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I have often asked myself the question, what does it mean to be Indian?
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In recent weeks, I have also started asking myself the question, what does it mean to
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We often take it for granted that we are citizens, but citizenship has so many rich shades of
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On the one hand, it is an administrative category, denoting the basic unit of the population
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On another, it is a term loaded with virtue and duty, which is why we speak of what it
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means to be a good citizen.
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The term citizen refers to a legal status.
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It also encloses an understanding of rights that the state is supposed to protect and
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entitlements that it might have granted one.
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It implies duties that one might have, definitely civic and perhaps social and political as
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It presupposes a sense of identity and belonging.
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It is a term especially loaded with meaning in modern times, because being a citizen is
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different from being a subject.
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A handful of centuries ago, we were all subjects of some empire or fiefdom or the other.
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In 1947, when India gained political independence, we also gained the right for every Indian
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to turn from a subject to a citizen, empowered at an individual level to be masters of the
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Though I would argue that we still have the mentality of subjects.
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Citizenship is something that we all tend to take for granted.
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Although the events of the last weeks have forced many Indians to sit up and re-examine
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What does it mean to be an Indian citizen?
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Although there are articles in the constitution and laws passed by parliament on this subject,
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one basic truth remains.
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Our citizenship is what we make of it.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioural
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Please welcome your host, Amit Barma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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Before we get started, a quick announcement.
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My partnership with the Good Folks at IVM podcast has ended and as of this week, starting
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with this episode, I will be producing The Seen and the Unseen myself.
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We did 151 episodes together and IVM was as much a labor of love for Amit Doshi and his
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team as The Seen and the Unseen has been for me, where the work has had to be its own reward
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because there hasn't been much else.
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Our parting was both inevitable and amicable and I wish IVM the very best.
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You can check out their collection of amazing Indian podcasts at ivmpodcast.com.
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Now on to this episode.
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We are recording this episode on December 20th and India has been on fire over the last
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few days over a new bill that the government has passed called the Citizenship Amendment
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Taken in conjunction with the proposed National Register for Indian Citizens, this bill has
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certain implications that has many Indians worried, including me.
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The CAB and the NRC and the competing notions of citizenship that are now being argued in
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the public discourse all carry enormous historical baggage.
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We cannot understand these present times if we do not understand that history.
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To help unpack all of this, I've invited my friend, the historian Srinath Raghavan back
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Srinath had last appeared in The Seen and the Unseen to discuss the troubled history
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of Kashmir and Article 370 and that episode turned out to be the most popular episode
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of The Seen and the Unseen so far.
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He's done three other fantastic episodes with me before that, all of which will be linked
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from the show notes at seenunseen.in.
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I'm glad he'll join me here again today.
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Srinath, welcome to the show.
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Good to be back on the new Seen and the Unseen.
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Srinath, the last time you came here, it was on the back of a crisis about Article 370
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and the time before that you came here, it could be argued that it presaged perhaps a
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future crisis, the India-Pakistan conflict where we, you know, after Balakot, we discussed
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the strategic implications of that and we're in the middle of a bit of a crisis now also,
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And it looks like this is a show for crisis and crisis management.
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So, you know, the thing is a lot of people are asking, like when I was reading about
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this, a common question that people seem to have been programmed to ask almost, especially
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on day one, it almost seemed as if the IT cell had asked their anonymous handles to
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all, you know, comment-asking protesters like us, what are the students protesting about,
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where the implication was that there's really nothing to protest, it's, you know, this bill
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has something to do with illegal migrants and all that.
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But the sort of historical implications of this are far greater if you look at the sort
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And one of the things that sort of struck me over the last three or four days is that,
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you know, when the bill was passed, I thought, okay, we are living in really dark times,
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things are getting worse very fast.
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But I have been enormously heartened by the protests that have been happening in the last
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And I think in a sense, in a perverse way, the bill has had the opposite effect, whereas
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you would imagine it, you know, in conjunction with the NRC to take down the number of citizens
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So I think there are actually now suddenly many more citizens, so to say, you know, if
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we use a distinction between thin citizenship, which is, you know, the legal status and thick
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citizenship where you actually involved with your nation, and people are suddenly taking
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the citizenship very seriously.
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Well, certainly it seems to have catalyzed a largely unplanned, spontaneous set of protest
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movements across the country.
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And I think it's very interesting that this protest seems to have a geographic reach,
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a sort of an institutional base in universities, not just of the old public universities, but
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you know, in technological institutions and institutions of management, in private universities,
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all of it suggests that there is a breadth and a depth to this feeling of antipathy towards
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what is being imposed on the country by way of amendment of the citizenship amendment
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And I think people have caught on to what is fundamentally problematic about the bill
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itself, which is that it effectively discriminates against the Muslims in India.
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And de jure reduces them to second class status in this country.
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And that they feel is unjust, it's incorrect.
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And it goes against the fundamental tenets of Indian identity, as they intuitively seem
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to understand was enshrined in the Constitution, which I think is very heartening because as
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you've been saying, you know, we have witnessed a number of important pieces of legislation,
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other kinds of court verdicts happening this year, right?
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You had the Article 370 of Kashmir being abolished, the state being divided into two union territories.
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Then you had the Supreme Court verdict on the Ramjan Bhoomi Ayodhya issue, where, you
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know, on the one hand, the destruction of the Babri Mosque was condemned.
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But on the other hand, the people who destroyed it effectively have been given possession.
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It was both condemned and condoned.
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So in a sense, coming on the back of these series of things, which has happened, it is
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quite interesting that people have looked upon this as a moment where some of their
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fundamental questions of status, rights and identity, you know, the bundle of things that
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go into the making of the notion of citizenship as really being tested at this point of time.
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And it seems clear that they have decided that it's time to stand up.
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And you know, one of the things which you're obviously going to do in this episode is talk
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about the historical background of all of this, both with the nature of citizenship,
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how it was in colonial India, the sort of battles in the constituent assembly at the
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time of independence to define it in such a direction forward and what it sort of revealed
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about the idea of India, the pluralistic idea of India that was then dominant among the
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framers of our constitution and problems of Assam and so on.
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So we look at the entire historical package and we will also, at the end, cycle back to
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the present and talk about what's going on now and what the implications are.
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But before we do that, I want you to sum up for me, what are we protesting about exactly?
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You know, on the face of it, what many people seem to are saying on CAB and I get constantly
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on family WhatsApp groups, I get messages about it that what's the problem?
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This is only about refugees from other countries.
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It doesn't affect our citizenship.
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Why should we be worried?
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Well, I think we should be worried because the bill and now the act effectively is very
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clearly discriminatory.
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It creates explicitly stated discriminatory provisions which leave out Muslims from getting
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citizenship as persecuted refugees from other countries.
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It leaves out certain other countries from the ambit of India's neighborhood.
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For instance, it leaves out Tamils who have come from Sri Lanka and who are still living
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in refugee camps in Tamil Nadu, maybe for about 25, 30 years now.
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So there is a range of exclusions, all of which militate against the guarantee of equality
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to all enshrined in Article 14 of the Indian Constitution.
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And in that sense, this bill seems blatantly unconstitutional, but more than anything else,
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it seems to strike a chord with people that here is a piece of legislation which is so
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blatantly discriminatory, which attempts to reduce a very large number of people in this
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country to effectively a new category of citizenship.
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And in that sense, you know, there have been parallels which have been evoked in a number
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of fora with the Nuremberg laws of Germany, right?
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And it's worth recalling what those Nuremberg laws were about.
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You know, the Nuremberg laws were one of the Nuremberg laws effectively said that you could
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only be German if you're effectively of German ancestry.
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And that German ancestry was defined as excluding the Jews, you know, people were prohibited
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from getting married to Jews under the Nuremberg law.
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So in a sense, it was an attempt to preserve a certain majoritarian notion of German identity
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by consigning Jews to second class citizenship.
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And that parallel, I think, has been evoked a number of times.
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It may not be accurate in all its particulars, but I think it strikes a chord because it
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is precisely that kind of a problem.
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And let's also face it that we have seen similar things happening in our own neighborhood in
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You only have to think about the Rohingya problem as it emerged in the context of Myanmar
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and the grotesque tragedy into which it has evolved.
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Even as we are speaking, you know, there's a trial going on in the International Court
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of Justice and none less than Aung San Suu Kyi has had to show up in order to defend
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So I think people are worried about what kind of a path are we embarking on by bringing
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in this piece of legislation.
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Now the CAA, the amended act itself may seem exclusionary, innocuous and so on, but it
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is effectively a pincer movement when you combine it with the proposed National Register
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Now, this National Register of Indian Citizens actually was proposed by the Vajpayee government
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There's a citizenship rules of 2003 which promulgated the process through which this
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Subsequently, when the UPA government came in, they set that aside and focused more on
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other projects like Aadhaar as a way of giving identity and enabling people to claim their
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But what the current government wants to do effectively is to first bring in the CAB,
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which then says that, then we will move on to the NRC exercise of enumerating who's
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an Indian citizen, which will have various kinds of requirements.
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As the case of Assam has shown, there are a lot of people, both Hindu and Muslim, who
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will be unable to produce the required documents in order to meet the threshold.
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But the amended Citizenship Act will allow everyone but the Muslims to go through a process
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for claiming citizenship and eventually reach the destination, whereas Muslims, who may
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be unable to have the requisite documentation in order to be able to do that, will then
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be consigned into some kind of a legal limbo.
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On top of it, we now know from newspaper reporting that instructions have been given to various
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state governments to open internment camps in various areas.
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We are speaking here in Mumbai and there is a camp coming up in Nehru as the newspapers
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Yeah, and the newspapers reported it some months ago.
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And what is going to be the status of people who are there?
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What kind of rights will they have?
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What kind of freedoms will they be allowed to?
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In fact, if you look at the detention centers, which have been on operation in Assam for
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some years now, even normal jail manual provisions are not being followed in those kinds of things.
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There is a report done by Harsh Mandir a few years ago after a visit to these things, which
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So, I think if you put the new amended Citizenship Act along with the proposed NRC, you are effectively
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attempting to consign a very large number of people in this country to second class
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citizenship and possibly throw them into a legal limbo.
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And I think that is something that all of us have to be worried about.
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I would in fact go a little further and say that we have to look at this piece of legislation
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in the framework of the broader sets of things which have been attempted by the government.
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There was the criminalization of the Triple Talaq.
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You know, Triple Talaq was a civil issue.
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Already the Supreme Court had ruled that it was illegal, it would not have any validity.
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But the government then goes on to bring a piece of legislation criminalizing a civil
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matter, right, which then says that the Muslim man effectively is a deviant entity for whom
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special criminal provisions need to be bought in which need not be bought in for other communities
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and people of other religions.
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Then you had Article 370 being abolished.
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So a constitutionally guaranteed set of provisions for some degree of autonomy, which in practice
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were never observed for the one Muslim majority state in this country, was ostentatiously
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and unconstitutionally without the concurrence of the state assembly done away with.
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And that state has been divided into two.
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And then, of course, as I said, you've had the Ayodhya verdict, all of which put together
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suggests that, you know, a very large zone of exclusion in legal constitutional terms
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is being created for Muslims in this country, or at least that is a fear.
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And it is not just about Muslims, because any such exclusions from provisions of citizenship
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of rights which have been guaranteed by the constitution apply equally to every one of
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It is not just about them, but it is about us.
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And I think that is the feeling that the people who are coming out in streets in such large
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numbers in totally uncoordinated, unplanned ways to let out their feelings against what
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seems to be a patently discriminatory, unfair, unjust regime, which is now being instituted.
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And I'll sort of state two responses to that.
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One is just to elaborate on what you said about the whole process of the natural register
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of Indian citizens coming about.
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One thing that people keep saying on Twitter and WhatsApp and so on is that, hey, listen,
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why are you worried if you're an Indian citizen?
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Just prove your citizenship and that's fine.
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But how do you prove your citizenship?
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I mean, I don't at this moment in time know if even I have the papers someone has privileged
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as me to be able to prove my citizenship.
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And I want to quote from a piece that Sanjeev Barua wrote for Frontline, where he talks
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about, you know, the difficulty in proving this, where he says, quote, the NRC exercise,
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and he's talking about what happened last year in Assam, essentially, where this exercise
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actually took place, and he writes, quote, the NRC exercise exemplifies a fact that contrary
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to the talk of a paperless society, the growing use of electronic technologies has actually
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increased the need for paper documents and underlined their importance in people's lives.
