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Before you listen to this episode of the Seen and the Unseen, I have a recommendation for
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Do check out Pullia Baazi hosted by Saurabh Chandra and Pranay Kottaswane, two really
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good friends of mine, kick-ass podcast in Hindi.
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Journalists believe in the power of words, but words are sometimes simply not enough.
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This is especially true in this day and age when the most eloquent words can serve false
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I'm a big believer in numbers and in data.
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In fact, I believe all of the world and all our emotions and grand romances can be boiled
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But even if you disagree with that, and I can assign a number to the probability that
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you do, it is undeniable that numbers can shed great light on our economy and politics
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and society and even who we really are as human beings.
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Numbers empower us with self-awareness and that is why the growth of data journalism
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is one of the most welcome advances of our times.
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Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen.
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My subject for today is data journalism and the political economy.
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Well, actually I thought of doing a show just on data journalism and the first guest I thought
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of inviting is actually also an expert in the political economy with incredible insights
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on contemporary politics.
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So it made sense to weave that into the show as well.
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Roshan Kishore is data and political economy editor at the Hindustan Times and beyond this,
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he also used to be a student politician himself in JNU, an experience which, as you will see,
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adds an added layer to his journalistic insights.
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This conversation was recorded on July 30th, but before we cut to it, let's take a quick
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This episode of the Seen and the Unseen is brought to you by Storytel.
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Storytel is an audiobook platform which you can listen to on your Android or iOS app.
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If you hop on over to Storytel.com slash IVM, I actually use Storytel myself regularly so
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The book I want to recommend today is a classic that if you haven't read already, listen to
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It's on Storytel and remember you get a 30-day free trial only at Storytel.com slash IVM.
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Roshan, welcome to the Seen and the Unseen.
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Roshan, I invited you of course because of your really interesting data journalism and
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your writing on politics and so on and so forth.
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But after inviting you, I found out that when you were a student, you were also into politics
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yourself and all of that.
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So, tell me a little bit about that, not just the political aspect of it, but you know,
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what kind of person were you when you were young?
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You know, where did you study?
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Basically, I'm from Bihar and I, you know, which is the normal thing, at least it was
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in our generation then that you had to qualify the ITG and all that and I studied sciences
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for my plus two and I was really very bad at it.
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But luckily, I took economics as a subject because you had to take a fifth subject, computer
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economics, and I thought I enjoyed it.
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So after having made a disaster of my plus two stint, I decided to come and pursue economics
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And even then, I'd never given a lot of thought to it.
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I think as things evolved, I also and more than that, my teachers, a couple of whom happened
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to be from JNU, realized that, you know, looking at the qualitative economic picture was something,
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you know, I had an aptitude and encouraged me to take the JNU entrance exam.
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And you know, I got through and you know, as you know, the JNU economics course is radically
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different compared to what the other premium institutions in this country like Delhi School
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I'm not saying that the former is good or the latter is bad, but it is a more heterodox
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Tell me a little bit about how it's different.
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The crux of it, I think is, you know, a lot of people say that, you know, it's no more
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Marxian and such, but I think JNU, I don't know what it is now, but I think the basic
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focus was they somehow, you know, emphasize the Kolesky-Keynes framework and classical
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political economy was sort of emphasized upon.
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So rather than, you know, you start running econometrics and regression equations, etc.
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from day one and you essentially go the job market way because a lot of, you should remember
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that that was the boom period then, this is before the crisis, you know, when I went to
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university and corporate jobs were really, I mean, coming at a very fast pace.
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So rather than just do that, I mean, JNU does that also, a lot of people from JNU have excelled
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in those kinds of fields.
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It also allowed you to the opportunity to look at classical political economy.
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So we had courses like political economy of development, where you would see, you know,
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what kind of trajectory did China take, the Korean-Japanese war and those sorts of things,
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the feudalism, capitalism debate.
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I'm not that I remember all of those today, but it allowed you to, I mean, try and look
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at the larger economic pictures if I could say, and it also allowed me to sort of develop
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You know, we were not very good at it when we were young students, but at least try and
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get the larger picture, develop arguments, question basic assumptions behind arguments
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A lot of comparative studies, you know, I joined my MA in economics in 2004.
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This was just a couple of years after the East Asian crisis had hit and, you know, three,
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four years before the larger global crisis hit.
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So those are very interesting times to be in the discipline, you know, even then there
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was a lot of charm for the corporate world and, you know, mainstream economic theory,
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but it was an interesting period.
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And I think, you know, because ours was a department which had very eminent left-leaning
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economists like Professor Prabhat Patnayak, Utsa Patnayak, Jayati Ghosh.
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So they influenced a lot of our, to a very large degree, our worldview as well.
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And then, you know, because JNU is JNU, politics also happened and, you know, the economics
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department has always, it has historically been a stronghold of the SFISO to say the
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left-leaning students, people like Sita Ram, etc. are alumni.
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So it was a mix of the two.
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The academic and the political sort of came together.
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That's the ideological aspect of it.
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But I also believe, you know, that I've been out of my home after my class 10th.
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So plus two, I did in different city where there were no hostels.
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So basically at a very young age, we were friends running a flat, a kitchen, etc.
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And life is very difficult when you do that.
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So JNU was the first time I actually went to a hostel and life in JNU is as convenient
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as it can get for a student.
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Now that I look back at it, I also think that, you know, one can be critical that it does
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not make you do enough hard work unless you are sort of self-driven and motivated.
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You will get along easily in JNU.
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This is something I also did.
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But that also played an important part in shaping my worldview because the left, you
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know, was a strong force in the union there and the history of student struggles, etc.
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Today, all of it is looked down upon, unfortunately.
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But that was the second, I think, but also an essential aspect of it.
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And was there a moment during all this or a phase during all this where it struck you
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that economics is not just something in a book, it's not just a theoretical subject,
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but it explains your world and it explains your world so viscerally that then it is a
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natural step for you to want to get involved in politics, for example, and, you know, all
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of it becomes one congruous whole?
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That I believe has always been true.
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It's not for me to say.
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For example, you know, great economic catastrophes, something like the Great Depression, I mean,
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it could not be arrested in time because people believed in the Say's law, you know, that
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supply will create its own demand and therefore there's no need to.
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Now, we know that Keynes had sort of, you know, pointed out those mistakes with the
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basic theoretical framework earlier, but it took a Second World War, it took a, you know,
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Soviet camp to sort of put that extra pressure to start the corrective mechanism after, you
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know, the Second World War ended, the golden age of capitalism has been no aid.
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Even if we look at, you know, for example, today there's a lot of discussion about why
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India couldn't embark on that manufacturing success story like the Aryan Station countries,
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Now, a lot of development economics today, even mainstream acknowledges I think the role
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of the fact that, you know, egalitarian land distribution was done even in these countries,
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you know, which after the Second World War went to the sort of the capitalist bloc.
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But you know, breaking of land monopoly played a crucial role in those things.
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So that way, definitely, if you look at the text also, I think there's ample evidence
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to suggest that economics plays a role and politics plays a role in determining the economic
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trajectory of societies, nations, etc.
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Now, let us come back to JNU again.
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Now, JNU is a place, you know, where you pay even today, I think, a few hundred rupees
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So it actually allows you to, you know, pursue things which you like without, you know, feeling,
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I would say burdened by the fact that you probably have to get out of the university
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and pay lakhs of rupees in student loans.
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So I do not exactly come from a very poor family, but you know, most people, middle
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class Indians, you know, like my socioeconomic background, could not have afforded this kind
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of study if they had to pay, say, student loans.
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So those kinds of intellectual choices, which I was able to make earlier in my life and
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know of which the professional reward I'm reaping today, you know, without, you know,
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having to have ever paid for that, you know, subsidized education, which I received.
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I think in a country like India, it still makes a lot of sense to at least have, you
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know, if not all some higher educational institutions, which allow people to do that.
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Because if you, if breaking even becomes the sole point of education, and this need not,
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you know, just confine itself to economics, any other discipline, I think you'd end up
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with a very different intellectual trajectory in any country or society.
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In fact, I had, I had coffee yesterday with a friend who's studying right now in JNU.
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He's doing his postgraduate economics shout out to Sanjit and the tuition fees are still
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In fact, he says he pays more for his hostel than for his tuition fees.
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And that also sounded like a really small amount to me.
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So what was politics like, like, you know, today, I think of you as one of the sharpest
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minds in political journalism and in covering the political economy and so on.
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And it's fascinating to me that you were also at one point a politician yourself.
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Is there any sort of correlation between the politics on a bigger scale and the kind of
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politics on the smaller scale?
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And what was politics on that smaller scale really like?
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I think it makes a lot of difference, you know, because I was never an active participant
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in it, but I've seen politics in Delhi University, now Delhi University, for example, I was looking
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at the papers yesterday, some 70,000 students have taken admission in BA first year.
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So if you look at it, when the DUSU elections happened, you're probably talking about an
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electorate, which is more than two lakh strong.
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We're recording on July 30th, by the way.
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So you can't have any intellectual engagement with that kind of crowd.
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It is physically, humanly impossible to even think of doing it.
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Now, compared to this January, the exact opposite, when we were students, we had around 4,000
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So politics essentially was a lot of room to room campaigns, going to students, discussing
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things ad nauseam with them, a lot of which the outside world would think is probably
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purely romanticism and doesn't have any bearing on the larger world.
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But even then, the crucial thing about JNU was your success or lack of success in politics
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actually depended on your ability to A, do hard work because it takes a lot of your time,
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B, your ability to sort of come up with arguments and counter arguments.
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And the ideological spectrum was very different, but this I think was the crux of the matter.
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And unlike a lot of what people believe, it actually had a material bearing on students.
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For example, when we were students, we fought agitations.
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So JNU, I don't know whether it's still the case, JNU used to, even though the fees at
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success were really low, it used to give scholarships to students whose family income was below
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I think when we were students, it was 75,000 rupees per year.
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So this was only for BA, MA.
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Now the question which we found most difficult was once you finished your MA, you got into
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an MPhil or a PhD program.
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Now, technically that's work, research in any first world country, you've paid a lot
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In JNU, that is not the case, B, India still doesn't have that kind of a developed sort
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of academic labor market where you could go out and earn your money.
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Those days projects are always still coming.
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So making ends meet was really a difficult thing to do.
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And even if you come from a relatively well-off family or not so poor family, you can't ask
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your family for sort of supporting yourself beyond post-graduation.
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So we fought an agitation and Professor Thorat used to be the UGC chairman and some sort
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of a scholarship started.
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It was bare minimum to make ends meet, 3,000, 5,000 rupees.
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So politics was identifying what these material problems were, trying to look for a constituency
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in JNU, which would sort of identify with these demands and support these demands.
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And then having the larger ideological debates at the same time.
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For example, JNU, so I joined JNU in four.
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Now four is the year when the India one actually lost power.
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So May were the elections and I went to JNU in July end, I believe.
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But before that, the five years, JNU being JNU, had problems with the first India regime
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Those were problems of a very different nature.
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There was Gujarat rights and all those things.
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But then politics qualitatively shifted.
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I would say for the 10 years under the UPA government, because the right-wing challenge
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was not so much of a challenge then.
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It completely shifted to things such as more scholarships, more hostels, et cetera, on
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the one hand, and then issues such as, say, the nuclear deal, which doesn't have a material
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But nevertheless, given JNU's ideological leanings, it's a big debate.
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Shingur Nandigram was a watershed event in JNU, because CPM slash SFI8 student wingers
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always enjoyed an intellectual hegemony, so to say.
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But once the Shingur Nandigram thing happened, it really sort of gave a body blow to that
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So the 2007 elections were the first elections where the SFI lost all major posts.
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And this had only happened once after the Tiananmen elections.
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So JNU that way gives you a rich political profile and experience, because you're dealing
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with pretty much everything under the sun.
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But nevertheless, people who are voted are equally, if not more likely to desert you
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on those ideological issues for more concrete issues.
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So that way, I think a lot of what the political arguments I can make or the way I can think,
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JNU has contributed a lot to that.
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And what was the impetus behind your getting into politics to begin with?
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Like, was it that, OK, these things need to be done, and someone's got to do them, and
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I'm going to get into politics and get it done?
