
And that tends to be focused much more on domestic Indian politics.
#
So it's kind of a—you know, it's a bit of a paradox.
#
I started out as a journalist.
#
So now I'm not sort of—I'm still kind of a journalist, though.
#
I'm on the opinion side, not on the news side.
#
I started out as a journalist working for a magazine called the Far Eastern Economic
#
Review, which doesn't exist anymore, sadly.
#
And the story really begins quite by accident.
#
You know, I might be one of the few columnists out there who owes his career to a nuclear
#
test because in 1998, I was in Princeton, I was studying public policy, and we had an
#
internship program that essentially allowed us to go anywhere, and Princeton would pick
#
up the bill, and I chose—this is between my first year and the second year of my MPA—and
#
I chose to come to Delhi.
#
And I started out working for—spending my time at a TV channel, but the TV channel I
#
was at was going through really bad times, and so I found that really I had nothing to
#
They were just sort of in some kind of crisis.
#
And so I was twiddling my thumbs, and it just so happened that I knew someone who worked
#
for this magazine called the Far Eastern Economic Review, and I said, well, you know, why don't
#
I didn't have anything in mind.
#
It was just like just to meet someone.
#
Turns out that this person who was the bureau chief in India had planned a long vacation
#
to France, had sort of a two-and-a-half-month vacation planned, and wrote to the editors
#
and said that, look, you know, I've got this guy who's an intern, he's a grad student
#
It's just good to have somebody around in the office while I'm away in France.
#
That was the summer that India tested nuclear weapons, and I was in the office, and it turned
#
out that the Far Eastern Economic Review got the first interview with Strobe Talbot, who
#
was then the deputy secretary of state and leading the Clinton administration's talks
#
with the Indian government.
#
And so I was sitting in the office, and I sent an honest but carefully crafted fax to
#
Just One Singh's office, where I said factually that I was writing for the Far Eastern Economic
#
I was visiting from the United States, and our magazine had just done an interview with
#
Strobe Talbot, and would he be interested in telling us about the Indian side of the
#
And at this point, Just One Singh had not spoken to anyone.
#
And so I walk into his office, and I'm wearing these sandals, and I walk in, and he sort
#
of looks at me, and I look way too young to be the person he would be talking to.
#
And he said, well, tell me about yourself.
#
What are you doing over here?
#
And I told him, well, actually, I'm the intern.
#
I'm just visiting from Princeton.
#
But to his credit, he didn't turn me out.
#
It was a bit of a scoop at the time.
#
And then from there, I just spent the next several weeks journeying out stories, because
#
this is sort of heaven for me.
#
I would have paid them to be doing what I was doing.
#
And I went back to Princeton after that.
#
And when it was time to graduate, someone from a magazine made me an offer.
#
And I wrote to the editors of the review asking for a recommendation, because I spent the
#
And instead, I was given a job offer, and I became the India bureau chief of the Far
#
Eastern Economic Review a year after I'd been the intern.
#
And in those days, it kind of tells you how time, how Asia has changed.
#
But in those days for us, Southeast Asia was much, much more important than India.
#
It was just the bigger story.
#
And so I was cranking out stories.
#
I had a story, sometimes two stories every week.
#
It was a weekly magazine.
#
And my editors in Hong Kong said that you're incredibly productive, and we don't want to
#
waste you in India, because really, who cares about the India story, why don't we send you
#
to someplace in Southeast Asia, or where would you like to go?
#
And I picked Indonesia, because for two reasons.
#
One, I'd lived there as a child.
#
And secondly, as an Indian, I had a bit of this big country bias.
#
So it's just sort of hard for me to get extremely enthusiastic about Malaysia or Thailand or
#
Whereas Indonesia was a serious country, more than 200 million people and so on.
#
So I ended up in Indonesia for four years.
#
I was there during the Bali bombings of 2002.
#
And I ended up writing a book about the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia.
#
And then for a while, after the book, I was just freelancing, doing my own thing.
#
And again, just by accident, I wrote something in the Wall Street Journal.
#
I happened to be in New York the day that Faisal Shahzad tried to blow up Times Square,
#
and it didn't work out.
#
And I wrote a piece the next day about how the reason why, historical reasons, Pakistan,
#
It's no longer true today, Pakistan produced such a large proportion of the world's jihadists.
#
And this ended up being blogged about on AEI's website.
#
One thing led to the other.
#
I went there for lunch just to meet some people.
#
I didn't, again, didn't have any idea that there was a job in the works.
#
And by the end of the lunch, I was offered a position as their South Asia scholar.
#
And so that's sort of been the...
#
I mean, it's been a series of accidents.
#
I still sort of think of myself in many ways as a reporter.
#
And in many ways, Columbia Journalism School was as important to me, as formative to me
#
as Princeton and public policy.
#
And Princeton and the public policy school was all about getting a grounding in macroeconomics
#
and microeconomics and international relations and so on, standard neoliberal dogma.
#
But the journalism school was really about...
#
That was in some ways, that was a very artisanal, it was about craft.
#
And I cared a lot about that.
#
And at the time when I went to journalism school, that's what I was really interested
#
And if I hadn't gone to policy school, I would probably have gone to an MFA and I would have
#
I didn't start out necessarily with a wonkish bent, but then it was just sort of one thing
#
led to the other and that's how it is.
#
In fact, we first met when your book, My Friend the Fanatic, launched in India.
#
If you remember, I did the Bombay launch where we had a panel discussion about it, panel
#
as in me interviewing you.
#
So this is like a revisitation.
#
So what were kind of your...
#
Through this period, you went to both Columbia, did journalism, you did public policy in Princeton.
#
What were your formative intellectual influences?
#
Have you changed along the way?
#
One question I ask a lot of my guests is, can you name a book or maybe multiple books
#
that changed the way you think about the world?
#
And would it be easy for you to pinpoint that?
#
Maybe it's been because I've been spending too much time in TV studios right now.
#
It wouldn't be easy for me to pinpoint one or two books in particular.
#
I would say that in many ways, what was formative to me was more than anything else, my work
#
And I found the Indonesia experience was extremely important for me because I had...
#
Like many Indians who had studied in the United States, I had not been surprised by the disparity
#
in wealth and development.
#
That's what you expect when you go from Delhi to New York.
#
And that was very normal.
#
And it was only when I moved to Indonesia, which was also a developing country, and I
#
saw just how much better Indonesia had done, talking about the late 1990s, in fact, I landed
#
in Indonesia in 2000, you sort of realize that even though Indonesia was in the midst
#
of the financial crisis, it still hadn't recovered from the 1997 Asian financial crisis three
#
years later, it had done so much better by its people.
#
And so a lot of my reading was around the East Asian miracle, around development, a
#
lot about politics in Southeast Asia, politics in Indonesia in particular.
#
So all of that was sort of part of it.
#
I wouldn't say any one particular writer from that period sort of stands out for me.
#
But certainly in terms of my experience, the travel and the experience of living in another
#
country and culture, immersing myself in it, and really having to report on it from day
#
one, which is what you do as a journalist, you're just thrown into the deep end and you
#
sort of start making sense of this.
#
That was extremely influential for me.
#
And what did you learn from your experiences there about what we were doing wrong?
#
What were they doing right?
#
What were we doing wrong?
#
What were the sort of directions in which we needed to go?
#
So if you think about it, Suharto and Indira Gandhi were almost exact contemporaries.
#
Indira Gandhi took power in 1966 and Suharto, after the bloody killings of the communists
#
in Indonesia, basically took power at the same time.
#
And the difference is that Indira Gandhi doubled down on state planning, socialism.
#
In fact, she deepened some of the errors that we had already made in the early years after
#
independence, whereas Suharto, with the Americans holding his hand, brought in some economists
#
Very similar to the Chilean story, right?
#
You had the Chicago boys in Chile, you had the Berkeley gang in Indonesia, and allowed
#
the market to play a greater role in the economy, rationalized economic decision making, allowed
#
the private sector to flourish.
#
And as a result, Indonesia really began to pull away.
#
And even today, so many years after we started our reform program here in India, it remains
#
a country which is the higher per capita income, higher human development indicators, and so
#
And it's not as though the Indonesian reform story has been perfect.
#
In many ways, it's had its share of flaws.
#
But the central difference between Indonesia and India was that by the 1970s, the Indonesians
#
had decided to trust, at least to a degree, the invisible hand of the market, whereas
#
through the 1970s, India was still trusting the heavy hand of the state.
#
And how relevant does this then become, for example, to how one looks at Narendra Modi,
#
for example, who we are discussing today, in the sense that there is one narrative arc
#
which talks about the rise of Hindutva right from the Jansang onwards, and the BJP getting
#
four seats in 1984, then the whole Ayodhya thing happening, and being the impetus for
#
their growth, and so on and so forth.
#
But at the same time, a lot of people also turned to the BJP, hopefully, because they
#
were so disheartened by the heavy hand of the state, which despite the partial liberalisation
#
of 1991, the Congress still seemed to believe in.
#
And in many ways, Vajpayee as Prime Minister did carry out a bunch of reforms and hold
#
out hope that India could move further in the direction.
#
And was that also then a parallel impetus behind the support that Modi got from a lot
#
of people despite the riots of 2002?
#
I'm not sure if I'd say it's a lot, right?
#
I mean, I would divide this, you know, between sort of elite opinion makers, people writing
#
in the pink pages, and your average guy on the street.
#
And at some level, that development story or the hope of development story does intersect.
#
But it was only a handful of commentators who essentially took the call on Modi and
#
said, here is the person who is most likely to pick up the mantle of the Vajpayee era
#
We'd seen them languish for 10 years under Manmohan Singh, despite Manmohan Singh's
#
own credentials as the finance minister who kickstarted liberalisation in 1991.
#
And so we had, you know, obviously, you know, we've talked about this before, you know,
#
there was a schism among those of us who have long argued for a greater role for the market
#
And some people felt that because of 2002 and because of the baggage that Modi carried,
#
he should never be allowed to, should never be supported for the top job.