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Legacy data are at the heart of the process.
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To be included in the NRC, one has to identify an ancestor whose name appears in either the
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NRC of 1951 or a pre-1971 electoral role and provides documentary evidence of linkage with
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Even with the substantial assistance available at the NRC Seva Kendras, this can be a challenge
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And he continues later, consider a person who lives in Assam but was not born in the
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In order to process his or her legacy data, NRC officials have had to make as many as
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600,000 requests for legacy verification to various state governments.
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The response from them has been poor and tardy.
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Some states responded to fewer than 1% of the requests.
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More than 100,000 requests for legacy verification were made to the West Bengal government, but
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the NRC authorities received responses only in 6.5% of the requests, top quote.
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And you know, we've all seen newspaper stories about how even ex-army officers, like the
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other day I read about some ex-army officer who fought in the Kargil war now being in
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a detention camp because he doesn't have the papers to prove that he's a citizen.
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And the thing is, because like it is fortunate given bureaucracy that a lot of papers can
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just be got with such jogar like ration cards and so on.
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But what this also means is that they are not accepted as evidence of citizenship.
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And therefore it's just extremely difficult to prove your citizenship for literally anybody.
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And if, and this brings me to the second observation, that if you are already of the mindset that
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you want to other a certain set of people, then this becomes a fantastic mechanism by
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which to do so, where you can say that, okay, you can't prove your citizenship, but if you're
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a Hindu, you know, under the CAB, we can still sort of grant you citizenship, but not Muslims
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because Muslims are specifically excluded from the CAB.
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Now my sort of question here is like one observation, which I think you'll agree with is that one
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doubt that a lot of people had about how serious this dispensation is about a social agenda
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is now sort of laid to rest.
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I mean, I want to make three points.
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The second point is something that Akar Patel said on an episode with me a long time back
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when we discussed Hindutva, where he said that, how do you define a Hindu Rashtra?
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And when it comes to like an Islamic state or an Islamic nation, it's very easy.
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There are certain positive laws which apply to what good Muslims must do, but the notion
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of a Hindu Rashtra basically seems to rest on othering and on being anti-Muslim.
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So if you look at all of, like I also read an episode on the Geeta Press with Akshay
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Mukul, where he spoke about this whole developing movement.
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And if you look at all these major tropes of the Hindutva movement, whether it's cow
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slaughter or love jihad, or, you know, since independence, the Hindu court bill and therefore
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the UCC, they all come down to a sense of let's get at the Muslims.
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And my third point is that one might have thought that the kind of polarization that
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is now happening and the kind of effect that this kind of othering rhetoric has is something
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that the BJP might have been using for winning votes alone.
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But the point is, if that was the case, then so soon after an election, when they have
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an overwhelming majority, they would not have started rushing through all of these things,
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as you pointed out with the UCC No Doubt Next, that they are doing this out of conviction,
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not out of a cynical vote grabbing exercise, which is, how do you react to all of this?
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No, I think that's, that's broadly true because, you know, the conception, one of the core
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ideas of Hindutva, and this goes right back to Savarkar and his pamphlet Hindutva, you
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know, 1923, where he says that, you know, India is the homeland, the pitru bhoomi and
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the punya bhoomi of all Hindus in the world, right?
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So it is akin to a certain conception of, say, like Israel being the homeland of all
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Jews in the world, right?
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And that in effect is driving some of these things, right, which goes back to the argument
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and we'll come to it a little bit more because some of these arguments were also made in
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the constituent assembly debates when citizenship provisions were actually being discussed,
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which is that why should India not be the place where Hindus should naturally come to,
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Since Pakistan has been created for Muslims, you know, where are the Hindus of the subcontinent
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You know, there is that kind of a rhetoric.
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But as you said, that automatically gives a privileged position to Hindus in this country,
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which goes against every tenet of the Indian constitution with its provisions for equality,
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the notion of secularism, which is weaved into the constitution in so many different
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And that is clearly an issue in play here, right?
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The second thing about, you know, why the BJP is kind of doing this, at some level,
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I think, yes, it is definitely a question of them saying, listen, we now have an electoral
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majority for the second successive time.
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We've come back in much greater numbers.
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Our program has been affirmed and validated.
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And we are doing just what we promised in our manifesto, right?
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The Home Minister, when he tabled this bill, as well as Article 370, repealing the nullification
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of that, those provisions in parliament, said this, that this is there in our manifesto.
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But the reality is that the manifesto of a party, even with 300 odd seats, is not the
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same thing as the Constitution of India.
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And that is a fundamental distinction that I think it is incumbent upon all of us to
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recognize and for citizens to say that an elected majority government is not at liberty
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to overturn fundamental provisions of the constitution.
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There have been sort of constitutional doctrines of basic structure, etc., to that effect,
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which affirm this principle.
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And I think this argument that, listen, we have a majority, we've won this election on
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the basis of this manifesto, hence, you know, we should be allowed to go ahead and do this,
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simply does not cut ice.
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A constitutional democracy works on the principle that you, on the one hand, have democracy,
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which is about aggregation of majority preferences, but on the other hand, you also have the grid
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of constitutionalism imposed on it, which says that there is an extent beyond which
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the majoritarian principle cannot operate.
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And I think we are pretty much at the cusp of that kind of a moment.
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And it's sort of interesting, like one of the books you recommended I read was Citizenship
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and its Discontents by Niraja Gopal Jial, outstanding book, and she also gave a recent
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interview to the New Yorker where she spoke about one of the things that is interesting
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about this whole majoritarian project in India and which distinguishes it from other majoritarian
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projects is that the people we are projecting as the other are not recent immigrants, not
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It's like, you know, you might have, for example, movements in Europe against recent Muslim
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immigrants from Syria or wherever, and you might have movements in the US about relatively
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recent, like over the last century, immigration from Latin America and so on.
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But what is happening in India is that Muslims have been a part of India for centuries, right?
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The othering that is happening is the othering of people who are fundamentally part of the
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Ironically, a fact even Savarkar recognized, because if one sees his rhetoric till about
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1910, it's actually very inclusive and he sees Hindus and Muslims as fighting together.
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And what really, you know, the two recent biographies on him elaborate upon is that
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the sort of brutal torture he was put through at Kalapani, even though the jailer was English,
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the people administrating the tortures were Muslims.
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And that seems to have awakened and radicalized him as far as Muslims were concerned.
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And therefore in Hindutva, it's all about Muslims are the other and India belongs to
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The other fundamental clash of concepts here is that what Savarkar seems to be intimating
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is that citizenship is something that comes from descent.
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So if you are a Hindu, you are a citizen, whereas the other notion of citizenship is
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If you are born in India, you're a citizen.
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And the interesting thing is that the notion of citizenship by birth was dominant both
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in the British conception of citizenship from, you know, which was an intellectual influence
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on our leaders and in the conception of citizenship by our freedom founders, including, you know,
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Motilal Nehru's document of 1928 and so on and so forth.
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But there has always been this sort of growing clash between these two where constitutionally
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we gave supreme status to citizenship by birth, therefore avoiding these sort of divisions
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that did not actually make sense for a multicultural and diverse society as ours.
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But you know, while that is in the constitution, in the political notion of citizenship, citizenship
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by descent has kind of made a comeback.
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You make a number of very important points.
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But before we start unpacking them, let me also make a plug for Professor Nirjah Gopal
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Jayaal's book, which I think is by a long chalk, the best history that we have of citizenship.
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I would recommend to every listener of yours to get a copy of the book and read it for
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I think it will clarify a lot of things about our current moment.
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It's a marvelous book, it will be linked from the show notes on scene and scene.io.
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Now, to go back to your question, now, let's take Savarkar as a starting point, for instance.
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Now, again, I don't want to get too much into the personal biography and, you know,
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trajectory of Savarkar and why he kind of, you know, gets to this thing.
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But at a very simple level, someone like Savarkar, you know, there is an irony that someone who
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speaks so much about Indianness, about Hindutva, Bharatiyata, as his descendants call it today,
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are actually captive to the classic European notions of what should be a nation state.
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So in a sense, that is the irony of fundamental irony at the heart of the Hindutva project,
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that a project which apparently is about Indianness, authenticity, et cetera, is actually mimicking
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and imitating and borrowing directly from a very straightforward 19th century European
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conception of a nation state, which is defined by one ethnic category or race, as Savarkar
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himself called it, defined by one language, which is unified in that sense, right?
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I mean, now, that is the context in which someone like Savarkar says that, listen, if
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every state has to be, every nation state has to be defined by one ethnos, then in the
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Indian context, of course, the Hindus, right?
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And others, as long as they are able to accept that culturally they are Hindu, you know,
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they can do what they want, that satisfies our requirement of having constituted that
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kind of an ethnic national state, right, which in turn leads to this kind of conception of
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citizenship by descent, which you talked about, right?
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Now, scholars of citizenship and political theorists broadly make a distinction between
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two notions of citizenship, right?
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So one is called use soli, use the Latin term J-U-S, use soli and use sanguinous.
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Use soli refers to citizenship by birth, which is the place where you're born decides whether
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you're a citizen or not.
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And use sanguinous is about blood, kinship and descent being the main principles through
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Now, historically, we tend to think of a Republican France as the sort of example of the first
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conception of use soli based citizenship.
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You may also think of it as civic citizenship.
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On the other hand, Germany is supposed to be the exemplar of use sanguinous citizenship
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And you can think of as ethnic citizenship, right?
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So civic and ethnic, use soli, use sanguinous.
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Now in practice, of course, all these regimes tend to interpenetrate to a greater or lesser
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extent in various kinds of regimes.
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Now as far as India was concerned, the reality for most Indians during the colonial period
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was that they had to cling to some conception of citizenship to begin with because you're
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subjects effectively of the British Empire, right?
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So all the debates about getting citizenship of the British Empire, et cetera, were fundamentally
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had to reckon with the reality of your subjecthood, of your being colonized by an alien power.
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And in the context of the British Empire itself, there are at least two levels at which discussions
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of citizenship used to happen.
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So one was what you might think of as imperial citizenship, rights of people who are dispersed
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across imperial territories.
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And let us face it, the British Empire was also a great engine of migration.
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Forced migrations, indentured labor, slavery, plantations of various kinds, right?
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So there are people from India who were implanted in various parts of the British Empire.
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What rights did they have?
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One like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi actually came to the fore talking about the rights
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of Indians in South Africa who were working there, who had gone there, and so on, right?
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So there is that kind of notion of what rights do we have as citizens, so to speak, of the
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And then there is a question of what rights do you have within the context of the British
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Raj in India itself, which is kind of more narrowly defined, right?
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And much of the struggle was about this.
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And the key sort of strand of liberal thought in India from, say, the mid to late 19th century
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effectively attempted to struggle for equality of citizenship, both within the British Empire,
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but also for grant of citizenship rights within the context of British India itself, right?
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And that was a project which was at the heart of this thing.
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And then one of the problems with the whole liberal model of nationalism of the late 19th
#
century variant was precisely that that was never forthcoming on the part of the British.
#
Even when they gave you certain rights, it was always hedged in with qualifications of
#
property, education, class status.
#
So in that sense, right?
#
And I'm always reminded of this wonderful book by Niro Chaudhary, whom you can think
#
of as a last exemplar of that great Anglophone liberalism of Bengal Renaissance, so to speak,
#
right, the self-defined Renaissance, in his extraordinary book published in 1951, soon
#
after India's independence, called An Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.
#
Niro Chaudhary has a dedication to the book, which made the book totally notorious, and
#
in fact made him an object of hate.
#
But Niro Babu remained an Anglophone to the very end.
#
He even migrated to England later on.
#
And the dedication of the book says this, right?
#
It says the book is dedicated to the memory of the British Empire in India, which conferred
#
subjecthood upon us, but withheld citizenship, right?
#
Conferred subjecthood, but withheld citizenship.
#
And then he goes on to say, to which yet every one of us threw out this challenge.
#
And he says, quote, civis Britannicus sum, which is to say that I am a British, a Briton,
#
yeah, that I am British.