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Well, A, there was no political ambition.
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So when I joined SFI, I did not even know that it was a CPM student wing.
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I think the biggest question was, see, for joining any kind of politics, you have to
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have an instinct for social engagement, that my world is not just me, but I want to engage
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But in my case, I think the most important thing was a sense of gratitude toward JNU
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offered to a student like me, because life was very easy.
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It was for the first time in my student life after having got out of my home, the comforts
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of my home, I actually did not have to worry about anything else but my studies.
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So it was this sense of gratitude which sort of attracted me to JNU then continues to attract
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Right, so in those years when you were sort of, you know, doing your MPhil, I think you
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Yeah, so in those years that you did an MPhil, and you also stood for president of the JNU.
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And those elections never happened.
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So the JNU elections were stayed for the non-conformity to link the committee recommendations.
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So I was the presidential candidate to never contest it that way.
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But I've been in the union in other smaller posts.
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So what were your sort of aspirations in those days?
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Like you told me you don't always think you'll be a journalist.
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What were your sort of aspirations like?
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And also, what were your interests like?
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Like your deep knowledge of data, is that something you started building up at that
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What were your influences like?
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How was your, like who are the thinkers who influenced you?
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What are the books you would recommend to my listeners, for example?
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There are two ways to look at it.
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The place where I come from in the country, higher education actually went down the drain
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in Bihar in the 70s itself.
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So there's been a large intellectual void to sort of say.
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And education, because if you could afford it, you would get out of Bihar.
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It was as simple as that.
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Anybody who could afford it would not do his or her college or university education in
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Bihar, unless you wanted to make a complete disaster out of your academic career or professional
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So as long as I was at home, education meant a degree of professional success.
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You get good marks in class 10, then you go to class 12, you either get into a medical
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school or an engineering school or things like that.
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Then when I was in BA, it were many things put together.
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Some of us wanted to prepare for the civil service, somebody, you know, management cat
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Some of us wanted to do places like JNU D school and probably go outside for GRE, etc.
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When I came to JNU, I came with a very open mind.
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None of these were foreclosed options, I had never made up my mind.
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Once the options started, and I saw that I had an interest in political economy, I gradually,
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politics also played a role in it.
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I gradually made up my mind that I'll finish a PhD in JNU, probably get a teaching job.
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Now, that never happened because I never finished my PhD.
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But the data bit, I think, again, JNU has a lot of role to play, because the basic courses
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which we did, so even things such as political economy or development, etc.
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So for example, my professor who eventually became my supervisor, Ruth Sapatnayak, she
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actually says that it is Lenin who discovered the Lorenz curve.
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So Lenin, he has this famous book called Development of Capitalism in Russia, in which he plotted
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So we were taught that unless your facts sort of back it up, you can't make an argument,
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Because no matter how ideologically persuasive it sounds, or no matter how much in agreement
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everybody is in it to it, as far as research is concerned, you have to have some substantive
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So data work is sacrosanct.
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So I'm somebody who never did field for my research, but a lot of my research was based
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on secondary NSS data, I worked on the public distributions, etc.
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So it was then that I realized that you have to have some factual thing.
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A lot of my time as a political activist, so the only thing comparable to what a journalist
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does, which I did in JNU was because JNU has this culture of distributing dinner pamphlets.
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So on your mess table, every day there are pamphlets.
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And because I happened to be in the SFI, anybody who leads an organization has to write those
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So four o'clock, we would decide what to write on.
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And within an hour, you have to produce this 600 word copy.
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So that is the closest thing I did, a journalist does as far as JNU is concerned.
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But again, then you say if you look at the budget, etc, so the one way was to go about
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it was to just throw adjectives and everybody would agree even then.
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But the other way was to actually look at data.
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So for example, if the budget has come, what has happened to say educational allotment,
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this scholarship, that scholarship, etc.
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Even when you were saying negotiating with the administration.
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So the fact that data was a useful skill set to have academically as well as to win a political
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argument is something JNU taught me.
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And that always stayed with me because I was never very good at other quantitative starts
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such as game theory or microeconomics, etc.
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So that was the natural sort of leaning I acquired and I used to like it also.
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So for a brief while between journalism and JNU, I was in research, there also I was looking
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at food security, I mean, how the Americans support their farm, agriculture, etc.
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And every day I would realize that if you had the numbers, your case become really strong.
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So that is how data happened to me.
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Once again, I think part of my academic political training, whatever one might call it.
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And you know, it strikes me that while data is objective, the numbers are what they are,
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the facts are what they are.
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And you mentioned before this when we were having lunch before the recording that the
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useful thing about data is that it makes you question your prior beliefs and your biases,
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you have to back it up with data.
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But isn't it also the case that there is so much of data that you can, you know, use data
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to almost support any conclusion.
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You can cherry pick data, you can, you know, torture data until it confesses the truth
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This is something I try and bring out in my own work as well now as a journalist.
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For example, if we were to look at say the unemployment rate in India, the latest figure
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Even when it was not that high, if you were to compare say unemployment rate in a country
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like India with an OECD country, I mean, the rates there could probably be much higher.
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Because you know, being unemployed in a first world country and being unemployed in a country
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like India are completely different things.
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I mean, an NREGA worker is technically considered employed in India.
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That would not be the case in say, Sweden or even in the United States, for most of
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the people in the US at least.
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So you of course have to know the context in which the data is being given to you.
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I mean, which is why, you know, rather than one data point, you have to have multiple
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data points and you have to know what exactly is the data point you're looking at.
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For example, in demonetization, a lot of people said that, you know, because these cash hoards
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would be purged, so we would get rid of black money.
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Somebody who has done his or her basic economics would know that that is not the case.
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Now there are stocks and there are flows.
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Black money, we know is a flow variable.
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So if I had 1000 rupees of black money sitting in my pocket, if it were to get extinguished
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today, in six months from now, I'll probably have 2000 rupees of black money in my pocket.
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So I think it is extremely important, especially in journalism, because, and this is something,
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once again, I value a lot from my, you know, initial days.
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As long as I was in school, probably the only nonfiction I've ever read in my life are newspapers,
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because you know, places in Bihar, even today, I do not think of a very strong library culture,
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But all my knowledge about the world was either from TV or newspapers.
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I mean, people take extremely seriously what is written in newspapers.
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I mean, I would not say that for television today, but at least even today, newspapers,
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if people read them, they take it very seriously.
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And in your case, were like English newspapers or Hindi also?
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I was not very comfortable reading English newspapers until school, but I would read
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It was more a language problem rather than anything else.
#
The moment I got comfortable with English, I started reading English newspapers.
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But so I think it is our duty to sort of do our own hard work and get our own concepts
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right while we are dealing with data.
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That I consider is extremely important.
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And not all data should be presented in the form of jargon, etc.
#
Basic things such as, and I think it is more important to use data to ask questions rather
#
Now, for example, we know that, you know, everybody knows that four quarters GDP growth
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So what does one make out of it?
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Which sectors is it impacting?
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What should we, you know, a lot of people on the left, for example, used to say that,
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you know, this entire obsession with trickle down growth theory that, you know, growth
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should be the be all and end all of economic policy is not good.
#
But today when the GDP declines, I mean, how do the same people go and criticize the government
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Then you have to have a larger theory or an explanation of who is getting impacted by
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this deceleration in growth, how much?
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I think as journalists, we need to sort of answer those questions and also ask those
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questions because there are a lot of people about today's world, economy, polity.
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These are the two things I am comfortable with.
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I'm sure applies to a lot of other things as well where we do not know the answers.
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But I think at least an attempt has to be made, especially, you know, from the profession
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I work in journalism to be able to ask those questions.
#
And have there been moments where, for example, you've gone into looking at a subject with
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certain prior assumptions and found and changed your mind after looking at the data completely?
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Like, is there something memorable like that which you remember?
#
Well, there's one puzzle which I think we need some more data points.
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For example, the entire demonetization thing which happened.
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Now the government said that it laid tax collection, etc. because the tax base will widen up and
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Now, this budget has been a shortfall, but the income tax numbers have still been growing
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Even after demonetization, corporate tax is not growing, GST is not growing.
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So how much of it is because of demonetization?
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How much of it is because of normal things is something, you know, because I've criticized
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demonetization a lot in my academic works, and I'm not the only one who's criticized.
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A lot of people have done that.
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But the data doesn't allow me to still make a substantive final argument that this is
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what we know about, say, demonetization's impact on income tax collections.
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Now, we know that those tall claims are probably will never be made, but has there been some
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Has there not been an impact?
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I would still like to wait for some time.
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So this is where I think data becomes useful.
#
It prevents you from sort of, you know, grandstanding about your own ideas or your own prejudices
#
if one could use the word.
#
Yeah, and I've also rented and raved about Demonetization and I have a bunch of episodes
#
on it which are linked from the show notes.
#
But then, you know, that brings me to the question of what do you do when data sources
#
aren't adequate or when they are not adequately trustworthy?
#
For example, demonet would be fair to assume that a significant part of the impact was
#
on the informal sector and we don't have direct data from the informal sector.
#
One has to make sort of assumptions based on other proxies, you know, and even apart
#
from the informal sector where data is a problem, there's also the growing issue of how much
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of data which comes from the government is reliable anymore.
#
Like I had an episode recently on the GDP with economist Rajeshwari Sengupta and who's
#
in sort of an expert on it.
#
And it left me alarmed because at the end of it, the feeling I got was that GDP has
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now become less of an economic measure and more of a political rhetorical tool.
#
And if you can't trust those kind of figures that the government puts out and if you don't
#
have independent means of getting that kind of data yourself, then what is one to do?
#
I mean, do you then rely on some kind of jugar with the data that is available and that you
#
Or how do you navigate that?
#
As far as the particular question about GDP is concerned, I think it is unfortunate that
#
that is the case unless the government, like you said, decides to sort of make it open
#
to at least an independent panel of economists, experts, we would never know.
#
That's sad for a country like us.
#
We are not some banana republic, we are a big country in terms of population, in terms
#
of our economic size in the world.
#
But then I think it becomes and you know these debates are so politically colored now that
#
it is impossible to sort of pinpoint as to who is being objective and who is not because
#
any criticism is then painted in the same brush by the other side and somebody who makes
#
an argument that maybe it is not 4.5 but 5 would also be put in some bracket or the other.
#
I think in that case, as journalists, because I am not an academic now, my work as a journalist
#
does not give me the luxury to sort of go back, I am not saying journalists should not
#
Sometimes we try and do that with subjects we like or we think we can actually make some
#
original contribution to but day to day it is not possible for journalists to take a
#
deep dive into each and every subject.
#
I think then it is important to realize at least individually as to what you can and
#
what you cannot do and beyond the point there is nothing you can add to the GDP debate.
#
Now there are people who have much higher stakes.
#
For example, before the RBI monetary policy meetings, Reuters does this poll of economists.
#
So now a lot of them have rating agencies, brokering agencies, these trading firms, they
#
have started doing their own work.
#
So for them the stakes are higher.
#
They probably cannot sort of accept it as fait accompli which we as journalists have
#
That is one, but the other thing which you said is more interesting because what if data
#
sort of does not allow you to understand things or the data which is presented, let us say
#
the data is not bad but sometimes data can be a half truth.
#
For example, because I write on agriculture often, I consider the farmer suicide data
#
to be a classic example of it.
#
Now there is a lot of song and dance about hundreds of thousands of farmers have committed
#
suicide in our country after economic reforms etc.
#
That is a terrible thing.
#
I do not for a moment sort of endorse what has happened.
#
But should we as a country take farmer suicides as the ultimate proof of whether or not there
#
exists farmer distress in the country?
#
Now most of the farmer suicides in our country, they happen either in Vidarbha or Andhra Pradesh.
#
They used to happen in Kerala, the Wayanad etc.
#
So basically it is commercially driven farmers which commit suicide.
#
Now you would find very few cases of farmer suicide from say Bihar or Eastern Uttar Pradesh
#
or Odisha or West Bengal which are among the poorest parts of the country.
#
Does that mean that there is no agrarian distress or rural distress in these parts of the country?
#
I would say there is probably more rural distress if one were to take into account just poverty
#
and sort of inability to make ends meet.
