#
Before you listen to this episode of The Scene and the Unseen, I have a recommendation for
#
Do check out Pulya Baazi, hosted by Saurabh Chandra and Pranay Kutasane, two really good
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Kick-ass podcast in Hindi.
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How important is religion to the idea of India?
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There was a time when it seemed that the answer was not very important.
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We lived in a secular, modernizing country where religion was a private pursuit but would
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never be anything larger than that, at least that's how it seemed to an English-speaking
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elite group of people of whom I suppose I am one.
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Maybe I derived my idea of India from my idea of myself.
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I am an atheist and a rationalist and I live my life by a moral code that gives primacy
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I took joy and comfort in social life, but the communities I was part of were communities
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of choice, built around voluntary action and based not on identity but shared beliefs
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No wonder then that I should project these preferences to the nation I was part of.
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What we have seen in recent years though is that religion is an important part of public
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life and many people take great comfort from being part of communities that they are born
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into and their group identity is just as important to them as a sense of themselves.
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In fact, the sense of themselves is often derived from larger communitarian feelings.
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I won't make a value judgment on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
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I have come to prefer longer discursive conversations to short and crisp ones.
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And whereas my early episodes aim to be 20 minutes long, I now aim for a couple of hours
#
During this evolution, I have asked myself what I want my show to be and here is my answer
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I want my show to be about maximizing insight.
#
I aim to get guests who have thought deeply about their subject of choice and I aim to
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draw their insights out in the course of long leisurely conversations.
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And sometimes there is another purpose to be served by these which can also be summed
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up in two words, provoking thought.
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My guest today is Suyash Rai who now works for Carnegie India and was earlier with NIPFP.
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I came to meet Suyash just a couple of years ago and as he is based in Delhi and I am based
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in Mumbai, we have met just a handful of times.
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Yet each of these times we have had long conversations in the course of which I feel like my brain
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Each conversation with Suyash leaves me both smarter and humbler and I thought it would
#
be nice to try and replicate that on the seen and the unseen.
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Now Suyash works as a scholar in political economy but our best conversations have happened
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outside this area of work.
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Today's episode is about conservatism in India and the role of religion in our society,
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subjects on which Suyash has read deeply though he asked me to include the caveat before our
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conversation that he does not consider himself an expert in these subjects.
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That said, even though I often disagree with him, I have always found my conversations
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with him thought provoking.
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What more can one ask for when talking with friends?
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Our conversation for this episode by the way was recorded a couple of weeks before the
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election results were out, even if the subject now seems topical.
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Before we cut to the conversation though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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This episode of the seen and the unseen is brought to you by Storytel.
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This week I want to recommend not a book in particular but a writer, rather a filmmaker
#
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So Yash, welcome to the seen and the unseen.
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Thank you for having me.
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So Yash, you work in the political economy which obviously is an interest of mine as
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well but it's interesting to me that you know on all the occasions that we've met we've
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never actually spoken much about economics and the political economies, just more being
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sort of an exchange of ideas and that's what I was hoping for today.
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So tell my listeners a little bit more about yourself in the sense what do you do, what's
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your journey been like?
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So I presently work mostly on political economy issues.
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I am working with Carnegie which I just joined recently.
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Before this for about eight years I was working at the National State of Public Finance and
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As a policy wonk, I was a fellow there working mostly on financial sector reforms, infrastructure
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regulation and reforms, issues of public finance and so on and so forth.
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So that's been my kind of before that I was in the financial sector but other than my
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professional interest in political economy, economic reforms, economic policy, I have
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other interests in reading and understanding the world just as you do.
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And broadly I would say that I'm interested in philosophy and literature and questions
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of religion and society.
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Also because of these interests I have been kind of reading and trying to understand psychology
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The way I've kind of gone about pursuing it is try to read great books.
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It's been an interest of mine from a very young age to read great books and try to plot
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Some of them are difficult and I'm not able to understand them fully but I try to go through
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what are generally considered to be great books.
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That has been a lifelong journey and in these different areas I've kind of tried to do that.
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And who would you say are the sort of thinkers and all books which have changed the way you
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look at the world, who had that kind of impact on you?
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It's a difficult question because I snowball from one thinker to another and one book to
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But if I were to look at the main influences I would say in literature my kind of the tall
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peak in my mind is Saul Bellow.
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I really enjoyed his work, his treatment of the human existence is something that appeals
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I've read his books several times over and kind of keep going back to him in many ways.
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In philosophy I would say that I find a great deal of appeal in ancient thinkers especially
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Plato and Aristotle and some of the more recent thinkers like Charles Taylor, Alasdair McIntyre
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and such thinkers I've had a lot of interest in.
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Closer home in our tradition I've enjoyed reading books on Indian philosophy and books
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which kind of reflect on Indian religious tradition and so on and so forth.
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And I enjoy reading religious scriptures across various traditions, our own tradition also,
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but also I enjoy reading books from Christian tradition.
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I have recently spent some time reading the Confucian tradition and different traditions
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and trying to understand where they come from and how do they think of human society and
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order and the place of human beings in this world and so on and so forth.
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And over time various thinkers of philosophy and psychology and religious thought have
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If I were to just name a few more I would say someone like Carl Jung has a little impact
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on my thinking about the world a little bit.
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Over the years I've read several books that he's written and contrasted that with say
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what Freud was trying to do and others are doing similarly as I said earlier.
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Some people who are modern philosophers like Charles Taylor and Alasdair McIntyre have
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tried to make sense of how modernity is kind of changing human life and human society has
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kind of changed the way I look at the world today as we kind of are where we are in this
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world where modernity is the driving force in many ways in different ways in different
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societies but it's such an important force in our lives and how we as a traditional society
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trying to kind of interact with it and trying to assimilate those ideas while also preserving
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some things that we may like to preserve.
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So these are some of the thinkers that have kind of influenced my worldview on these issues.
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But if you were to kind of go further into it and it's hard to name specific individuals
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because there are many people who kind of work off each other.
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It's hard to for example in philosophy there's a kind of tradition and different traditions
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and different branches of traditions which speak to each other starting from the ancient
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times to today in the West as well in our own traditions and different traditions that
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are there the Chinese tradition and the Islamic tradition and so on so forth.
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So I try to understand to the extent possible given the time constraints and all where these
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traditions are and how they have progressed over time.
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And you know just kind of looking back at my own development I can I can you know clearly
#
see say a difference between the 15 year old Amit and the 45 year old me which clear differences
#
in the sense of 15 year old Amit would have been vaguely left liberal would have been
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like any kid in the 1980s someone who believed in you know government is the answer to everything
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if there's a problem with the world government should solve it and obviously I mean so you
#
know me well enough to know those kind of and as do my listeners where I stand today
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and how I've kind of evolved.
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So if I could kind of throw that question back at you that you know how is say the 15
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year old Suyash different from the in terms of what he believes in core beliefs or whatever
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are different from the Suyash who sits across me at the table today.
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Not 15 year but around 18 or 19 year old age I started reading a lot of existential philosophy.
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So I was reading Kamo and Sa'at and many people who stand in that tradition that kind
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of was its intellectual legacy to basically Nietzsche and Heidegger to a great extent.
#
So I was reading a lot of that and I was thinking about the world from that kind of prism and
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for example someone like Kamo is extremely powerful as a thinker and if you read a book
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like Myth of Sisyphus it moves you it affects you it changes your worldview and it did that
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to me also to a great extent and I was trying to use that as a template you know this concern
#
for authenticity and thinking of human existence in the way the existential thought things
#
to kind of form my inner life sort of speak and over time now it's been more 15, 16 years
#
I would say that I've changed a great deal I've become much more respectful of things
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like social traditions and things like religion and also more respectful of the human I mean
#
more thoughtful about human limitations and understanding the word limits of human knowledge
#
when it comes to economic questions that is something that you and I agree on more or
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less limits of thinking on what human rationality can do with respect to existing structures
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social as well as economic.
#
So I'm much more kind of modest about those things but more respectful of what exists
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what is out there and trying to work with that I would say then I was as a kind of a
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So I don't want to thrust a label on you but would it then be fair to say that you're a
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It's not a I don't like to use labels of that sort because of all the other implications
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they kind of yeah I think these labels have a little explanatory power because of one
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simple reason that when you use a word like that it has very different meaning for different
#
individuals and it will take a great deal to use that word well.
#
So it's better not to use such labels and I don't think anything is achieved by me applying
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a label of X to myself or Y to you.
#
It's more of a conversation stopper than something that helps make conversation move forward
#
especially in these deeply polarized time.
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I guess a utility of a label though and I was applying this label in a perfectly respectful
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way though I'm not a conservative myself because it helps you sort of understand the core beliefs
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of a person and where a person is coming from.
#
I mean one of the subjects we've often spoken about in our coffee house conversations is
#
ideology and have you read Arnold Kling's book The Three Languages of Politics?
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Okay so in his book The Three Languages of Politics and this really it's a fascinating
#
insight very short book I'd recommend all my listeners to pick it up can be read in
#
one sitting and it's probably more relevant to American politics but it nevertheless was
#
pretty insightful for me in that context and Kling says that the problem with our politics
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and the cause of our depolarization is that we are often talking past each other because
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of fundamental premises of all the three major ideologies that he picked out which is liberal
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in the American left liberal sense, libertarian and conservative have different starting points
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and different first principles and what he said therefore for example is that the American
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the left liberal or as we would call them has her core value is equality and the libertarian's
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core value is freedom and the conservative's core value is tradition for different reasons
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and therefore when say a libertarian and a left liberal are talking to each other they
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might both be making perfect sense given their starting points and they're necessarily therefore
#
talking past each other unless they have the courtesy and the effort to acknowledge the
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other person's starting point and take it into account for example I mean I'm very
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clearly someone who believes in the importance of individual rights and freedoms so for example
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when I'm talking with someone for whom equality really matters and they're in favor of things
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I wouldn't be like redistribution and all the coercion that involves my effort would
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then be to take that value into account and say that no equality is actually best served
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through the root of freedom and try to explain that and make the case that way which has
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a better chance of working than just you know shouting the other people down and so on and
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I mean this is not really relevant to India per se because obviously we don't have a conservative
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tradition in that sense in sense of you know the Burkian conservative sense where you recognize
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or even the Haikin though he famously wrote an essay about how he's not a conservative
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but in the sense of understanding the limits of your own knowledge respect or realizing
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that the social structures that exist can't just be redesigned from the top down and they
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have much more power than that and so on and so forth.