#
Civis Romanus sum was the sort of phrase used by Quiqueiro to talk about rights of Romans
#
What someone like Niro Chaudhary is trying to say is that we asked citizenship of the
#
British Empire, but it was withheld to us.
#
But nevertheless, his admiration for that empire remains undimmed, right?
#
And if this is the sort of, you know, the kind of backward glance by one of the last
#
surviving members of what you may think of the classic Indian liberalism of the late
#
19th century variant, you can see why the product failed.
#
Simply because you just could not get it on those terms from the British Empire.
#
And of course, you know, there are discussions about what should constitute citizenship in
#
And there you mentioned about the Motilal Nehru report of 1928, which is an interesting
#
document because it is something like a proto-constitution for an independent India or an attempt at
#
devising some kind of constitution for independent India.
#
And the Motilal Nehru report already enshrines use solely of citizenship by birth as the
#
principle of granting citizenship in independent India, right?
#
And it says that anyone born or naturalized within the territorial limits of India or
#
who's the child of a father born or naturalized in the territorial limits of India would be
#
given Indian citizenship.
#
Now, please note, if your father was born, you could be right.
#
So it's still a restricted form of citizenship.
#
There is a gendered quality to that notion of citizenship, which is enshrined in the
#
1928 Motilal Nehru report.
#
But nevertheless, the fundamental principle is of citizenship by birth.
#
It is of a civic form of citizenship rather than an ethnic form of citizenship.
#
And that is what then comes to the fore in the debates in the constituent assembly, which
#
are happening against the backdrop of partition itself.
#
So we'll come to that later just to sort of, you know, get back to the sort of the strivings
#
within India for citizenship of the British Empire.
#
You know, it kind of strikes me that, you know, when you look back in the late 19th
#
century, you have these very fine liberals like Nauroji, Gokhale, Ranade, Agarkar and
#
so on, whom we now collectively call as moderates because they were moderate in their methods,
#
And in fact, I had an episode on Indian conservatism with Jerry Rao where he claimed that they
#
were conservatives because their methods were not radical.
#
And it's sort of interesting to put yourself in their shoes where India doesn't exist.
#
You know, today we sort of look at the past through a frame of the present and all the
#
things we take for granted that there is this, you know, there is a state of India which
#
we are part of and we are all patriots and we love the country and whatever, and we are
#
proud citizens of India, so why would you want to be a second class citizen somewhere
#
But there you have all of these very fine liberals, Nauroji onwards, who are basically
#
part of the British Empire.
#
The conception of India is something that is still nebulous and hasn't really solidified
#
And within those restraints, they are essentially trying for, you know, and even the term citizenship
#
If you just look at the landscape of the 19th century, you know, there aren't so many, like
#
women don't vote, you know, you still don't have universal suffrage and the conception
#
of a citizen is very different from what it should be now.
#
And I'm sort of struck by, you know, how one can look back at all of them and find them
#
ineffectual and say that, hey, what were they asking for, what were their methods, you know,
#
with the benefit of hindsight.
#
But it's still an interesting battle to take Indians forward.
#
And there's a very interesting quote here by Lala Rajput Rai, which I got from Neerja's
#
book of course, where he talks about the increasing group of elite Indians in the early 20th century
#
who are asking for more rights or more like quasi-citizenships, where he says, quote,
#
the fact is that the British government in India is on the horns of a dilemma.
#
They want the Indians to believe that they are the equal subjects of the king.
#
But when the former claim their rights as such, they behave as if they have neither
#
the power nor the desire to secure the same for them.
#
Perhaps it is not so much the fault of the government of India, as those statesmen who
#
have to reconcile their professions and principles of liberalism with their policy of subjection.
#
And then he goes on to say, the desire, the ambition and the necessity of claiming the
#
rights of British citizenship is no longer confined to educated Indians, but is permeating
#
through the uneducated classes and even the masses.
#
And of course he uses the phrase British citizenship here and a lot of the sort of quote unquote
#
citizenship and the rights or entitlements that are given to Indians at that time are
#
on the basis of property and education confined to a very small number of people.
#
How does the conception of citizenship within India grow from this?
#
From just a few people with property and education having any rights at all, to something all
#
encompassing as it did when we gained independence?
#
Well, I think there are two aspects to it which are worth recalling.
#
First, as far as the older, you know, discourse about citizenship in the context of British
#
empire is concerned, I think the point of reference for that, especially from the turn
#
of the 20th century really is about the fact that there are certain parts of the British
#
empire which are given various forms of recognition in terms of their autonomy, their rights,
#
which are known as the white dominions, which are Canada, Australia, South Africa, right?
#
And these areas are recognized and there is a very clear racial divide within the British
#
empire itself which is running through, right?
#
You know, the great African American thinker W.E.B Du Bois talked about the color line
#
girdling the globe, right?
#
And it definitely girdled the British empire.
#
And there was that racial divide which said that, you know, certain dominions and certain
#
colonies had greater rights within the British empire, could aspire to various forms of citizenship
#
because they were officially even known as the white dominions.
#
And you know, even among the white people, there were divisions in the sense that like
#
one fascinating factor, it was that if you were a French person naturalized in New Zealand,
#
you'd be a British citizen as long as you were within the dominion of New Zealand.
#
But if you went back to England, you would be considered a Frenchman and a foreigner.
#
And the thing which was done was that the white dominions were given power to regulate
#
immigration to their territories.
#
You know, Lala Rajpatrai's observations here as well as many of his other writings from
#
that period also have to be understood against the backdrop of the infamous Komaga Tamaru
#
Which in some ways crystallized many of these problems, which is that when a ship bearing
#
a number of Indians attempts to berth in Canada, it is turned away, right?
#
And so in a sense, the white dominions were allowed to restrict people from other parts
#
of the British Empire from entering their own territory, right?
#
Which suggested that you had a distinct second class status even within the British Empire.
#
And that was primarily a racial sort of divide which was there, even though it was not termed
#
But it was absolutely evident to all the people that you named that this was the game in play.
#
And that is what they were trying to rise against.
#
And as I said, even Gandhi was trying to do similar things in the context of South Africa.
#
Yeah, and Gandhi, of course, moved from a position of working with the Empire to eventually
#
rebelling against the Empire when working with the Empire wasn't working out.
#
Just to sort of briefly tell my listeners what Komaga Tamaru was, there was a ship called
#
Komaga Tamaru which took a bunch of Indians, I think around 200, to Canada.
#
And the Canadian government refused their entry.
#
It I think just took one Indian doctor, four people and 20 people who were Canadians coming
#
But the remaining Indians were sent back on the ship.
#
And when the ship embarked on what was then Bombay, the British government refused to
#
let them disembark because they said that, you know, you guys committed sedition by leaving
#
us and going to Canada.
#
And there were clashes and I think 19 people or something like that actually died in those
#
That's kind of where we are now.
#
We get to independence.
#
And you have the and as Gopal points out in her book, quote, at midnight on August 15,
#
1947, all the erstwhile Indian subjects of King George VI did not, as we might expect,
#
automatically become citizens of the new nation.
#
You know, there is still a process left.
#
The country is independent, but the people are not citizens.
#
There is still a process left.
#
That process is being debated in the Constituent Assembly.
#
Guidelines are being discussed by the framers of the Constitution on how we should look
#
Tell me a bit about that period and what are the fault lines in those debates?
#
Well, I think the starting point is to recognize what historians or partition have been telling
#
us for some time now, which is that partition was not an event.
#
It was actually a process.
#
It did not just happen at the stroke of midnight.
#
It was something whose practicalities both India and Pakistan had to grapple with for
#
several years, perhaps even decades into the future about the kinds of, you know, actual
#
realistic administrative and various kinds of legal measures that had to be put in place.
#
And that, of course, goes to the heart of the problem, which is about the movement of,
#
you know, maybe 10 plus million people across the borders of the newly created states of
#
And again, it was not something that was concentrated in time, but was spread out.
#
And how do we deal with this?
#
So it is in that context that really the Constituent Assembly has to consider the citizenship sort
#
And it is recognized that once the Constitution comes into play and there is a government,
#
the parliament will legislate and create a citizenship act.
#
But in the meantime, the Constituent Assembly, which is also doubling up as the legislature,
#
had to take certain kinds of, put certain kinds of principles, both to guide future
#
legislation, but also to cater for some immediate problems of what is happening.
#
So those debates are an interesting mixture.
#
And they're fascinating precisely because, you know, they are discussing principles even
#
while the tragedy of partition is unfolding.
#
So you have, you cannot leave the practicalities of it aside.
#
You cannot leave the emotions that are in play aside.
#
So it's a very, very interesting thing.
#
And in the last set of discussions on the citizenship provisions of the Constitution,
#
Devar La Nero actually says that, you know, this is perhaps the one part of the Constitution
#
that we have discussed the longest.
#
Because it was very contentious, because it mixed both issues of principle, issues of
#
practical importance, issues of imminent practical importance.
#
There are broadly three provisions of the Constitution, which were, you know, dealing
#
with these questions, articles five, six, and seven.
#
So let me just quickly summarize them.
#
I don't want to get too much into detail and then talk a little bit about how those debates
#
So article five effectively says that at the time of the commencement of this constitution,
#
26th January, 1950, as it turned out, anyone who's born in India or either of whose parents
#
Please note, we've improved from the Motilal Nehru report of 1928.
#
So either of whose parents are born in India or who has been resident in India for five
#
years continuously will be a citizen of India.
#
So that is the main provision of article five.
#
Article six talks about provisions for those who migrated to India from Pakistan.
#
And it says that if this person, her parents or grandparents were born in undivided India,
#
which is British India, and they talked about Garden of India Act, 1935 is defining those
#
boundaries, and if that person migrated before July 1948, when the sort of the migration
#
controls were bought into place and were residents since then, or if they came between July 1948
#
and the time that the constitution comes into force, then they would be registered as citizens.
#
So you have a provision for people who are coming in from Pakistan to India.
#
And even though no religions are named, it is understood that a majority of those people
#
are going to be Hindus and Sikhs.
#
So that is the demographic of that particular movement.
#
Now, article seven, which in some ways is important because it superseded the, you know,
#
It says that anyone who migrates from India to Pakistan after March, 1st of March, 1947,
#
right, which is even before partition happens, shall not be deemed a citizen of India.
#
This is a very strong provision which is brought in to say that anyone who left India on or
#
after 1st March, 1947, will not be seen as a citizen of India, even if they want to come
#
And if they return to India, they will have to return with a permit, which is issued by
#
the Indian High Commission in Pakistan.
#
And then there would be a path for citizenship to them, which is that they will be seen as
#
people who are effectively coming after July 1948 as per the provisions of article six.
#
So in a sense, you say, first of all, that anyone who left India for Pakistan, which
#
is effectively Muslims, after March, 1947, shall not be regarded as citizens.
#
And that if they want to come back, as a lot of people were coming back because their family
#
is their property, et cetera, might have been in India, then they would have to get the
#
special permit and have to get into this track for coming into citizenship.
#
So between these three things, article five, which is overall provisions, six, which is
#
about people coming into India, seven, which is about people going from India to Pakistan
#
who might want to come back.
#
These three provisions together were at the heart of the Constituent Assembly's discussions
#
And these were very contentious provisions.
#
I mean, let me just sort of give you an example of the kinds of arguments which were made.
#
I mean, there are very fascinating discussions.
#
One of the great things is that the Constituent Assembly debates are now very easily accessible
#
So I'd encourage viewers to go back and read this because it gives you a sense of how
#
thoughtful, but at the same time, impassioned those discussions were.
#
And in some ways, a refreshing contrast to what happens in our discussions.
#
In fact, a sign of how impassioned they were is that Jaspart Roy Kapoor called article
#
seven the obnoxious clause.
#
And a lot of the literature refers to it as obnoxious clause, quote unquote, because that's
#
how strongly they felt.
#
And then just worth pointing out that Jaspart Roy was a senior congressman from UP.
#
And many of the people who criticized these provisions or said that, listen, why use solely
#
based principle or why should people coming back from Pakistan be given an opportunity
#
even to become citizens at all when they have actually first left for Pakistan, right, were
#
not necessarily people who are from the Hindu right, so to speak.
#
They were from the Congress party as well, because there was a lot of feeling at that
#
point of time that the country had been divided.