#
So why does the farmer suicide data not show in these states?
#
Because agriculture is driven by a completely different set of considerations there.
#
An average farmer in Bihar is only interested in growing enough wheat or rice probably or
#
a poor lentil to sort of grow enough to feed yourself and maybe sell a little and then
#
rest of the time when you are not cultivating you actually go and work as construction worker
#
So I think it is in these things where half truths being captured by data become sort
#
of the guiding pole of discussion around very serious issues in our country is where we
#
have to be really careful.
#
For example, the informal thing.
#
Now I think it is equally important to keep harping upon the fact that we do not know
#
what is happening to the informal sector in our country.
#
I mean you have to keep harping upon it and people have to understand that GDP numbers
#
probably do not mean a lot for.
#
So with the same amount of GDP growth, pre-GST, post-GST, life would have become completely
#
different for the informal sector in our country because margins would have taken a deep hit.
#
So these are things I think which have not been emphasized upon adequately and I think
#
Western journalism, things like the Financial Times and a lot of other things have a lot
#
of good things to teach us when it comes to journalism and I have always been a believer
#
in the fact that wherever good things you can learn from you should always learn.
#
But to look at and understand a country like India which still has a very large informal
#
sector, a lot of its workforce, almost half of it still depends on agriculture, I think
#
in those areas even the globally established best practices, best works, best minds, especially
#
in the journalistic profession cannot help us in understanding our country.
#
There has to be some sort of a concerted effort to develop indigenous thinking, indigenous
#
methods, reportage, analysis, whatever that it might be to help our own case I would say.
#
And also is it like, I am just thinking aloud, you mentioned sort of the pharmaceutical sites
#
and you know when you look at data like that there are so many things you can do with that
#
data, you can make different kinds of political cases with that data depending on how you
#
look at it, you can try to contextualize it by saying okay if this is the suicide rate
#
among farmers what is the rate among housewives and if it's worse among housewives what does
#
that mean and should we then ignore the former data and blah blah blah.
#
So in that sense as a journalist, when you are a journalist, do you find that whatever
#
your prior inferences might be or whatever your biases might be because I mean frankly
#
everybody is biased but you try to be as objective as possible in your reportage, of course
#
but human beings are all biased without exception but you try to guard against bias or be transparent.
#
So do those sort of your philosophical leanings and the principles that you hold also then
#
influence the questions that you ask of the data and therefore influence the directions
#
I think that is the honest way to go about it.
#
So the farmer suicide case is a bit straightforward because thankfully the NCRV included a subcategory
#
in its data so it now lists reason for suicide and if you look at those reasons actually
#
you know most farmers commit suicide due to economic distress, crop failure or economic
#
So that one pretty much stands out.
#
Now let us now go into a more controversial topic.
#
Let us look at the election results we've had with 2019.
#
Now we know that this is a phenomenal victory which the Bharti Janata Party has sort of pulled.
#
Now a lot of people know liberals those leaning on the left would like us to believe that
#
if not all an overwhelming driver of this victory has been the Bharti Janata Party and
#
its leaders abilities to sort of polarize the electorate and communal lines.
#
That is what we are told at least.
#
Now this is something the BJP has been doing for ever since its inception.
#
That's its core politics from Ramzan Bhoomi to many other things.
#
Is it just that or is there more to this victory?
#
It could be national security, it could be pro-poor programs, unfortunately we in India
#
still do not have that kind of detailed election data.
#
I mean the CSDS does some transparent surveys but the sample size etc. are still small.
#
Those numbers are still not out in the public realm, they'll probably take their own time
#
On questions like these I think is where the real test comes.
#
Now what do you do because there's no easily accessible data.
#
You have, you would like to believe, well let me put it this way, I mean whether or
#
not you would like to believe there's a convenient set of explanations which are being forwarded
#
by people who are otherwise very established in their academic careers.
#
I think this is also a challenge for people who are doing this kind of work in our generation
#
because if we look at the world today globally, polarization is increasing, a lot of leaders,
#
very powerful leaders, I mean our Prime Minister is one example, we have Donald Trump who are
#
leading into waters which were considered I would say the other unimaginable, for the
#
United States presidents to be making the kind of statements he's making etc.
#
So these are very different times, economically these are very difficult times also.
#
So we know that economically things are not going to be as good as they were even ten
#
Now when there is economic distress, when there is a lot of polarization already happening,
#
how do you explain the world, how do you even try and engage with the world?
#
Now data can be one bit but I think the correct approach or at least the one which I try and
#
take is, I mean look at the data because that's at least sacrosanct and the good part in India
#
is most of the data actually comes from the government, so if you're using the government's
#
own data there's only a limit to which people can disagree with you including those in the
#
government, so that's the good part about using data.
#
But I think then one also has to have a very sort of open mind, you know you asked me the
#
question earlier about which are the thinkers I would sort of, I draw my thoughts from.
#
I think the kind of world we are in today and there's not one thinker who you can use
#
to sort of explain the world.
#
For example, let us look at somebody like Babasaheb Ambedkar.
#
I think in today's India if there's one politician slash leader who is admired by everybody across
#
the political spectrum.
#
Now the RSS BJP has a lot of problems with Jawaharlal Nehru, I mean they do not say so
#
explicitly but they have a lot of problems with a lot of things Mahatma Gandhi also did.
#
But Babasaheb Ambedkar is one person with whom everybody, now the communists also used
#
to be critical of him earlier from the ultra left to the ultra right sort of eulogises
#
If you were to read his writings in entirety I think Babasaheb would be the most hated
#
political figure in this country today because he's really spoken in mind on all sorts of
#
In fact especially hated by the Hindu right wing.
#
Difficult to say, a lot of people would hate him for a lot of reasons.
#
So I have been trained in a leftist tradition, so I of course think that the basic thing
#
which sort of Marx, Lenin etc still holds a lot.
#
But you could say that you draw your basic larger analysis from the Marxian scheme but
#
there's no socialism in today's world.
#
I mean I cannot envisage a socialism which does not allow me free markets or the basic
#
No, a lot of people on the left today celebrate basic liberties.
#
What kind of civil liberties did the Soviet Union allow to its people?
#
What kind of civil liberties does China allow to its people?
#
I mean you say our country, you know there's communal politics etc, look at what China
#
is doing to Muslims who have been put in those camps.
#
So I do not think there's a grand narrative today which fits the world.
#
But I also think that, and it'll probably become more important, I think we have to,
#
the fact that India and you know my formal training is in economics, so my knowledge
#
of history and you know politics is relatively much poor compared to what the student of
#
politics or history would have.
#
But the more I try and read about it, the more I get fascinated with the fact that India
#
as it were, we were able to arrive at this constitutional consensus to sort of adopt
#
the constitution and what we have managed is of course in the third world sort of unparalleled.
#
I mean we look at our neighbours, we look at other third world countries, emerging markets
#
etc without a political shock to our democracy barring the emergency which also you know
#
the transition to democracy was I would say relatively much more peaceful than what other
#
countries have had to have, without a major economic crisis and you know when we talk
#
about the 91 balance of payment crisis etc, but that basically involves shipping some
#
gold from here to London, I mean look at the kind of economic crisis East Asian countries
#
have had, Latin American countries have had to have.
#
So by and large we have you know emerged pretty much sort of unharmed.
#
Now I think India has to change, I mean it can't be the way it has been.
#
For example this is something I always say you know so a lot of people on the left today
#
say that if you want to counter Narendra Modi you have to have a Bernie Sanders or you have
#
to have a Jeremy Corbyn etc.
#
Now for people like say Sanders or Corbyn to be able to you know indulge in the kind
#
of rhetoric they are doing and you know a lot of which I agree with but that is besides
#
I think it draws traction from the fact that both you know United States, UK etc they at
#
least you know after the Second World War had golden age, I mean where social security,
#
education, economy everything was in a really good shape.
#
I don't think that was the case in India ever.
#
So if one were to ask you know say intergenerationally or otherwise also I do not think there are
#
a handful of people you know who might be like that but most people are actually materially
#
well off in India even today compared to what they were earlier.
#
So we need to have a different kind of a theory for it, I mean this is something I dwelt on
#
I mean class in the classic sense of the term as we stand it for example in the old left
#
rhetoric of Tata Birla etc I mean today Adani Ambani has replaced the Tata Birla.
#
I think the average man and the person on the street loves Mukesh Ambani for the geophones
#
because you know we have cheapest data in our country today.
#
Or for the Mumbai Indians entertainment where you could be.
#
But talking in terms of materially I mean telecom revolution in our country, IT revolution
#
in our country these are all genuine capitalist driven innovations which our country has really
#
We talk of the IT boom today you know I talked about JNU for example I said you know JNU
#
you know being cheap fees etc subsidized education that it was.
#
But you know JNU has only produced a handful of people like me.
#
If we talk about our success in the IT boom you know because of which a lot of remittances
#
come into our country, a lot of people in my generation, our generation are employed
#
in those sectors, these are all private engineering colleges.
#
I mean your IITs could only have produced so many graduates.
#
I mean thousands and thousands of engineering graduates which we are producing because of
#
private sector and education.
#
So I think you know there have to be certain things which are sacrosanct, civil liberties
#
should be one, basic health and education should be one.
#
But you largely have to have a you know political framework even if you know you want to criticize
#
any regime be it this regime or the earlier regime or the next regime which comes.
#
I think you have to have a way to sort of evolve on your existing successes in case
#
of India, in case of you know for example you know there were one thousand one million
#
problems with the Soviet Union but it did certain good things to the world.
#
There was universal suffrage after the Soviet Union came into being etc.
#
So I think the successes of the past have to be sort of I mean imbibed and then you
#
can't ask for going back to say the past.
#
That is how I think political thinking has to evolve in our country especially in today's
#
You have to know what I mean for example I would love to read all of what Bawa Sabha
#
I would love to read more about the constitution assembly debates.
#
I have not read about them at all.
#
But you have to bring those kind of debates into focus.
#
How did we agree on what we actually agreed on?
#
Were there pending disagreements about important things which were you know where the attitude
#
of the political class was so to say kick the can down the road?
#
I think those kind of debates have to be revived today, have to be engaged with to be able to
#
construct any meaningful political civil discourse in our country.
#
I think what I largely find and this is a lament is that instead of a deepening of the
#
discourse the way you just mentioned what we are seeing is a shallowing out of the discourse
#
where at least in the public discourse what you see is increasing polarizations as people
#
take essentially tribal positions.
#
Which you know brings me back to your earlier point that you made that you know that when
#
you take something like these 2019 election results and they can be interpreted in so
#
many different ways and people will just stick whatever narrative they want on it where some
#
people will say this shows that India is bigoted and some people will you know you can make
#
different narratives out of it and all of which may be true or false to different degrees.
#
But the question here is that even as a journalist when you work with data for either journalists
#
or public intellectuals there is also partly the expectation that in some way you will
#
help to make sense of the world and in some way that will involve creating perhaps a narrative
#
However it might be more nuanced than the other narratives out there but however nuanced
#
it might be creating a narrative.
#
And my question when you work with data is that in the social sciences how easy is it
#
For example I mean it's very hard to when you talk about public policy to infer causation
#
and you know figure out what is causation and what is merely correlation like an economist
#
who's been a frequent guest on my show Shruti Raj Gopal and she once gave me a really good
#
She said let's say you want to figure out if dropping a coin in water will raise the
#
level of the water or not.
#
Now you can arrive at it through scientific first principles and say that yeah of course
#
it will or you can say we'll do an experiment and within a lab in controlled conditions
#
you take a beaker of water you measure the length you put a coin you measure the height
#
again and you know what it is.
#
But in social sciences the equivalent of that is you are in a large swimming pool with many
#
people bobbing in and out and you drop a coin in that swimming pool and then you try to
#
measure the height of the water and sometimes it will be up sometimes it will be down.
#
On what basis are you going to infer causation.
#
So when you look at all the data that emerges out of our madly messy society and our madly
#
messy economy isn't that a sort of a problem that you face that you are supposed to make
#
But I mean how do you handle that challenge.
#
There are two three ways about it first like you said I think even today you know it might
#
seem a cliche for the people who actually know the subject.