#
That was, in fact, my position also until around the middle of 2013 when he became the
#
Once I sort of saw it mentally as a primary process, he was not the person I would have
#
liked to see win that primary, though I did think that his stewardship of Gujarat did
#
give him a claim to perhaps have an outside influence, outsize influence in running the
#
After 2013, when he became the candidate, I thought that this was the best bet.
#
He was the best bet for reform.
#
Now that was a sort of conversation that was being had, as I said, on the op-ed pages and
#
in television studios and so on.
#
On the ground, it was obviously not a conversation, it was not this kind of conversation, right?
#
I mean, I remember I was in Varanasi for his election in 2014.
#
I went to an English teaching class, and these were just mostly young people, obviously people
#
who did not speak English as a first language, they were trying to learn English as adults.
#
I asked, the teacher was very kind, she sort of let me just chat with the students, and
#
I asked them, so these are people not necessarily, so the age group would be roughly from 18
#
to 28, so many of them were working people who were then coming in to sort of improve
#
their English, and I asked them who they would vote for, and the overwhelming majority picked
#
Oddly enough, a few of them picked Ahmadmi Party, which seems so quaint now, five years
#
later, but most of them picked Modi, and the reasons were very sort of basic.
#
It was like someone said that he had a brother who worked in Gujarat, and he had gone to
#
visit his brother, and he found that in Gujarat they didn't have power cuts, but they had
#
Someone else showed me a photo, it turned out to be some precursor to the fake news
#
flood we'd seen, it turned out to be a photo from China, but look, this is some bus stop
#
that Modi has created in Gujarat, but it was these sort of very concrete reasons, right?
#
So people just had a sense that India, things are not moving, and it's certainly true that
#
the pundits may have fed that on the periphery, but I don't think that elite level conversation,
#
that wonkish conversation was the same conversation that the masses were having.
#
And there was a recent caravan story on you and a bunch of others who, you know, criticizing
#
you guys for supporting Modi in 2014 and then changing your minds, as if changing your mind
#
is a bad thing when the facts change.
#
And the way I look at it is that in some senses that kind of judgment comes from the tyranny
#
of history in the sense that whatever has happened in the past seems inevitable after
#
it happens, but in 2014 it would certainly not have been inevitable that it will necessarily
#
And I think the bet that a lot of people made was that he can either carry on consolidating
#
his power and actually follow through on some of his development rhetoric and leave the
#
Hindutva behind, which for a lot of the time he had done in Gujarat where he sidelined
#
the RSS guys like Gurdon Tafadia, sidelined the VHP and so on, or he could ignore the
#
development and go for Hindutva.
#
And of course, as we know, what has happened is that economically the last five years have
#
been pretty much a disaster and society is more polarized than ever and it's gone in
#
that way, but it need not have gone in that way and with the benefit of hindsight to now
#
sort of look back and say that, oh, you should have known this all along, I think is somewhat
#
I think it's perfectly okay for the caravan or indeed for anybody to criticize me or anybody
#
else because we're in the public square.
#
We should be criticized.
#
We should be scrutinized.
#
Part of the problem I have though with the way this was framed is that a section of the
#
left is pretty similar in terms of how they view these things.
#
It's quite similar to the right, I mean, except that they have better spelling and punctuation.
#
And it reminds me of something that, you know, E. M. Foster once had this, you know, he divided
#
characters in a novel into there are two types of characters, flats and rounds.
#
And a flat character is a character who is essentially the same on page one and the same
#
on page 300 and a round character is a character who evolves over the arc of the novel.
#
And I think the problem with people on both ends of the spectrum is that they view Modi
#
as a flat character, whereas I think that any serious politician must be viewed as a
#
It's not as though you change your judgment every week.
#
It's not as though you change your judgment every month, but you are aware of what they
#
are saying and doing and your assessment changes as they evolve, right?
#
Bill Clinton as governor of Arkansas is not the same as Bill Clinton as president.
#
And I think it was, you could certainly, it's fair to criticize me and it's a criticism
#
that I accept if you say that, look, you called it wrong.
#
You thought that this guy would do certain things and he didn't do it and you were wrong.
#
And I will accept that.
#
And I will say, you know what, you are right.
#
But I don't think it's fair to criticize someone for changing their views when the facts changed.
#
And this is something I've, you know, I chatted about this with Ram Guha, I did a couple of
#
episodes on Gandhi with him and we spoke about how people contain multitude.
#
So it's very easy to judge Gandhi for being A, B or C, but people always contain multitudes.
#
And it's similar in a sense to Vajpayee that when, you know, he passed away, all the judgments
#
of him was, a lot of the judgments of him were as an essentially flat character, either
#
he's the best prime minister we had or he's a bigoted demagogue who, you know, brought
#
this upon us and they're not necessarily true.
#
But I'm curious when you speak of the evolution of Modi per se, would you say he really evolved
#
after 2014 and if so, what made him evolve or was it the case that the master as he is
#
at optics in 2014, all he did was successfully appear all things to all people, allowing
#
people who wanted economic reforms to believe that he was a development guy when actually,
#
And that was him all along.
#
Or did he actually evolve?
#
And then if he evolved away from that development direction towards this polarizing, I nominate
#
Sadhvi Pragya to the Lok Sabha kind of direction, what would have brought about this evolution?
#
I mean, to a certain extent, it's true that, you know, he was all things to all people,
#
but that's really not unusual in politics.
#
I think successful politicians are often many different things to many different people.
#
So that's not something that I hold against him.
#
I would say there was an evolution.
#
You would say that, you know, from about 2002 to 2007, he was positioned and he positioned
#
himself really as the Hindu strongman of Gujarat in the aftermath of the riots.
#
From around 2017 to 2014, he tried to position himself as Mr. Development.
#
We can get into the Gujarat model, but I don't think it was all optics, right?
#
And I spoke with many, many businessmen at that time, both foreign businessmen and domestic
#
businessmen, and they genuinely praised, they genuinely thought the world of him.
#
They would tell me about how much, how easy it was to do business in Gujarat, how well
#
organized it was, the infrastructure, the problem solving that was centralized, but
#
there was problem solving.
#
The Vibram Gujarat summits did attract a fair amount of attention.
#
He did say things that in hindsight, he didn't follow through on, but he said things like,
#
you know, minimum government, maximum governance.
#
The government has no business doing business.
#
We're going to replace red tape with the red carpet.
#
He even sort of tweeted out something when Margaret Thatcher died.
#
So, you know, so certainly in hindsight, it's, it's, it's fair to say that, you know, maybe
#
some of us, because we were, we wanted that change so desperately, we were then willing
#
to connect the dots in a way that, that, that, that convinced us so that we saw what we wanted
#
to believe and that he was clever enough to put some of that out there.
#
But on the other hand, you know, you look back on that campaign, the truth is that it
#
was focused on development.
#
There was very little Hindutva in that campaign.
#
The way he presented himself, it really was, he would go into places, he would talk about
#
jobs, he would talk about electricity, he would talk about inflation, he would also
#
talk about a strong nation and standing up to Pakistan and China and so on.
#
But I do think that, you know, it's one thing to look back in 2019 and say that, well, things
#
did not pan out as some of us had hoped.
#
But that doesn't mean that the bet in 2014 was irrational or unjustified.
#
The bet in 2014 did have, there were things that were, that were going for him.
#
I mean, I sort of, I had an episode with Salman Sohz recently where he says the exact same
#
thing about 2014 that if you actually look at the BJP manifesto, he's a congress spokesman,
#
but he said that he found a lot of things about the manifesto which he liked and was
#
hopeful that Modi would carry those promises around.
#
And I also had an episode a few months ago, which will be linked from the show notes with
#
Prashant Jha, who wrote the book, How the BJP Wins, where he speaks about how Modi was
#
a master of the narrative in terms of being able to simultaneously project himself as one
#
Hindu Hriday Samrat and two, the development guy and three, the Garibo ka friend guy.
#
And that all of these were simultaneous and working across different levels.
#
And what you said about how it is now obvious that, you know, that Modi didn't carry out
#
on all of this and people who said Modi would carry out these particular promises were wrong.
#
And it's true that they were wrong, but the bet wasn't necessarily wrong.
#
And this is like, you know, I was a professional poker player for five years and I keep talking
#
about the importance in everything of probabilistic thinking.
#
After something happens, it has either happened 100% or at 0%.
#
But before it happens, there are always percentages.
#
And if you bet on something that is, say, 60% to happen, your bet is correct.
#
But it doesn't mean that if it doesn't happen, that, you know, you were drastically wrong
#
And in that sense, even though I myself didn't support Modi at any point, but I could understand
#
why the support, I mean, I could understand the rationale which went behind supporting
#
How did a lot of the people who supported him, how did you in fact, then reconcile
#
Like, was it a sense of, oh, innocent uncle proven guilty and maybe he was just incompetent
#
rather than an actual colluder in the riots or was it a sense of even if it happened,
#
I struggled with that a lot.
#
And in fact, when I first started writing about him in one of my first columns for the
#
Wall Street Journal in 2010 was titled Prime Minister Modi Won't Fly.
#
And it was essentially about how he had done a pretty good job running Gujarat, how he
#
was the most business-friendly politician in India.
#
But the taint of the 2002 riots essentially disqualified him from the prime ministership.
#
And then I wrote a cover story for the foreign policy website after he was reelected chief
#
minister of Gujarat for the third time in 2012, where I essentially expanded upon that
#
So it certainly wasn't easy for me.
#
In the end, it was more a case of, was absolutely a case of, well, this is a terrible episode.
#
However, since then, there has been no further violence in Gujarat.
#
Since then, he has distanced himself from and in fact, earned the enmity of the likes
#
The VHP guys were actually campaigning against him in 2012.
#
Yeah, he kicked out Gurdwaj Dadafi, who was a farrier from the cabinet.