#
And it kind of goes back to some of the arguments which were made by the home minister when
#
In the discussion, he sort of at one point burst out saying, it is a congress party which
#
divided the country on the basis of religion, you know, actually the congress party accepted
#
partition, but they never accepted the two nation theory, right?
#
And even if you look at the partition plan of 1947, which was unveiled, it is very clear
#
that the congress party does not at any point say that we accept the division of India on
#
the basis of the two nation theory.
#
What the congress party signs up to effectively is this.
#
The partition plan says that the legislatures of the state provinces of Punjab and Bengal
#
will vote on whether the provinces should stay united or should be separated.
#
The legislature of Sindh will vote on whether it should go to India or Pakistan.
#
There would be a referendum in the northwest frontier province, because even though it
#
is a Muslim majority province and contiguous to Punjab, et cetera, and Sindh was ruled
#
by a congress government.
#
In the select district of Assam, which we will come to again later, you know, there
#
will be a referendum, right?
#
So effectively what the congress party signed up to was to say that if democratic tests
#
could be used to establish that a significant minority of the country wanted to secede,
#
and if it was geographically possible, then we will not stand in the way of such secession,
#
That was what the congress party signed up to.
#
They never accepted that the two nation theory was the principle on which we are accepting
#
So they accepted partition, but never the two nation theory.
#
So in that sense, the honorable home minister was totally wrong when he said that in the
#
But these points were, however, you know, reflected in the debates on the CAD, right?
#
So for instance, there is Bhargav Das, you know, who says that he, I have only two wishes
#
as far as the citizenship law is concerned, right?
#
That every person who comes from Pakistan as a refugee should have no problem becoming
#
But whoever left for Pakistan in order to become a citizen of Pakistan before independence
#
should never get citizenship in India, right?
#
So there's this sense that, listen, those who have left, why should they ever be given
#
the opportunity to come back, right?
#
Even before Jasper Troy talked about the obnoxious clause, et cetera, you know, there's another
#
very interesting person called Dr. P.S. Deshmukh, who later became the union agriculture minister
#
in 1952, a senior congress leader, who said that, you know, forget about Article 7.
#
In fact, I think Article 5 itself, which defines a basic, you know, use solely principle, he
#
says should be changed to state that every person who's a Hindu or a Sikh and is not
#
the citizen of any other state should automatically be eligible for the citizenship of India,
#
So he wanted to bring use sanguiness or dissent into the story because the argument which
#
he makes, and he says this in the constituent assembly, he says, if the Muslims want an
#
exclusive place for themselves called Pakistan, why should not Hindus and Sikhs have India
#
That is the classic use sanguiness argument.
#
The interesting thing is that even as Dr. Deshmukh is saying these things, he says that
#
I know this will militate against our conception of India as a secular state.
#
He says that also in the constituent assembly debates, right?
#
So there is a recognition that the use sanguiness principle will cut against the broader vision
#
of the thing, but there is a sense of anger that the country has been partitioned and
#
those who left should simply not have the option ever to come back, right?
#
In fact, there's a reflection of that anger and the same thing you're saying and what
#
Jaswant Roy himself said, where, you know, talking about Article 7, the obnoxious clause,
#
he says, quote, it's a serious matter of principle.
#
Once a person has migrated to Pakistan and transferred his loyalty from India to Pakistan,
#
his migration is complete.
#
He has definitely made up his mind at that time to kick this country and let it go to
#
its own fate and he went away to the newly created Pakistan where he would put in his
#
best efforts to make it a free, progressive and prosperous state, stop quote, where the
#
implication is, and this is also a kind of fathering, the implication is that, listen,
#
you left and therefore you're a traitor and now you can't come back.
#
And you know, we can think of it in harder terms right now, but at that point in time,
#
everything is very fluid.
#
People are going back and forth and that date is something arbitrary, which many citizens
#
don't even realize that there is a date like that or, you know, I mean, I read about a
#
guy who went on a business trip to Pakistan before the date and came back after the date
#
and he was stuck in a case for years because...
#
And that precisely was the kind of divide in the constituent assembly, right?
#
So those who wanted to tighten the provisions of article seven by saying, there should just
#
be no avenue for those who left for Pakistan to come back to India, effectively arguing
#
that this was purely a matter of voluntary choice, right?
#
As he says, he has kicked this country, he has gone, he has made his choice.
#
Why the hell should such people be allowed ever to come back, right?
#
And if they come back, they will be fifth columnists in this country and so on.
#
And again, what is striking about not just these debates, but many other debates in the
#
constituent assembly is this language of saying, you know, people have to be loyal to the country
#
Even Jawaharlal Nehru says it, though to Jawaharlal Nehru's credit, he says that Pakistanis should
#
be loyal to Pakistan, Indians should be loyal to India, right?
#
But there is the sense that how are we going to create this national unity and so on, right?
#
Which is an underlying sense of many of these kinds of things.
#
So isn't then the case, the fault lines that exist today in the discourse, which have led
#
to these protests, which has led to the CAA, were also present then?
#
It's just that the people who sort of, you know, like even those who are arguing that,
#
you know, that India should be the home for all Hindus and whatever, and just as Pakistan
#
is a home for Muslims, is in a sense, arguing a version of the two nation theory.
#
So did the fault lines also then exist then, except that then they were on the losing side
#
and the broader, secular, inclusive vision won out and now they're not on the losing
#
I think that is the important thing to remember, that it was not at all inevitable that the
#
secular, broader vision, pluralistic vision should have won out in the constituent assembly,
#
Which is why I was trying to emphasize that the people who are making these points are
#
They are not people from the Hindu mazaba who are a small minority whom you can just
#
So it's a dominant stream of thinking.
#
A very important stream.
#
And that is why these were the most contentious provisions as Jawaharlal Nehru observed, right?
#
But the point is that how were they able to persuade and win over this thing, right?
#
First by affirming that, listen, we are for a secular state and that the principle of
#
citizenship by birth is the one that best captures this.
#
Yes, we recognize that those who left Pakistan, they should not have an Indian citizenship
#
would not be so cheap that people can just come back and ask for it.
#
But at the same time, we cannot tell them that, listen, you cannot come back.
#
And the argument which was made was to say that this is not always a matter of choice,
#
that a lot of people left under compulsion, under duress.
#
When you have communal violence of that kind erupting, a lot of people thought it might
#
be safer to move to areas where there are Muslim minorities and vice versa, right?
#
It is in that context that a lot of people left.
#
When things settle down, people want to come back to their home and earth.
#
You know, there is also an underlying economic dimension to the story.
#
A lot of the people who opposed the provisions of Article 7 said that Muslims should never
#
be allowed to come back from Pakistan to India and claim citizenship.
#
We are also concerned that those who are coming back will also claim property.
#
The property they left behind basically and which has now been taken over by the evacuee
#
property organization, right?
#
I mean, and they said that, listen, if they claim back property, how are we going to resettle
#
refugees who come to India, right?
#
And Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress Party, Patel and others made it very clear, saying
#
that, listen, it is the responsibility of Indian state to rehabilitate those people.
#
It is not the owners should not be left upon people, communities and the property which,
#
you know, they have at their disposal.
#
The second thing which they said very clearly and Nehru says this in his sort of important
#
intervention in these debates is that to argue against Article 7 is to argue for discrimination,
#
is to argue for unfairness.
#
It is exactly the language that the protesters of today are using to say that if you want
#
to exclude some people from provisions of citizenship, yeah, it is not to say that everybody
#
It is not like what the Prime Minister said or should every Pakistani be eligible for
#
That is an absurd claim.
#
The issue is that do we put in place laws which will systematically exclude some people
#
from claiming citizenship in that context and it was a very hard won victory.
#
It was not an easy thing for even the Congress Party to carry the Constituent Assembly and
#
for these provisions to come into play which is why I think it is all the more important
#
that people should actually go back and read those debates to understand that the Congress
#
Party and the Indian nationalists of the time, not just the Congress Party, the mood in the
#
Constituent Assembly was never to accept the two-nation theory.
#
There was a lot of, you know, heat around these debates, around the anger of the fact
#
that the country had been divided but at the same time that anger was not allowed to subsume
#
fundamental principles of equity, pluralism and secularism on the basis of which the Constitution
#
And as an aside, you know, there is a semantic reflection of the tenor of those debates and
#
which might even have relevance to what is going on today in the sense that even though
#
these words did not make it to the actual articles, two of the words used a lot in the
#
debates were refugee and migrant.
#
Whereas refugee, it was sort of used in a sense of Hindus, you know, fleeing Pakistan
#
and East Pakistan as it were and therefore poor guys, they have no choice, they've been
#
So, you know, we will welcome them.
#
But with migrants, it was a reference to the people article, the seven dealt with that.
#
Muslims who might have gone to Pakistan or been there on that date and then they decide
#
to come here, you know, and but they're, you know, spoken of as migrants, not refugees
#
because, you know, there's a choice involved and what is their intent and we must assert
#
in their intent and, you know, you have then commission sitting over the intent and not
#
listening to what the stated intent is, but, you know, rejecting a lot of Muslim applications
#
for citizenship on that basis.
#
And so, you know, it does seem to me that sort of, okay, you know, the secular liberal
#
way of thinking sort of won the argument back then.
#
But I think the argument that a lot of people are sort of making now, is that a permanent
#
Why should that still be the case?
#
Because of course, something I lament because I think both you and I are of the persuasion
#
that we should not discriminate and, you know, we value secularism.
#
But the point, and I think I brought this up in my, in our episode on Kashmir as well,
#
the point that the India made about the constitution were not in so many words, but the idea being
#
that look, it was a constitution imposed by a liberal elite on a country which did not
#
So, you know, it's one thing to say, like you said at the start of the episode that
#
just because they have won an election doesn't mean that they can overturn the constitution.
#
But their argument would be that look, the constitution number one is not a permanent
#
Number two, the constitution has been desecrated constantly through the decades by Nehru and
#
Indira Gandhi repeatedly.
#
They themselves desecrated the constitution to the extent that as early as 1953, Ambedkar
#
said that, you know, if I could, I would burn the constitution, you know, a document that
#
he authored, he felt so strongly about what was being done to it.
#
So the argument of the people today would be that look, look at what Nehru and Indira
#
did to the constitution to the extent that for example, the preamble that people are
#
reading out in all these protest marches is basically not the Ambedkar preamble, it's
#
And they would argue that, no, now, you know, we are the people, we have proven that in
#
the electoral system that we have.
#
Why does that have less significance than the constitution?
#
That is a question that could be posed, not something that I am posing or I agree with.
#
But that's one way of looking at it.
#
No, the constitution was never intended to be a dead document.
#
It was supposed to be a living document, right, which is why the provisions for amendment
#
were made and there are fairly liberal provisions for amendment, right.
#
And if you, the threshold for amendment is not that high for many parts of the Indian
#
constitution, which is why the Indian constitution is not just one of the longest documents of
#
its kind in the world, but it's possibly one of the most amended such documents as well.
#
So there is no, you know, point in saying that, listen, this thing, and in fact, the
#
first set of amendments were bought in by Jawaharlal Nehru, we know that back history.
#
In fact, there's an old cartoon about how the constitution is not a book, but a periodical.
#
And in fact, Nehru himself says in one of his letters, saying that, you know, the biggest
#
problem with this constitution is that, you know, we try to plug everything into it and
#
it constantly keeps coming in the way of what we are trying to do in any context.
#
So that is, I think it is taken, but the issue is whether a set of laws made by a parliament,
#
which is elected on democratic principles, can effectively overturn the fundamental underlying
#
principles of the constitution.
#
And there, there is a doctrine which goes back to the famous Kesavananda Bharati judgment
#
of the 1970s, which talks about there being a basic structure to the Indian constitution
#
and that no legislation which undermines that basic structure will be deemed as consonant
#
It has been affirmed many times that the provisions of equality of secularism are basic structures,
#
features of the Indian constitution in as much as the current amendment to the citizenship
#
act undercuts and goes against those principles.
#
It is to my mind unconstitutional.
#
I'm not a constitutional lawyer.
#
We can discuss these things.
#
I'm sure the courts will hear it at some point, but the reality is that that is what the argument
#
The argument is not to say that, listen, the constitution is frozen in time or that it's
#
a document which cannot be changed, but you know, here's a point.