#
I think as journalists it is our duty not to sort of engage with the experts or the
#
converted but to the larger audience which in India I still believe sincerely looks up
#
to journalism to give them information as unbiased as it can be.
#
So I think the most important point is to reiterate the first principles.
#
We have to know what I or you might take for granted in terms of even inferring the data
#
that we have sort of go out and educate the larger audiences.
#
For example a couple of years ago for Hindustan Times on the day of the budget we actually
#
did a large data piece explaining the basic things for example what does a revised estimate
#
and a budget estimate mean.
#
For us it's obvious I mean we know it but I think for the larger audience even those
#
bits of knowledge I mean we should at no point of time consider explaining these basic things
#
beneath us that I think is the first requirement of being a journalist you have to know you
#
engage with at a very mass level.
#
The second thing is I think what you said to point that out that this is what actually
#
Now because inflation under this government was you know very low it doesn't mean that
#
all of it was a policy success.
#
Inflation was low also because this government enjoyed for a very large part of its the previous
#
government for a very large low oil prices.
#
Something as basic as that has to be explained.
#
I mean bonds the government is planning to issue them so a lot of people have written
#
against it a lot of people have written in favor of it.
#
I would like to do a piece at some point of time you know something as basic as this that
#
not you borrow five billion dollars today the exchange rate is 70 for a dollar today
#
you expect it to be 75 for a dollar when you have to repay that loan in say five years.
#
What if the exchange rate were to be 90 per dollar?
#
Then the kind of money you have to pay I mean would increase many folds.
#
Similarly if the exchange rate were to go down it would probably make a windfall.
#
Then you go to another data point as to how the rupee has behaved.
#
So I think a step by step narrative counting all the possibilities which might or might
#
not happen actually this is my experience personally.
#
For example you know I am the happiest when you know one day I write a piece in ST then
#
some class 11 student from say Jalandhar writes a mail to me that I really like this I want
#
to be a journalist etc.
#
Sometimes it does happen.
#
That is what I really look forward to because the experts you know I am very grateful to
#
them that they promote my work etc. but that is something you know where I do not have
#
to make an extra effort sort of go and engage with them that is their subject of interest
#
they like it they you know sometimes they also engage with me to sort of promote me
#
encourage me develop my own arguments.
#
But when I am able to engage with a intelligent layperson reader no by not compromising the
#
basic method I do in my story writing is when I feel the happiest and I think that the future
#
for these kind of arguments to be made more and more people should be making it.
#
So what you are saying is that your work is not just you do not view your work just as
#
interpreting data and coming up with an explanation or a narrative of how things are but also
#
helping people see how the different kinds of data interact with each other and therefore
#
helping them better understand the complexity of it the complexity of the swimming pool
#
That is right so you know as you mentioned earlier I have this past as a you know political
#
activist so you know ingenue and you know it is very common with the left.
#
So Marx has this famous quote philosophers have only interpreted the world the point
#
however is to change it I think when you are a journalist only the first part of the phrase
#
applies to you your job is basically to interpret the world as well as you can and list all
#
But you are basically helping change it also I mean that boy in Jalandhar who wrote to
#
you and you might one day go on to.
#
But I think this is also an extremely important thing and this is something I believe because
#
you know I have been on the other side of the world as a political activist and today
#
I am a journalist and I think you know unless and until you are writing opinion there should
#
not be an overlap in these two and it is important for unbiased journalism.
#
But I think as journalists we also need to understand that you know just because we think
#
and we always try to we are writing what the truth is it does not mean it will have automatic
#
traction in the society.
#
Now this is something which is not rocket science a lot of philosophers etc Marx has
#
written on it that you know no matter whether an idea is true or false the kind of social
#
traction political traction it has also depends on larger social conditions political conditions
#
So if you have that in mind then it gives you a certain amount of I would say critical
#
distance or whatever one might call it or the ability to work very dispassionately and
#
That is something I consider myself lucky to have developed that thing early in my career.
#
And as someone who looks at data on a daily basis and perhaps reflexively you look at
#
the data in every subject that you do do you look at columnist and opinion writers like
#
myself for example and think ki yaar ye hawa mein baat kar rahe hai matlab it's not grounded
#
in because then it must seem very easy for anyone to just sit down and write an opinion
#
Because if they don't have to back it up with data whereas your work is around data everything
#
So does it change the way you look at other opinion writers columnist all of that.
#
So my newspaper my idea of a newspaper and this has never changed you know when I was
#
standing five or six and I used to read a Hindi newspaper today I read a lot of newspapers
#
I would probably like to read even more.
#
So my newspaper always used to finish at the open pages so business foreign sports I never
#
looked at them throughout my life.
#
Now that I work in a newspaper I realize how important they are.
#
So I think one thing which newspapers teach you is plurality and diversity of use is extremely
#
And when I say views I do not just mean views I also mean work you know because I might
#
be doing data somebody might be covering the BJP somebody who might be looking at personal
#
finance business papers have more than one reporter just tracking mutual funds.
#
I think you know all of those works are extremely important including people who write opinion
#
pieces because what it allows a journalist is like I said earlier I think good journalism
#
in this country even today has a lot of potential to bring intellect levels up in our society.
#
I might never have read a what should I say even the basic text of Ambedkar I have not
#
read much of it but a lot of people when they write the fact that there exists something
#
like a constituent assembly debate the fact that there was a debate on cow protection
#
you know in our country when the constitution was being made these are all things I've learned
#
from newspaper writings popular writings.
#
I think this is where public intellectuals have a role to play and public intellectuals
#
need not only be in universities or very high-ranking think tanks I think this is where all of us
#
have public intellectuals have a very important role to play.
#
We have to learn to agree to disagree I will not agree with everything you say etc. but
#
even then I think it is extremely important especially in today's conditions when there
#
is a lot of social polarization political polarization that we get to engage for example
#
I would personally like to know a lot more about what Deendayal Upadhyay's writings
#
are unfortunately I've never read them but no when we have a prime minister who's probably
#
one of the most popular leaders in my generation the most popular leader because I never saw
#
Mrs Gandhi who swears by Deendayal Upadhyay's ideology who claims that the BJP is driven
#
by Deendayal I think there's some merit in engaging with that so I would actually love
#
to have a lot more people writing on what Deendayal Upadhyay wrote.
#
Now you have to there's good work in journalism there's bad work in journalism there's good
#
opinion writing there's bad opinion writing but I think this is one of the beauties of
#
free market and its society which has I think a lot of freedom to write read engage etc.
#
You can always go out and choose what you want to I mean the Indian journalistic scene
#
to make I mean is the we don't have a Walmart in country but this is the Walmart of ideas
#
I think I mean you can go and look at what you want to buy and don't want to buy I think
#
No and that's beautifully said and that strikes a chord with me also and what you said about
#
having that multiplicity of kinds of journalism and ideas and all of that in newspaper where
#
you have a business page a foreign page and I usually go to the sports page first so kindly
#
judge me for it but does it worry you that in modern times how people interact with content
#
is changing to the extent that all of this is getting sort of like earlier what used
#
to happen is that you get a daily newspaper at home and everything is there is available
#
to you and you flip through it and you know you may or may not read some things but they're
#
all available for you and today the way people discover content discover media is mostly
#
you'll go on Facebook or you follow a link on social media is all been kind of this aggregated
#
you don't get these filtered packages coming to you instead you get I mean there's a different
#
kind of filter which comes at you from social media it might even be a tribal filter because
#
social media is so increasingly polarized and a lot of people are being exposed therefore
#
to only one specific kind of content and not to that broad diverse sort of content that
#
is there in our newspapers is that something that I may be overstating or is it something
#
that worries you for the future.
#
It should not happen in principle is something I agree on but you see there are certain things
#
which you know you have to take them as they come is what I would say I mean there was
#
a time when there were no newspapers there was a time when there were no courts in our
#
country there was no I mean not just our country everywhere so society has evolved so I think
#
the news industry is also evolving today and there are you know I mean you are only talking
#
about the desirability aspect of it I mean all of us who work in media know that there's
#
a very big revenue aspect to it also.
#
Traditional business models in media are struggling now I'm not somebody who understands a lot
#
of it but working in a company I know that how difficult things are today for everybody
#
in the media industry how will deal with those challenges time will tell there are more capable
#
people than me you who would have to deal with these challenges I mean free market also
#
means that the ones who adapt survive the ones who do not probably do not survive but
#
like I said no when I talk about it in terms of pure desirability I think the casualty
#
which you know causation which one draws is that because you know Facebook and WhatsApp
#
and fake news and videos etc are happening this is why a certain kind of politics is
#
sort of getting traction in India in the world etc.
#
I think that's partly true but that's also not true the basic premise no if you follow
#
the sort of you know Marxian scheme of analysis is that you know you were able to make a revolution
#
in 1917 because majority of the people agreed with you know the basic cause you were espousing
#
when Lenin said land peace and bread so many people in the what was then Russia later became
#
Soviet Union came with him made a revolution today if your premise is that you know I think
#
Obaisi sir phrased it in the best possible way that the Hindu mind has been hijacked
#
I think you can't stop there I mean if you believe and you know I think there's an objective
#
basis to saying that that a lot of people are financially in trouble things are not
#
good as they were before the crisis a lot of our young generation who are getting out
#
of colleges universities etc are not finding jobs even if you are rich you sort of having
#
difficulties earlier you could go to a engineering college probably go to the US now those things
#
will not happen you're even if your father can afford 20 lakhs for a private engineering
#
college you will not get a job that easily then ultimately somebody has to go and build
#
a political case that here is what needs to be done I think you know this entire social
#
media and no I could sound a bit extremist when I say that is an alibi for a failure
#
to come up with an effective opposition to the kind of right-wing populism we are seeing
#
not just in our country but in the world today I mean you cannot say that we'll go back to
#
the past so which is why probably a Hillary Clinton no lost to a Donald Trump I mean people
#
associated certain kinds of things with the Hillary Clinton the old elite I think no however
#
and personally I do disagree with a lot of political things the present regime says but
#
I think the critique of the old elite stance and India today thanks to you know pro-market
#
reforms a lot of upward mobility which has happened is a far more democratized place
#
in terms of opportunities and ideas also they will not listen to the old elite they wanted
#
I mean I've seen in front of my own eyes in Delhi you know something like an arm of the
#
party growing now I do not know where the arm of the party will go you know from here
#
in the next election five years down the line they were very promising in Punjab at one
#
point of time today for all practical purposes they are a Delhi based party but the fact
#
that in a city like city-state like Delhi which is a proper microcosm of what India
#
is you have placed you know people from all over the country in this city could grow up
#
as a political force capture the imagination of power I think it also shows how open possibilities
#
of building alternative politics are and those kind of options are open to everybody I mean
#
it is not just that the BJP only circulates fake news also I mean if I were to give one
#
example I think technology can never be an alibi of failing to come up with social change
#
I mean then the Marxists would have packed their bags and gone long ago that's a fantastic
#
insight and we'll take a quick commercial break now and we'll continue chatting about
#
the political economy and politics in particular which I've been looking forward to talking
#
about with you after the break.
#
Hey everybody welcome to another great week on the IBM podcast has been a really fun week
#
also just a reminder if you're not following us on social media please do we're IBM podcasts
#
on Facebook Twitter and Instagram one thing that we are trying to do as much of as possible
#
and we want to keep doing this is if you hear something that you really enjoy take a screenshot
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of it and track us on whatever social media platform you prefer and we'll try and repost
#
If you want to keep your listening light and funny this week check out shows like Cyrus
#
Says Golgappa and The Empowering Series on Cyrus Says Cyrus Talks to hosts of another
#
IBM show Football Shootball Gaurav Sapra, Kartik Ayer and Sivaram Padmanabhan.
#
Tune in to listen to some fun conversation about sports advertising and Bollywood.
#
On Golgappa Tripti is joined by cinematographer Milan Zogue who shares ripped hickling stories
#
from his shoots and on The Empowering Series Zarina is joined by comedian Suresh Menon they
#
talk about his early days in comedy his chemistry with Jose and how he started Khan Masti.
#
If pop culture is what's going to get your engine going this week then you know we got
#
shows like Geek Fruit where Tejas and Dishnu this week are rounding up the hits and misses
#
of announcements made at Disney's D23 Expo.