#
How relevant is this in an Indian context and if the left right spectrum isn't relevant
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at all in India and I don't think it is but nevertheless you know what are our ideologies
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So let me kind of offer one counter to something you said you said we don't have a conservative
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tradition in the say Burkian sense yeah so I don't know what it means to have a tradition
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in a Burkian sense but let me just kind of respond the way I think it makes sense is
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that we do have a conservative tradition which has many kind of ideas coming out of it one
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of this idea is that society is a self-organizing kind of a system and it should change on its
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own volition and its own workings and if there is a form and change it should happen on its
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own and the state is not something that should intervene in that for example if you read
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I mean even if you were to think about the 20th century thinkers on this someone like
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Sepp Karpatri Maharaj or someone like Sri Rajagopalachari so you will see these ideas you know so I
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recently read I bought I mean I had bought some time ago Geeta Press book Maqswad and
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Ramraj it's a Hindi book it's a long book which has a middling kind of critique of modern
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western political philosophy and it's kind of thinkers like Hobbes and Locke and all
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of that but it offers an alternative to that in terms of a dharmic kind of society which
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is self-organizing and where the state is just kind of there to serve that social order
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and not really kind of change it through methods of legal positivism where I mean rationality
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is used to describe what is good and what is bad which is outside of that particular
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tradition so there are these traditions that exist I mean in Indian intellectual thought
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also and if you were to go back you can find different ways in which they found expression
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at different points in time in our history we do have these kinds of strands of tradition
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I don't know I don't have the kind of scholarship required to say whether all of these add up
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to a proper tradition as such a political tradition or and the extent to which they
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currently inform the politics of our in our country but there is this intellectual tradition
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that is kind of there and there are some thinkers who've tried to for this viewpoint so left
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and right can be thought of different ways so I mean the origin of left and right is
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you know 1789 that French assembly where on the right were people who wanted to preserve
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the social order with the king at the top and aristocracy and all of that on the left
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of those who wanted to destroy their social order and replace it with a different kind
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of order so in that sense you just take that language then we do have right like there
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are people on the right wing who think that the social and economic order should not be
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shaped by the state power and there are people on the left who think that they should be
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and in fact some of our kind of founders I mean in terms of the people who were leading
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the independence movement and by the virtue of that also got an opportunity to play a
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outsized role in the constituent assembly have had those views right that they did build
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into the constitution's power of the state to intervene in the economy as well as a society
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so that debate has been there and I don't know whether you've read this recent book
#
identity and ideology which also kind of brings out this point I mean I want to give acknowledgement
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very stew that this debate has been there since earlier and it is kind of in some ways
#
playing its way out even today what is the role of the state in the society and the economy
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and at that level the debate is actually very much comparable with the debate in some western
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countries but let's be careful here because the way I see it is that every ideology actually
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works as an embodiment of some you know the views of some social group in a particular
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context so we you and I can discuss left and right in an abstract sense but if you go to
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say UK or US the left and right spectrum is currently being defined in a particular context
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in a particular way there are certainly differences but the issues that they're fighting today
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are very different and can change over time so I can give you an example Barry Goldwater
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who was in whom a lot of conservative angst in the mid 20th century in America kind of
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crystallized he was this Arizona Senator and fireman leader was conservative movement he
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wrote this book called conscious of a conservative where he says that here one example he was
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dead against corporate funding of political parties and political election campaigns just
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a few decades later the right wing in America has a totally opposite view on this point
#
right so ideologies work their way in social groups over time I'm not saying that ideologies
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are just byproducts of social processes I'm not making that point but I'm also not saying
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that ideologies exist independently you know of any social mooring or any social kind of
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you know context both have to be seen you know this abstract notions working their way
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through a particular society and social groups and contestation groups both are important
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if you look at only the abstract only the context you're missing that kind of the how
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ideas work through society so I think when we say that these things won't apply to India
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they do I think we have very similar kind of variations of the same themes let me put
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that way so I have like four follow-up questions which are all very different but on the same
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point and one of them sort of also then leads me to clarify what I meant when I said that
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there's no sort of analog of Burkian conservatism and it's not a definitive statement I'm making
#
but it leads me to my question which is like when I think of Burkian conservatism I think
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of it as coming from an intellectual tradition of ideas where for example Burk is looking
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at the world around him and seeing the impracticality of trying to design it from the top down and
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from there coming to a respect for tradition not as a respect for tradition per se on its
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own but simply a respect for the processes that make tradition what it is and therefore
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understanding that it's harder to break that down whereas the question I would ask is and
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again I am much less knowledgeable than you about this like I haven't I'm also not an
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expert I could I could easily be wrong but then my my question is my question slash speculation
#
is that for example though the book you referred to by Chibber and Rahul Varma is called ideology
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and identity and my question then is that how much can we how much does one arise from
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the other how much does a former arise from the latter how much does ideology arise from
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identity in the sense as you yourself made the point that okay there are social contexts
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in which ideologies emerge now one can look back at some of these thinkers like the book
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you mentioned from the Gita press which again I haven't read so I don't want to impute something
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but where for example one might say that okay they might be expressing conservative thoughts
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in terms of respecting tradition that someone like Burke may agree with but the source of
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that expression is say they want to preserve the caste system for example.
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So yeah so this is a Paul Ricoeur calls harmonics of suspicion that we should look at these
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treatise and ideologies as to present a suspicion okay what are they trying to preserve what
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is their hidden intent they may themselves will not be aware what they're trying to do
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you know when they put forth certain ideas but let me kind of so it is very difficult
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to actually settle this question because intents are not so easily kind of deciphered from
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even reading or even seeing the behavior of a person so clearly because we don't have
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that level of knowledge about the person himself may not realize they're not realize because
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they are yeah I mean you have to be careful about what they realize and how they construct
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their kind of ideas so just to take the example of again Garpathri Maharaj his critique is
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significantly critical materialism and the ability of human thought to understand social
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forces and modify them through you know the means of the state and I mean politically
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powerful state so there is an intellectual critique there it is so that intellectual
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critique may be motivated by an intent to preserve a social order which did have even
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at that time even today has quite a bit of injustice built into it it could be and it
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So what you're saying is ignore what the intent might be and just focus on the intellectual
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I don't think we should ignore it I think any tradition should certainly try to incorporate
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the suspicion into it because there is especially in our traditions I do think that there's
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a lot of I mean practices which are preserved in the name of just preserving the tradition
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so if somebody is looking at it from a suspicious perspective bringing a hermetic of suspicion
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and saying that hey this particular practice is just trying to preserve certain kind of
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privileges and all of that you should try to be fair to that perspective because this
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suspicion might make us better over time we should try to deal with it in our own kind
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of ways and we should debate it talk about it but what we should not do is reject it
#
upfront because it is true that many people who think of the word in the suspicious manner
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are sometimes wrong and sometimes half right but they're also quite often right and they
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do have a point often but is it fair to say that as far as a discourse is concerned it's
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better to focus on the effect rather than the intent.
#
For example if something that you are talking about also has the effect of say preserving
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some privileges like the caste system just to use one example would it be better to focus
#
on that instead of turning attention on the person and say oh he is saying it because
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he wants XYZ to continue because I think that poisons a lot of the discourse when the focus
#
turns to the intent of the person rather than arguing on the basis of the argument itself.
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So what do you mean by intent so yeah I think it's not particularly useful if you get personal
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and say Karapatri Maharaj was making an argument to preserve this Raja Gopalachari was arguing
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for a certain kind of education system which put the kid in the households you know vocation
#
for half a day because they were trying to preserve the caste system and all that.
#
So the individual kind of attribution of intent is I think a little tricky because it's makes
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it the conversation very difficult but we do have to recognize the structural forces
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that may be at work I use that term with a great deal of hesitation because I think structural
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analysis is often overrated and it pretends to have more insight than it really does but
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I think there is something to that so now if you were to kind of broaden that discussion
#
and let's look back at the assaults that were made on religion and the most powerful assaults
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that have been made you know in other traditions in the Western tradition specifically the
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assault by Marx, assault by Nietzsche, assault by Freud for example you know you read this
#
in fact this hermetic of suspicion term comes from their treatment of Marx made it about
#
you know class interest this is trying to preserve certain kind of class interest and
#
you know there's a much more interesting critique of ideology and this religion that he makes
#
then Freud makes it about much more of you know of the subconscious forces and the you
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know psychological explanations for it Nietzsche has a much different explanation of you know
#
genealogical explanation for it and all of these if you were to think carefully and try
#
to incorporate they might reveal some truths about society so I would say just take the
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idea take the idea but not just the consequence of the idea but also the idea in itself and
#
see what's in it you know because I think the consequences are where people have disagreements
#
on a lot of disagreements on what is the good society what is the good state of the world
#
so you say that say look at the consequence but it's not so simple to look at the consequence
#
because there are no agreements on the consequence the whole point of disagreement is that we
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disagree on what a good society might look like.
#
And some people might privilege group rights some people might privilege individual rights
#
and some may say that certain kind of privileges are justified for example many libertarians
#
say that if you are a multi-billionaire you worked built a business or even if you're
#
inherited it's your business and you should enjoy the privilege some people say that income
#
inequality is obscene and unfair and it is disproportionate and based on past privileges
#
and all they may have a point there also but the point is that these are points of substantive
#
moral disagreements that is where the division will happen so it's not so simple that you
#
look at the consequence and you'll settle the debate I don't think for example earlier
#
you said that if a libertarian wants to have an argument with somebody who is interested
#
in equality then you if you can show that equality will be achieved through libertarian
#
means I think it's a little naive to say that there is a such easy reconcilability of these
#
points of view these points of view are fundamentally irreconcilable roles and a nausicaa not can't
#
be reconciled so simply if you were to just talk 20th century thought because their points
#
of departure of what is good is very different.