#
So and I'll link to a talk that my friend Shruti Rajgopalan gave on YouTube about this,
#
about the constitution changing over the years, is that every time Nehru did something unconstitutional
#
or Indira Gandhi did something unconstitutional and this happened many times and it was ruled
#
to be unconstitutional, they changed the constitution.
#
So my hypothetical question to you therefore is that if this lot, which almost has a numbers
#
to change the constitution and might well, God forbid, have those numbers at some point,
#
if they change the constitution, then are we to sit back and say, oh, okay, this is
#
It's no longer unconstitutional.
#
No, but that is precisely what the Kesavananda Bharati judgment and the basic structure doctrine
#
prevents you from doing, which is to say that there are limits to what the parliament can
#
do by way of amending the constitution.
#
There are some aspects of the constitution that you cannot tamper with, right?
#
So there is no straightforward constitutionally correct option to wholesale overturn the fundamental
#
nature of the constitution itself.
#
If you want to do it properly, then effectively you should ask people, campaign on the basis
#
of saying, listen, we are going to have a second constituent assembly.
#
Please put that on the manifesto, go to the people.
#
If you win a victory, then perhaps you can convene a second constitution assembly and
#
design the constitution that you want and then go back to the people and get it approved
#
with them in a referendum.
#
Who knows they might actually do this and then you'll be back here and we'll be discussing
#
I'm happy to sort of contemplate a possibility like that in a sense, I think, but that is
#
the only way to change the constitution.
#
Every other way of doing this stuff by stealth, as it was done in the context of 370, you
#
know, by sort of an indirect scalduggery type action, cannot stand scrutiny if the courts
#
take a proper view of what is happening.
#
I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but this much I know that if you want a fundamentally
#
different constitution, then you need a second constituent assembly of some kind.
#
You need a different constitutional regime in order to bring in a new constitution.
#
You cannot just marginally keep tinkering and getting to that point.
#
Now, we may well get to that point if the courts do not stand up for the constitution,
#
which they are there to interpret and protect.
#
And you know, an irony that strikes me here, and this is an aside before we sort of get
#
back to the main body of our discussion.
#
An irony that strikes me here is that many supporters of this government sort of identify
#
as conservatives and they call themselves conservative, but it kind of strikes me that
#
what this particular government is doing, and I mean this in an entirely negative sense,
#
what this government is doing is not conservative at all as both revolutionary and radical.
#
They are one, not only going against the grain of the constitution itself, as you pointed
#
out, which is an extremely radical act, but you could argue that they are also going against
#
the grain of Indian society, which by its nature is assimilative and tolerant.
#
And this is sort of a debate that I wrestle with in my own mind.
#
You know, I brought it up in my recent episode with JP Narayan, where he objected to my classification
#
of India as an illiberal society.
#
And you know, one can obviously point out many illiberal things about our society, especially
#
the misogyny and the way women are treated, for example.
#
But equally in one way, we are a liberal society in the sense that we assimilate influences
#
from all over so well, including the fact that Mr. Shah's name is of Persian origin,
#
the elegant churidar kurtas of Mr. Modi are obviously of Islamic origin, and we assimilate
#
it all beautifully and make our own.
#
So to now to do this sort of othering that the government is doing is a radical act,
#
not a conservative act.
#
First about the conservatism and radicalism.
#
There is a famous article by the American political scientist Samuel Huntington called
#
conservatism as a positional ideology, where he says that conservatism as a doctrine never
#
It is not defined by certain tenets in the way that liberalism is.
#
It is about saying whether you are for change or you're against change effectively, right?
#
And he says that, you know, you can be a conservative in various contexts.
#
And in that sense, he says that, you know, those who are trying to uphold liberal values
#
in America today against the onslaught of communism in the Cold War are effectively
#
And in that context, I'd say that all those people who are coming out in the streets are
#
conservatives in as much as they want to conserve the existing institutions and the framework
#
I think it is a very straightforwardly, you know, a conservative impulse, but on the assumption
#
that what we are trying to conserve, on what we are trying to preserve, protect, you know,
#
which is what our president is supposed to do under the oath of office, right?
#
Preserve, protect and defend the constitution.
#
The Huntington point is also made by Hayek in his famous essay, Why I Am A Conservative,
#
where he says that, you know, they don't have ends, they're just a means, you know, they
#
just want everything to be the same.
#
The second point which you made, which is about, you know, what is the nature of society,
#
what is Indian identity and so on, that is always a point of political, intellectual,
#
ideological contestation, right?
#
I think every society tells certain stories of its own past for itself.
#
Every society rests on certain commonly accepted fictions, if I may put it that way, right?
#
We all imagine certain pasts for ourselves.
#
But what is important about these imaginations is which of these models do we find persuasive,
#
It is in that sense that these acts of imagination fundamentally are about political.
#
They are about being able to persuade others to buy into that vision.
#
What the Indian National Congress and the leadership that got us independence, what
#
the constitution into this country did was to persuade that there was one reading of
#
Indian history, which was, which made for a better future for India than anything else.
#
And that was precisely this thing, right?
#
Jawaharlal Nehru has this famous metaphor in the Discovery of India, where he says that
#
India is an ancient palimpsest, line upon line has been written, but what has gone before
#
has never been totally erased, right?
#
So in a sense, you know, there used to be a slogan when we were growing up in schools,
#
It used to be plastered on the wall saying unity in diversity.
#
But actually the Indian National Congress and the Indian National movements and the
#
Constituents Assembly's vision was not so much unity in diversity, but as reminding
#
us that we are diverse in our unities, that this is a country of extraordinary diversity
#
of all kinds, diversity at a scale which is unprecedented in world history.
#
And if we want to make a new nation state with a new constitutional regime, we will
#
have to accept and accommodate those diversities, which is why the constitution of India is
#
a constitution which is not, even though it talks about a unitary state, it is not necessarily
#
federal in its listing, but has a federal complexion, has federal provisions.
#
But its underlying vision is to say that, listen, there are various forms of differences
#
and asymmetries that we have to accommodate within this country, which is why then you
#
say that, listen, let's have personal laws.
#
You know, it's always better to have a uniform civil code.
#
But the history of India, the moment of partition suggested that it is better to let some identities
#
gain confidence before they themselves decide that they want to come forward and do things.
#
So it was an acceptance.
#
It was a messy compromise, but that is what India at the time of independence was.
#
You know, you had to do that and it was a working model.
#
It was a work in progress.
#
And success depends on its ability to persuade Indian citizens that this understanding of
#
What the Hindutva project is about is an alternative understanding of Indian past, which again
#
true to form is effectively borrowed from colonial forms of knowledge.
#
It was the British who first taught us to think about our past as being divided into
#
a Hindu period, into a dark ages when the Muslims ruled over India.
#
And then, of course, the onset of enlightenment with British blessings of liberty and prosperity
#
So the tripartite periodization, which is at the heart of their thing, right?
#
So every time they say, oh, we are writing 600 year old wrongs, right?
#
This was a period of Muslim domination.
#
You are effectively buying into that particular vision of India, which, funnily enough, is
#
So the Bharatiyata in this country are the greatest prisoners to the British Orientalist
#
project and its categories of knowledge and thought that they left behind.
#
So in a sense, if there is anybody who deserves decolonization, it is them.
#
And I think I had an episode with Manu Pillai where we also kind of discusses how many of
#
our own nations of what our civilization was like have come from the narratives built by
#
the British because the British go to this new place and they have to explain it to themselves.
#
And typically the early narratives of this will always be simplistic and will always
#
And those narratives are narratives that we have somehow embraced unquestioningly and
#
which now sort of dominate the discourse.
#
And like you pointed out, what is sort of remarkable about India as an experiment is
#
obviously the incredible diversity, which is why the typical mistake that, say, Savarkar
#
and the RSS made of looking at it more in European terms, where it's one nation, one
#
state and all of that, is such a mistake.
#
And it's a fantasy and we can discuss it because the logic of those arguments is what is creating
#
the kind of turmoil that you see in the Northeast today, which is just one sort of place, example
#
of how tightly woven some of these diversities and this tapestry is.
#
I mean, in a sense, you pull at one thread, a lot of it can unravel and that's the kind
#
And of course, Gandhi has always was an outlier to everything.
#
I mean, the originality of the man was precisely in that.
#
Gandhi has this wonderful line where he says, happy is the country that has no history.
#
He says, forget about history.
#
And in fact, it was Gandhi who carried the day even after his death in the constituent
#
assembly because people invoked him to say that Gandhiji said that every Muslim who has
#
gone to Pakistan should be free to come back to India and he should come back to India.
#
And that is what I think we tried to do.
#
But obviously within the limitations of what the practicalities of the constitution were.
#
So it was not a perfect set of arrangements between articles five, six and seven.
#
A perfect arrangement would have said that, you know, listen, why even have declared that
#
those who left for Pakistan are not citizens, right?
#
I mean, you should in a sense have open ended.
#
But the reality, as I said, was that the constituent assembly was grappling with this issue, not
#
just as a matter of principle, but were imminent practical exigencies which impinged upon the
#
lives of millions and which excited the passions of millions more.
#
So you had to strike those messy compromises.
#
And frankly, that is what politics is about.
#
This desire for neat mathematical solutions of the kind that seems to animate our current
#
That, you know, everything has to be sort of systematized.
#
There is one nation, there is one nationalism, there is one this thing.
#
It's something that fundamentally goes against the grain of the way that the constituent
#
assembly thought about these things.
#
So we have the framing of the constitution, our side, so to say, wins the debate.
#
We have article five, six, seven.
#
You know, the citizenship by birth takes preeminence here.
#
And it's an inclusive vision of citizenship, despite the sort of exclusive arguments made.
#
But that's not, you know, the constitution isn't like Upendra Bakshi, for example, makes
#
a distinction between, quote, the constitutional state, the normative and aspirational framework
#
enunciating the desired social order and the political state as framework of competition
#
for political power or even the struggle to capture the constitutional state, stop quote.
#
So you have the constitutional state, which is sort of that ideal principled vision, which
#
is laid down by the framers of the constitution.
#
But in actual politics, you have those contestations aren't settled in our actual politics.
#
They are still going on.
#
And in a sense, you could say that, you know, they have now come to the fore in a very big
#
way and those arguments are sort of taking place again.
#
And I'd say that there's also perhaps a necessity to have those arguments again and win that
#
argument again, as hopefully we are doing with all our protest and civil disobedience,
#
rather than just hug back to the constitution and say we won that argument and this thing,
#
which I don't think we did win that argument.
#
And I think Professor Bakshi's point also is to say that in a sense, whatever might
#
be the sort of, you know, text of the constitution or laws on statute books, the reality is that
#
in administrative practice, there were still various kinds of discrimination which were
#
practiced, which is what he's referring to.
#
And then we have historians like Vazira Zamindar, who have pointed out that how even after all
#
of these things happened, you know, Muslims who were seeking to return, come back to India
#
were, because of a range of administrative measures, effectively kind of made it very
#
difficult for them to come back and claim their properties.
#
And the evacuate property story is a very long one.
#
I don't want to get into that digression, but, you know, this is absolutely true in
#
a sense, you know, that no argument is ever won just by, you know, getting a law passed.
#
So to that extent, that was true.
#
What I also buy the argument is that in some ways it is important for this kind of discussion
#
I'm not so sure whether we have won as yet or whether we will even win.
#
I mean, a lot will depend on what the government does and what the courts do.
#
And a lot also depends on how we define victory.
#
For example, even if a majority of the people agree with us, the first pass or post system
#
means that, you know, absolutely it's just very, and that's the system we've signed
#
So we also have to play by the rules of the game.
#
So, I mean, so I think, I think that is, but your point I think is important, which is
#
to say that the mere fact of the discussion and the fact that we are sitting here and
#
talking about these things as are so many, you know, millions of people out there itself
#
is a good sign because, you know, constitutional sort of, you know, values need to be embraced
#
That was Ambedkar's fundamental point, right?
#
He said you can write any book that you want, but if the society at large and its normative
#
values are going to be totally untouched by those things, then it's just a top dressing
#
on a totally different kind of a soil, right?
#
So that is the point, right?
#
So constitutional cultures have to be created and in other contexts, they are created by
#
these kinds of movements.
#
They are created by these kinds of struggles.