#
Mr. and Mrs. Binge Watch you know I mean like that's a really fun show where Janice and
#
Aru talk about TV show runner Jenji Kohan and her extremely successful Netflix shows
#
as Orange is the New Black and I can't remember the other one but they've got another really
#
On IBM Likes Abbas Antrikshan Daras discussed the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and
#
rate their top five Tarantino films man I wish they called me to do that.
#
So if you only have a really short time and you want to check out some of our shorter
#
stuff you can check out Origins of Things where Chuck narrates a brand origin story
#
involving a tabloid and a gold digger it's gonna be fun guessing which brand this is.
#
And on The Habit Coach Ashton shares some interesting facts about coffees and afternoon
#
naps and also don't forget to check out Urmi Kotari on the Kinetic Living podcast where
#
she has Thriving Thursdays and Tabata Tuesdays both of which are if you want to be fit you
#
should do those things.
#
On our new coming of age show Agla Station Adulthood hosts Ritasha and Ayushi discuss
#
casual dating hookups and modern day love.
#
On Keeping It Queer Navinak Varha talked to producer Madhuri Advani about body image issues.
#
But with that let's get you on with the show.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen I'm chatting with Roshan Kishore about data journalism
#
about the political economy which he writes about regularly and you know coming to sort
#
of Indian politics now you've been a data journalism and sort of a data journalist and
#
sort of in the thick of things during what is a transformative period in our politics.
#
Tell me a little bit about following politics during this time you know the 2014 elections
#
or 2019 elections has it have there been parts of it which are bewildering which have taken
#
you by surprise and also how has a political how has our politics changed during this time.
#
So ironical as it may sound my most bewildering political experience actually doesn't come
#
from doing data journalism but going out in the field this is during the Madhya Pradesh
#
I think this was somewhere between Jabalpur and Bhopal district we went to a village talking
#
to a bunch of people all of these people were rooting for the Congress they were extremely
#
angry with the BJP government etc. and we were having this conversation and then this
#
guy tells me that when the Babri mosque was being demolished he along with all other villagers
#
actually went to demolish it.
#
So here is a group of voters who were not just supporters but active participants in
#
what is you know often and rightly thought of as one of the most communal acts of politics
#
in our country organized then but they were not voting for the party they were still aligned
#
I think that is how complicated politics has become in our country or if I were to put
#
it the other way maybe politics has always been like that but we never realized it was
#
Now so let us go back to the 2014 elections Narendra Modi for the first time in 30 years
#
got a majority on his own made a big thing a lot of explanation was that it is actually
#
the anger against UPA 2 you know 2G and Commonwealth etc etc etc and then you know there was mixed
#
evidence so 2014 you win these elections then you have some success in Maharashtra, Haryana
#
etc by the time we come to Delhi 2015 the BJP is all but wiped out you get just three
#
seats then no you go to completely different electoral battlefield which is Bihar in 2015
#
October once again somebody who has been epitomized as the symbol of corruption nepotism etc by
#
the BJP Lalu Prasad Yadav pulls off a spectacular victory along with Nitish Kumar with the BJP
#
then you again know 2016 the BJP is irrelevant because it is Bengal Kerala Assam they win
#
but by and large not major players then no demonetization happens then UP happens then
#
once again there is a big bang you know the Bihar government falls under the bunch of
#
its own contradictions because the BJP Nitish Kumar said it openly was invincible nobody
#
could defeat it so he made it very clear why he was going then 17 onwards we get into completely
#
different trajectory where the BJP manages to somehow retain Gujarat then 18 there was
#
the shock defeats for the BJP so by the time we got to 2019 I am very honest about it this
#
was my personal belief as well that it was anything but a closed race I mean I did not
#
see the BJP performing the way it did because no being a numbers guy I was actually looking
#
at those previous numbers and if you were to look at previous assembly elections before
#
14 there was always 80% of the assembly elections actually sort of manifested in the Lok Sabha
#
election the trends so I thought there was no way the BJP could do what it ultimately
#
ended up doing now that it has happened I think one has to try and go back and ask those
#
questions as to how it happened now there are a bunch of people who think that EVMs
#
are rigged etc I think all that is bogus I mean as simple as that because you know the
#
same sets of EVMs etc have been used the biggest takeaway I think from the 19 victory
#
of the BJP is that people in our country are actually voting separately at different levels
#
of government formation so they might elect somebody else to be their chief minister they
#
might elect somebody else to their prime minister I mean Odisha is the perfect example it went
#
to poll on the same day assembly and Lok Sabha elections they have drastically different
#
results people voting in the same booth on the same day are voting for two different
#
parties now this is a very big thing as far as Indian democracy is concerned Indian politics
#
is concerned this also means that the BJP going from here no however implausible it
#
sounds right now it sounded so in 2014 also might suffer reverses in state elections but
#
then the opposition because it will not have to not be able to construct a popular sort
#
of narrative along with a figure which is now extremely important because now we are
#
voting no more for a leader rather than a party and the BJP also has absolutely no pretence
#
in acknowledging that it is a vote for Narendra Modi these are very interesting times I think
#
one has to have a substantive analysis of what Narendra Modi did now mind you in politics
#
there could be things which we think are counterproductive something like demonetization but could help
#
politically there are things you know such as demolition of the Babri mosque which we
#
think is very bad to do but democracy you know we have to accept it is also in a rule
#
of the majority so majority of the people do not agree with an idea however right it
#
is or agree with the idea however preposterous and dangerous it is then that idea always
#
sort of carries on in a democracy or we are a democracy so we have to think along those
#
lines what are the things which they did right which were also right for the larger interests
#
of the country the economy the polity which they did right which were otherwise counterproductive
#
more importantly what are the things which the opposition could not do for example something
#
like demonetization you know I still believe had the BJP been in opposition the amount
#
of public anger which would have erupted against demonetization you remember Venezuela tried
#
something similar when demonetization exactly they had to take it back Venezuela is today
#
a far more repressed democracy than India is but India did not have one credible protest
#
against demonetization now that speaks volumes about the failure of the opposition now the
#
crudest explanation could be a lot of people grassroots leaders were actually exchanging
#
notes I mean you never know but to be able to in cash popular anger against you know
#
a lot of policies which we think and some of which we rightly think are wrong I think
#
is also there also has to be an analysis of what was done by the opposition and what was
#
not so those are the two tracks in which I think any political analysis from now on must
#
And if you sort of look at the broad currents along which people vote you know what really
#
happened around 89 and then 91 in that phase was that the two big issues that dominated
#
Indian politics became mandal and mandir and they completely changed Indian politics and
#
you've written a recent piece called mandal mandir and markets where you talk about sort
#
of these three M's and I remember I think right after the election I think it was Shekhar
#
Gupta who wrote a piece where he said that there's another M which has completely surpassed
#
all these M's which is Modi and his point really was that mandal and mandir are now
#
irrelevant this is a Modi thing and again I believe there's some amount of data by
#
Milan Vaishnava among others which backs up that a lot of people sort of a lot less people
#
would have voted for the BJP in 2014 at least if Modi had not been the PM candidate.
#
How do you view this evolution of why people vote are mandal and mandir and perhaps markets
#
still important reasons why people vote or is it a very personality driven thing now?
#
See we were talking about it in the earlier part of the podcast which is where you have
#
to sort of realize how much to read into the data which you have now when you know surveys
#
say that you know half of the people who voted for the BJP would probably not have voted
#
for the BJP had Modi not been the Prime Minister candidate we have to understand what is it
#
that Modi brings to the BJP I mean it is not that people like his face and vote for him
#
I mean it can't be I think Narayanan Modi today probably is the not only is the biggest
#
mass leader in this country he and under him the kind of BJP leadership which is developing
#
they are also people who are deeply convinced about what their core politics should be.
#
So now my generation Narayanan Modi is somebody now look at it from the BJP's point of view
#
say a core BJP voter driven by Hindutva etc. now a lot of liberals actually try to turn
#
2002 against Narayanan Modi now Narayanan Modi has never gone on the defensive visa
#
with that I think that plays a role in the psyche of the core BJP vote that's a feature
#
He would never desert Narayanan Modi because he stood the test of the time he is not somebody
#
like a Lal Krishna Advani who went to Jinnah's mausoleum and did what he did similarly there
#
are a lot of other things for example you know this entire thing you know we do not
#
we did not have a 2002 unlike before the 2004 elections we did not even have 2003 Muzaffarnagar
#
unlike what happened before the 2014 elections which is what I have sort of argued in my
#
Mandir Mandal Markets piece but does that mean that there was no communal polarization before
#
Look at things that what is happening in Kashmir today you know 370, 35A these are matters
#
of great detail these are matters of constitutional integrity what is the special status of Kashmir
#
should if Kashmir does not have a constituent assembly can you even remove these articles
#
if you were to do away with article 370 will Kashmir technically be bound to be a part
#
of India we can debate ad nauseam about these things but when a political party goes to
#
a hinterland constituency in say eastern UP or Bihar and poses this question that those
#
who want you know 370 to stay are actually aiding and abating the cause of separatists
#
in Kashmir I think it makes an extremely powerful impact on the voter when you go out and say
#
that you know we are bringing the citizenship amendment bill and all Hindus who are persecuted
#
in say Pakistan or Bangladesh or Afghanistan would be granted a citizenship of this country
#
I think you are making a very powerful point your core politics like it was in 2002 even
#
today is intact and I think the voter gets those messages when you say that because Rahul
#
Gandhi is contesting from Wayanad which is a Muslim majority seat it basically means
#
that the Congress is only looking at Muslim votes in the 2019 elections it makes a very
#
powerful point when the Prime Minister of India goes to a Gujarat election campaign
#
and says that a former Prime Minister of India actually conspired with Pakistan to get him
#
killed no it's beyond the pale but it strikes a chord yeah so I think it is the BJP today
#
has mastered the art of keeping the communal pot simmering without there being any large
#
precipitation so they would not have a Muzaffarnagar on their hands they would not have a Godhra
#
Gujarat Ahmedabad Narodha party on their hands but the pot is still simmering so if we were
#
to go back to the social science analogy the BJP has actually mastered the art of keeping
#
the swimming pool empty so the only people who jump in the swimming pool will be people
#
of their own choosing I think this has been a miserable failure of the opposition on that
#
and this is something I say from a lot of personal experience I think I was in standard
#
one when the Lakshmi Advani started Ramshira Pujan Yatra 89 was when the Bhagavpur riots
#
happened in Bihar I mean I remember our school was closed for a month because of communal
#
tension since then the Hindu right wing has never stopped its own propaganda sometimes
#
Ayodhya sometimes it will love Jihad and right now it could be 370 they kept changing whatever
#
suits them they do the other side on the other hand always thought that the way to deal with
#
it was not to take it head-on but sort of build bypasses around it so in Bihar Lalu
#
Yadav built what is now famously referred to as an MY equation I have the Muslims which
#
are captive because anyway they can't vote for the BJP I'll get the Yadavs along and
#
here in a first post the past system I have this invincible target no vote share level
#
of say 36 percent which is enough to beat everybody else Narendra Modi and Amit Shah
#
today are proving that that is not going to be enough because we will surpass 50 percent
#
in each and every state that is the next level they have taken Hindutva politics so I think
#
it is extremely important to realize you know what the success of the present you know leadership
#
of the BJP is and it also seems to me that there's an apparent contradiction there which
#
bewilders me so on one hand I completely agree with you that a lot of the support for Modi
#
is not necessarily because of his personality and all of that but because he stands for
#
a vision and an ideology which people feel deeply but also it is true that just as the
#
BJP has an ideological purity which no other party has because other parties don't really
#
stand for something which is as powerful within Indian culture but also a parallel strand
#
of the BJP political movement in the last few years has been a will to power perhaps
#
you know led by the political strategy of Amit Shah where he almost does a mergers and