#
Yeah and it's not just then a question of what your first principles are whether it's
#
you know freedom on one side or equality on the other side the difference also lies in
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how differently you look at consequences and therefore you can't reconcile them from either
#
It's not so simple to reconcile but I think interesting thing is to keep having this conversation
#
though I agree with you on this point find ways to have conversations right like what
#
we have seen in the last four five years and especially even going back earlier I don't
#
want to say only four five years is the framing of political differences in a very Schmittian
#
terms you know Carl Schmitt wrote this book called concept of the political where he framed
#
political differences as you know friends and enemies so political opponents are your enemies
#
and the supremely political moment is when you realize somebody is an enemy you know
#
that so that's his idea of the political and more and more we are seeing framing of the
#
political in this kind of a way which I think is very inimical to this very binary way it's
#
binary and it is not just binary it's also it has a phenomenological consequence for
#
the way we kind of perceive the world around us.
#
I mean these are I mean very important differences let's not underplay the importance of political
#
differences you know like you can't say that a Soviet Union person who supports the Soviet
#
Union a person who supports a very different system is in consequential the difference
#
are highly consequential there is a lot at stake the stakes are very high but how do
#
we play this very high stakes kind of like I don't know use the word game but how do
#
we participate in this kind of high stakes contestation without framing this as friends
#
versus enemies kind of situation because then if it's the enemy then all means are fair
#
and then I mean you can't have institutions preserve or you can't have many other you
#
know things that are required at the foundation to have political conversation and unfortunately
#
in the last few years in India we are seeing a lot of this framing which is so extreme
#
that it is and on all sides I would say I mean I don't want to say a little bit more
#
perhaps on one side than the other but framing is I think if you were to I don't believe
#
in having absolute kind of you know entry conditions to have a conversation but commitment
#
to at least having a conversation is the entry point to have that conversation right because
#
otherwise you get into this paradox of intolerance and so on so forth.
#
No and I'm totally thinking of Twitter right now given all that you said and Twitter I
#
would say is now that I've learned a new phrase from you is a very Schmittian environment.
#
I think Twitter brings out every person is better in real life than on Twitter and they
#
are better on Facebook than on Twitter.
#
They're better in a blog than on Facebook and so the formats do have a kind of constraint
#
that they present and especially the conversations political and I mean differences are highly
#
emotional and it's also the nature of the way we kind of form political opinion how
#
A lot of it is emotional and there are passions involved.
#
And also Cass Sunstein referred to this phenomenon called group polarization and what you see
#
a lot on Twitter is not only do you quickly get divided along these quote unquote tribal
#
lines in terms of friends and enemies like to use that Schmittian phrase I'm going to
#
keep saying Schmittian but what also happens is that then most political discourse on Twitter
#
just simply becomes a way of raising your status within your own in-group by signaling
#
how strongly you feel and therefore the discourse gets more and more polarized and the bizarre
#
thing is you know like what I keep ranting about is that people think in binaries you
#
know like I have been called both a congressy when I've criticized Modi or a Sanghi amazingly
#
enough and I've criticized Rahul Gandhi and the thing is you can't really converse like
#
that because of course I've criticized them both and of course I've criticized Modi much
#
more because he happens to hold the reins of government.
#
So you're always trying to speak truth to power but the point is that you know once
#
you form these binary sort of tribal camps then the political discussion is useless it's
#
all signaling and you're not actually discussing issues.
#
Yeah so the root of this is that people are coming from very different premises the ideological
#
premises are very different and people who share those premises for them this is a no-brainer
#
like you can 140 characters not even 240 characters say something that will just make sense to
#
them of course but people who don't share those premises will be aghast that something
#
like that can be said you know.
#
So for example if you say on Twitter a libertarian says tax is theft libertarians say that there's
#
a genuine kind of this is a line that they use.
#
Taxation is theft they say then and somebody else who's thinks of morality and political
#
ideology differently and says things that taxation is important to not just for the
#
public goods also for redistribution and all will be aghast at that and they'll see this
#
as a provocation right.
#
Now the libertarian didn't mean it as a provocation because it's just so central to their worldview
#
that taxation is theft you know it's something that is canonical to their worldview and somebody
#
else thinks very differently about it so that's why I think the way the political ideologies
#
in modern world are kind of taking shape there is a great deal of difference on basic premises
#
about what it is and that in communication so when we go and participate in the public
#
sphere it makes communication much more difficult because our premises are different and this
#
is a point on which Alasdair McIntyre is very good he kind of he has in his two books who's
#
just his wish rationality and after virtue kind of tried in the at least in the western
#
context find out the roots of the kind of differences although we also have some of
#
these similar kind of debates and we do have a certain globalization of discourse that
#
is happening over time so we can also see the kind of underlying differences there's
#
a lot to learn from this kind of analysis but the irreconcilability is one part but
#
the second part is also what she says is that the person who makes the argument makes it
#
that if there is a no brainer like a person who says of course it's your fundamental right
#
to privacy there is a debate about that right and another person will say that hey I do
#
I have different views about that and this is a very common thing that happens in our
#
discussions and much more on Twitter because Twitter is like that it's just reaction quickly
#
that how can you have a debate on that of course I can have a debate on that so it's
#
really it goes back to the foundation of these ideas and then of course emotions get involved
#
and emotions ship idea the idea ship is fish emotions that's an endless kind of discussion
#
we can have but there is it gets me in very fast you know you just picked that taxation
#
is self-example because I'm sitting across you but I should point out is very unfair
#
because there are like two and a half libertarians in all of India and as far as you the specific
#
example is concerned taxation is theft I think every sensible libertarian would say the taxation
#
is theft but we need some theft in the sense that look how do you define theft it's taking
#
money by force from someone and the thing is I think everyone can agree that no one
#
would have contributed money to the government on their own if it was not illegal to not
#
pay taxes and therefore by that definition it is theft slash decoy tree and we would
#
also argue that you need some because you do need a state to protect your rights or
#
whatever whatever but that's a completely separate debate we won't get into that now
#
that we have established a taxation is indeed theft and that I'm fine with it so kill me
#
I'll let you have a last word on it for now but Indian Republic has had many many last
#
words Indian Republic so the other question is to sort of go back I told you that there
#
were a number of questions raised by when you were speaking about the notion that there
#
might be a conservative tradition in India and another sort of a question that I often
#
for example I've asked other guests like Shashi Tharoor and so on and got a variety of different
#
answers Shashi Tharoor, Aakar Patel and different people who've been on the show is that there
#
is an argument often made I think Deendayal Upadhyay made a version of this argument that
#
the Indian Constitution being liberal though I feel it's not liberal enough in terms of
#
protecting individual rights but let's say it's more liberal than Indian society that
#
the Indian Constitution being a liberal constitution if we granted that is actually be a liberal
#
constitution imposed on an illiberal society to use the language of the liberals or on
#
a conservative society to use different language and that imposition itself cannot be liberal
#
I mean the conservative viewpoint of course is that look society has to change from within
#
that a change cannot be forced from top and by and large there is a lot of merit to that
#
as far as the enforceability of change is concerned but not necessarily the morality
#
of change because two questions that then come up is one how do you reconcile the imposition
#
of a liberal constitution because if it is imposed how can it be liberal on a society
#
which may not be as liberal as the constitution itself and two what do you then do about things
#
like say Sati, Sati was outlawed now there could be people who would argue that look
#
we are a society which believes in group rights this is a tradition and why should we protect
#
individual rights because just because some liberal somewhere says that and you know to
#
both of us of course it seems completely obvious that Sati had to be outlawed and it's a given
#
but how do we then reconcile that with the conservative belief that society can only
#
change from within and if there are exceptions to that how do we demarcate those exceptions
#
and how do we enforce them without that enforcing being illiberal.