#
So he had gone some distance to distance himself from some of these scummy elements.
#
The SIT, what they call the clean shit, did sort of also make a difference.
#
In the end, do you believe in rule of law?
#
If you believe in rule of law, you've got a sort of, this has been an investigation.
#
It was an investigation ordered by the Supreme Court.
#
This was not a Gujarat government investigation.
#
So there were a lot of things which allowed you, if you sort of added it all up, to say
#
that, well, look, this is awful and ideally, you would not want a prime minister who had
#
any association with something like that.
#
However, under the circumstances, it comes down to him or a third term for Congress,
#
which has not only failed miserably on the economic front, but it has also run probably
#
the most corrupt government in Indian history.
#
And what does that say about Indian democracy if you're giving these guys a third term?
#
Those were the choices.
#
They were flawed choices.
#
And I think under those circumstances, to me, it was the superior choice.
#
In fact, as another friend of mine who supported the BJP at that time quite actively and later
#
chilled his mind, Rajesh Jain did a long two hour episode with me on the scene and the
#
on scene, which I recommend everyone listen to, that'll be in the show notes.
#
And the way he put it was he supported them because they were the lighter shade of gray.
#
And I mean, with hindsight, of course, you can look back and say, hey, no way.
#
But you know, at the time, I think that's reasonable enough.
#
So tell me, you know, looking back through, say, the last five years before we get to
#
these elections, looking back through the last five years, at around what point did
#
you begin to feel that, wait a minute, you know, this guy is not going to do any of the
#
development stuff instead, you know, there are lynchings happening and all of this is.
#
So you know, I was hopeful, obviously, when he came into office.
#
My journal column the week he was elected was essentially said India votes for hope,
#
which I believe was definitely the case, which is, I mean, true, regardless of how it turned
#
Now, I became critical right away.
#
I criticized the first budget because it was the interim budget, because it was just there
#
was such a huge opportunity to get rid of this retroactive tax.
#
There was so much he could have done to just dominate the headlines in the financial press.
#
And they dropped the ball right away.
#
So I was critical right away.
#
And in terms of the interim budget, in terms of the first budget, because already you could
#
sort of see that they were not doing many of the things that I had hoped that they would
#
Similarly, I was critical right away when a clock happened.
#
And again, that was frankly such a gimme.
#
All he had to do was step up and say the right thing because the easiest thing to do in the
#
This is a guy whose own brother was in the Air Force.
#
I mean, all basic humanity just demanded that you say something, embrace the family.
#
And he dropped the ball.
#
But those criticisms were episodic.
#
So it was like, well, you have not done this, and you ought to do it.
#
For me, there were two things that really began to fundamentally change how I viewed
#
And on the economic front, it was demonetization, which is, of course, no surprise.
#
And it's the case for many people, demonetization, just the sheer stupidity of it, the sheer
#
callousness of it, the opacity of the decision making, I mean, at every level, right?
#
This is really, you know, though I use, I describe demonetization as too crazy for Venezuela.
#
Because they considered it and said, no, wait a minute, if you've got a policy that's too
#
crazy for Venezuela, you're in trouble.
#
So on the economic front, it was really, it was demonetization that, you know, was the
#
straw that broke the camel's back.
#
And on the cultural side, it was the appointment of Yogi Adityanath.
#
Because at some point, you just have to say, look, where is this train headed?
#
And the way where this train is headed is not where I want to go.
#
And I remember having conversations with many of my friends who were very close to the government
#
and in fact, remain close to the government.
#
And I said, look, where are the brakes on this thing?
#
And I never got a satisfactory answer.
#
And I still don't have a satisfactory answer.
#
In fact, I mean, I was equally aghast by demon.
#
I was writing about it from the week it came out, I've had multiple episodes on it.
#
It is essentially the largest assault in property rights in human history as I see it.
#
You know, I compared Modi to Mao at that time, in fact, in the Times of India and got a lot
#
But you know, going back to what you said earlier about say, a clock's killing.
#
And at that point, Modi could so easily have just put out a two sentence statement and
#
that would have kind of covered his ass, but he didn't even do that.
#
And what we've seen is that all through most of this period, the cow lynchings and the
#
stuff that's been happening.
#
I mean, he's occasionally come out and said a couple of things, but mostly he's been silent.
#
What do you think the incentives on him are?
#
Like how much of the control does the RSS have on the BJP and Modi?
#
How much is Modi himself a true believer in Hindutva?
#
Because with every politician, there's always sort of a trade off between what you really
#
believe in and your will to power, what kind of gets you there in the first place.
#
And my sort of take of Modi once upon a time was that, look, he's a sociopath, he'll do
#
anything to come to power.
#
He doesn't necessarily have any beliefs of his own.
#
He'll just do whatever gets him in power.
#
And yet through all this point, if he stays silent through all of this, if he nominates
#
Raghya Thakur as an MP, as he did recently, then you've really got to wonder that either
#
the pressures on him from the RSS are huge or he's actually a Hindutva believer.
#
You know, I don't have a good answer to that.
#
And in a way, it almost doesn't matter.
#
I actually don't really care what Modi thinks at three in the morning.
#
I judge him by what he says and what he does as prime minister.
#
And whether at three in the morning, tossing in his bed, he is actually appalled by his
#
own silence or whether he is secretly exultant is kind of irrelevant.
#
That was just, you know, that moment stood out for me partly because of, you know, the
#
story there, the family story over there.
#
The simplest thing to do would be to put out a statement and then frankly to invite the
#
brother who was a mechanic in the Air Force, invite him to the prime minister's residence
#
and just reach out and show that you don't put religion above humanity.
#
You don't put religious sentiments above basic humanity.
#
So you drop the ball on that.
#
The way it's been explained to me is that, you know, there is a certain percentage of
#
this population, I mean, this classic base politics.
#
You have a certain amount of the base which would be upset if he'd done that.
#
And he wasn't willing to take on that.
#
I mean, what's interesting is that if you look at Modi's own statements over these
#
last five years, not counting some of the stuff he said in the campaign, by and large,
#
he said the sort of things that world leaders say.
#
He's gone and addressed conferences and said that Islam is a religion of peace.
#
He sort of, you know, made the right noises when he goes to the Middle East and so on
#
and Abu Dhabi and places like that.
#
So it's not as though most of his rhetoric, not counting the campaign and we can get to
#
that, most of his own rhetoric has been reasonable as prime minister.
#
The problem arises in his, first of all, the silences and those silences cannot be wished
#
And secondly, in the kinds of people he has empowered.
#
And as long as, if you really wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, which I did,
#
as long as you had, you know, the likes of Yogi Adityanath and Giriraj Singh and some
#
of these other people as part of the coalition, but very clearly kept at a distance and not
#
people in power, that was something that I was willing to live with, right?
#
I mean, you have, this is true of conservative movements everywhere, that you're going to
#
have some people who are not very responsible, not very likable.
#
But as long as the responsible elements are in charge, you live with that.
#
The problem arises when you start mainstreaming those people, right?
#
And when you take someone whose main claim to fame is his violent, inflammatory anti-Muslim
#
rhetoric and you put him in charge of India's largest state, what are you saying?
#
What's the signal you're sending to the next generation of BJP leaders?
#
You're saying that this is the fast track to a brilliant political career.
#
You do this and you get to be the second youngest chief minister in the history of Uttar Pradesh.
#
And so there was just absolutely no way to explain that.
#
And I still look back on these five years and I think that he could have just done a
#
few things differently, because if you look at most of his chief ministerial picks, they're
#
pretty centrist figures from within the BJP.
#
If you look at most of his senior ministers, these are people who choose their words carefully.
#
Sushma Swaraj, Rajnath Singh, Ghatkari Jaitley, these are not people who are shooting their
#
mouth off and talking about, you know, if you kill one of mine, I'll kill a hundred
#
of yours or standing sitting on stage while someone is talking about digging up corpses.
#
I mean, they don't, they're just, they're very far away from that.
#
And I think that this is where Modi's BJP really lost the plot.
#
And I think, you know, for me, in fact, Adityanath being made chief minister was also a sort
#
of a, a very revelatory moment.
#
I wrote a column at the time arguing that this was sort of society striking back at
#
So let me ask you a question.
#
I have asked Shashi Tharoor on the show.
#
I asked Aakar Patel, we did a long episode on Hindutva and I'll come back to that later
#
and I asked him as well.
#
And it's something that still bothers me, which is this, that our elites drafted a liberal
#
constitution, not liberal enough for me in terms of predicting individual rights, but
#
by and large liberal, our elites drafted a liberal constitution and imposed it top down
#
upon a country that you could argue was really an illiberal society.
#
And the question then arises that how is that imposition of a liberal constitution on an
#
illiberal society, is that itself not an illiberal act?
#
And if society then decides to strike back and say that, no, we are illiberal, we like
#
our illiberalism to hell with what you elites try to impose on us, how are we to sort of
#
And this, by the way, was a point that, you know, even in different language, and I found
#
out later after I'd made it, a point that even Deendayal Upadhyay, who is one of Modi's
#
heroes, had himself made in his time.
#
No, I think it's a tough question, because the people who've drafted the constitution
#
were not remotely representative of India, right?
#
If you just sort of look at their profiles, look at their level of education, look at
#
their wealth, look at their exposure to Western learning, start with Ambedkar with his PhD
#
from Columbia, this was clearly unrepresentative of India.
#
And that perhaps if you'd had a referendum in the aftermath of partition and of what
#
kind of state you wanted to be, maybe the majority would indeed have voted for some
#
And so I think that's a fair point.
#
But I think at the same time, if you happen to believe in certain ideas, because you think
#
that those are their superior ideas, and they offer you a better way of ordering society
#
and ordering government, then you'd still stand by it, because it's a value judgment.
#
You think that those liberal ideas are better ideas, and they're worth fighting for.
#
I mean, my position on that simply is that if we want a liberal society, then we get
#
to that liberal society through the culture.
#
It has to happen bottoms up.