#
acquisitions things where you're always constantly acquiring people from other parties right
#
so you'll go to the northeast and you'll acquire people and Gujarat elections or Goa elections
#
whatever happens you'll acquire some people and you'll do whatever and that seems almost
#
contradictory to this because on the one hand you stand for ideological purity but on the
#
other hand you're bringing in people you oppose and who opposed you very strongly into your
#
fold and almost like saying that okay we'll be this broad umbrella you know and it's been
#
very successful for them both in terms of bringing other politicians into the party
#
and managing to form governments and so on and decimating the opposition it's also that
#
broadening of their typical social base has also been successful in terms of you know
#
for example famously getting non-Yadav VBCs in UP non-Jatav Dalits and in fact they now
#
you know in both elections they've had a larger share of the Dalit vote than the Congress
#
Is there a sort of a contradiction here that on one hand it stands for this firm kind of
#
ideological purity and on the other hand it's just taking in everybody so I'll go back to
#
my earlier avatar as a political activist and not a journalist I think this is what
#
politics is day-to-day politics especially in a country which is as diverse as India
#
and as big as India it can never be adhering to a text cast in stone politics in India
#
always has to be about and it will be about handling contradictions so if the BJP can
#
handle its contradictions in Goa it'll have a field run the BJP could not handle its contradiction
#
in Kashmir so the government fell I think politicians and this is where persons become
#
important no because sometimes you know it could depend on just one person so it took
#
a Natal Vihari Vajpayee to run an NDA coalition for that I think if the BJP today had those
#
kind of numbers nobody would do business with Narendra Modi it is only because Narendra
#
Modi has the majority that people know JDU with all their reservations I don't know how
#
they're going to vote on the triple talaq bill today but they'll stay with the NDA then
#
they have absolutely no other choice so I think that is where the art of handling contradictions
#
becomes extremely important and that is where the rest of the opposition has absolutely
#
no idea what to do I mean look at Bihar for example now I'm from JNU so I was biased so
#
Kanhaiya went and contested Begusarai he actually came second whereas the RJT candidate came
#
third but Tejasvi Yadav you know he was in charge of things he could not even give that
#
one Lok Sabha seat to Kanhaiya look at the BJP I mean it gave an equal number of seats
#
to the Janata Dal United now we all know that the BJP did not need to do that look at what
#
they've done to the Shiv Sena Amit Shah went to Uddhav Thackeray's house to sort of accommodate
#
placate Uddhav Thackeray no no you have to stay with us I think this is something you
#
might think that the BJP leadership you know a lot of people say that you know they are
#
all fundamentalists and very you know sort of predatory in nature etc but I think behind
#
this so-called strong face of the BJP leadership which people like Narendra Modi and Amit Shah
#
sort of display I think they also bring with them a lot of flexibility in day-to-day politics
#
lot of commitment to protect their core ideology even while doing all these compromises and
#
a lot of the electoral success with the BJP has had in this country in the recent past
#
is also because of that it is not just ideology they are doing you know the BJP might oppose
#
beef-eating in say Uttar Pradesh or Bihar but they would go to the northeast and say
#
that you please go ahead eat your beef we have absolutely no problems with you they
#
are doing business with the Christians in Kerala they have made a minister who comes
#
from the Christian community in the state they have absolutely no problems with beef-eating
#
so the BJP today is not only the most ideologically convinced party in this country it is also
#
the most flexible and pragmatic party in the country when it comes at political praxis
#
so let's say it practices all this flexible politics as a means to an end which is to
#
come to power that's it but when it comes to power its core supporters would expect
#
it to carry to do something about their ideology whether it's Mandir Banao or Bankaustra or
#
build a Hindu Rashtra where do you sort of see it going like what is a few do you just
#
keep the circle going where you know your means to an end is again coming to power is
#
an end in itself is that where it continues going or does it actually start acting upon
#
some of this and we go in those without casting a value judgment on those directions like
#
forget whether Hindu Rashtra is desirable or not or whether we should build a temple
#
or not but so there are two ways about it one is you know people who are more Christian
#
than the Pope within the BJP ranks if you want to use that phrase what do they do when
#
the government doesn't deliver the now they either have a choice of going and floating
#
something which is you know even to the right of say the BJP or they have the choice of
#
going and doing business with the opposition so like I said you know the Babri Masjid you
#
know farmer angry with the BJP example I think both of these cases happen so we have that
#
farmer in Madhya Pradesh who actually went and took part in demolishing the Babri mosque
#
but voted for the Congress we have somebody like a Praveen Togadia who my generation has
#
always associated as the most rabid right-wing political voice in the country who actually
#
has been who was trying to criticize Modi and sort of caused some political damage none
#
of it happened and back when Modi was CM of Gujarat he had actually sidelined Togadia
#
yeah so I think both of these trends will continue but what I think is how it works
#
it a large part of that political spectrum which actually concurs with the world view
#
of the BJP today also thinks that if this government were not to be in power they would
#
actually be worse off so with all their reservations which they might have they actually think
#
that it is in their interest to sort of continue invested in this strategy right and and let's
#
kind of move on from the BJP to the opposition and and you recently wrote a piece about how
#
Rahul Gandhi's analysis of why they lost the elections is completely wrong can you elaborate
#
on that a bit so if one were to very crudely summarize Rahul Gandhi's letter it basically
#
meant that the Congress should be doing more of what it was already doing I don't think
#
that helps no the biggest reason it doesn't help is because the Congress actually won
#
those three states you know in December 2018 and in less than six months it ended up losing
#
all of them so it can't just be an organization in my view it can't be the case that your
#
activists were actually delivering six months ago and today they can't the question is what
#
do you do about it I think one part of it is you have absolutely no idea how to build
#
a constructive effective critique of this government's economic limitations and there
#
are many I personally believe that so you actually do not know what to go and talk to
#
whom the second thing is I think the Congress and which is where I focus a large part of
#
my piece on is the Congress has no idea how to take care of this Hindu polarization business
#
they actually want to be seen as Hindus which reflects in the temple visits and what not
#
done by especially the two active politicians from the Gandhi family Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka
#
in these elections and before these elections but they don't know how they should be doing
#
it because like I argued in this piece it is not enough for you if you want to counter
#
the BJP politically to be seen as pro-Hindu there would be moments in the campaign in
#
before an election where the BJP would actually portray itself as either know explicitly or
#
not so explicitly anti-Muslim so when you say you would implement NRC in the entire
#
country I mean people understand what you're hinting at you you basically hinting at the
#
fact that there are a lot of Bangladeshi Muslims in this country who could actually be West
#
Bengali Muslims and you would deport them you might never come to do you know around
#
to doing that but this is something nobody in the opposition can go and champion when
#
Narendra Modi goes to say Calcutta and says that Mamata Banerjee is preventing us from
#
implementing NRC here and she's Farooq Abdullah's ally who is preventing us from abolishing
#
Article 370 there which basically helps terrorists etc. how does the opposition go and deal with
#
this acquisition by the BJP now can you go to an average villager in say Begusara in
#
Bihar or Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh and teach him or her what was the instrument of accession
#
when Kashmir was being annexed to our country what happens if article or do you go to people
#
around the country and show them census data that this is what Bangladeshi infiltration
#
is this is what the number of Bengali speakers in a lot of places doesn't work like that
#
I think and this is where you know cultural intervention becomes very important this day
#
to day primacy of the unidirectional cultural discourse which has happened in our country
#
which the right wing especially the know which is sort of in concurrence with the politics
#
of the BJP has completely I think occupied how do you deal with it there's absolutely
#
no there's no effort by the opposition to take it now one part of it can be economy
#
you know that actually you know religion is the opium of the masses and you don't have
#
the job so basically all this is being sent to but I think in a country like India you
#
know so this is something Walter Anderson's book on the RSS when it was released I was
#
invited to a discussion on the book where professor Anderson himself was present so
#
you know this is something I said there that actually you know a lot of intellectuals in
#
India criticize the RSS on the basis of the premise that RSS worldview does not stand
#
intellectual scrutiny we have to understand that the RSS is not an intellectual institution
#
it does not require intellectual scrutiny and sanctity to sort of propagate its ideas
#
it is at the end of the day a majoritarian religious body which basically needs to consolidate
#
people from its old religion and I said look at somebody like Mahatma Gandhi I mean if
#
you were to intellectually analyze Mahatma Gandhi I mean any rational intellectual would
#
find a 1000 problems with the kind of arguments political praxis behavior he indulged in
#
right from his grams or as to many other things but he was the biggest mass leader in our
#
country so politics and rationality are two sets where there is a significant union but
#
not all of it is common I think the opposition especially the Congress party needs to figure
#
out how do you deal with this dog whistling if one could use the term against Muslims
#
in day-to-day politics by the BJP especially during elections what do you do about it unless
#
they have an answer to this question which I am pretty sure they do not have because
#
the only thing they could figure out was going to temples they are going to have a very difficult
#
time in dealing with the BJP from what you just said a couple of thoughts strike me about
#
the Congress one is that if you go back to the history of the Congress you will find
#
that pre-independence and even for a few years after independence the Congress within it
#
had genuine Hindu nationalist leaders of state Madan Mohan Malviya founded Banaras Hindu
#
University and at the time of independence Siddharth Patel was there Govind Vallabh Pant
#
was the CM of UP Lal Bahadur Shastri was the Home Minister of UP in fact both of them were
#
in charge when the Ram idol was installed in Ayodhya and I think 49 and Nehru said remove
#
it and they obfuscated and they denied it so you had these Hindu nationalist leaders
#
whom Hindus could take seriously today there are no leaders like that within the Congress
#
for good or for bad and all of what they do like Rahul Gandhi going to Kedarnath is frankly
#
just very obvious posturing you can only sort of just laugh at that and I totally agree
#
with what you also earlier said about how you cannot hug back to the politics like one
#
point that I keep making about the Congress and the BJP the contrast between them and
#
this is actually a criticism of both in a sense is that the Congress behaves as if history
#
began in 2014 so they will constantly talk about all that has gone wrong since 2014 and
#
a lot has so all of that criticism is completely valid but they will ignore their own sins
#
of the past and they will ignore that voters have turned to Modi and rejected them because
#
of their misgovernance of decades and you know not only will they not engage with that
#
they will promise the same kind of policies and the same kind of visions for the future
#
which has already and correctly in my view been rejected by the nation and the BJP is
#
a converse of that where they behave as if history ended at 2014 so what Modi did in
#
the last five years is irrelevant everything is Nehru's fault.
#
No I would actually you know I have a slide I think it is the Congress which believes
#
that history I think the Congress actually thinks that we are still not in 2014.
#
They have a sense of political entitlement which I think makes them think that the Congress
#
still should be the default choice of the people in this country now 14 when there was
#
a question whether it was a one-off thing or not but I think between 14 and 19 now we
#
know that that is not going to be the case so the Congress party has to realize that
#
and the Congress party actually wants to regain its stretcher as the default political choice
#
of the people in our country it has to completely reinvent not just its organization but also
#
its politics so there was a phase in Indian politics which lasted you know one could say
#
from Nehru till the emergency was one phase then post emergency was a very turbulent phase
#
then we had this relative degree of stability I think post 14 we have entered into a completely
#
new phase the Congress has to realize that.
#
And is there a way out of it for them both in terms of realistically is there a way out
#
of it given what the organization is today and the near feudal capture and the erosion
#
of the organization itself and also that if they is there a way out of it is there a potential
#
hypothetical way out of it just in terms of narrative because the question that you yourself
#
asked how do you counter this dominant narrative it's obviously not by you know going harking
#
back to the past but then how.