#
We've seen it happening in country after country, you know, notions of rights, of freedom are
#
They continue to expand, you know, even in the context of Indian citizenship and the
#
way that people thought about it, there were various kinds of exclusion.
#
There were gendered exclusions, there were, you know, exclusions around religion, et cetera,
#
in practice, which had to be overcome, right?
#
So and then even as we discussed in the context of Assam, there's an entirely different set
#
of history and practical politics that you have to deal with.
#
So there is no taking away from any of that.
#
In fact, my point is precisely the opposite, which is that the beauty of the Constituent
#
Assembly debates and this thing is precisely their willingness to balance principle and
#
pragmatic immediate choices and then to say how best to be sort of cope with these things.
#
It is not an exercise in abstraction and they're actually very fascinating for that reason
#
that it is, you know, that they are framing that constitution, which embodies those principles
#
at the same time as there is violence and bloodshed on the streets and they have to
#
figure out a sort of way to make it work.
#
You know, you mentioned gendered inclusions and, you know, something that really has no
#
relevance to the subject on hand, particularly today, but is an interesting side light and
#
is also an illustration of our inherent sexism as a society is, you know, in December 1949,
#
the Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Act.
#
And you know, to read about all the things that happened today is, you know, just shocks
#
me even from this distance where basically the Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration
#
Act laid down a date after which all mixed unions, that is unions between men and women
#
belonging to different religions would be treated as cases where women had been abducted
#
and forcibly married or converted.
#
Now the thing is that obviously a lot of women on both sides of the border were abducted
#
and these things did happen.
#
But the assumption was that all marriages would be treated as cases of abduction if
#
they were of mixed religions, as if, you know, inter-religious marriage was otherwise impossible
#
And this led to a paradigm of recovery and restoration where these women would be recovered
#
and then restored to, you know, whichever side they were, quote unquote again, abducted
#
from and you know, Gopal in her book makes this exceptional point that quote, this entailed
#
not only determining the religion at birth of a woman, almost as if it were a biological
#
characteristic, but also her biological status as a woman whose body had been violated, impregnated
#
and otherwise defiled by union with a male of another religious community.
#
A powerful patriarchal nationalism informed such interpretations of the abducted woman's
#
body as a metaphor for national purity, honor and morality.
#
And now the critical line, women's citizenship was thus produced by three concentric circles,
#
the citizenship of her father or husband, religious identity, and on the basis of the
#
first two, her imputed national identity, stop quote.
#
And it kind of strikes me how, you know, in every debate that we have about different
#
crisis in India, there is a deeper crisis when it comes to women within that domain.
#
For example, we can talk about the crisis in agriculture, but it's actually far worse
#
for women in agriculture and so on across different domains.
#
And it strikes me that in this whole citizenship debate, we are still talking about the citizenship
#
of men and women are just treated as property in a sense.
#
The hierarchy is kind of turtles all the way down in the story when it comes to this thing.
#
And, you know, in fact, apart from Professor Dayal's book, I'd recommend Amrita Pritam's
#
story, Pinger, which was also later on made into a very powerful movie, which actually
#
captures what could be the kinds of relationships in which people were caught up and why this,
#
you know, assumption to make the woman's body, the sort of symbol of national purity, etc.
#
And as a parenthesis, I will say that, you know, a similar kind of problem also played
#
out in the context of Bangladesh after its liberation, when women who were victims of
#
sexual violence and the children that they conceived as a result were deprived of citizenship
#
of the state because, you know, they were not.
#
So the women were hailed as biranganas, as, you know, sort of this thing.
#
So on the one hand, you hail the women, on the other hand, you deny citizenship to the
#
children that they had to conceive.
#
Because they are quote unquote defiled in some way.
#
So we are very much, and it's not just India, but, you know, well beyond the subcontinent,
#
these kinds of practices do play out.
#
So after the constitution sort of frames Article 5, 6, 7, you then have the Citizenship Act
#
And where are we now when this act happens?
#
So as I said, the Constituent Assembly had always envisioned that the parliament would
#
legislate on citizenship and that the provisions that they were debating were to set some fundamental
#
principles in place and to cater for the immediate problems that were considered.
#
And the reality is that by the time the government of India catered with the so-called immediate,
#
so many years had passed, because as I said, partition was a process, it is not an event.
#
And so it's only 1955 that the Citizenship Act comes in.
#
And that is the act which is today being amended.
#
So it's important to sort of, you know, note that timeline, 1955.
#
So the Citizenship Amendment Bill, or CAB as we call it today, amends the Citizenship
#
The Citizenship Act is actually, it's fairly straightforward.
#
It basically says that an illegal migrant in India is a foreigner who has come to India
#
without a proper visa or who has overstayed in India after the expiry or whatever permit
#
he had to come to India, he or she.
#
So that is one kind of very clear thing, you know, which takes away from all these things
#
about, you know, whether you're a refugee, persecution, minority, you know, which religion,
#
As far as citizenship itself is concerned, it created certain clear categories under
#
which citizenship could be given.
#
And again, we don't need to sort of get into it.
#
The text of the bill is available on the web for our listeners to go back and read if they're
#
But broadly speaking, it talked about birth, parentage or descent, registration, naturalization,
#
the kinds of things that are quite normal.
#
It outlined the various ways in which a person could become a citizen of India.
#
And those are the fundamental bedrock provisions on which citizenship in this country and its
#
regime has been constituted.
#
Assam constitutes the sort of, you know, different and exceptional zone to this.
#
We'll come to Assam in a bit.
#
But I think it's at this point of time worth talking a little bit about how the sort of
#
use solely conception, which is kind of at least upheld in principle in this thing and
#
more or less embodied in the context of the 55 Bill, is already undergoing certain kinds
#
of changes when the BJP government under Prime Minister Vajpayee was in place.
#
So in 2003, there is a amendment to the Citizenship Act, which is also bought in, which actually
#
makes an interesting point.
#
It says it modifies the clause for citizenship by birth, which allows, you know, either you're
#
born in India or either of your parents are India, to exclude persons born in India, one
#
of whose parents was an illegal migrant at the time of their birth.
#
So even if you're born of India to one parent who was an Indian, it would not suffice.
#
Now, this might seem like saying, oh, listen, but we are talking about both parents actually
#
But there is a certain conception that there are illegal migrants are foreign to the body
#
And in that sense, their offspring cannot claim.
#
And this is one particular amendment to the act, which is bought in.
#
And again, it was bought in broadly in the context of these concerns about illegal immigration,
#
et cetera, which are driving our current debates as well.
#
There was one more thing which was kind of important, which happened, which is the amendment
#
to the citizenship rules of 1956.
#
So the rules are framed after an act is passed.
#
Now, the 2004 amendment to the citizenship rules delegated powers to grant citizenships
#
here, particularly to district collectors in the two states of Rajasthan and Gujarat,
#
both of which have borders with Pakistan.
#
And here it explicitly catered for minority Hindus with Pakistani citizenship who had
#
migrated to India more than five years back.
#
So in a sense, it said that for those people, they could have various other kinds.
#
So a special category is already being created already on the basis of religion.
#
But this is not done in the act.
#
It is done through the provision of the rules.
#
And it is done for very specific locality where there is an issue of this thing.
#
And at that point of time, this was also targeted at maybe around 11 or 12,000 people, Hindus
#
who had come to Pakistan after the violence that racked all of the subcontinent post the
#
demolition of the Babri Masjid.
#
There were violence in Bangladesh.
#
There was violence in Pakistan as well.
#
And these were Hindu communities which were obstructed from Pakistan.
#
And so in a sense, you could argue that, listen, this is an administrative measure.
#
But nevertheless, as you know, we discussed earlier, administrative measures can sort
#
of seep into the seep into and bring in various other kinds of principles into the laws that
#
So that was already being done.
#
Now, when the BJP government under Prime Minister Modi comes back to power, it effectively
#
issues a couple of notifications in 2015 and 2016, which presage the constitutional amendment
#
bill that they sort of introduced and passed in this parliament.
#
And which says that it exempts Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, Christians from
#
the three countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, from the provisions of the Passport
#
Act, et cetera, in a sense that they would not be treated as sort of illegal migrants.
#
And it said specifically that these were if they were compelled to seek shelter in India
#
due to religious persecution or the fear of religious persecution.
#
So this provision, even before it is enshrined in law, is already being enshrined in the
#
administrative kind of, you know, sort of procedures for this.
#
And it said that for these people, because they should not be treated as illegal migrants,
#
they can actually apply for a five-year visa, which will then allow them to stay on, et
#
And then you have the citizenship amendment bill, which takes the same provisions, embodies
#
it in law and says that the cutoff date is 2014.
#
And everyone who has come before that, who belongs to these communities, which is everyone
#
minus Muslims, from these states, which is Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, which are
#
Muslim majority states, those alone can be eligible for a separate track for gaining
#
So Muslims or refugees from other countries like Sri Lanka, et cetera, are not eligible
#
to get citizenship under this thing, which is a clearly discriminatory.
#
So all of this is just by way of saying that things have been already changing.
#
But the change which has now been brought in is being brought in explicitly as a law.
#
The second point I want to make in this connection is that, you know, there have been videos
#
circulated on WhatsApp by, you know, the sort of whatever, the IT cell and its, you know,
#
boundaries, which are quoting Dr. Manmohan Singh as leader of opposition in the Rajya
#
Sabha in 2003, speaking at the time when the citizenship amendment of 2003 was being debated
#
as saying that, you know, we should have other pathways for, or more liberal ways of granting
#
citizenship to people who are fleeing religious persecution.
#
But what he was making a case was for people who are fleeing a religious persecution.
#
Not to say that certain communities alone should be favored or not.
#
In fact, it is very interesting.
#
And people seem to have forgotten that in 2012, the then secretary, general secretary
#
of the Communist Party of India, Marxist Prakash Karat, actually wrote a letter to Prime Minister
#
Manmohan Singh, reminding him precisely of the speech and saying that we should bring
#
in more liberal provisions for grant of citizenship for people who are fleeing persecution from
#
And he was, of course, talking about the Hindu minorities who might have come.
#
And they were an important, so to speak, vote bank for the CPM in Bengal as well.
#
I mean, so in a sense, everyone plays these games.
#
But the reality is that neither Dr. Singh nor Prakash Karat were talking about bringing
#
in such a patently discriminatory legislation.
#
And I think that should be stated very clearly.
#
I think this country definitely needs a good law for refugees.
#
We have not acceded to the UN conventions on these issues.
#
We definitely need to go to legislation.
#
But what we don't need is a legislation which under the garb of providing citizenship to
#
refugees effectively is discriminatory and alongside the NRC creates a situation where
#
a lot of people can be consigned to a legal limbo.
#
And it strikes me as two observations here.
#
One is really a question.
#
And the observation one is that how for a lot of this, you essentially need to read
#
between the lines and you need to consider context.
#
For example, like you said, a refugee law is a great thing.
#
If you just look at the CAB in an abstract that persecuted minorities from all of these
#
countries will be given blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
#
It sounds great until you realize what they left out.
#
And this omission is a deliberate one because time after time you will actually see, for
#
example, Amit Shah on his speeches and there are many videos of this where he will talk
#
about all the different religions which should be accepted when they are refugees.
#
And the one notable omission always, of course, is Muslims.
#
And combined with the NRC, when you get that sort of context, you realize what's going
#
The other point that I'm slightly puzzled about and completely ignorant of really is
#
that, look, I get it that parties have these tropes which go on over years, if not decades.
#
And you spoke about how Karat is, for example, thinking of his vote bank when he made the
#
Now I get a lot of the Hindutva tropes have been coming from the 1910s, 1920s.
#
So you know, cow slaughter is an old one, love jihad is an old one, from after independence
#
you have the Hindu court bill and blah, blah.
#
All of these are standard tropes, anti-Muslim tropes, often anti-Dalit tropes.
#
They've been coming around.
#
But this particular trope of, you know, Muslim migrants specifically being left out sort
#
of baffles me a bit because I see them as, you know, on the one hand, the whole RSS movement
#
is right out of Nagpur.
#
And on the other hand, the BJP is largely a North Indian party till recently when they
#
are sort of, and now, of course, expanding.
#
In all of these places, this is not such a huge issue, is it?
#
I mean, it affects such a small number of people.