#
It can't happen top down.
#
And in a sense, the fact that Adityanath is the chief minister at Pragya Singh Thakur
#
is an MP that Modi won such a big election just now is a testament of the failure of
#
You can't impose liberal values.
#
You have to seed them into the culture.
#
And that is a task at which liberals in India have failed utterly.
#
However, one defines the word liberals.
#
Well, it depends, right?
#
I mean, if you look around the region, I still think that in some ways, India has been more
#
successful than any other country in the region.
#
I think that the Indian elites, I think the collision of the Indian elites with Western
#
ideas, you know, the whole Macaulay project, it's run much deeper in India than, for example,
#
in Pakistan, certainly.
#
And so there's no equivalent of, say, the times of India in any other country in this
#
So I think that there was a moment if we'd been having this conversation in, say, 1974,
#
you could have said that things are going to go turn out in a different way.
#
In fact, even if we'd been having this conversation in 2010, it looked like the BJP would never
#
be a serious contender for power.
#
And that though India was not a perfectly liberal society, it was certainly liberal
#
And in the direction in which it was moving was towards, you know, more individual rights,
#
more freedom of speech, and so on.
#
Driven as much perhaps by globalization and technology and all of those things.
#
So that was a real moment.
#
And I think in many ways, this is sort of this is where what's happening here fits into
#
what's happening in so many other parts of the world, because, you know, in that end
#
of history moment, right, Berlin Wall falls, and then you have Indian liberalization kicking
#
off two years later in 1991, there was a certain self-confidence among global elites.
#
And that was certainly something that was reflected in India, where there was, you know,
#
one kind of narrative that was dominant.
#
I don't think it's died entirely, but obviously, you know, liberalism is severely on the back
#
And to sort of, you know, go back to Hindutva, again, I had an episode with Akar on the intellectual
#
traditions that drive the RSS and the BJP and so on.
#
And there are two ways to look at the BJP, obviously.
#
One is that it's a modernizing party, in a sense, as under watch by it tried to be.
#
But the other is also that it is carrying a long old tradition, actually not very old,
#
but I mean, old in the sense of, you know, maybe a hundred years old, but not old in
#
a deeper civilizational sense.
#
But it's carrying that tradition forward, and this is sort of what it all comes down
#
So now, you know, for example, you work in a think tank, which is considered a conservative
#
think tank, and you've obviously thought about conservatism a fair deal.
#
And I'd argue there's no analog of Burkian conservatism per se in India.
#
But the BJP does represent a certain kind of conservatism.
#
And to you, what are the intellectual traditions really driving the BJP?
#
Are there any coherent traditions or is it just driven by bigotry and the sense of the
#
I mean, I guess in some ways you could, I mean, I haven't really pondered this, but
#
you could argue that the traditionalist view that was reflected in some of the Johnson's
#
thought, for example, don't move too fast to amend Hindu personal laws.
#
I mean, you could argue in a sense that that's Burkian.
#
You know, let these things are organic, let them proceed at their own pace and so on.
#
But I think your larger point is true because the BJP is fundamentally revolutionary and
#
they're not interested in conserving in the Burkian sense as much as they are in appending
#
what they think has gone wrong in this society.
#
Now, again, you can sort of go back to, you know, Savarkar and Golwalkar and Dindayalopadhyay,
#
And he gave those four famous lectures on integral humanism and see this quest to reimagine
#
the world through this pious Hindu lens.
#
And you know, in some ways, I think, you know, the closest analog because I've spent some
#
time traveling with and talking to and reading about Islamists is, you know, that's where
#
the parallels are very interesting, right?
#
There was this need for a mythical golden age to sort of have to root your present in
#
the idea of past greatness, right?
#
And for the Islamists, this is the era of the first four caliphs.
#
And for the Hindutva guys, it's ancient pre-Islamic India.
#
So there's that commonality.
#
There's the idea that your faith is better than everybody else's, right?
#
So if you ever point out, for instance, that secularism is under threat, immediately a
#
hundred people on Twitter will tell you, it is not possible because we are just innately
#
We have the best, most innately tolerant faith imaginable.
#
And if you don't agree, we'll troll you, that's how tolerable we are.
#
And again, it's very similar to sort of, you know, how Islamists view sort of their faith
#
as kind of this, you know, Judaism and Christianity are just like God trying stuff out and then
#
he finally got it right with Islam.
#
So there is that, the difference lies, I think in a sense, an important difference in that
#
the Islamists are much more programmatic.
#
And part of this is because they have relatively recent history to fall back on in terms of
#
how society in the state was organized, right?
#
The caliphate was only abolished in 1924.
#
So they can sort of go back and think, you know, and say that, well, look, this is how
#
we used to do things not that long ago.
#
And so what they have is much more prescriptive in terms of policy.
#
So when I was in Indonesia and I was traveling with Islamists, you know, you could ask them
#
all kinds of questions, right?
#
What should the currency look like?
#
And they say, well, you know, we should have the gold dinar and the silver dirham.
#
If we did that, then the price of the chicken today would be the same as it was a thousand
#
And what should movie theaters look like?
#
Well, there shouldn't be movie theaters, but there's some ones who wanted movie theaters.
#
Well, okay, the women should sit in one place and the men should sit in one place.
#
What should a banking system look like?
#
Well, there should be no interest.
#
So they have a lot of this stuff that's worked out.
#
Whereas with the Hindutva folks, in some ways you could argue it makes them more benign
#
because they don't really have much of a program.
#
They might get there, but they don't have that.
#
They haven't sort of thought about these things in the same way.
#
But in other ways, it's scary because what they do have these sort of inchoate sense
#
of resentments and you can't really be on the point, have a rational conversation with
#
many of them because at some level, their conception of time is a pre-modern conception
#
But I'm always struck by this in TV studio debate with the BJP guy and he'd be talking
#
about something that happened in, you know, 1525 as though it happened last Tuesday, right?
#
There's no capacity to sort of say that, well, you know, this just, this happened to me on
#
my way to the studio and this is something that happened 500 years ago.
#
And we don't normally, these things don't exist on the same plane in our minds.
#
But for these guys, for many of them, they do.
#
So it's very difficult to have a fair, rational, reasoned conversation when someone, first
#
of all, their starting point is that they must settle the scores of history, right?
#
I can have a conversation.
#
We can have a disagreement and I can sort of, you and I can come to a compromise.
#
But if I've decided that you are responsible for something your ancestors may or may not
#
have done 500 years ago, what can you do?
#
What can you do to satisfy me?
#
And then the other problem, which is again, quite similar to the Islamists is just the
#
inability to speak rationally or reasonably about certain kinds of things.
#
So I was on an NDTV debate last week and one of these guys, sort of BJP oriented guys started
#
talking about Hindu terror and how this was this horrible thing and how can you talk about
#
Hindu terror and you're defaming a billion people?
#
And to me it was just like, it's a completely absurd argument, right?
#
If I describe somebody as an Italian mafia don, it doesn't mean that all Italians are
#
I've just said that this person is an Italian mafia don and you can be a terrorist from
#
You can be a Tamil terrorist.
#
You can be a Basque terrorist.
#
You can be a Mormon terrorist.
#
You can be an Islamic terrorist.
#
Is it true that there are relatively few Hindu terrorists?
#
Yes, I'll grant you that.
#
Like very few, relatively few cases where people inspired by the faith or their sense
#
of defending the faith have gone out and murdered or attempted to murder random civilians.
#
But you can't say that this is simply not possible because you have some kind of mathematical
#
equation in your head that says that a Hindu can never be a terrorist.
#
And I fear that on these kinds of questions, the space to even speak, I mean, this is not
#
This is something so, it's basic, it's commonsensical.
#
It's just how you use language.
#
But I've had these conversations with people who I regard as intelligent people and who
#
you could have a reasonable conversation with about many, many other topics.
#
But when it comes to this, they're not able to discuss it rationally.
#
And so I think that's another sort of, you know, it's a similarity, right?
#
Because you can't have a reasonable conversation about the blasphemy law in Pakistan.
#
You know, and I fear that we are increasingly in similar territory on some of these things
#
because if you mention something, it'll immediately be bent out of shape, it'll be distorted.
#
And they essentially, the way they operate is that then they said a mob on you to sort
#
of claim that you said something that you didn't say.
#
And it's an effective strategy, I mean, unfortunately.
#
And, you know, one question I've asked others such as Akar and that I wonder about is that
#
where do these resentments, this anger, this bitterness, where do they all come from?
#
Because if you actually look at Hindus in India, they're far better off than Muslims
#
in your everyday life, you're not being victimized by them or dominated by them or so on.
#
You know, even Hitler, you know, the resentment that he had against the Jews could be explained
#
because the Jews were dominant in terms of finance or whatever.
#
And you know, but Muslims are literally the downtrodden of India, they're far poorer in
#
general than Hindus are definitely far worse off.
#
Why are these resentments so widespread that so many common people feel resentful towards
#
First of all, I think once you start feeling like a victim, then you can always look for
#
signs of your own victimhood.
#
I agree with you that this sort of doesn't measure up to the facts.
#
But when I talk to people who do believe this, here are the kinds of things that they say.
#
They would look, first of all, the important history is very, very important, right?
#
So someone like Rajiv Malhotra would say that, look, a thousand years ago before the advent
#
of Islam in the subcontinent, there were Indonesia was Hindu, Java was a Hindu island, Sumatra
#
was Hindu, Hinduism sort of stretched across Afghanistan was Buddhist and so on.
#
And that the physical space for Indic religions has been shrinking because it's been under
#
assault from Abrahamic religions, primarily Islam.
#
Then they would look, for example, at something like Kashmir and the terrible tragedy of the
#
Kashmiri pundits driven out.
#
And that would sort of be another data point.
#
Then they would look obviously at partition and the bloodshed of partition, the ethnic
#
cleansing that accompanied partition.
#
And again, sort of see that look, the Hindus were at the receiving end of this.