#
So this is a very big and difficult question to answer because I mean there are ten thousand
#
questions hidden there in that one question but and I don't want to answer it in a manner
#
that I have some kind of a glib response to it because it's not it's not something which
#
is can be settled based on some quick well some very simple principles you know it's
#
not something very easy to settle because you do see when you say that society should
#
reform on its own you see certain practices that are very repugnant to most individuals
#
and then you say okay why is this still kind of in place and so for example taking a Sati
#
example there was some practice of Sati and when it was abolished there was very little
#
actual resistance from the society on that evolution there was some degree of you would
#
say I would I don't know enough but I would argue there was some degree of acceptance
#
perhaps society that there is a problem here and when it was abolished at that point if
#
you see there was not that much resistance against that sometimes so sometimes you do
#
need the state to do something which actually the society was almost on the verge or could
#
have done it but there were some reasons social and I mean institutional reason because of
#
which it was not able to do it its own internal checks and balances had broken down or it
#
was they're not working well enough on that particular point so it's not so simple that
#
either society settled on its own the state should settle it's an issue that needs consideration
#
careful consideration about the situation that we find ourselves in and then what is
#
the state can do and what the society can do but what I do think is required in a constitutional
#
republic that we kind of build in 1950 are some basic minimum standards which are mostly
#
in the form of rights that are protected by a constitutional state which protects those
#
rights in a manner that is predictable and it is based on rule of law it does not discriminate
#
it doesn't do any kind of arbitrary action those rights that protect for everybody equally
#
that is I think many people across political spectrum might agree with that where they
#
may have a difference is on issues of religious reform using state power issues of whether
#
they should be a special recognition given to certain kind of groups for example you
#
know there's a for example reservation now if suppose you didn't have a reservation
#
on day one of our kind of independence you would have very I mean most of the senior
#
government positions filled with a few social groups can you have that and have legitimacy
#
in the state it's very difficult to say that if you vote right because I mean you need
#
to have legitimacy you need to have legitimacy in the representation through the democratic
#
system of elections and all that but also in the administrative state you need to have
#
some degree of legitimacy you can't say that only a few I mean people who are what the
#
education early on who had that kind of around they should certainly dominate the Indian
#
state so in Indian context there are two issues that make this much more complicated one is
#
the issue of certain communities that have kind of historical disadvantages especially
#
the Dalits for example there's been a significant disadvantage even when we got independence
#
and then the question of majority versus minority so this framing that there's a Hindu majority
#
and there's a there are the minorities and how do you ensure that there is some kind
#
of majoritarianism doesn't go to the extent of you know destroying the rights of minorities
#
and you know doing something which is more domination of sorts you know so these issues
#
kind of problematized this framing that should have just simple equal rights everybody and
#
protected by the state so then you had to do more of you know recognition through reservations
#
and other things and you had to have a politics when you can argue that's I'm arguing one
#
side of it where there is a recognition that you need to give a certain degree of comfort
#
to speak politically to different groups who might otherwise feel like they are probably
#
at the risk of being marginalized in that the main instrument through which this can
#
be done is state power so state power is required to do these things and the question that either
#
I have and I think it's requires more thinking and more working around is that how do we
#
ensure that this happens in a rule of law manner and not in arbitrary manner that the
#
founding happened and after that we have in many ways diluted some of the rights for example
#
the freedom of speech in India has had a really rough time to kind of put it mildly and many
#
other rights have had a tough time over time and it has been done in the name of these
#
things only like the state has said okay I want to preserve certain social order but
#
to be able to do that some of the rights have to be you know compromised in fact original
#
cases for I mean in the pre-independence time there were some communal riots and all because
#
somebody published a book which was derogatory of one particular religions when sentiments
#
and so on and so forth so there's been this kind of tension in Indian politics and Indian
#
constitutional thought has also kind of been affected by this tension that how do you have
#
a state which is actually kind of legitimized by democratic politics where you have this
#
couple of problems there's certain kind of some communities which are significantly disadvantaged
#
historically and some which in the because of their religious identity may going forward
#
be at a risk and it's not an easy question to answer and it requires I mean constant
#
thinking and rethinking so that the society actually can deal with these issues in a manner
#
that nobody is at significant disadvantage and the legitimacy is not just of a 60-70
#
percent majority it is a wide-based and if nation becomes habitable for everybody that's
#
the kind of objective that we need to have but it has to be worked politically so I think
#
when you say democracy and you say okay such and such rights should be there or some special
#
recognition should be there for some power some groups then it has to happen through
#
at least some measure of democratic agreement you know now then it gets into the issue of
#
majoritarianism or the potentiality I'm not saying the majority is more of a threat that
#
it may not actualize but there is a potentiality that can happen and that depends on the kind
#
of politics that we have and the kind of persuasion that is done because beyond a point suppose
#
you have some specific provisions in law or constitution which are not in line with what
#
vast majority of people think and they have not been persuaded to think otherwise then
#
you have a tension which can blow up in many ways so politically because you also have
#
the instruments of that kind of blowback right because you have everybody in equal votes
#
and there's an election and over time certain kind of resentment can crystallize in the
#
form of support for some leaders or some party or some kind of ideologies and so there is
#
no alternative to continuous conversation and persuasion on these issues what I don't
#
think is particularly helpful is if you have people who think that they can go to a court
#
and settle these kind of questions and not have some kind of a mobilization around it
#
some kind of attempt to persuade more and more people and speak to their better senses
#
because when you do establish democracy you have immediately on that day in some ways
#
in a very basic political equality established that everybody is equal as one vote everybody
#
is a citizen it's a very important event in itself and that event has its own consequences
#
you know it's not for the state to just look at the society and engineer it in this direction
#
that is also partially important but let's look at the force of democracy itself like
#
you say okay there is inequality there is issues of majority minority and all of that
#
but when democracy says that everybody is equal and everybody is one vote that itself
#
has a certain kind of force and power in society I don't know whether you will talk well and
#
is democracy in America and how it describes democracy as a generative force so to speak
#
that it has a certain kind of power of its own I mean it's not it works in a mild ways
#
it's not like the state which uses its kind of power and coercion it has that also needs
#
to work so I think we need to have both of these tracks running where there is a certain
#
politics and more level of mobilization around certain ideas of equality and liberty and
#
you have a state where the executive and also the sometimes judiciary is intervening to
#
correct specific kind of problems but there is no shortcut to kind of just side stepping
#
the need for mobilization and persuasion so you know I'll come back to the force of democracy
#
later but just thinking aloud from the first part of what you were talking about it seems
#
to me that as a libertarian there are two different clashes of ideas which worry me
#
and which I can't reconcile one of course is like what you said constitutionalism and
#
one of the basic purposes of a constitution is to a place a limit on state power and b
#
protect individual rights which is exactly my position that's what the constitution should
#
do but then I look at society and the thing is that is society ready for that because
#
leave aside the ancient example of sati if you just look at modern India today you'll
#
see that there are khaap panchayats and you'll see that there are honor killings and you'll
#
see that society is still divided along these lines and that that division is enforced by
#
non-state authorities and traditions and so on and the thing is that the fundamental
#
un irreconcilable difference there is again between individual rights which I believe
#
in and in many cases group rights which some of these people would believe in where a khaap
#
panchayat would think of the quote unquote interest of the group over that of the individual
#
or how they define the interest of the group that's one conflict and I don't have an easy
#
answer for it and the second sort of conflict that comes to my mind is one between the constitution
#
protecting individual rights and between the constitution trying to redesign society to
#
transform society as it were and the second involves infringing individual rights usually
#
in some way or the other and here again it becomes a question of group rights being given
#
precedence over individual rights except where in my first example with khaap panchayats
#
and honor killings it's really the right which I'm fighting against and in this case is really
#
the left I'm fighting against which doesn't understand the futility of social engineering
#
and the kind of unintended consequences it can lead to and the divisions that can be
#
festered by privileging group rights and thinking in terms of groups over individuals I know
#
it sounds like I'm rambling but I just thought I'll think of the I don't think you're rambling
#
the I also wrestle with these issues we are all kind of thinking and these are not easy
#
issues to deal with but let's take them one by one in my I'm just kind of try to reflect
#
in my own limited understanding of these things that so go back to the history of legal systems
#
so before this kind of modern state came along and the legislature makes the laws and executive
#
I mean implements them and the judiciary then kind of give I mean looks at specific cases
#
or where there's a violation of a law and kind of meets all punishments and so on so
#
forth and also looks at laws that are unconstitutional and strikes them down to some degree of judicial
#
review and all that so that's the modern it's built on some I mean some version of legal
#
positivism there's some thinking that law is basically what humans make of it in some
#
sense and there is an assumption that some people come together ideally elected and enjoying
#
legitimacy of electoral victories and make those laws and they can so today for example
#
you have something which is illegal tomorrow the parliament can pass the law and make that
#
legal right and then when it's illegal there you have systems to enforce it and change
#
it and so on and so forth and if it's illegal you can you can do it before this system came
#
along we had more traditional law and not just India every society had had this kind
#
of law and they were of course it was a mixed system they are also there were some aspects
#
of law that were some kind of council could sit and change but most of the laws were just
#
evolved over time it was not like this some council can sit one day and change it for
#
example Catholic religion has had reforms right the Vatican too sat down and made some
#
changes for example very significantly they made the nuns when sisters equal to the lady
#
you know they said they don't have any special place there in that sense in the church they
#
could make such changes but most of the laws were evolved over time and they were enforced
#
through social you know means of partly nudging and partly coercing and I would not say honor
#
killing is something which is an example of that but a cop and child there's a lot of
#
things frankly and not all of that is something which comes out because it's just mutually
#
acceptable to different parties you know their community based systems of conflict resolution
#
and they have been there for a very long time they are still here the tension here is this
#
so let me just kind of complete this particular thought about contrast between traditional
#
law and legal positivism is that over time as legal positivism and this modern state
#
has taken over it has obviously crowded out traditional ways of making and implementing
#
laws and it has made it difficult for societies to organize themselves around their own traditional
#
laws and their own ways of enforcing those laws because you know you can have only one
#
sheriff in town so the state says that I am that and you can't do much they tolerate a
#
lot of it so when carpenters do stuff small stuff around property disputes and where there
#
is somebody who claim and they can as the community come around and say okay this is
#
this person is right and the person accepted and goes along it's fine 99% of the stuff
#
you'll never hear of but one person and it does come out then you can see this conflict
#
between the state and traditional law and traditional systems of enforcing those laws
#
so there is this tension that has happened that it is I mean I don't know that's desirable
#
but certainly we are not there and that all the law is only made by the state or anything
#
that is called law, law I mean broadly since all norms on all kind of difference of what
#
is allowed and disallowed is only made by the state and only enforced by the state and
#
the early system was the only made by the society so to speak more or less and there
#
was of course this notion of a monarch or some kind of a state which was when playing
#
a part of that was a part of the system it was not external to it this modern state is
#
external to it it's separate and it is claiming the space that the society had so this creates
#
these tensions that the society is not completely changed and evolved to become compliant with
#
the state as such it's always contested space and when something like honor killing happens