#
I think when Nehru spoke of these kinds of migrants once, people who are coming back
#
from Pakistan, I think he mentioned the whole debate as being dust on a pan.
#
It's a minuscule number of people.
#
Why is it then such a huge issue?
#
Well, for one thing that in the particular context of Assam and northeast of India, which
#
we will talk about, it was not a dust in the pan as it turned out, right?
#
I mean, the flow of people, et cetera, continued for much longer.
#
Again, the numbers are very unclear because there are no reliable statistics, but it has
#
effectively, it has been an issue which is at most in the minds of people of that religion.
#
And that has been then since, you know, taken over by the BJP and imported onto the national
#
So in a sense, this whole category of somebody called an infiltrator and to contrast that
#
infiltrator with a refugee, right?
#
So like Mr. Shah says, there are Sharanarathi, who's a refugee, and there is Guzpatia, who's
#
So we will pull the infiltrators out, right?
#
Now, is anyone going to be able to really establish whether they have fled because of
#
religious persecution, et cetera, et cetera?
#
It's obviously as a practical point, it is moot, I think the answer is very well known.
#
But the reality is that this kind of a distinction allows them to make a important point, which
#
goes back to your earlier point, which is that I think the one very important thing
#
we have to recognize about the BJP's approach to these questions, right?
#
And this is not just about the current BJP, but I think it goes back all the way to Mr.
#
Advani's invocation of this notion of pseudo-secularism, is that the BJP has found ways of actually
#
packaging each of these substantial changes that it wants to bring about to the constitutional
#
sort of fabric of this country by presenting it as if they are the vindication of various
#
kinds of progressive liberal agendas, which all of us should actually sort of most welcome.
#
Why would you protest against criminalization of triple talaq?
#
It is about Muslim women's rights, yeah?
#
You're talking about patriarchy, how can you oppose it?
#
That's the question, right?
#
How can you say that, listen, we are opposed to Article 370, it is about fighting terrorism
#
and ensuring unity of this country.
#
Do you support terrorism?
#
So how can you support this?
#
Why will you oppose a uniform civil code when we agree that we are all liberal citizens
#
and that it's now been such a long time?
#
How can we say that it's not, right?
#
Let alone the fact that there are Ambedkar resigned over the Hindu code bill.
#
He was unhappy with what was being offered to the Hindus because he thought that was
#
not going far enough, right?
#
In a sense, if you're talking about uniform civil code, the Hindu code has as many problems
#
as any other code of any other community in this country has.
#
And hopefully we'll have a chance to discuss that at some point of time.
#
In fact, it has materially benefited the Hindus much more than any civil laws of any other
#
I have a feeling the next time we'll do an episode is when the uniform civil code comes
#
So anyway, as we move from legislation to legislation and history to history, but the
#
point is that they have captured this language, right?
#
And again, today, you know, while on the campaign trail, Mr. Shah and subsequently, if you read,
#
you know, the publications of the, you know, RSS, you know, they've been very clear that
#
the CAB and NRC are processes and in fact, the correct sequence is CAB should have come
#
In fact, that is a criticism of the NRC.
#
And this is something, mind you, this is something, there are these lot of defenses being made
#
on Twitter about how these two are not connected and as if we are concocting them.
#
But there are videos of Amit Shah specifically using the word sequencing, where he's talking
#
about how they go together.
#
No, but the reality is that now that they understand that people have gotten this nexus
#
between these two things, and that is in some ways driving a lot of the concern around this
#
The attempt over the last three, four days has been effectively to say that these are
#
completely different things, right?
#
So you have all these FAQs being given by unnamed, unsigned, you know, sources within
#
Alleged government releases.
#
ANI and others are putting it out, right?
#
Saying that, listen, why should the CAA, the citizenship amendment, which has been bought
#
in, is actually about giving citizenship.
#
It is not about taking citizenship away.
#
So why are you guys assuming that anybody's citizenship is going to be deprived, right?
#
So you leave NRC out of the picture altogether, right?
#
And then when you asked about the NRC, you say, listen, the rules are yet to be framed.
#
We will frame them in such liberal ways that, right?
#
So in a sense, this invites us to a certain form of politics, you know, which the great
#
German writer and film director Alexander Kluge calls learning processes with a deadly
#
If you are going to sit around, what they want us to do is to wait and see how this
#
That's what Mr. Shah said.
#
For the rest of us, we have to understand that the outcome might actually be very deadly
#
And Prime Minister Modi said the same thing about demonetization.
#
Wait 50 days and blah, blah, blah.
#
So in that sense, that has been the way that they are packaged.
#
Now, again, I will say that, you know, you have to commend them for their ideological
#
consistency on these issues and they do have a majority.
#
But as we discussed earlier, parliamentary majority does not mean that you have all the
#
rights to overturn every constitutional principle.
#
So long as people are willing to stand up for them, the courts are willing to stand
#
up for the constitution.
#
I think there is a point still to be made, whether it gets us anywhere or not, I don't
#
But I think the point should be made and is being made.
#
So Srinath, let's kind of move on now and let's talk about Assam because Assam sort
#
of is at the focus of a lot of this talk.
#
And that is something that, you know, that's a game that's been playing out for much longer
#
than the last 70 years and much before independence.
#
And the point is the migration has been a burning issue there from well within colonial
#
And I think Assam has emerged as a major flashpoint in the current discussion and it has its own
#
And I think it is important to understand those peculiarities both so as not to flatten
#
out the picture of trying to say that, listen, everybody is kind of broadly thinking about
#
the same sets of things.
#
And secondly, also to not to tar the Assamese sort of protests with possibly a wrong brush,
#
We have to understand their concerns from their point of view as well before we arrive
#
at quick judgements about what those things are, right?
#
And as you said, Assam, the history of Assam in the 20th century and even in fact already
#
from the late 19th century has been very strongly shaped by waves of migration, right?
#
And it's important to understand what are the various kinds of things that are of concern
#
So, you know, the ethnic Assamese or the Kilondia as they are nowadays referred to, they have
#
had to deal with various kinds of influxes of people and their identity has been shaped
#
as all identities tend to be in some degree of contradistinction with these various kinds
#
So, on the one hand, they had to face the influx of upper caste Hindu Bengalis, particularly
#
from Silet, which is actually a Bengal dominated district.
#
Yeah, now with Bangladesh.
#
But under colonial, once, you know, the British Raja had taken over what is today's Assam,
#
they had attached this Bengali majority district on to Assam and a lot of the administration,
#
the bureaucracy of the British Raj as it operated, the provincial government as it operated in
#
Assam was actually staffed by these Bengali speaking upper caste Hindus who came from
#
And this is also a period when the Bengali language was coming into its own as part of
#
the so-called Bengal Renaissance.
#
So, there is a degree of cultural assertiveness of the Bengalis, of pride in their language
#
and culture, which naturally grates and goes against what the Assamese, you know, so there
#
is a fundamental problem, right?
#
Just as in the case of, say, a state like Burma, you know, Burmese's relationship with
#
the British Raj is mediated through various people who were staffing the civil service
#
who are actually of people of Indian origin or of other peoples like your mercantile communities
#
which are Chettiyars from what is today's Tamil Nadu, right, who are operating there.
#
So, it's a very similar situation.
#
So, it's not an unmediated relationship, it is mediated through the Bengali Hindus through
#
a separate elite, which in this case happens to be not an Assamese elite, but Bengalis.
#
Not an Assamese speaking, they are Bengalis speaking Hindus.
#
I think that's the first point to make.
#
Now from the turn of the 20th century, right, around 1901 or thereabouts because that's
#
the time in census figures we have, we experience what the great historian of Bangladesh, William
#
Van Schendel calls the closing of the agrarian frontier of East Bengal by which he means
#
that per capita pressure of people on every square kilometer of land in East Bengal becomes
#
There are so many more people than the land can support that there is a natural migration
#
of people from the closing frontier in search of other spaces which where they can work,
#
where they can get some land.
#
So, a lot of them are willing to go and work in parts of Assam where others which are seen
#
as areas which are there, right.
#
So, there is, as with every migration, there is a pull factor and there is a push factor,
#
So, in this case, the push factor is the closing of the agrarian frontier of Bengal and particularly
#
we see that from the district of Maiman Singh, of Pabna, of Rangpur, there is a huge influx
#
of Bengali speaking Muslims from East Bengal, many of whom are people who are looking to
#
work some piece of land where they can live and survive work, right, because agrarian
#
Bengal is basically facing a form of involution and that becomes a very important thing, right.
#
And this is pre-independence.
#
This is again pre-independence, but the numbers are pretty striking, the number of people
#
who sort of come in and who are there.
#
So, there is a push factor, but there is also a pull factor.
#
The British Raj sees this as a great opportunity to put more areas of Assam under various forms
#
of agriculture, thereby enabling them to draw more land revenue.
#
So, they also enable these people to sort of come.
#
So, there is a push and there is a pull because of which agricultural migrant labor from East
#
Bengal, majority of the Muslim speaking Bengalis come into those and those communities settle
#
in various parts of the Singh in the Brahmaputra Valley and other parts.
#
Even today, they are referred to as Mias, Mias Muslims, right.
#
The Mias are basically people who came from Iman Singh, but there were people who came
#
from other parts as well, as I said, of these adjoining areas of East Bengal.
#
So, you had Hindu Bengalis with whom you have a problem.
#
Then you have this huge influx of Muslim Bengalis and the Assamese feel that, listen, you know,
#
this is, you know, and the whole pre-partition history of Assam in some ways revolves around
#
this question of how do we deal with these two things?
#
How do we, first of all, get select out of this thing so that we are beyond the domination
#
Secondly, how do we deal with this problem of these extraordinary numbers of people who
#
are waves of immigration which is happening and which seems to be changing the demography?
#
And then the leaders of the Assam, you know, provincial Congress, et cetera, always made
#
it a point to tell the national leadership that, you know, we want the Indian nation,
#
but you have to understand our peculiar problems as well and these are there, right.
#
And then they never got the kind of traction because as today, back then, North East is
#
seen as not just on the margins of the map of India but on our mental maps as well, right.
#
So it never really got the kind of traction that it did.
#
But around the time of partition, the politics of Assam became quite heated, right, because
#
there was a feeling that, listen, we may well lose all of Assam to Pakistan if an eastern
#
wing of it was created.
#
And it was the Congress leaders of Assam who were at the forefront of the opposition to
#
the so-called, you know, the cabinet mission plan of 1946 which talked about some kind
#
of a confederal arrangement, but which would have clubbed Assam with the eastern province
#
of Bengal as well, right.
#
And that the Assamese did not want to and they fought tooth and nail.
#
And anyway, you had partition, Silat, as I said earlier on, there was a referendum and
#
it was, you know, attached now then to East Pakistan, subsequently became part of Bangladesh,
#
But what happens in the context of the eastern end of the partition of India, which is Bengal
#
and Assam, and is that, you know, both Indian and Pakistani leaders, funnily enough, assume
#
that unlike the Punjab, you know, here minorities are broadly going to stay put because there
#
is not that much of large-scale violence, you know, in Punjab there was a conflagration,
#
I mean, one of the members of the constituent assembly debates calls it a holocaust even
#
It is recognized as an issue of that gravity.
#
Whereas in Bengal, you don't get that kind of sense that there is that extraordinary
#
level of violence which is happening, right.
#
And there are periodic strokes of violence.
#
In one of our previous episodes, we talked about the Bengal crisis of 1950, which comes
#
out of a communal sort of riots in both places, you know, there is a movement of people.
#
That particular episode comes to an end due to an agreement between Nehru and the Pakistani
#
Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, which says that minority rights in both places will be
#
Minorities can go back, they can take possession of property, et cetera, right.
#
Now, the Liaquat Ali Khan, you know, the Nehru-Liaquat pact also then enables in some ways a further
#
sort of movement of people back and forth, right.
#
So, and the Assamese are continuously concerned by what they think is the apathy of the government
#
of India towards their particular concern.
#
They feel, you know, all your laws, everything is very focused on what's happening in the
#
western borders, but you know, you have just left Assam more or less to this thing.
#
But nevertheless, under the urging of the Assam government, the central government of
#
India in 1950 passes an act which is called the Immigrants Expulsion from Assam Act of
#
1950, which is an act passed by the parliament, especially for Assam, which says that, listen,
#
if there are illegal migrants who are in Assam, there must be provisions whereby they can
#
be sent back from there, right.