#
And then they look at provisions in the constitution and they look at the idea of minority rights,
#
the way it was framed in India, not as protections, which was the idea, but as special rights.
#
And there's a certain element of truth to that, right?
#
So one of the telling examples, I think this is where the sort of the Hindutva approach
#
to some of these issues deviates from the classical liberal approach is the RTE.
#
And the RTE is, as you've written and others have written, it's a terrible piece of legislation.
#
It's the worst of Indian statism.
#
It's intrusive and it's placing all these rules and restrictions and it's focused more
#
on inputs than on outcomes.
#
Now you and I, when we look at RTE, the way we think about it is that, well, get the state
#
And so we should liberate, so obviously, you know, religious schools like Christian and
#
Muslim schools are exempt, they're minority exemptions.
#
And so our way of looking at that would be, well, let's exempt everybody.
#
Everyone can be equal and everybody can be, you take the hand of government off.
#
The way they see the same thing, they see the differential, but what they want is for
#
everybody to be controlled.
#
Can we get the government to regulate their schools too?
#
So it's not as though they don't have a story, but what you need to do is then make the leap
#
into this idea of constant persecution, which simply doesn't exist.
#
There is no persecution, right?
#
I mean, I blame the liberals for some of their missteps.
#
I blame Manmohan Singh for making that statement about Muslims have the first right of resources.
#
That was not something that a leader of a secular state should say.
#
He should really have said everybody has equal resources.
#
But the fact is that in the end, the people who really got the short end of the stick
#
over there were Indian Muslims.
#
It's not as though he actually went and actually got the first dibs on resources.
#
He just said something stupid, that stupid thing that he said, fed resentment.
#
Muslims never had anything to do with that.
#
But these, I think in many ways, the sort of traditional left of center Indian parties
#
have, they've played some of this stuff really badly.
#
And I think that from the 80s onwards, they've really misunderstood the nature of Islamism,
#
the changing patterns in the world and so on.
#
And what that allowed the Sangha Parivara to do was to couch many of their arguments
#
in classical liberal terms or in terms of just fairness.
#
For example, I agree that there should be a uniform civil code.
#
I agree that the Indian taxpayer should not subsidize the Hajj subsidy.
#
But the difference is that when the Hajj subsidy was abolished, I was happy.
#
And then I made the point on Twitter that you should also abolish this Mansur over subsidy.
#
It's exactly the same principle.
#
Why should the state be paying for someone's pilgrimage?
#
You could do your pilgrimage on your own money.
#
Why should the taxpayer pay?
#
And it doesn't matter whether you're Muslim, Hindu, Christian.
#
The problem is that when you, so they're very happy, many of them, to go along with the
#
universalist argument when it comes to a so-called a privilege or a benefit or something being
#
given to a religious minority.
#
But when you turn around and say, look, I want to apply the same thing to you, then
#
they have these, you know, historical reasons and they'll say, well, you know, we've had
#
a rough time for so long, we need this for some time, right?
#
So there's no good faith there, right?
#
They're not really interested in being fair.
#
They're interested in presenting an argument for fairness because it allows them to gain
#
We'll take a quick break now and we'll come back and talk about the 2019 elections, which
#
is what we were supposed to sit down and talk about anyway.
#
Welcome to another incredible week on the IVM Podcast Network.
#
If you are not following us on social media, please make sure you do.
#
Follow your IVM Podcast on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
#
A couple of messages up top.
#
First, we're hiring right now.
#
We're looking to hire a producer.
#
We're looking to hire a copywriter.
#
We're looking to hire an audio engineer.
#
We're looking for web developers.
#
We're looking for business people.
#
If you're looking to work at IVM, which in my opinion is probably one of the best places
#
to work at, then please do send us an application.
#
Also, please do download our app if you're not listening to it on our app.
#
Our app is available on the Play Store.
#
And I also want to thank our sponsors this month, Savari, Storytel and Paytm Money.
#
Thank you very much for supporting us.
#
On Cyrus Says, Cyrus is joined by Mayank Shekhar, film critic and editorial head of Midday
#
They talk about their memories from St. Xavier's prom nights, Mayank's very first encounter
#
with Cyrus, the recently concluded elections and Mayank's process of writing.
#
On the Filter Coffee Podcast, Rani Skrewala joins Karthik Nagarajan to talk about his
#
early days as an entrepreneur and what has kept him going during adversities.
#
And if that's not enough Rani Skrewala for you, listen to his podcast, the Rani Skrewala
#
Podcast where Rani talks to me about the benefits and disadvantages of being an outsider, building
#
a brand identity and the learnings from collaborating with business giants across the world.
#
On Business.Next, Govindaraj Athiraj is joined by author Jason Jennings.
#
They talk about the key ingredients that are crucial in building a high-speed economy.
#
On Geek Fruit, Tejas, Alika and special guest, Ishaan Krishna of Bayanak Mod, go down nostalgia
#
lane and discuss the world of Pokemon, including the newly released Pokemon Detective Pikachu.
#
On Simplify, Chuck Narain and Sriketh discuss the origins of the Yeti, Loch Ness Monsters,
#
Bigfoot and other cryptic creatures.
#
On Stages of Anarchy, Hunsini's guest is Benjamin Katz's Silverstein.
#
He's from the Foreign Policy Research Institute and he busts myths about the Democratic People's
#
And with that, let's get you on with your show.
#
Welcome back to The Scene on the On-Scene.
#
I'm chatting with Sadanand Thumay about the impact of the 2019 elections and what exactly
#
At least we're supposed to talk about that, but we spent an hour just contextualizing
#
that discussion, talking about Modi and the BJP and Hindutva and those intellectual traditions
#
that brought us here and so on and so forth.
#
At what point did you realize, I mean, I've seen tweets by you after your travels through
#
UP and so on, where you said that, look, now I'm convinced having been to these places
#
that the BJP is going to win.
#
At what point did you get convinced of that and why?
#
In April, I went to early April, I traveled in Western UP.
#
Actually I was in, I was going to Kathmandu for something and I managed to sort of just
#
steal a few days in Delhi and Western UP.
#
And I was just sort of in mini poll mode where all I did, I mean, literally, if I met somebody,
#
it didn't matter, Uber driver, room service guy, bell boy, Panwala, random woman in a
#
If I met you, probably the most irritating person in the city, I would like pinhole you
#
and ask you what you thought and what was going on.
#
Random woman in a wine bar in UP.
#
No, not in UP, that was in Delhi.
#
And then I went to travel in Western UP and in the Jat belt and, you know, Bakhbath, Shamli
#
and some of these other places.
#
And again, just, you know, talk to as many people as I could.
#
And a couple of things emerged.
#
And to me, the single most important, you know, you started out this podcast by talking
#
about the various explanations, but there was one to me that was actually stood out
#
And it was simply the fact that virtually everybody I spoke with thought of Modi as
#
It was just a character thing.
#
It was, you know what, he's a hardworking person.
#
He doesn't have family.
#
He puts in all this effort every day for the country and he deserves another chance.
#
And more than anything else, that to me was my dominant takeaway.
#
And so at that point I came and because, you know, because of the nature of Delhi, you
#
meet a lot of people who are migrants.
#
So you know, I was talking to people from Rajasthan, from Madhya Pradesh, from UP in
#
Delhi, apart from traveling in UP.
#
And this wasn't even close, Amit.
#
And so you got the stories, you got the character part.
#
And then I got stories about people who had actually received the gas cylinder, people
#
who had built a toilet in their village.
#
Guy who is a hilarious guy who had got a mudra loan in his wife's name and was really happy
#
because he didn't think he ever had to pay it back.
#
So there were all these stories.
#
And you know, in some cases it was people who themselves had benefited or had been touched
#
by some of these programs.
#
But beyond that, there were people who just, even if these programs had not touched them
#
personally, the messaging had gone through and they had a feeling that this stuff is
#
And I left and I wrote my column in the journal after that.
#
And by that I was fairly convinced that this is something going on.
#
And not one person, not one person spoke like that about Rahul Gandhi.
#
And so that was a sign.
#
And then again, that was reinforced more when I came back in the middle of May, early May
#
and traveled a little bit in Eastern UP.
#
And that was my sense that the battle of the narratives was completely won by Modi, absolutely
#
And so to me it was, you know, pretty clear.
#
I didn't think, I didn't believe as most people didn't, I didn't think he'd get the BJP would
#
get 303 seats, but I was pretty convinced he's coming back.
#
In fact, you know, much as Twitter elites made great fun of the interview Modi did with
#
Akshay Kumar, I thought it was a masterstroke because he might have been bullshitting his
#
way through it, but he came across as such an affable, nice guy, the kind of uncle you'd
#
want your kids to have.
#
And just in terms of optics, it was, it was a masterstroke.
#
This is, you know, you spoke of the battle of narratives and there's this interesting
#
column by Shekhar Gupta, I just read today in the print, where he says that the dominant
#
sort of conflicting narratives for the last 20, 25 years were Mandal versus Mandir, right?
#
Where on the one hand you have all these other parties which are exploiting caste divisions
#
and caste identities and, you know, trying to build vote banks on the basis of that.
#
And as a counter to that, you have the BJP effort of the Mandir narrative where they're
#
trying to subsume many of those identities within a broad Hindu identity and, you know,
#
And Shekhar's point was that now that battle is irrelevant, it's not about Mandal, it's
#
not even about Mandir, it's about Modi, that, and which seems to, you know, hawk to exactly
#
what you said now, that it's a personality thing, I mean, Milan Vaishnav just wrote a
#
piece for the Washington Post today, which I retweeted, where Milan pointed to a survey
#
which shows that the number of people who would have voted for BJP if Modi was not the
#
man in charge is far less, 32% I think something, 32% less, is far, far less and Modi made that
#
And is this a similar personality cult to Indira Gandhi?
#
If so, how did it come about?
#
Was it happenstance for Modi or was it actually planned by the great strategist Ramit Shah?