#
it's a no-brainer right basic thing is you don't need to kill somebody like that but
#
most of the situations are not like that there's much more subtle kind of coercion and subtle
#
kind of nudges here and there where it's not so obvious whether it should be in the social
#
system of norm setting and enforcing or should the state do it so there are some no-brainer
#
examples that you just mentioned but most of the cases are not like that but the way
#
you think the way I think about it is that there are some basic kind of rights and protection
#
that the constitution has given their laws that have been made in the constitution as
#
long as there is no conflict between the two there is no problem society cannot kill somebody
#
or put somebody in you know communal jail or something like that those things are not
#
if you don't allow them to steal from you that is if you don't pay your taxes and they
#
will abduct you yeah so but now let's come to this but I'll briefly I'll briefly interrupt
#
here and and this will not make you laugh but I recently appeared on an episode of the
#
Hindi show Pulya Bazi where I spoke in Hindi which will be linked from the show notes where
#
I spoke about Hayek and Hayek makes this very interesting distinction between law and legislation
#
where he defines law as what would basically be defined as common law the way it emerged
#
where basically the state's job there is to codify the laws that already exist in society
#
for example it is a social norm that you cannot steal from someone that you cannot kill someone
#
that you cannot force someone to do something and these become codified as laws by the state
#
which is a function of the state according to Hayek and his point is that this is the
#
legitimate function laws are often in Hayek's words confused with what he terms legislation
#
which is the quote unquote laws that states create to rule over others for example you
#
could say that you know a business needing 37 licenses to open up Israeli legislation
#
not a law and this is the state misusing its monopoly on violence for this and Hayek's
#
warning therefore is that a state will always stand the people who are in a state after
#
all human being subject to the normal incentives and a state will always stand to increase
#
its power by increasing such legislation on its own behalf or on the behalf of interest
#
groups which fund the parties which get to power and that leads to a reduction of freedom
#
and it's important for alert citizens to distinguish between law and legislation and again I'm
#
just thinking aloud this just came to mind that you know in the same way as the law against
#
sati was kind of welcomed by society because this time had come the striking down of 377
#
recently was I think by and large welcome by society it's a no brainer resistance as
#
such it just took the you know the tip the balance in the right direction and I would
#
argue that the society was more or less ready with ready for it and 20 years ago it wouldn't
#
Let me complete my previous kind of call you interjected so now we are talking about two
#
kind of autonomous systems one is this kind of social norm setting and enforcement and
#
there's a state legislation law and enforcement of that the most important tension is here
#
if the state tries to do too much of this with the society that it's trying to crowd
#
out completely all ways of in which society makes its norms and kind of enforces them
#
there's a risk that the society might capture the legal system so to speak and say there's
#
enough mobilization which is of a reactionary kind so I would say that this is a continuous
#
kind of balance to be struck but it would be less than ideal for the society if this
#
goes in the direction where there is a big reactionary kind of movement which says that
#
nothing doing now we will just capture the system I mean through the means that you capture
#
the state by mobilizing through elections and through getting concrete terms what something
#
like this could look like no so I'm just saying that this is not concrete that this is this
#
is abstract expression that I'm talking about two autonomous semi-autonomous systems there's
#
a legal system which is based on this basically I mean I'm oversimplifying but this system
#
of legal positivism where laws are what we make no I get your point and the other is
#
this traditional law of that and if you intervene too much on the former in a manner that is
#
totally unacceptable society time and again you have a risk that this system will be mobilized
#
to take over and implement its own ideas into this I agree with you which is why I'm asking
#
can you illustrate that for me either with a hypothetical example or when it's really
#
happened that way so okay I think it's better to talk about examples which have happened
#
elsewhere so if you look at the issues of in the mobilization of religious conservatives
#
in America it was a part of the conservative industrial movement in America since the mid
#
20th century and it found its crystallization in the form of different individuals and different
#
kind of ideologies and so on and so forth but the way it is kind of mobilized around
#
the issue of say abortion like it was a part of traditional law to so to speak that you
#
know in their religious tradition this sanctity of life from inception so to speak and now
#
it has become a part of the political discourse because state has said that there is some
#
it has a view on it and I'm just giving a comparative example and the there's one side
#
of it which has focus on women's rights and their sovereignty over their own bodies and
#
so forth and the religious conservatives mainly and there are some other allies there also
#
say that no we should not and there is a sanctity of life and so forth recently they have passed
#
some law in one of the states where abortion is six weeks is illegal and so on and so forth
#
so they are then attempt by society to now capture and try to intervene in this and say
#
that there's a this is just one specific example no it's a great but it can happen at a large
#
scale also that the whole nature of the state might be transformed over time in a to a reactionary
#
movement and there's a dialectic at work here which we have to be mindful of and there is
#
always a balance to be struck between trying to reform somebody while telling them that
#
they are equal citizens and they have equal powers as everybody else and also tolerating
#
some things which may not be totally repugnant and I mean may be allowed for some time to
#
change on their own so I don't think there's a simple answer to this question and it's
#
a fantastic example because it totally illustrates what you know like being libertarian I'm obviously
#
pro-choice and the autonomy of the woman is everything to me but I can also get why someone
#
who believes in group rights over individual rights would say that no that you know we
#
need to preserve every human life and the autonomy of the individual doesn't matter
#
as long as we impose our values yeah it's not just religiously when our Peter Singer
#
once gave an example of his philosopher friend who is absolutely liberal on everything I
#
mean on the left liberal side but on abortion he's you can't have a conversation with him
#
he says that hey it's life it's human life how can you end it on your own choice so there
#
are these other non-religious kind of people also who on that particular issue we have
#
a different view so you can find allies you can mobilize and all that but I'm this is
#
an example of a specific issue but I was referring to a wholesale takeover which I mean then
#
you kind of get unmoved from the traditions on which modern state is built the main point
#
is there has to be persuasion and mobilization and conversation at a broader level in society
#
than in a courtroom or with a few kind of politicians who have power through anti-defection
#
law not the power of actual convince actually convincing even their MPs so these systems
#
of which weaken our democracy weaken the power of democratic functioning our society I think
#
are actually doing a disservice to our potential as a society in which to quote James Baldwin
#
you know achieving our country I mean people would disagree about what our country is to
#
begin with so what do we achieve achieving means achieving what we could be you know
#
as a look at the potential that we have as a multicultural society nobody gave India
#
a good chance in nineteen fifteen forty four forty seven nine fifty look at what churches
#
said about us and many other supposedly intelligent people said about us and I mean we have surprised
#
them in many ways you know so we have a potential of a really great country what I meant was
#
there are so many different ideas of India out there that even the phrase achieving our
#
country would mean different things I agree I agree with that it's just that as we discussed
#
earlier there's a certain kind of irreconcilability in differences but I'm talking from point
#
of view of certain kind of idealism about potentially people can agree on some things
#
you know like for example the nation should be livable for everybody you know something
#
like that people can disagree on that I can see that and but we should have a conversation
#
about why that disagreement is I think a broad area of disagreement would be you and I would
#
say that you know multiculturalism and the diversity that we have is one of our great
#
strengths and we should embrace it and that is what is going to make us a great country
#
while others would see it as a threat but we'll take a quick commercial break now and
#
screenshot posted Instagram Twitter Facebook whatever and tag us and we'll tag you back
#
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#
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get back to you shortly on Cyrus says actress and soon to be director Tiska Chopra talks
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to Cyrus about her childhood in Afghanistan how she got pulled into acting her new original
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web series hostages and how she's looking to write and direct more in the future on
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the Ronnie screw a la podcast Ronnie talks to me about the pursuit of inflection points
#
understanding the size of markets and the importance of brand and creating scales speaking
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to the Ronnie screw a la podcast if you want to send us some questions for Ronnie for his
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last episode then please do so it's a shows at Indus Fox.com in case you missed it check
#
out episode four of the note with Marok and I and she lists five reasons why Rahul Gandhi
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stepping down is the right decision on junior one Sheila that they are joined by Sachin
#
Parekh founder of easy roads easy roads is a great platform that allows you to do local
#
road trips and we discussed the startup and the tech behind it and local travel on the
#
empowering series arena talks to hit all this I senior VP at and paradigm they discuss different
#
reasons why people quit their jobs the importance of interpersonal relationships between employees
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and employers and more or the Prakriti podcast economist Anupam Manor is in conversation
#
with power about where Britain stands in regards to Brexit three years later and why it has
#
caused them to prime ministers and with that let's continue on with your show.
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Welcome back to the scene in the unseen I'm chatting with my good friend Suresh Rai and
#
Suresh the Andrew Breitbart who so called alt-right thinker had once said politics is
#
downstream of culture and the fundamental point there and no matter what you think of
#
Breitbart's politics I think it's an important insight is that whatever change happens social
#
change happens first happens in the culture and then it finds a political expression how
#
true do you think this is I think it's quite true I mean it's not as true as saying that
#
it's downstream and there is no nothing that goes the other way it's that's not quite true
#
but substantially yes it's downstream from culture and I remember reading somewhere that
#
Hannah Arendt is one said that every generation we are invaded by barbarians we call them
#
children you know so and then they're not barbarians barbarian but they're instinctual
#
beings and who do have something in it they're not blank slates but then on that there's
#
a lot of process of civilizing and telling them what's right and wrong and telling them
#
I mean kind of letting them be also but also kind of giving them some sense of what is
#
I think children in flights and restaurants are barbarians but I mean you're a doting
#
parent and I'm very anti having children so there is that that in this in the culture
#
this kind of value certain values are preserved and certain things are considered good some
#
things are considered not good some things are tolerated something are celebrated a lot
#
of that happens and politics draws a lot from it but I would argue that there is often also
#
an opportunity for example for statesmen for people who are political leaders but they
#
transcend just politics of appeasement and politics of pandering to actually shape culture
#
and shape societal values take very big risks and put their values out and kind of change
#
the way people think about some issues or so I mean at the top of my mind is someone
#
like say Gandhi someone like Lincoln you know who people who even I mean I would argue some
#
people who I mean not good example I would say but if you would take bad examples and
#
someone like Lenin for example through politics or an interesting example of someone I think
#
who otherwise has been a bad politician I had Salman Sohz on the show recently and I
#
asked him what he likes about Modi and one of the things was Modi's focus on Swachh Bharat
#
where his point was that whether or not he actually implements any Swachh Bharat policies
#
the fact that he is praising it and making it a part of the discourse can have a positive
#
Yeah it can so the way what has happened over time is that politics is everywhere or we
#
saw that coming 70 years ago everything is now political he wrote so anybody who rises
#
in politics and becomes very very powerful someone as popular as say Mr. Modi has the
#
opportunity to I mean influence not just politics but also culture in some ways and it may happen
#
in indirect and unseen ways it may happen over time but just as process of you know
#
And it's part of it like the nature of celebrity in the sense that you could say for many people
#
Modi is in politics what Tendulkar is in cricket so it's the same kind of influence
#
in the sense that Modi is impactful not necessarily because he's like he has an important position
#
but because he's a celebrity in politics in the same way that Sachin Tendulkar is a celebrity
#
in cricket or Amitabh Bachchan is a celebrity in cinema so their words carry weight.
#
I think it's a different category because of the way politics is thought of and much
#
more in practice now but even Aristotle saw politics as the highest level in system of
#
human knowledge something that actually arbitrates between different other forms of knowledge
#
and systems of value and so on and so forth.