#
I think it's a two step problem now let us go back to the example of Narendra Modi Narendra
#
Modi comes from an extremely ordinary family in this country the kind of political choices
#
he made when he made them to become a swim saver despite being married not have a family
#
life etc I think even in his wildest dreams he would never have imagined that he would
#
end up being where he is today you have to give it to him let us come back to the Congress
#
now an average Congress person who is entrenched in the leadership say if we were to look at
#
top 20,000 people in the Congress organization in this country if they were asked to explain
#
why is it politically that they are with the Congress party and if you were to exclude
#
say religious minorities in our country because they have a vested interest in promoting a
#
political force which is by and large secular in its outlook now the Congress has made those
#
compromises with secularism but we know that they are programmatically completely different
#
from what the BJP is if you were to ask those 10,000 people who come from the majority religious
#
community Hindus in this country why are you in the Congress party I think all of them
#
would struggle very hard to come up with a coherent answer that would not be the case
#
I would not say it so much about the BJP but at least with the RSS in this country I mean
#
you might disagree with their worldview or agree with it but they would tell you exactly
#
why they are in the RSS and why they would be in the RSS why they would sort of get people
#
that is the basic problem I think I mean you have to have now there is that material basis
#
if you want to enter into politics you do some real estate you get some more money here
#
that is how we know local politics that is how it operates in the entire country today
#
the scale might differ depending on how developed your capitalism is but the subjective question
#
regarding politics I think and this is a crisis not just of the Congress but also of the left
#
today in our country I mean if you were to go to JNU recruit somebody say you know become
#
a part of the SFI why I mean there's not going to be a revolution I don't think any communist
#
leader in this country believes that there's going to be revolution in the world I mean
#
you used to have a government in West Bengal which notwithstanding all its problems had
#
a very glorious track record in terms of basic land distribution etc that doesn't hold today
#
so why should I join the left I mean you're in your party program you still say that North
#
Korea is a socialist country you still say that China is a socialist country today despite
#
of all the problems which are happening in Venezuela and I think Chavez did some good
#
things and certain things have came back to bite the regime but you if you continue to
#
celebrate those things then where do you draw the moral grandstanding from to be able to
#
attract bright intellectual people into your force who would then be willing to make a
#
certain amount of individual sacrifice to sort of further your political cause because
#
Narendra Modi made a certain amount of political sacrifice very early in his political career
#
Amit Shah comes from a very wealthy businessman family so I think you know we might have a
#
lot of disagreements with him but he made a certain amount of political sacrifice to
#
give time and resources to the BJP and that was the case the entire generation the socialist
#
leadership of this country from Nitish Kumar to Lalu Yadav to everybody else all of them
#
made political sacrifices during the anti-emergency struggle they were put in jail they faced
#
a lot of state atrocity now all of those acts I do not think can be you know a product of
#
purely Machiavellian consideration that I have to do well in politics hence I have to
#
do that I don't think that is the case so there was a degree of romanticism subjectivism
#
etc as far as the larger thing is concerned and this is far more difficult here because
#
a with liberalisation etc people who study in elite institutions I think people like
#
us have a lot more opportunities in front of us than what people in the 70s or 80s had
#
I mean if you are really you know bright you have the world to conquer right from here
#
to the United States to everywhere two I mean because there's so much you know for example
#
you know somebody you know in Delhi who goes to a private school today a group private school
#
goes to a good you know public or say you know went to Sadar Patel Vidyalaya you went
#
to Ashoka University you came back with a PhD you would have absolutely no idea of what
#
the common people think in this country because you have never engaged with them so the kind
#
of class ghettoisation which is you know being imposed even if inadvertently on you I mean
#
how do you build a connect with the masses I think these are very serious sociological
#
economic questions which people from the opposition I think so when Narendra Modi makes that critique
#
about Rahul Gandhi of him being entitled part of it is true I mean it is not it is purely
#
an accident of birth I mean Rahul Gandhi is not to blame for it but the kind of India
#
Rahul Gandhi or Narendra Modi would have seen are very different now Rahul Gandhi tried
#
bringing those kind of people in the organisation but I think unless you have a subjective factor
#
unless you have a robust critique of you know what the BJP stands for as a Hindu party if
#
you can offer a better alternative to that I think it will be very difficult to build
#
an alternative going on from here either for the Congress or anybody else.
#
Quick note for my listeners he mentioned Venezuela I did have an episode on Venezuela as well
#
which will be linked from the show notes would it be fair to sum up your point by saying
#
that the point that you're making is that if you look at Narendra Modi's trajectory
#
he is here today because he joined a party a political party which wasn't doing so well
#
at the time so he didn't join it for the lust for power but because of a deep ideological
#
belief with whatever the core vision of the party was and that drove him and many others
#
like him and obviously you see the one person who got to the top to actually form the backbone
#
of the BJP and if someone joins the Congress or the left now what is that vision which
#
At one point of time that vision used to be there.
#
No and you know what you said about Rahul Gandhi and the entitlement and you know the
#
class barrier also reminds me of you know Mahua Mitra who's very much the flavour of
#
the town right now gave a recent interview where she said she was once in the Congresses
#
you know in the youth wing or such like and she was there for some time and then she left
#
and she left because a there was sexism she wasn't being taken seriously because she was
#
a woman B she found that even regardless of gender there was a ceiling and you needed
#
to be to have some political backing to get ahead of it and in a party like that which
#
suffers from that kind of feudal mindset you're really not going to rise up the ranks and
#
someone like a Narendra Modi from a OBC background and you know from the kind of poor background
#
where he came isn't going to rise up a party like that and that's that's sort of something
#
Well Congress is not the only such party a lot of these regional parties including you
#
know it's Mitra's own party we know that it is not run on what exactly can be termed
#
as democratic principles.
#
So I did not go into these details because we are talking about larger issues so if you
#
want to know take BJP's ideology head on you have to have an ideological affinity for your
#
own political project which can't be ridiculing everything which is Hindutva.
#
It can't just be oppositional you have to stand for something.
#
You can't put off people I mean this is something the opposition doesn't understand I mean just
#
because you do not like Narendra Modi you cannot ridicule that he's going to be on this
#
discovery show it doesn't help your political cause let me be as blunt as that.
#
The pro-BJP people actually enjoy those things you have to have a more substantive material
#
And also just because someone is pro-BJP doesn't mean that he can't stick to those sort of
#
beliefs which make him pro-BJP but still find a reason to support you for example so I'm
#
just throwing a thought at you tell me what you think.
#
I think that you can't categorize people very simply we all contain multitudes and there
#
might be an individual who is a believing Hindu and who believes in the BJP project
#
but he might also have liberal instincts and he believes in free speech and he might also
#
believe in free markets or whatever we are a bundle of impulses and what the BJP political
#
project has very successfully done is appeal to one aspect of their belief systems and
#
for that reason they support BJP but you know it is still nevertheless I would believe possible
#
for other parties to appeal to other aspects of their beliefs and whatever you know very
#
complex multifaceted worldviews are and draw some of that support away.
#
Now given that a lot of the work that you do which deals with data is like any political
#
data is also in its nature I would guess social data.
#
What would your thoughts be on this observation?
#
You're exactly right this was in 2016 I guess CSDS Lokniti which is among the few credible
#
political research institutes in our country they did a survey of youth so they had this
#
questionnaire they went along with everybody one of the questions in the questionnaire
#
was which political party do you support there were a host of other questions ranging from
#
do you support eating beef to you know whether somebody who you know consumes alcohol should
#
be your neighbor etc etc when we ran cross tires what it shows was that apart from the
#
question of eating beef there was by and large complete political concurrence among supporters
#
of different political parties whether you supported the BJP or the Congress or anybody
#
else there was absolutely no difference.
#
So your sociological beliefs you know your behavioral beliefs I think are more or less
#
shaped by your socialization rather than anything else rather than which political party do
#
you support if you were to go to say South Bombay and if you were to go to Gaya the place
#
I come from I mean what is acceptable socially and what is not acceptable socially would
#
probably be very different and you cannot brand the person living in say South Bombay
#
or Gaya and be that as may in either cases as being prejudiced or biased or I think social
#
change has to be something which you consciously strive for which is where you know I think
#
you know take lynchings for example what is the by and by now the established liberal
#
reaction to lynchings lynching happens I think both you and I agree that it is completely
#
unfortunate then you have a protest here in Delhi etc where is the preemptive political
#
effort to prevent such things from happening has the opposition done a campaign now some
#
people like Harsh Mandir etc have tried to do it but they are individuals I mean you
#
can't have that kind of an impact if you want to prevent a religious polarization in this
#
country where is the preemptive political effort to do that I mean it is extremely convenient
#
for a bunch of political actors to come out everything ex post after say this thing has
#
happened where is the ex ante effort I don't see that then how can you go and say that
#
I don't know people are becoming bigger they don't listen to us I think that's intellectual
#
and political lethargy so we have spoken about the BJP we have spoken about the congress
#
let's speak about the left because you have been a man of the left yourself and I am sure
#
what has happened over the last few years must pain you though it doesn't pain me but
#
I am sure it must pain you is the left dead what did they do wrong what happened the political
#
left as we knew it I see it very difficult that will revive I don't think that's going
#
to happen now has it all happened in the same way no let us take the Bengal and Kerala examples
#
the two states where left was actually very strong the Bengal thing I think is a classic
#
case of complete ideological disarray because you ultimately ended up I mean I think there
#
has been a lot of serious academic work there were a lot of problems with you know the left
#
front government when it was in power if you look at the social indicators etcetera Dwaipayan
#
Bhattacharya who is a professor of political science in JNU has written a very good book
#
you know it's it's called governance as practice how left got consumed in its own contradictions
#
gives a very powerful account of what happened but ultimately you basically lost power on
#
the question of acquiring land for a handful of corporates now that's the worst way in
#
which a communist party would like to lose power let's go to Kerala now I think Pinarai
#
Vijayan's government and the CPIM and the LDF there took a very principle position when
#
it came to the question of Sabarimala they were the only political actors in the state
#
the Congress and the BJP both sort of decided against doing it who stood for the Supreme
#
Court judgment that women of menstruating age should be allowed to enter the holy shrine
#
I think this electoral loss is a political prize for doing that now they have lost from
#
a politically very principle this is something I think even you would agree with yeah yeah
#
absolutely in Tripura it took a completely different turn I think somewhere between the
#
Bengali and the tribal contradiction they lost the plot and ended up losing a large
#
amount of tribal vote and once they lost power it has all led to a meltdown so if one were
#
to talk about the electoral decline of the left I think one has to take a heterogeneous
#
view because each stronghold how the left lost it I am not so sure whether they come
#
back in Kerala or not but let us for a moment assume that they are all different factors
#
there are all different factors but the larger factor and a lot of you know political leaders
#
in the left like to say but that why should these states be held accountable for the decline
#
of the left what about the rest of the country why did the rest of the party say not support
#
the Bengal party or the Kerala party that is where the ideological question I think
#
becomes extremely important that what is it you want to mobilize people on now let us
#
look at some progressive legislations which happened during the UPA one the left played
#
a role in all of them rural employment guarantee right to information forest rights act I think
#
the left had it not been supporting the UPA government these legislations probably would
#
never have seen the light of the day interestingly the left did not start the agitations for
#
demanding these agitations employment guarantee started from the right to food campaign right
#
to information was Aruna Roy Aravind Kejriva a lot of these other people forest right acts
#
bill was a lot of tribal organizations I mean there were some left leaning organizations
#
also so even these little successes against the Indian state which you think actually
#
democratize the state further till the balance if one could say so in favor of the extremely
#
marginalized now these are extremely marginalized sections of the society the left did not take
#
an initiative on its own where is the left really strong today despite its all its political
#
setbacks bank unions insurance unions these are the ones know if the public sector bank
#
unions decide which are still dominated by the left they'll be in the banking industry
#
to complete time still in our country and full of universities students and etc so you
#
actually have a situation where your remaining political capital is rests with people who
#
are fast becoming marginalized in their own way we know that public sector banking is
#
not going to be the future of banking in this country whether the government privatizes
#
banks or not is a different debate but 20 years from now public sector bank would not
#
be what they are today so between these two extremes you know this is something the left
#
exploited early in its career etc I mean it had a lot of video you know Jyoti Basu was
#
a lawyer educated in England he came back and did that politics so I mean I we spoke
#
about Narendra Modi who comes from a very modest family had very little education I
#
mean was not successfully professionally otherwise but became a political old timer
#
now here is the other extreme Jyoti Basu who comes from England is educated in England
#
could have you know earned all the money in his life decides to work for a communist party
#
so there was also the other side of the political you know infatuation affinity whatever one
#
might choose to call it it actually the Bombay film industry at one point of time today people
#
rave and round about you know Akshay Kumar supporting Narendra Modi etc I mean the communist
#
party actually had its headquarters in Bombay the entire you know the Indian people theater
#
association the galaxy of film stars used to work for the left so how do you regain
#
that ideological I think and I can say this with a lot of confidence for the left without
#
a larger ideological narrative left politics cannot have any future in any society I mean
#
your your basic justification for your politics even today comes from the fact that there
#
is a established school of analysis in social sciences which was founded by Marx which has
#
been improved upon by a lot of thinkers because left politics by definition is a scientific
#
way of politics and that is what the left likes to claim it is people might have disagreements
#
with it so even if you disagree with the left you say that the basic problem is in the theory
#
I mean it is not that people do it wrong so the left has to think about going back to
#
the drawing board on that now where do you get your people you don't have factories
#
you can't have trade unions farmer politics etc you today even if you were to say that
#
I want to do land reforms no farmer would come to you a land has become hopelessly fragmented
#
be nobody wants to be in farming so where do you draw your ranks from I think is a very