#
You know, and how does one counter it?
#
It's definitely not happenstance, it was carefully planned and extremely well resourced.
#
The BJP is much richer than any other party in India, possibly richer than most parties
#
So they certainly had the resources and the ability to get that message across.
#
And you know, anecdotally, again, you know, it's sort of distasteful to ask people what
#
But, you know, when you're reporting in the Hindi heartland, you kind of hold your nose
#
and you do sort of ask just because that's how the narrative is set by journalists.
#
And it was not uncommon at all to come across people who were from subcasts that were not
#
traditionally seen as BJP voters, who were just voting for Modi.
#
And they just like Modi.
#
And they're just like, he's a good guy.
#
He's the person I trust.
#
So in many ways, the messaging, if you look at it, the messaging has been extremely simple.
#
And so the sort of things that we make fun of, right, the sort of things that people
#
make fun of on Twitter, right, like this whole thing he did on the last day of voting where
#
he, you know, wore that ridiculous cape and then had the guy under the sink, I mean, come
#
And so you could have done a whole sort of, if we had a sort of more of a comic tradition
#
on television, you could have done a whole skit on how, you know, here's this sort of
#
vain guy who has like the camera following him everywhere and everyone made fun of it.
#
But that's the kind of thing that actually boomerangs badly.
#
I'm not saying we shouldn't have made fun of it because, hey, but boomerang so badly
#
because at one level you have most people who are in fact connecting with him.
#
Many of them are living vicariously through that moment.
#
So for them, he is this deeply spiritual man who is connected to the religious traditions
#
of this land and he is out there doing something deeply meaningful.
#
And then not only is that something that they're connecting with, and they have to put up with,
#
you know, a bunch of English speaking, faithless people, atheists, God knows what, bee feeders
#
and you know, out there making fun of him, right?
#
And so in fact, it sort of, it boomerangs Sankashvara Thakur actually had a piece in
#
the Telegraph today where he also made that point.
#
And I think it's absolutely correct.
#
And that's where Modi has been a masterful communicator.
#
He's not trying to communicate to you or me.
#
He realizes that we are ultimately irrelevant.
#
And the only reason the Congress party folks cared about us a little bit was because they
#
bumped into us at cocktail parties, but Modi's not going to cocktail parties.
#
So there's no danger of bumping into us.
#
And so that's very, that's a powerful insight he and Amit Shah have as politicians.
#
And you can see how that narrative was crafted, how that image was crafted of the hardworking
#
And in fairness to him, there's an element of truth in it.
#
I mean, you've talked about this, the biographical element, the story is incredibly powerful,
#
In a society that is as stratified.
#
I mean, this is the thing, right?
#
You don't have to agree with everything he does and you can criticize him while conceding
#
that it's an incredibly powerful story in this kind of stratified society where so much
#
of your life trajectory is determined by the accident of birth, right?
#
You and I are having this conversation in English because we were born into certain
#
We didn't do anything special to learn it, right?
#
It was just the luck of the draw.
#
And so many of our life chances end up being determined by just this luck, just this chance.
#
So in such a stratified society, for someone to emerge with no advantages, he doesn't have
#
the advantage of class.
#
He doesn't have the advantage of caste.
#
He doesn't have the advantage of godfathers.
#
He just, he makes it through hard work and ambition and smarts and it's an incredibly
#
In fact, you kind of spoke about, you know, how he's good material for comedy and so on
#
And you should check out TikTok sometime, which I'm kind of addicted to.
#
Have you checked out TikTok?
#
My life has already been ruined by Twitter.
#
It is incredibly though.
#
I'd love to see you start a TikTok channel.
#
That would be quite something, but you need to work on my dance moves.
#
Going back to kind of what you said earlier is, you know, for example, about people who
#
about subcasts and groups, which would otherwise not have voted for him, voting for him, you
#
know, I mean in 2014, what he did famously do was that he exploited intra-caste resentments.
#
For example, in UP, he reached out to non-Jatav Dalits and to non-Yadav Obisis and so on and
#
got them on his side and he managed to expand those sort of alliances over time.
#
And just today, I think I saw a tweet thread from Jignesh Mewani, the Dalit leader in Gujarat
#
and who was kind of bemoaning and saying, I don't understand it that so many Dalits
#
actually seem to have voted for Modi.
#
And you know, there have been Dalit scholars in the past who said that, you know, the Dalit
#
party in India today is basically the BJP, which seems, you know, like a masterful achievement
#
And coming, you know, then coming to that, like there is one way where you can think
#
that this rise of Hindutva and this rise of the BJP, especially given the incompetence
#
of the opposition was inevitable.
#
But another way of looking at it is to, you know, do the whole great man theory of history
#
thing and say that, no, Amit Shah is really the strategic genius who's made all of this
#
How do you sort of look at that?
#
I guess maybe a bit of both, right?
#
For sure you have Amit Shah's ability to craft these very sort of carefully plotted alliances
#
and look at the math of these things with great granularity, then you have Modi's undeniable
#
charisma, his, the powerful biography.
#
I mean, you also have the fact, frankly, that both the Lohia parties and the Dalit parties,
#
basically the SP and the BSP are, you know, they're a travesty, right?
#
I mean, Mulan Singh Yadav's sons driving around in a Lamborghini.
#
These are not people who have maintained any kind of standard of probity in public life.
#
What are they in it for?
#
And that's the question I ask.
#
You can disagree with the BJP guys and I disagree with them, but, you know, for example, as
#
the results from Ometi were coming in and, you know, it was, it was getting late, there
#
were a bunch of workers who were there as Smriti Irani supporters, right?
#
They were in the booth.
#
They are, they're driven by something.
#
They wake up in the morning and they are energized because they believe in something.
#
What do these other parties believe in?
#
What do they believe in beyond making their own family or kinship group wealthy or powerful?
#
I mean, what was the SP, SP rule in, you know, in, in UP, they did some good things.
#
They made some roads and so on.
#
But a lot of it was about empowering, you know, gundas from their community to do whatever
#
So I think the moral center has really fallen out of these parties.
#
And that has, that, that was one thing that, you know, that's just made for the BJP.
#
And so that's why you don't get the kind of transference, right?
#
So this is the assumption of the Gatbandhan was that, look, we're together.
#
So all the Dalits are going to vote for the SP candidates and all the, the Yadavs are
#
going to vote for the, for the BSP candidates.
#
Ashutosh even wrote a piece in the Indian Express where he sort of broke out all the
#
math, but that's not how it works because the BJP has for the Hindu majority, especially
#
in the Hindi heartland, they've been able to craft a kind of moral message.
#
The tragedy of that message is that it involves a complete lack of compassion or any kind
#
of connection to things like minority rights and the things that we talk about.
#
And you know, one of the things that I kept remarking on as these elections came close
#
was that the BJP seemed to behave as if history ended in 2014.
#
They would not talk about the five years, the governance records of that time, but keep
#
going back to Nehru did this and Rajiv Gandhi did this and so on.
#
But the Congress on the other hand behaved as if history began in 2014 where they would
#
ignore their past misgovernance over 70 years, where in fact when Rahul Gandhi would be asked
#
about things like bank nationalization or the horrors of the emergency or the horrors
#
of 1984, which he was a, where he at one point denied that his family had a role.
#
And they were sort of in denial of all that in the past and basing everything on Modi
#
is a bad guy, don't vote for Modi, vote for us without sort of laying out their own vision.
#
And you know, as, as the elections came, they did lay out a little bit of their own vision
#
and some of it was old school, welfarism of the Garibi Hatao type, like the whole Niai
#
And some of it was just hypocritical in the sense.
#
And I asked Salman about this in the episode I did with him as well, that, you know, they
#
had a thing in the manifesto about we'll have directly elected mayors who will be actually
#
empowered to do local governance, which is great, but that is a state subject.
#
The Congress is in power in so many states and if honestly done jack about it, you know,
#
in fact, a lot of what is in their manifesto for 2019 could have been implemented by state
#
governments in different ways and they've done absolutely nothing.
#
This is just posturing to Twitter elites.
#
What has gone wrong with the Congress, right?
#
Even after this heavy defeat, they are still sticking to failed and competent leaders.
#
I mean, we need a whole different podcast on what has gone wrong with Congress.
#
And to start with, you know, in some ways, if you think about the big narrative about
#
India since 1947, you know, despite the fact that, you know, we've done pretty well relatively
#
speaking since 1991, all in all, if you step back and you look at India 1947 to 2019, I
#
think it's fair to say that we haven't done as well as we should have and that many other
#
places have done much better.
#
And this plays into more of these hands because the story that Congress has to tell voters
#
is that, look, actually, we did a pretty good job.
#
And they try to tell that story by pointing to the IIMs and ISRO and the IITs and certainly
#
No question about it, right?
#
And if you look at per capita income literacy or anything, there's been progress.
#
But you can't really make the case that they did a fantastic job, right?
#
The Nehru Gandhi family did not do for India what Lee Kuan Yew, what the Lees did for Singapore.
#
They just didn't, right?
#
And Modi is able to wield that as a club.
#
And so their defenses just come across as weak, right?
#
It's like, no, look, we actually helped build whatever, X institution or whatever.
#
And so that's part of the problem.
#
The other part of the problem is that, you know, Raoul Gandhi, he's basically a European
#
Nyaya is a handout scheme.
#
And I believe this is truly who he is.
#
I think he's being sincere.
#
This is how he sees the world, right?
#
You go back to, you know, go back to 10 years and he was talking about the two Indias and
#
how he was going to fight for the tribals of Orissa and so on.
#
It's complete zero sum thinking he doesn't really have any deeper understanding of economics
#
And to the degree that he has any kind of instincts, those are his instincts.
#
The problem is that when you are a fourth or fifth or whatever, depending on how you
#
want to count it, generation, uh, dinnest, you really can't play the, I'm the Messiah
#
of the poor game better than the tea seller.
#
You can't, you may think you can, but you're delusional if you think you can.