#
So it's a different level and it has the ability to change much more than someone like Tendulkar
#
I don't know whether people look up to Tendulkar for maybe one or two but whether they look
#
up to him for kind of substantive questions of values and questions of you know culture
#
I don't know there are some who might do that but much more that happens with popular political
#
leaders they have some ability and whether they use that ability as statesmen or they
#
don't use it is up to them but they do have some of this ability to if there's a tension
#
in society I recommend this book by Harry Jaffa Crisis of the House Divided which is
#
between the Lincoln Douglas debates he's analyzing through the prism of the Declaration of Independence
#
and the US Constitution but mostly Declaration of Independence about how the Lincoln's stance
#
in that was revealing of the nature of American Republic you know and you can't have a house
#
that is divided around something as basic as that so as something like slavery for example.
#
So he could tip the balance in the right direction there was tension I'm not saying that society
#
was totally pro-slavery and he could just turn that around that is very difficult to
#
do by one person in one lifetime or even some few years but if there is tension somebody
#
can through the charisma and through the ability to move people change the way they look at
#
things also conflict when he went to war right he went to war hundreds of thousands of American
#
laid on their lives to overthrow the meant to change abolish slavery in some ways.
#
So that is also possible but substantially it's true that I mean culture is upstream
#
of politics and we do get the politics that in ways that culture determines.
#
So let me bring you now to a subject which I know you've thought about very deeply which
#
is the role of religion in politics because if we again talk about the essential conflict
#
between say the state and the society and one of the ways in which it plays out and
#
it plays out in the context of India definitely is that we are set up as a secular state and
#
you could say again this is the result of a statesman driving change in a manner of
#
speaking because it was really Nehru's vision that stood out over those of others in his
#
party who had slightly different divisions but for what it's worth we are a secular
#
state and thank goodness for that because that in a sense to me is something that gives
#
space for diversity to flourish but a there's been pushback against that in terms of how
#
I mean one of the like I had an episode on Hindutva with Akar Patel and one of the contradictions
#
asked him about is that earlier the BJP used to accuse the Congress of not being truly
#
secular but pandering to the minorities and doing what it called pseudo secularism but
#
then when they use the phrase pseudo secular you assume that they have a problem with it
#
because it is pseudo but they also have a problem with secularism which kind of baffles
#
me but to cut a rambling question short I think that the role of religion in society
#
and in politics is something you've kind of thought a lot about tell me how this sort
#
of fault line has evolved in the last 70 years and where are we today.
#
I'm not an expert on this issue at all but my inquiry is not so much in my thinking and
#
reading have not been about role of religion in politics as such but more about religion
#
in modern society and kind of what kinds of role it can play and what are the ways in
#
which it might transform it is transforming and what are the new forms that it is taking
#
more of that and part of it is of course to do with the politics of religion and in some
#
ways what people call religion of politics also I don't know whether this philosopher
#
Eric Vogelin has this book called Political Religions in which he argues somewhat persuasively
#
but what really is that in modern ideologies are the new religions I mean he was even criticized
#
significantly it's not a settled position you know what's your position so yeah so the
#
political ideologies do have some kind of appease to our kind of need for community
#
need for meaning and all which earlier religions did have fulfilled so there is something to
#
that parts of religion do politics does political kind of movements and part of political ideologies
#
do work in some ways like religion but they are not religion they're different category
#
you know all authority is not the same you know like religious authority is very different
#
from political authority so and what you seek in religion is very different when people
#
see different things in religion there's not one thing but all those things put together
#
are not the same as what you see through politics so there are different categories but there
#
is I mean they do appeal in some ways to our similar kind of desires so there are variations
#
of that so I'm still thinking about how to put it now the other part which is the politics
#
of religion right about where we are and so the view that was taken in Indian Constitution
#
is not of American style separation of church and state that we don't have in fact very
#
few countries in the world have that kind of separation of church and state which is
#
a classic traditional meaning of secular right no so this is very rare actually to see total
#
separation of church and state okay for example Sweden until year 2000 had the state subsidized
#
church so it is a very secular society but until just 19 years ago they had a state subsidized
#
church Lutheran church which is so Europe Europe doesn't have that I mean it has gone
#
through many stages and it doesn't have that it has a fairly I mean in effect it has a
#
very secular state but in at least de jure there's a lot more of you know religious religion
#
in politics and politics and religion are intertwined so in our stance as one thinker
#
on this has written is more of a principle distance that we will keep a distance from
#
religion but we will make principle interventions so on things like some issues of rights issues
#
of rights and things of temple entry marriage and some specific issues on which we will
#
intervene and make change try to reform religion but we will otherwise keep a principle distance
#
so there has been that and it's been mostly I mean looking at Hinduism as a religion much
#
more obviously because of the nature of the founding and all of that they have looked
#
at Hinduism more from the point of view of reform by state intervention so other religions
#
have had and Hinduism they've defined very broadly it's not just Hinduism Buddhist and
#
Jains and all sorts of the constitutions defined including that so that has been that was the
#
founding moment and over time it has led to many laws and judicial cases and all of that
#
which have kind of built on that most recently being the Sabarimala case all of that so over
#
time it has happened and there's been a basic argument is that we have some minimum standards
#
as a constitutional republic about rights and in certain situations we can so they built
#
this essential practice doctrine they said unless it's an essential practice we can intervene
#
and change that in the name of consistency with the constitutional principles so to speak
#
I'm not a lawyer so I'm talking very loosely but they built that doctrine and they built
#
other kind of jurisprudence around it the court state and so that has been a long journey
#
and it's still continuing as we saw in Sabarimala and all that and so there is a view that politics
#
has a role in what religion should be and this is politics right the state of the political
#
being and I think it has many many kind of consequences you don't know what those consequences
#
specifically are but it will certainly has consequences about the interest that religion
#
takes into the state then right because if you say that okay the religion can be changed
#
by state power then people who are mobilizing around religious identities and religious
#
kind of themes will say that now we have a greater incentive to come and take power and
#
make sure that those interventions are minimized or something like that there's a politics
#
of that I mean it has to be fought and there is a contest there it's not something which
#
is settled and it will go in one way or the other but if you look at it broadly around
#
the world what has happened is that in Western Europe religion has less Western Europe Northern
#
Europe religions has declined very substantially secularization is the process that they call
#
China it's hard to say because I mean the state is an atheist state so if you do surveys
#
you don't ever get word value survey says three percent Chinese say they're religious
#
but in practice there may be more so we don't know what it is but for the rest of the world
#
there is considerable amount of religiosity I mean it varies a lot across the world and
#
US is an exception for example US has among advanced countries you'll see less religion
#
generally but US has more religiosity reducing slowly but has much more religiosity but wherever
#
there is a great deal of religious religiosity this quotation is much greater because this
#
kind of question of the legal system versus the religious law and religious practices
#
is much greater and India is one of those so if you look at the surveys of India India
#
is one of the most religious societies in the world like if you look at the comparables
#
across the world where they look at the same question across countries more than 90 percent
#
Indians say that religions is important to their identity so it's so it becomes much
#
more important in our context because we haven't and it's increased over time so religiosity
#
has increased over time.
#
Why do you think it's increased over time?
#
That is very it's something that social scientists have to study but it is something which could
#
have many reasons so if I were to look at so I'd some time ago did a review of literature
#
on secularization on political science sociology and historic history I mean these are different
#
methods through which we were studied so there are different reasons why they explain I mean
#
they explain away how secularization happens and why religion declines and all of that
#
most of these accounts are kind of one or two variable accounts simplistic so but there
#
is some explanatory power in them so for example one of the leading I mean political science
#
books on this is sacred and the secular by Piper Norris and Ron Englehart and they their
#
main thing is that their thesis that the secure societies there are people who feel more secure
#
they don't they face less risk I mean there are different type of risk that they differentiate
#
the egotropic risk which is to yourself and your family and sociotropic risks which are
#
to the community if they face more of those risks then you are likely to be more religious
#
if you feel less of this risk which is the case mostly in advanced countries if we face
#
less of this religiosity so you see increase in religiosity in US after 9-11 because the
#
community was at risk to speak then there is someone the other theorist like sociologist
#
Rodney Stark and his associates have written up about how religion which thrives on competition
#
the multiple religions and same society then you have more chances of religiosity rising
#
because you are always reminded of the difference and there is an incentive for organized religion
#
to put itself out there and keep its flock together so I am just trying to look at the
#
different possibilities then if you look at some recent book I read on secularization
#
in UK Britain then Callum Brown is a historian who wrote his body of work on secularization
#
in British society he is one of the interesting account he has written but his central point
#
is the increased participation of women in workforce so he says that women played a very
#
central role in religious life of the British society which kind of organizing being the
#
organizing person of family to make sure everybody is going to church and all of that and being
#
I am talking about those that is not India this is all from different countries and he
#
says that as in the 60s there was a big increase in female work level for participation and
#
this he calls de-piatization of femininity it is a term that he has kind of created and
#
that led to a significant factor in secularization of the British society then there are other
#
books I mean there are Steve Bruce and David Martin their books on how if there are some
#
societies in which there is a need for cultural defense so for example Irish nationalism and
#
Catholicism are very intertwined because Irish nationality is very much built on the Catholic
#
identity so there also and they feel under siege right there's a nationalist movement
#
to separate and all of that so that feeds religion the different ways people have described
#
why religions rise or fall in societies and I feel many of these factors in India are
#
quite true I mean if I were to just think about it in a very simplistic way social science
#
doesn't work that way but I am a student I am not an expert on these issues but I mean
#
our female labor for participation has fallen significantly over the last 10 years we are
#
a very insecure society there's a lot of poverty a lot of egotropic and sociotropic risks we
#
as a people are often kind of feel that we are under threat from both sides of our borders
#
then if you were to kind of go beyond these political science and sociological accounts
#
and get into the philosophical argument about change in the social imaginary about how non-religion
#
or atheism becomes a viable option there's a journey that societies go through which
#
in the West they went through for example Charles Taylor is very insightful on this
#
he wrote a book called secular age which is I think the most insightful account on this
#
that I have read about how the philosophical ideas shifted over time the key event he says
#
is the Protestant Reformation that kind of happened which changed the nature of religious
#
practice in some of these societies and that I mean there's a very interesting it's a