#
important question this is a question which is not very easy to answer but the existing
#
leadership of the left I don't think has even made an attempt to answer that question and
#
what strikes me and obviously I don't know the left as deeply as you do so feel free
#
to sort of tell me if you disagree but what also strikes me is that these sort of theoretical
#
debates that you speak of are something that might be happening in academic circles but
#
how does a common man think of the left and why has a left gained traction wherever it
#
has with the common man and the reason partly is of course a reaction against an oppressive
#
state and apart from that a certain sort of pro-poor rhetoric that you know the rich are
#
exploiting you and we'll you know redistribute their wealth a little bit and we'll make society
#
more equal but what seems to have happened in recent times is that that narrative has
#
been co-opted by the BJP like you mentioned the NREGA and and you know one of the multiple
#
factors which I have read about from reporters you know I think Parth MN reported on this
#
extensively before the elections is that a lot of people seem to have voted for the BJP
#
because of these social welfare schemes because of the delivery the last mile delivery of
#
these social welfare schemes sometimes when they benefited themselves and sometimes when
#
they saw others benefiting and said hey maybe I can also benefit in future so that whole
#
pro-poor populist narrative has seems to me to have been co-opted by the BJP which then
#
then you wondered at what space in the popular imagination forget the theory what space in
#
the popular imagination can the left possibly occupy now well that's one way to look at
#
it but let me pose a counter question let us say the people voted for the BJP because
#
they got toilets and houses sure Swachh Bharat and this Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana perfectly
#
all right for people to vote for the BJP in one election is that going to be enough for
#
them to vote for the BJP again because politics the beauty of it is it's it's it's an infinite
#
process yeah it's not a one-off thing now will Narendra Modi give them another toilet
#
and another house probably not because there's a limit to the amount of welfarism even this
#
government can do I mean you don't have those kind of resources so you know the question
#
is you know can you mobilize people who were given say a one-time asset transfer by a government
#
to demand something more now if a political party were to start a movement in this country
#
today that we don't just need schools in our country we need better schools there's a lot
#
of talk about these learning outcomes we need learning outcomes to improve no because children
#
when even when they get out of school after class 10th or 12 they can't speak they can't
#
write this is something we directly affects your employability I mean even if you want
#
to know work as an assistant at a grocery shop the shopkeeper would expect that you
#
probably do the basic maths and a lot of people find that very difficult in our country in
#
fact a small part of the jobs crisis is also the disconnect between the jobs and education
#
it's a large part of the job crisis I mean you might have an MPhil degree but so what
#
I mean how do you make yourself employable what are you good for yeah especially in provincial
#
universities things are really bad syllabi have not been up revised for 30 40 years most
#
of them work with the my father teaches in a college in Gaya so I know I mean he has
#
to take care of 1000 students with the strength of three teachers so I mean you can't teach
#
it's humanly not possible you go nuts if you try to do that so if a political party were
#
to take that thing mobilize the youth I think it could yield results and if the government
#
you know to prevent the opposition from winning does it then that's the best case scenario
#
I mean then you've completely sort of radically transformed your education system which would
#
make you use your demographic dividend in a better way I think one of the biggest reasons
#
for the problem you know whether it is the left etc is that the people who are at the
#
top who are making decisions of what needs to be done what doesn't need to be done have
#
absolutely no connect with the yeah let me be harsh I think the left leadership in this
#
country is a bunch of bureaucrats awaiting retirement you know and it's very interesting
#
that the political marketplace has transformed itself many existing players haven't been
#
able to adapt like the Congress and the left however there is a space for new entrepreneurs
#
and this is demonstrated by the example you gave earlier of the army party in Delhi where
#
they came up and they found an issue like corruption and they took it and they made
#
a space for themselves within the political marketplace whether you agree with them or
#
not is a different matter it's a it's a triumph of political entrepreneurship and like you
#
pointed out maybe education is another wedge factor or whatever this is up to political
#
entrepreneurs to figure out what sort of narratives they can find and which brings me to my next
#
question which is the politics of identity or the politics of mandal as it were which
#
you know received a big philip around 89 91 you know those years and they were sort of
#
the the consensus view of Indian politics was that it is essentially a politics of identity
#
even when the 2014 win of the BJP was being analyzed it was okay these are the different
#
kinds of caste coalitions you made and so on and now there is a counter view coming
#
up saying that that has changed completely and a lot of these smaller identities have
#
been subsumed within this larger Hindu identity and that is a triumph of Modi and Shah what's
#
your sense of this I am not so sure there is definitely an element of Hindutva in the
#
BJP's political success today is true I mean nobody should dispute that does it mean that
#
the caste identities do not matter I do not think so I mean a lot of thought goes in ticket
#
distribution we know for a fact you know even for the BJP caste equations are paramount
#
for them look at Karnataka for example I mean Yedurappa has become the chief minister he
#
is a Lingayat leader he is not a Hindu leader in Karnataka I mean that is the core identity
#
with the BJP thrives on politically in the state but the Hindu consolidation we also
#
have to understand how it has been achieved I think you know the othering of Muslims is
#
just one part of it but in places like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh it has also been achieved against
#
the erstwhile dominant Yadavs, Jatavs etc. so that is also a very integral part of the
#
Hindu consolidation so the BJP is still is at around 35% of the vote it is not the case
#
that they've reached 60-65% of the vote I think and this varies a lot across state there
#
is a lot of social tension in the BJP's ranks regarding the caste thing also all of us saw
#
how the BJP struggled to balance caste equations so when the Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh
#
defeats came it was said that there was a lot of pent up anger among the upper caste
#
about how the BJP nullified the Supreme Court's amendments to the SCSD prevention of atrocities
#
act that there was a feeling that the BJP was being pro-Dalit which who were victimizing
#
upper caste was the claim I'm not saying true or false what did the BJP do the BJP brought
#
reservation for economically weaker sections from upper caste who had never had reservations
#
this is a complete game changer as far as social justice politics is concerned in this
#
country the BJP does not stop here then what did it do then another case came in the Supreme
#
Court this was about implementing reservations in higher educational institutions so the
#
question was whether you implement reservations at the level of a department or do you implement
#
reservations at the level of the institution if you did so at the level of the department
#
the number of effective seats would be very high there the BJP government actually once
#
again nullified the Supreme Court order but in favor of the socially deprived caste it
#
was a completely anti-upper caste thing so the it is doing a lot of flip-flop between
#
both camps and trying to keep both the camps happy OBC is now now we have the talks of
#
an OBC reorganization commission there is talk that three categories within the 27 percent
#
OBC reservation would be made where the communities which have benefited the most from OBC reservation
#
would only have seven percent instead of 27 percent so the BJP I think is doing a lot
#
of experimentation with the identity politics in our country the Congress also tried that
#
they tried to make Linga as a religion in the Karnataka election it completely backfired
#
on them the BJP before the elections in Maharashtra now has given Maratha reservation effective
#
reservation probably has gone to some 70 percent which is absurd in my personal view but nevertheless
#
I mean BJP does mean so I think identity continues to be a very significant part of it but I
#
also think that for an anti-BJP force to just bank on identity and counter the BJP has become
#
extremely difficult because there's a historical legacy to it so if you get just the Yadavs
#
and the Muslims everybody else will unite against you in Bihar so you basically get
#
30 percent of the vote you don't get any seats the opposition gets 56 percent the NDA gets
#
56 percent walks away with everything so it only works for the BJP in today's age identity
#
doesn't work for the other camp but there must be like if it is true that the politics
#
of identity still matters and it is also true that at some point there will be limits to
#
how much you can gain with patronage and some of these coalitions are bound to be uneasy
#
coalitions and fissures will develop and then there is possibly hope for the others there
#
well I will see for example Goa is a very interesting case you talked about it earlier
#
so this these MLAs from Congress resigned and went the BJP actually dumped an existing
#
ally of it sort of their ministers were removed from the cabinet and they are feeling completely
#
betrayed I'm sure there's some identity at play I think a part of these MLAs were defected
#
are Christians or something so we'll have to see how it goes about but like I said what
#
is important is these things could work at the state level they could work in a Madhya
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Pradesh or a Rajasthan or a Chhattisgarh but I think when it comes to national elections
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the political appeal which Narendra Modi has today and that I don't think is based on identity
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that is based on a very larger macro macho outlook of a national leader who is not afraid
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to sort of strike at the enemy who has taken India's prestige to completely new levels
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etc you cannot use identity to puncture the those achievements so I'm I've taken a lot
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of your time we are almost reaching two hours so I want to end with sort of asking a question
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as that asks you for a subjective assessment based on objective data which is you know
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you study data all the time for many years you've been doing that you can see different
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trends within this country social trends political trends so on and so forth if I ask you to
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indulge me for a moment and go 10 years ahead 10 years forward in time to 2029 what do you
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think is a best-case scenario and a worst-case scenario for the Indian political landscape
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and therefore for India I mean that's it's let's come to the worst-case scenario because
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that's easy easier to envisage yeah I think climate change would play havoc with you know
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agricultural production in the country and a lot of farmers were already you know struggling
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very hard to make ends meet would have a very difficult time you know agriculture would
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become very difficult and financially unrewarding in large parts of the country food security
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is something we have learned to take for granted in a country for a very long time now I'm
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afraid that will not be the case 20 years from now this I think more than anything else
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is what really scares me you've also written about the water crisis recently the way you
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know from Punjab Haryana which is the which are the traditional green revolution states
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two states such as Bihar arsenic poisoning is a huge problem in Bihar I mean Nitish Kumar
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has known he started this scheme which promises tap water to every household in a village
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but basically that tap water comes from a submersible pump instead in the village so
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it's not some natural water supply that I think is the worst case scenario the best
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case scenario I think would be the kind of political competition the BJP has brought
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into politics in this country I think the old ossified establishments of politics a
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lot of which like you said were based on patronage identity etc I think will not remain so even
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you know the western interests which have thrived on those old establishments sooner
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than later will lose their hold so there would be a genuine I think democratic upsurge to
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build a constructive opposition and when I say this I'm keeping my personal biases out
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I'm not saying that this is right or the other is right it could take any shape any ideological
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inclination etc but there would be an effort to engage with the government not on what
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the today's opposition not on terms on what the today's opposition thinks they should
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be so there would be a large because in the kind of a young country we are and the kind
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of problems our young generation faces essentially jobs employment etc you know even people like
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us professionally white-collared otherwise there's absolutely no job security you know
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India is a country where you have absolutely no social security you know you might be rich
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enough you might have a medical insurance but if you know encounter serious illness
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there's a lot of problem so there has to be some sort of a no occupational solidarity
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among the young at least which will hopefully give a progressive tilt you know in terms
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of at least the economic policy of it it has to be more egalitarian we have to take care
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we remember development should not just be more roads and more flyovers and more airports
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but it has to it will have to hopefully you know take into account health and education
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this is something which has not been done till now but that I think you know is the
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best case scenario we should all be hoping for.
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On that hopeful note thanks so much for coming on the show I learned a lot from talking to
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you today and I think it's a saving grace of our democracy that we have journalists
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Thanks a lot Amit it was a pleasure talking to you.
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If you enjoyed listening to the show then you can follow Roshan on Twitter at RoshanJNU
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one word RoshanJNU you can follow me at Amit Verma A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A you can browse past
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episodes of the Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in thinkprakati.com and ivmpodcast.com the Scene
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and the Unseen is supported by the Takshashila Institution an independent centre for research
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and education in public policy Takshashila offers 12 week courses in public policy technology
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policy and strategic studies for both full time students and working professionals visit
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takshashila.org.in for more details thank you for listening.
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