#
And this is the fundamental problem.
#
He is not an authentic bearer of the message that he wants to bear.
#
Quite apart from the fact that he has sort of other problems, he doesn't have the most
#
basic political skills.
#
He's an anti-politician in some ways and we can get into that.
#
But the story that the Congress could sell is the story of competence, relative competence
#
to the extent that they might do stupid things, but they wouldn't do nutty demon, right?
#
You know, it was, they would, they might, you know, screw up on interfaith relations,
#
but you wouldn't have Yogi Adityanath as chief minister of UP.
#
So their story was really of, look, we are, we're the grownups here.
#
And that may not have been a compelling enough story because the country happens to be a
#
large chunks of the country are in love with Narendra Modi.
#
I'm not saying that I would have won them the election, but this idea that this guy
#
born with a silver spoon in his mouth, not just a silver spoon, the whole cutlery set,
#
This, that this guy is somehow going to be the, the, the, the Messiah of the poor and
#
he's going to take on the, the chaiwala.
#
I mean, it's preposterous.
#
In fact, I'm, I'm really amused by the fact that a lot of my friends who call themselves
#
progressives actually support a guy who is very, is only because he was born into extreme
#
privilege and because of power structures in his party prevent others from actually
#
rising up through the ranks and the support this guy and to me, it simply doesn't compute.
#
It's classic hypocrisy.
#
I mean, I've said in the past that, you know, a couple of years back, I'd said that, you
#
know, those who support Gandhi today are helping Modi win in 2019.
#
And similarly today, I think those who are helping Rahul Gandhi's reign power are helping
#
But you know, tell me something.
#
I mean, it's, if the Congress is a dying party and the Gandhis help it along, that's fine.
#
But a healthy democracy needs an opposition.
#
Where are the possible avenues an opposition can emerge from?
#
And I think that that's, you know, the only argument you in fact have for keeping the
#
Congress alive at this moment in time is that without them, there'd be even less of an opposition.
#
There's no meaningful political opposition, even with the Congress, with their 52 seats
#
or whatever, and in the Lok Sabha, the media has been, a large chunks of the media have
#
been co-opted and the parts that have not been co-opted can probably be safely ignored.
#
The courts do have a measure of independence, but again, I think a powerful executive with
#
five years ahead of it would have enough tools to sort of slowly and gradually make sure
#
that the sort of people that they approve of are in the courts.
#
And we've already seen, for instance, in the last five years, the collapse of any kind
#
of case where the victim happens to be a minority and the accused happens to be someone associated
#
with the Sangh Parivar.
#
So you already sort of see the courts under pressure.
#
Where does that leave, whose bureaucracy has been politicized?
#
So I think we are in uncharted territory here.
#
We really have, we're in a place where the old argument and the old complaint about India
#
used to be that, look, things move too slowly.
#
There's no foot on the accelerator.
#
And I think now we have to sort of start thinking of India and imagine what it's like to have
#
And that's what's going on now.
#
There are things that have happened in the last five years that we would not have been
#
I would not have been able to imagine that someone like Hemant Karkare, who was a national
#
hero, loses his life fighting Pakistani terrorists on 26-11 in Mumbai, can have his reputation
#
savaged and soiled overnight on social media because the BJP has decided to nominate Sadi
#
So even if people who have this sort of traditional set of protections, civil service, IPS, gallantry
#
award, people like that, their reputations are no longer safe.
#
So in many ways, we're just in a place where virtually anything is possible.
#
And some of this stuff is probably outside the realms of our imagination.
#
Sort of moving on back to, you know, leaving the opposition aside and just moving back
#
to the BJP and this government, you'd mentioned earlier about the massive amount of resources
#
And in fact, this is a point, say, Raghu Karnad made through an excellent video a while back
#
on YouTube and he persistently drives this point home on Twitter that the BJP just have
#
so many more resources than anyone else to push the narrative and that is a massive part
#
of their victory as well.
#
And at one hand, of course, you don't know which way the causation also goes.
#
Part of the reason they have these resources is that the narrative is winning out.
#
But then also it's a question of maybe network effects, power attracts money, money buys
#
more power and so on and so forth.
#
Is that something that worries you?
#
Well, beyond that, look at the evil genius of it.
#
They come up with these electoral bonds, which basically make funding completely opaque and
#
they sell it to people as a reform.
#
I mean, it is, you've got to at one level admire it.
#
Look, I've cleaned up electoral funding.
#
How have you cleaned it up?
#
I've cleaned it up by introducing these completely opaque bonds, of which 90% or 95% of them
#
never come to my party.
#
In theory, you don't know who gave the money, but you can be pretty darn sure that the people
#
who are buying these bonds believe that the parties know exactly who they're giving the
#
And so in some ways, it's also this moment where the Indian economy has grown to a certain
#
size and elections have become so expensive.
#
And this party that is very well organized and absolutely ruthless when it comes to winning
#
elections has seized the reins of power.
#
And now it has this first mover advantage that gives it such a huge leg up over anybody
#
And it really comes back to 2014, where at one point Congress would have had those advantages.
#
They didn't have the ruthlessness.
#
They didn't have the imagination to really press their point.
#
They were shambolic and disorganized.
#
These guys have power now.
#
I mean, you never know in politics.
#
Of course, people go up and down.
#
And given the kind of system that is being put in place, both in terms of traditional
#
media such as television, the fake news factories that they've set up, where basically there's
#
no difference between...
#
There are people out there who genuinely believe that Nehru was this lascivious man because
#
they've seen a picture of him pecking his niece on the cheek at an airport.
#
There are people who really genuinely believe that Nehru had Stalin put both into some gulag
#
This stuff is believed.
#
I've met people in Uttar Pradesh who tell me that Nehru's great grandfather was a Muslim.
#
I mean, this is just...
#
So what is true and what is not true?
#
They have an ability to just dominate both traditional media and then using WhatsApp
#
and these fake news sites that they've set up like Postcard News also just put out misinformation.
#
And then they have the resources to amplify this and you have this completely inept opposition.
#
You have the fact that a large section of our punditocracy will very happily get co-opted.
#
The best example for me of that is all the self-professed libertarians singing the praises
#
To bring libertarians into it is absolutely shocking.
#
I'd written a piece about this called Beware of the Useful Idiots talking about the intellectuals
#
who supported Modi even long after it became obvious that he is what he's shown himself
#
And in fact, in that, I don't know if you read it, but I held you out as an example of
#
intellectual honesty because you kind of changed your mind there.
#
But you know, just fake news, I mean, we live in an age of bullshit in the sense that Harry
#
Frankfurt defined the term bullshit, right?
#
Which is that a person who lies knows what the truth is and he chooses to lie to divert
#
people's attention from that.
#
A person who bullshit doesn't care what the truth is.
#
He's saying whatever he feels like at the moment and it may or may not be true.
#
And you know, Modi is a classic bullshitter and it works for him in the sense that even
#
if you see that much maligned interview of him, where he speaks about how clouds sort
#
And now the thing is, you know, by making fun of him, we're just like getting him, you
#
just, you just increase his vote margin even more margin because number one, people don't
#
And number two, what he does well in that interview is he comes across as this folksy
#
likeable as this guy with folksy wisdom and he's, you know, likeable and all of that.
#
And that image has nothing to do with whether he's talking sense or not.
#
And this is something which I think a lot of people just haven't figured out that we
#
live in an age where facts don't matter.
#
But I don't think it's just bullshitting.
#
I don't think it's a question of, well, I'm talking about the larger machine, not Modi
#
I don't think this is a question of not caring.
#
The lies and the fabrications are very carefully crafted.
#
Again, it's the same thing.
#
It comes down to sort of like the cloud.
#
They are preposterous to us.
#
If you're educated, you think this is like, it's actually, you can't read this stuff
#
Nehru's grandfather was Ghiazuddin Ghazi.
#
But this stuff is believed.
#
So, and it's all very well constructed and all goes in a particular direction.
#
And they have at this point, they have done such a number on Rahul Gandhi.
#
I don't think his political reputation is recoverable.
#
And it's because they didn't have the capacity to take this seriously.
#
So they're not just bullshitting.
#
They figure out who they want to go after.
#
I mean, at one point it was kind of, I mean, at the sort of lower end of this, I sort of,
#
at some one point I found that there were all kinds of people who were on Twitter who
#
And they will always accuse me of taking either two lakh rupees or five lakh rupees from the
#
Of course, they haven't read the fact that I've been critical of Congress for more than
#
10 years and still remain critical of Congress.
#
But anyway, they were like, you're on the Congress payroll.
#
And I was kind of, I couldn't understand why they only ever accused me either of taking
#
two lakh rupees or five lakh rupees.
#
And I was just like, why are there no four?
#
And it's kind of an insult that they're accusing you of being so cheap.
#
Like you can sell your soul for five lakhs.
#
Well, five lakhs is a lot of money for me, I don't know about you.
#
No, I think it was a recurring thing.
#
It wasn't a one time thing.
#
So I was sort of like, why do they only have these two numbers?
#
Why don't they have three and a half?
#
And it turns out there was in one of their fake news sites, someone had written a story
#
where they hadn't attached names on, put names there, but they'd put out this story saying
#
that Cambridge Analytica has hired, I don't know, 125 intellectuals to defame Modiji.
#
And my hunch is that there was another version of this, which is probably on WhatsApp, where
#
they had sort of lists of people.
#
And people believe this stuff, right?
#
I mean, and this is just someone just writing a column somewhere and they care enough to
#
Imagine if you're actually, you're a real opponent.
#
This is terrifying, right?
#
You're doing yourself a disservice.
#
You're a real opponent.
#
I mean, Nitesh Kumar was just, you know, one day he was being battered every day on television
#
as for corruption and his whole image was Mr. Clean.
#
And then suddenly he switches and then those stories go away.
#
So the comparison I've been making more recently, I mean, the obvious comparison, of course,
#
is with Erdogan because of the roots in religious nationalism, support from the business class,
#
the distance from secular elites and all of that.