#
long and very detailed account and the way people construct meaning so to speak I mean
#
the unstated assumptions and presumptions that shape our kind of understanding which
#
is he called a social imaginary has changed that and the way he defines secular age is
#
basically a age where belief and non-belief are both options for you to exercise in India
#
I think for most people that's not true as of now for some people it is true like people
#
like you and me are actually living in a secular age so to speak you know because non-belief
#
is very much option we have we know we have friends who live without faith and live fairly
#
I mean at least from the distance looks like reasonably good lives I mean it's not seems
#
like they are lacking anything substantial or faith is not even a factor for them for
#
some of them but for vast majority I don't think that is yet the case because when they
#
still are embedded in the social and kind of cosmic kind of systems in which their imaginary
#
is placed and there is a variation of that so it's not every person who practices religion
#
practices the same way right there are a lot of variation the way people practice religion
#
in India but some people prefer this experiential mode of you know they give more importance
#
to meditation and all of those kind of things and some are much more in the bhakti mode
#
and much more of the entangled with the deity and kind of you know that is what important
#
some are much more infused with narratives of historical identity much more some are
#
much more doctrinal they actually so most of us are just hearing the Vedas they actually
#
understand what's in them you know for most of us just a sound so there are different
#
variations but how do you go from there to a society where it's just an alternative
#
and then you can shift you know we can be ups and downs and all of that but for many
#
many communities in India it's not such an obvious option you know it's not that you
#
just move to non-belief and you can still find a lot of order like if you go to my village
#
I most of my family lives in my village it's just religion orders your life in many ways
#
you know the whole year is ordered around events that are actually in some ways a part
#
of the religious calendar so to speak social and religious are the same so to speak and
#
your whole life is also ordered there is this sanskar that you go through all of that so
#
then to just move away from that into a different kind of life is not such an obvious option
#
it may happen over time and it may happen very rapidly also who knows you know the organization
#
is happening many things are happening and forming transformations are happening so if
#
you go to a Saudi movement meeting in say rural Gujarat that I have attended earlier
#
years ago they they are much more interested in discussing talking about the Gita and discussing
#
the message of Gita and all of that they take religion very differently from say the art
#
of living you know which is much more of a self-help type of kind of transformation of
#
religion how these transformation will transform the way religion looks in India is very different
#
very very difficult to say and these are I think the questions were studying and understanding
#
as we go so I have a bunch of follow-up questions but before that an aside I wrote a column
#
a few years ago about how I was once at a dinner with my friends and there were seven
#
of us at the table and at one point it struck us that all of us were non-believers and we
#
were asking each other the question okay when did you first realize that you were an atheist
#
and what you just said is absolutely true that that is like a remarkably unusual thing
#
for India that those of us who are non-believers by which I mean me let me ask you two questions
#
yeah do you believe in God no do you believe in socialism no so you are in point zero percent
#
the no to these two questions put you in a very very small minority in India I already
#
did tell you that there are three and a half libertarians in India so if you add that to
#
the mix that it's like yeah it's very little so I have a bunch of questions and one is
#
just again I'm thinking aloud and wondering that you know the economist Stephen Landsberg
#
who wrote the famous book the armchair economist I think but he also wrote a book called big
#
questions in which he made an interesting point about religion and belief in God where
#
he basically said that if you look at revealed preferences most people who profess to believe
#
in God don't really believe in God because they would not put their faith in God if it
#
came to the crunch in a life and death situation and the thought that kind of strikes me when
#
we talk about people being religion to what extent is religion just a happenstance peg
#
along which they place their tribal allegiances that is everybody wants to belong you want
#
to belong to a community of people and have that sense of belonging and this is my home
#
and these are my people and to what extent is religion merely a peg for that not involving
#
true religious belief and again I'm thinking aloud and not I think the assumption in Landsberg's
#
argument which is I think it's a flawed assumption that there is some kind of a comprehensiveness
#
to religiosity that once you say you're religious everything you do should be based on that
#
and should be informed on that but I think it's much more interesting the way we you
#
know the modes of knowledge that we kind of use so I can recommend another book to you
#
this Paul Wayne who is like teacher college of Francis his book called did the Greeks
#
believe in their myths you know in which he tries to show how different modes of knowledge
#
and imagination shape different aspects of our lives and these contradictions which from
#
outside look like contradictions for the person who is holding this what is called the constitutive
#
imagination are actually not contradictions there are different modes in which you operate
#
so he gives an example of a Coptic Christian in Ethiopia who believes that the leopard
#
is a Christian and therefore will not eat meat during end but he still keeps his cattle
#
protected so he believes that but he also so one of one of it is this religious truth
#
that you believe in as an experience of having leopards eating or killing there so there
#
are different modes and they both operate differently in life human beings are not this
#
kind of internally consistent single value beings so there we often have contradictions
#
that we which appear to be conditioned from outside but there is a certain amount of coherence
#
that one feels the feeling of life is very different from its perception from the outside
#
so and anybody who claims that there is a perfect consistency of everything they do
#
I mean if you look closely you'll find that there's a lot of like Wittgenstein used to
#
say that if you want to figure out if somebody is religious don't ask them observe them
#
so sometimes people actually without knowing do things that are quite religious but your
#
point would be that it doesn't necessarily mean that they're not religious or they don't
#
really believe it's just that there are different aspects to one's personality so for example
#
the same way it is completely reasonable for a scientist to believe in God or for a person
#
who is rational and other ways to say good you're putting in a different mode of distance
#
so and we do believe have a very interesting and complex when existing like one of my favorite
#
writers C.S. Lewis he has this great quote in one of his books that if there are desires
#
in me that nothing in this world can satisfy the only logical conclusion is that I was
#
made for another word you know so there are aspects of our beings that are not satisfied
#
by running the human genome project for example which is a teleological statement just saying
#
I was made for another word so like not satisfied by those things and then you seek other ways
#
to satisfy them and religion is one part of it for some people it's everything a great
#
deal of their life is shaped by religious beliefs and quite a few religious thinkers
#
say that everything for example in Christianity this idea of the Holy Spirit in whose presence
#
you do all your acts in Catholic is that that everything you do should be sacred and everything
#
should be towards the teleology that Greek Catholic thought has but India's favorite
#
Holy Spirit is old monk sorry carry on okay that's really everything taking conversation
#
to a blasphemous level but so I think it's a I'm not saying that all contradictions
#
are good and we should all kind of celebrate contradictions steadily but all conditions
#
also not bad I mean this is not a simple thing I mean people can see different things in
#
different modes of our life we don't for example in a family situation with our family we're
#
not playing the same I mean role that we do elsewhere and we are not we don't approach
#
situations in the same way we do elsewhere now don't even think it's necessarily a bad
#
thing because people contain multitudes and that's something we should celebrate because
#
that's what being human is all about but but to cut to sort of another question now like
#
earlier you used the phrase shifting from being a religious society in the context of
#
how the West has kind of managed that and parts of the West parts of the West have managed
#
that and we are still very religious so two questions one is such a shift desirable in
#
the sense is it something to aspire to as a society or as individuals within a society
#
and number two do you see the shift becoming possible in India at a future point in time
#
so the first question I cannot answer because it's I don't know what is the frame in which
#
I would answer that question whether decline of religion will be necessarily a good thing
#
or a bad thing because I don't know what it will take what will take its shape it could
#
be replaced by some other belief system or narrative. There are parts of for example
#
the explanations of why World War II happened and the holocaust happened which go into this
#
question about decline of religion led to this gap in which nazis and other fascism
#
and different ideologies even communism could take their place and the worst monster of
#
20th century you think people like Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot were non-religious
#
and they could take this place and so there are these I don't know whether this is there's
#
much validity to this account but there are very serious people who have made these kind
#
of accounts so it's possible that religions may decline and something very bad could take
#
their place it is also possible that religion may continue and because and may actually
#
that may not be a good thing because it may take form that we don't that doesn't lead
#
to the outcomes that are good but because it's ultimately a question of counterfactual
#
right like what could exist. We can't really answer that we participate in this world with
#
the limited knowledge and on a very specific situation we are able to bring all our world
#
views and say take a very great difficulty take a view. How do I then answer this big
#
question about whether decline religion will be good or a bad thing I can't I mean we
#
are just we can just hope that whatever happens will be good and we should try to make the
#
best out of it. On the second question this is interesting because as you know and we
#
discussed earlier that religiosity has increased in India at least in some. Is it a problem
#
is the increasing religiosity in India a problem. No I don't think it's a problem in and of
#
itself okay I it could become a problem it could become a problem in some ways it could
#
become a problem if it's a religiosity is used in a way that leads to problems for some
#
communities and all of that. Because some would argue that over the last five years
#
what you've gradually seen is increasing polarization attacks on minorities lynchings all of those
#
things so some would argue that the expression of the increased religiosity in India is a
#
problem in our politics some would argue. These are so I want to say that the these
#
things that you just mentioned lynchings are nothing to do with religion they I mean people
#
some people are motivated by religion to do these things but this is not a central tendency
#
of the religious people it's not central to what an average religious person stands for.
#
So there are potentialities within the religious worldview or worldviews that can lead to such
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things also and there are potentialities that lead to great acts and deeds. So I mean Mahatma
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Gandhi was deeply influenced by religious thought I mean the idea inside is the core
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of Jan thought so he was inspired by so there are many good things that have come out of
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it so we can't talk about these things in a deterministic way that's what I'm trying
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to say that if religion rises it can lead to good things also because religions have
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the potential to lead to greatness and goodness and all of that.
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Philanthropy serving others all of those things.
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Not just philanthropy also just better human beings also you know better communities better
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human beings and through that many many changes and the best way to change is through if one
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person gets better because he's inspired to get better then that's significant right and
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then it can go in that direction or it could go in another direction. So I can't take this
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one phenomenon and make a deterministic prediction that it might be good or bad.
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But is it fair to argue that then it's perfectly reasonable to say that religiosity is compatible
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with the Nehruvian socialist idea of India or I won't say socialist the Nehruvian secular
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Yeah I mean modes of religiosity are so for example I would say that the Nehruvian idea
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and Ambedkar's ideas were not consistent with the mode of religiosity that says that certain
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castes can't enter certain temples so those are not consistent that's one mode of religiosity.
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Other modes of religiosity are perfectly I mean nobody is saying that you can't seek
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the kind of enlightenment that an average Hindu is supposed to seek or can't participate
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in social communities which are share religious denomination or you can't read the doctrines
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of Hindu religion or you can't identify yourself in terms of narratives of Hindu identity
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that goes back or Muslim identity or Christian identity as case maybe or you can't do other
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aspects of most of religion is for you to practice even if that interventionist state
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is doing its bit to kind of look at the use the state power to reform the religion even
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then a lot of it is still available to you.
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So let's kind of come to one issue where religion or at least the excuse of religion has become
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a big part of politics which is a whole Ayodhya issue which of course has been festering from
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you know it's like I read this fascinating book which was recommended to me in fact by
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Aakar Patel and I'll link it from the show notes I think it's called Ayodhya The Dark
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Night but NIGHT by two co-authors named Jha in which which is a fascinating account of
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how in the late 40s and early 50s you had the Hindu Mahasabha which is just coming out
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of the ban after Gandhi's death trying to figure out how to make its political space
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and deciding that one issue that will help them mark out a space for itself will be by
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contesting Ayodhya the mosque and then there is this whole thing where they organize this
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event and they have a group of people who go sneak in on the dead of night and they
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plant an idol of Lord Ram in the mosque in Ayodhya and the issue festers from then on
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until the current year and it's very interesting because then you realize that a lot of the
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Congress were in a sense sympathetic towards these forces including the Chief Minister
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I think it was Govind Ballapant at that time who was a protege of Siddharth Patel and one
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of the people who was inactive and did nothing at that time to stop this happening was Lal
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Bahadur Shastri who was Home Minister of UP despite you know Nehru's furious missives
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to all of these people saying do something this can't go on solve this issue and none
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of them really bothered which makes Nehru seem like you know a statesman who is all
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on his own and the currents in the party are against him but then Siddharth Patel dies
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and Nehru establish himself as completely in charge but that whole Ayodhya issue sort
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of you could say in a sense was born out of a political compulsion for a party to establish
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its USP and positioning you know and got new life perhaps in the early 90s late 80s early
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90s for that very reason when the BJP which got I think only about three or four seats
#
in the 84 elections needed to sort of find a way to get back into public consciousness
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and use the Ayodhya issue.
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So how much of that issue is politics how much of it is religion and it's still festering
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what's going to happen?
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I mean how do you know what like for one person it may be actually about religion it is faith
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and for another person it may be an opportunity to mobilize and all that but one interesting
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thing is that this such kind of continuity of these issues right for example we talked
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earlier about Kalpatri Maharaj he was one of the people who was instrumental he started
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the Ram Raj Parishad which started these issues in some ways very in one of the initial kind
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of mobilizers around this issue of Ayodhya, Kashi, Matsura then this issue of I mean Hindu
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code basically the uniform civil code which became that issue later this is the issue
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of inclusion of tribals into the Hindu kind of fold so you take their practices and apply
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Hindu metaphysics to that and so your Hindus so these issues have kind of been the same
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for such a long time right there are such persistence to them is quite remarkable I
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think because it's been a small number of issues have been the center of mobilization
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for a very long time almost 50-60 years now longer than that.
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So there is in Ayodhya the issue is of course because it's one of those things that all
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over the world you see that place of religious significance a conflict around that is very
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difficult to resolve there is a mosque which is a place of religious significance some
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people argue that hey it's not so important it was just another mosque it's not so central
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as it is to Hindus who because it's place where Lord Ram was born so it is much more
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important to them but as you know in religions the importance of a particular spot is only
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people who practice that religion can say so it's very difficult to actually for somebody
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from outside that reason to say that hey you give up this land or somebody else to say
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that this is not so important for you it depends on them so therefore there is a really difficult
#
situation if it were some other kind of property dispute then it would have been much easier
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So if you were to just wear your constitutional lens you would say that this is a property
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right dispute you just look at the property rights and settle them that's one way but
#
it seems that the Allahabad High Court and also now the Supreme Court has said that that
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way is not going to work I don't know why they did that because it is possible that
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they just look at that and then let the chips fall where they may who knows where it's going
#
to go but they have decided to not wear that hat and they want to find some conciliation
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but conciliation is very hard on these issues because it's not so much just about that particular
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spot it's there is a larger politics around it right like you can make compromises but
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sometimes the compromises may lead to consequences which are not acceptable to you now what are
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the see and even if it leads to compromise they're not acceptable to you still have to
#
be compromised you know because compromise is good for politics right because it leads
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to peace and it can lead to harmony you know if there is conflict you can diffuse it you
#
can find opportunity to find to to promote peace in a society and fraternity can grow
#
and all of that but there is also a counter view that if you compromise you might be accentuating
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certain tendencies which may go further so this is the you know argument about a slippery
#
slope that your ways is going to go so one risk for them from point of view of the Muslim
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community so to speak is that there is the chance that this might if they compromise
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on this they they can be a larger you know mobilization around such issues and it might
#
change the nature of the Indian state no and if there is some confidence building that
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or some measures that build trust to say that that is not going to happen then you could
#
find compromise around the issue so it's not so much about that particular spot that is
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I mean that there is something to that of course it's a sacred spot but also what the
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larger politics of religion around that and what kind of regime will it lead to I mean
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if such compromises are made does it lead to a better regime or a worse regime from
#
the point of view of specific community and also for the point of view of common good
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for all of us that's the important question and that question is a political question
#
that's a question that has to be answered by all of us and also people who are involved
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in mobilizing around it to create this trust that this is not going to lead to further
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you know and it is not going to lead to domination by one side over the other and I don't know
#
whether that is happening enough.
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So you know what would you say just sort of looking at this uneasy ongoing interplay between
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religion society and the state what would you say is like a best-case scenario and a
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worst-case scenario over the coming 10 years?
#
The best-case scenario I mean in general in an abstract way but looking also at Indian
#
society is that religion plays a role for creating I mean ethical good human beings
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or time helps play that role but plays a role in that process virtuous citizens so to speak
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turning barbarians into virtuous citizens and they then participate in a democratic
#
process through this kind of a virtuous stance and then the other ideological contestations
#
can happen in a better way over time because of this and all religions can do that they
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have the potential to do that even though right now every some religions may in their
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practice look certain way others look a little better but every religion has the potential
#
to do that at least the major religions that we have in our subcontinent and that's the
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I mean so this religious associations are the forms of associations creating helping
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create these kind of citizens who are who care for the good they may disagree on what
#
is the good but they think about it care about it and serious are serious about it and think
#
about the common good think about a good society and participate in that spirit also certain
#
amount of toleration you know of the other of the other points of view can come also
#
through your religious interactions with other people of different religions and all that
#
that also is good for society that's good for democracy because democracy is about differences
#
negotiating those differences that practice you can get in your religious thinking you
#
know that so I'm just thinking about various ways in which a positive good outcome can
#
that's the best case what's the worst case the worst case scenario I think in terms of
#
I mean where we are right now is this what we talked about earlier a war of groups against
#
groups you know where it's just a Schmittian construct but more of you know group sense
#
that you think that that community is your enemy and you're they'll destroy you if you
#
don't anything and you do a lot of projection you know as a psychologist I say you project
#
a lot of negativity onto them which may not be actually belonging to them they may be
#
much more much more boring than the demons that you describe them to be but you project
#
onto them great then it becomes a war of community against community and that I think is a disaster
#
for I mean for democracy because it I don't see we don't have the I mean we don't have
#
resources to overcome that because it is not so obvious that we have any you know sources
#
of order that we can go to which once this process starts playing out which can then
#
intervene and kind of make things better before a lot of harm is done so it has to be prevented
#
much more than anything and that prevention is not just about political you know coalition
#
building that is part of it you have to build coalitions you have to figure out ways to
#
it also up to your culture and it's much more about finding a new symbol for community through
#
which we can kind of associate and overcome the centuries of resentment and you know there
#
is a truth to this resentment that we have there's been a lot of I mean like Ambedkar's
#
book on partition where he makes a list of riots and this and that and other activities
#
if you have other things that we can keep thinking about and keep becoming slaves to
#
you know the past is the worst kind of tyranny because you can't change it so there is
#
a sense of becoming a victims to I mean prisoners of our past we need to find a new symbol to
#
overcome that it's not an intellectual analytical exercise it cannot be built into existence
#
we can just hope and pray that it comes about because if it doesn't come out I mean the
#
worst case scenario can also happen because we are a multicultural society we have different
#
very very different worldviews we can agree on many things we have a constitutional project
#
which we are trying to implement for last 70 years that is one kind of at least a intellectual
#
set of new ideas around which quite a few of us can kind of get together more or less
#
we may disagree on specifics of it but it's much more of a cultural question about what
#
is the symbol around which we can say that okay this symbol can help us transcend this
#
baggage that we carry in our psyche we have been carrying it for a long time and we keep
#
reminded of it all the time and how long can this kind of go on but I would argue that
#
I mean I may be sounding like a doomsday person because we are able to find order right sometimes
#
intellectuals think oh my god things are going to happen but people are able to still find
#
ways to live together amid all that despair there is a note of hope so let me sort of
#
end the episode by assuring my listeners that even though I'm one of the three and a half
#
libertarians in this country and I probably disagree with all of you I don't think of
#
the world in Schmidtian terms you are all my friends as indeed as Suyash and thank you
#
so much for coming on the scene in the unseen I always learn a lot by chatting with you.
#
Thank you Amit for having me on the show.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode you can follow Suyash on Twitter at Suyash Rai
#
one word S-U-Y-A-S-H-R-A-I you can follow me at Amit Verma A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A you can
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browse past episodes of the scene in the unseen at scene unseen dot I-N thinkpragati dot com
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and IVM podcast dot com the scene in the unseen is supported by the Takshashila Institution
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time students and working professionals visit Takshashila dot org dot I-N for more details.
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