#
But another really good example parallel is with Orban in Hungary.
#
And what you have is when Modi talks about the hard market consensus and he talks about
#
going against it, what he's basically doing is that he is pitching his own sense of Hindu
#
authenticity against this supercilious, sneering, globalized elite.
#
And this is a framing that's actually common to all populists, like I'd written a column
#
about it a couple of years ago based on Jan Werner Muller's book on populism, where, you
#
know, blaming the elites is one of, I think there's a whole laundry list of things that
#
populists have in common, whether it's Erdogan or Modi or Duterte or whoever, or Orban.
#
And one of them, of course, is blaming elites.
#
And you can't say that our elites haven't made their job easy for them, of course.
#
I mean, it only works because there's a kernel of truth there, right?
#
People are supercilious.
#
I mean, I'll give you one example, right?
#
The whole, let's say, if you were a religious Hindu, the entire conversation about the Ram
#
temple outside of popular politics, if you look at it, the sort of newspapers, if you
#
look at the TV studios and so on, the entire debate was dominated by people who just mostly
#
just are not very religious.
#
They're just not, they're not connected.
#
They don't have a dog in this fight.
#
And I think that this sort of thing, it breeds this tremendous sense of resentment, of being,
#
you know, and I think that a lot of the BJP people, that's what they crave.
#
What they don't understand is that you have to earn respect.
#
And they think that they can, the only way to get that respect for them is to point to
#
vote totals and say, look now, I mean, again, it's totally illogical, right?
#
I mean, you can get 303 seats in the Lok Sabha, but demodization is still too crazy
#
But that's not how they see it.
#
And it's something even Modi and peak bullshitting mode doesn't mention anymore because it's
#
this kind of, that's not even a case to be made.
#
You know, speaking about the BJP, if we kind of look back through history and trying to
#
figure out where they may go from here.
#
And one thread that I've kind of found in political Hindutva from the Jansang onwards
#
is that every leader has been made to look moderate by those who followed him.
#
For example, Vajpayee, you could argue made Shyama Prasad Mukherjee look moderate.
#
Advani made Vajpayee look like a statesman.
#
Modi made Advani look acceptable.
#
And then came Adityanath and perhaps now even Pragya.
#
And do you therefore see the BJP getting more extreme, especially now with this consolidated
#
hold on power and the questions that are coming from certain sources, which, you know, I mean,
#
I've heard people asking, ki mandir kahan hai?
#
You know, people arguing that Modi is too moderate, Adityanath is too moderate, we voted
#
you to power, mandir kahan hai?
#
What do you think of the future direction of the BJP?
#
Are there competing forces pulling them in different directions or is this inevitable?
#
So I think you could certainly make that argument for a progression the way you've made it.
#
But I view it slightly differently.
#
I think that there are always choices and think that the BJP in the Vajpayee era was
#
in many ways grappling with those choices.
#
You can fault Vajpayee for, you know, in the end, not sort of not doing everything that
#
You know, there were certainly, you know, if you look at the kinds of people he surrounded
#
himself with, people like Brijesh Mishra, people like Jaswant Singh, people like Arun
#
Shourie, these are, you know, broadly people who were, you know, who wanted economic liberalization
#
and had broadly liberal views on, you know, questions of faith and identity politics.
#
And again, you know, as a conservative, it's not as though there are no problems there,
#
There are problems on the sort of, there are problems that the liberal left in India has
#
preferred not to look at, right?
#
I once wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal about how this extremist Wahhabi cleric Zakir
#
Naik was being hailed as a liberal by Indian liberals, which is preposterous.
#
So I think there was a moment where the BJP could have turned towards a more moderate
#
path and that moment was not seized.
#
Moving ahead now, I have to say it's hard to be optimistic, you know, I've been in Delhi
#
the last few days talking to people and they point to the Gujarat experience and they say
#
that look just as Modi as chief minister of Gujarat, when his second and third terms,
#
he kind of clamped down on the hotheads and so on, and that he's going to do that again.
#
The way I see it though is that, you know, once you have unleashed these forces, and
#
again, I go back to the Adityanath model, it's just, it's very difficult to put this
#
genie back in the bottle.
#
Now that they control the narrative, now that they have, you know, some of these sort of
#
completely outlandish things, right, I mean, look at the, you know, if the, there's a point
#
I made in one of my Times of India columns that, right, if the World Bank had an ease
#
of doing bigotry index, India would be like the fastest moving country on that, right?
#
So we went from being in the space of a few short years, we went from being a country
#
where you could not even discuss things like Islamism and terrorism, right, the taboo topics,
#
you couldn't even go there, and now we've reached a point where people on national television
#
are propounding just like absolutely, you know, batshit crazy theories and ideas.
#
I was on a channel the other day, on Counting Day, and I won't take his name there, but
#
we were having this discussion and Sabha Nakvi made the point, which is a perfectly legitimate
#
point, that the kind of margins that people like Pragya Singh Thakur or Giriraj Singh
#
Sakshi Maharaj had got, which suggested this 2019 vote in some ways is a vote for majoritarianism.
#
It's a perfectly legitimate point.
#
You can contest it, you can say it's also a vote for other things, but there's nothing
#
wrong with saying what she said.
#
And immediately you had other panelists, you know, attacking her in the most base terms
#
and accusing her basically, because she's someone who happens to be Muslim, of launching
#
a Ghazwa-e-Hind to subjugate and wipe out the Hindus.
#
This is like, this is again, you know, some of it again, I mean, it's so crazy that it's
#
funny, but it sort of tells you what has happened to the discourse, and because this has happened
#
to the discourse, I see no will to discipline this, right?
#
I don't see, what they want to do is image management, right?
#
They're not actually willing to do something.
#
And the best example of this is that, you know, the prime minister after Pragya Singh
#
Thakur says that Nathuram Godse was a patriot, he says that, oh well, I'll never forgive
#
But if this is such a big deal for you, why don't you dismiss her, right?
#
So that's the point, right?
#
There's image management, and then there's actual principle, and we've seen no evidence
#
that actual principle is actually out there to trump image management.
#
I want to ask you one last question before we sort of end this episode, which is, okay,
#
now that Modi has got this resounding mandate, and now that we are where we are, looking
#
ahead to the next five years or the next 10 years, what gives you hope and what gives
#
What gives me hope is that, you know, for all the problems, India's democracy has deepened,
#
and that there is a possibility that India could just, in its own messy way, stumbled
#
upon the right set of policies, learned from trial and error, at least there's going to
#
be a certain amount of political stability.
#
And so he may be able to get the economic reform story right in the second term, but
#
she wasn't able to be due in the first term.
#
I'm not saying that will happen, but if I want to be hopeful, I'll talk about that.
#
And I would also hope that the sort of natural fact that this is a deeply pluralistic society
#
is going to prevail, and that people recognize that this is just not only morally reprehensible,
#
but also insane to try to sort of take 20% of your population and make them somehow feel
#
as though they're not fully part of your country.
#
So that would be the sort of optimistic side of things.
#
On the pessimistic side, I think that there are quite possibly, you know, playing with
#
things that have long-term implications that they have not really figured out, right?
#
I mean, these are really serious debates.
#
Just the other day I was reading a series of essays that Lala Lajpat Rai wrote almost
#
exactly a hundred years ago, in 1924.
#
Gandhi had just arrived on the scene.
#
There had been riots between Hindus and Muslims in various parts of British India.
#
And he was really trying to work through some of these issues, right?
#
How do you work together as Hindus and Muslims and get the British out, but also maintain
#
some kind of good relations and so on?
#
And one of the things that struck me was that we really no longer have people in the political
#
class with a few exceptions, right?
#
There are people like Shashi Tharoor, even Jay Panda, who sort of read and are engaged
#
But by and large, the decline of the quality of our political class, right?
#
Look at what was thrown up in the last 40 years of British rule.
#
And look at what we've thrown up in the 70 years of independence.
#
The decline in quality has just been staggering, right?
#
I mean, you go from Ambedkar to Mayawati, if you just look at it in terms of intellectual
#
So I worry that we're headed into an era where India is going to continue to face extremely
#
large and complex problems, and we have a political class that may not be equipped to
#
deal with those problems.
#
On a truly dark and depressing note, thanks so much for coming on the show, Siddharth.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you can follow Sadanand on Twitter at Dhumeh,
#
An archive of his writings is also linked from the show notes on the episode page.
#
You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, that's A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at www.sceneunseen.in, www.thinkpragati.com
#
and www.ivnpodcast.com.
#
The Scene and the Unseen is supported by the Takshashila Institution, an independent
#
center for research in education and public policy.
#
The Takshashila Institution offers 12-week courses in public policy, technology policy
#
and strategic studies, and for both full-time students and working professionals, visit
#
takshashila.org.in for more details.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
We are from the Open Library Project and we host a podcast called Paperback.
#
Paperback is a podcast where we engage with stalwarts and experts from various industries,
#
suggesting non-fiction titles that contributed to their journey in a big way.
#
We've had guests like Anjali Rehna, Dr. Marcus Rani, Dr. Swati Lodha, Ambhi Parmeswaran,
#
Apurva Damani and many more on our show Paperback.
#
Find new episodes every Wednesday on IVM Podcasts app, website or wherever you listen to podcasts.
#
India's a massive subcontinent home to truly stunning diversity.
#
Behind the veils of smoke that obscure our thriving cities, our history is still alive,
#
glimmering like sequins, waiting to be discovered.
#
And if you, like me, are straining to hear the echoes of our past, this podcast is for
#
I'm Aniruddha Kanissetti, a history and geopolitics researcher and I host Echoes of India, a history
#
podcast about India, by Indians and for Indians.
#
In Echoes, we journey through the complex histories of South Asia and what they can
#
teach us about our globalised world.
#
Tune in every Wednesday on IVMPodcasts.com or your favourite podcast app.