#
But what happens is that soon after this act is bought into place, you have the Nehru-Liaquat
#
pact, which is seen as diluting these two things.
#
So, as a further way of assuaging the concerns of Assamese and of dealing with the particular
#
problem of this kind of constant flow of people through what was a porous border, in 1951,
#
the Assam government undertook the exercise called NRC, National Register for Citizens,
#
which was an exercise which was conducted solely in Assam and was twinned with the census
#
So, they basically took more details than what a census would include in address and
#
they maintained that for district by district.
#
So, that is the original NRC, right.
#
So, what is happening now is effectively an exercise for sort of, whatever, recreating
#
that NRC, updating it, so to speak, right.
#
So, that is when 1951 is when the first kind of NRC type exercise is brought in.
#
But the reality is that even then, the flow of migrants because of these kinds of natural
#
factors, you know, that it is what you might think of as a secularly driven thing, right.
#
It is not just that Hindus from East Pakistan are coming, but even Muslim migrants from
#
East Pakistan still came to Assam in search of work, you know, they would be temporary,
#
they'd come, they'd go back, it's a porous border and so on, right.
#
Particularly in the years 1964 and 65, you had a, you know, important uptick.
#
You know, we have numbers, particularly for Hindu migrants of that period in the National
#
Archives, which I looked up as part of one of my earlier pieces of research.
#
And you know, in between 1964 and 65, in just those two years, you had over 800,000 Hindus
#
who came from East Pakistan to India.
#
And these were particularly peak years because in 1964, again, there was a bit of a communal
#
riot all across the subcontinent.
#
You know, there's this incident in Kashmir where a relic, which is believed to be the
#
hair of the Prophet Muhammad, it's called the Muayyam-e-Kaddas, was lost or was stolen.
#
And there was a huge, this thing, and at that point of time, there were riots and then the
#
movement happened, right.
#
But so you did have those kinds of peaks, but those were sort of controllable.
#
But 1964, 65, again, then becomes an important year because that's a period when there's
#
What causes, I mean, is there anything that causes a spike in particular?
#
As I said, it was primarily over those, you know, the fact was that, you know, the Prophet's
#
hair was supposed to have gone missing from the Hazratbal.
#
And that then leads to a lot of protests amongst the Muslims and agitation.
#
And then there are communal riots which happen not just in India, but in other parts of the
#
subcontinent as well, Pakistan and East Pakistan.
#
So you have Hindus fleeing from there, basically refugees.
#
So again, what we see is that, you know, it is usually events around these kinds of things,
#
right, which tend to give post-partition big spikes.
#
As I said, you know, post the Babri Masjid, there was again in more recent times, nothing
#
of comparable numbers, but still there was even from Bangladesh as well as Pakistan,
#
you had Hindus coming in.
#
So that is what you have.
#
So anyway, so in order to deal with this burgeoning problem, the Assam government in 1964 brings
#
in a piece of legislation which is called the Foreigners Tribunal Order, which basically
#
sets up a series of tribunals in order to identify people who are illegal migrants into
#
Assam and then to send them back to the other thing, right.
#
And these tribunals are active from about late 1969 till March 1973, at which point
#
of time the tribunals have wound up because it is felt that they have more or less done
#
their job, whoever had to be identified had been done, right.
#
But this is also the period when another cataclysm happens in the subcontinent is the 1971 war
#
and the flow of approximately 10 million refugees from Bangladesh into India.
#
Which we have had an episode on.
#
So people who are interested in the background can go back and listen.
#
But what I want to say is that, you know, that the extraordinary flow of the refugees
#
into India at one stroke threatened the demographic balance of a number of parts of North India,
#
A state like Tripura, for instance.
#
I mean, it had three times the number of refugees than it had local people.
#
And in some ways, its demographic composition was unalterably changed because of that.
#
And the Indian government's own resolution and desire to ensure that these people went
#
back was ultimately the reason why they went to war, right.
#
Because you wanted to create conditions where those refugees go back.
#
That was Mrs. Gandhi's demand from the beginning to the end.
#
Because it was unviable basically for India to manage so many refugees.
#
But you can't send them back as long as there's a genocide happening, which in a sense there
#
So the best thing is that you, you know, get rid of the circumstances which make it unfriendly.
#
So, so, so 10 million refugees, the numbers are obviously mind boggling for a poor country
#
like India, but they were all concentrated in areas where refugees and migrants and immigration
#
was already such a problematic issue, right.
#
So you have to see it in that context.
#
Now what happens is that in 1972, after the Bangladesh war is over, Mrs. Gandhi goes to
#
Dhaka and there is a sort of a set of things that she discusses with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
#
And one of the things which they agree is that when we are talking about the repatriation
#
of refugees from India back to Bangladesh, the cutoff date for deciding who are the people
#
who should be repatriated was 24th of March, 1971, because it's on 25th that the crackdown
#
by the Pakistan army begins.
#
So they say that anyone who came before the 24th of March will not be seen as, you know,
#
someone who has to be deported.
#
So in effect, they are somehow de facto to be accommodated within India and they have
#
So there is an international agreement which, or whatever, an understanding which she sort
#
of, you know, arrives at in order to solve a problem and to maintain good relations with
#
this new state that you have helped to create.
#
But it has repercussions for you domestically, because what happens is that then the movement
#
in Assam then tends to become to say that, listen, if we are really going to say that,
#
you know, everyone who has only, you know, come before 1971 can stay on, what are we
#
What happens to all those people who came from 47 to 71?
#
So let's say, or 1951 to 71, let's say when the NRC was done, those 20 years, we know
#
that so much of movement has happened.
#
How are we going to deal with this?
#
Are we going to sort of let everyone be here?
#
Then over a period of time, you know, Assamese are going to become a minority.
#
So there is that concern which is there.
#
So you have to understand that there is a real problem which they have to deal with.
#
Now, in the post-emergency period, you know, as with many other parts of India, the politics
#
of Assam tends to get quite scrambled.
#
About a year after the emergency comes to an end, you have a first Janata government
#
coming to power in this thing.
#
And then subsequently, when Mrs. Gandhi comes back to power, you have, you know, a new sort
#
of elections which are announced.
#
And it is at that point of time that the All Assam Students Union, also which has been sort
#
of a student union, which has been talking about and agitating on this issue for almost
#
a decade by that point of time, really starts making, you know, very urgent, important demands
#
saying that the electoral rules have to be revised and all illegal migrants have to be
#
struck out of that role and that we are not going to solve this thing.
#
So that becomes a very important demand.
#
And the various factions of the Janata Party, which includes the Bharti Jansang, which later
#
becomes the BJP, all come out in various forms of support for the thing.
#
So, over this next five years, effectively, in 1980, 1985, you have a series of negotiations
#
between the student movements in Assam and the central governments under Prime Ministers
#
Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, which results in the Assam Accord of 1985, right.
#
And the Assam Accord of 1995 effectively is some kind of a compromise, right.
#
Because when the talks begin, the Assamese Students Union wants the cutoff date initially
#
for determining migrants to be the NRC of 1951.
#
But then there is a moment where they say, why not choose 1966, because 64, 65 are these
#
So, you know, after that, we can do it.
#
But Indira Gandhi is very clear that, listen, it has to be 71 because I have done a deal
#
with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and we can't go back on that stuff.
#
So, that is what is at the nub of these very protracted discussions about saying, what
#
is the point at which we have to choose in order to make these people come through.
#
So, ultimately, the Assam Accords of 1985 basically says that 1966 becomes the base
#
So, all migrants who came before 1966 would be deemed as Indian citizens.
#
Now, those who came to India between 1966 and 71, which is the period that Indira Gandhi
#
was very concerned about, should register themselves as foreigners.
#
Immigrants will have to be eligible to apply for citizenship after a period of 10 years.
#
For those 10 years, they will not be allowed to come on the electoral roll of Assam.
#
However, they were allowed to hold something like passports for Indian government.
#
So, you do not have citizenship, but you have travel documents which are given to you.
#
And anyone who came after 24th of March, 1971 is an illegal immigrant.
#
So, you come up with this kind of a compromise thing and the government of India says that,
#
listen, we will enact this, we will revise the citizenship rules.
#
A tangential question though, just in practical terms, how did they determine who came when?
#
Because you know, what documents kind of proved that and I am sure Jugaar can be done for
#
those who have the smarts, but otherwise.
#
I mean, so that has always been the problem.
#
But the thing is that in order to give the Assamese a sense that, listen, their state
#
is not being run over by this thing.
#
And also, you know, frankly, both during the Assam Accords and this thing, there were Muslim
#
groups as well, which ultimately sort of signed up to these things.
#
Simply because they felt a little unable to put their own questions of citizenship to
#
Because, you know, the closure.
#
So, there's an argument that, listen, my forefathers came in the early 20th century to this part
#
You know, why should I sort of be constantly under a question mark?
#
So, I'd rather have closure.
#
So, everybody feels that they don't listen.
#
But the problem was that once the accord is signed, the actual implementation of it never
#
really happens simply because of these various kinds of complexities and so on.
#
And there is, of course, also a political dimension to it.
#
The, you know, the Congress party is seen as pro-immigrant simply because it is benefiting
#
from some kind of a vote bank.
#
And that perception is also sharpened when in 1980, particularly, when Mrs. Gandhi, you
#
know, makes the Chief Minister of Assam, a lady of Muslim origin called Anwara Taimur,
#
who was the first Muslim woman Chief Minister of any state in India, as the Chief Minister
#
And, you know, that is seen as, you know, somehow legitimizing this brand of politics
#
of, you know, giving shelter to migrants.
#
There's another thing which happens, which is very interesting during this period.
#
There is an act which is passed in 1983 called the Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunals
#
Now, by saying that, what they say is that we'll set up tribunals which will weed out
#
So we are catering to your demand.
#
But actually, the provisions of the act are that it was incumbent upon neighbors of suspected
#
illegal immigrants to go and complain about them.
#
So effectively, what the government was bargaining was that we could bring in such a law.
#
People would, you could tell the people of Assam that, listen, we have done something
#
But at the same time, you put the owners on communities which are unlikely to, you know,
#
where people do want to work together.
#
You trust that people believe that, you know, day-to-day living is more important than these
#
And how do you, how do you even prove, like, if you can't prove where you come from, how
#
do you even prove where your neighbor came from?
#
So the owners is put on the, you know, that the complainant has to go and complain and
#
And in fact, the, in the Assam Accords negotiations, the, the All Assam Students Union and others,
#
they very strongly wanted this act to be repealed because they said that this is actually preventing
#
us from, you know, doing it because, you know, there is no real provision there for doing
#
But at that point of time, when the Rajiv Gandhi government was closing it, all they
#
said was that we'll give you an assurance that we will look at this particular act, but
#
it's an act of parliament.
#
We can't just as a accord between, you know, two parties, we just cannot tear it up and
#
You know, in a sense that they said this, but it's very interesting because there is
#
There is a public interest litigation filed against this act in the IMDT.
#
And the IMDT is actually struck down by the Supreme Court in 2005 as ultraviolet is the
#
And the person who leads this PIL is the current chief minister of Assam, Sarbananda Sonowal.
#
So there, you can see that there is a strand of the movement within Assam, which has sort
#
of, you know, made this whole story of illegal immigrants, et cetera, central, not just in
#
the context of what the ASU and, you know, the students unions wanted at that point of
#
time with the Assam Accords.
#
So effectively you had a situation where the Assam Accords promised some things, but they
#
were not able to deliver that.
#
And it's only from about 2005, mid 2000s, that the talk of doing another round of the
#
NRC comes back into circulation.
#
And by that time, you actually have a Congress government in Assam under Tarun Gogoi.
#
And they feel that, listen, maybe it's time to actually sort of do this because, you know,
#
at various levels, they are feeling the pressure.
#
And as I said, one of the interesting things about the NRC exercise in Assam, the most
#
recent one, which is proven to be, you know, sort of an albatross around the state's neck,
#
was that various groups and political parties wanted it for a variety of reasons.
#
So, of course, you had the Assamese and the Killondia sort of groups, you know, who said
#
that, listen, this is very important for us to identify who are the sort of foreigners.
#
And, you know, there is an Assam Accord which says what the cutoff dates are.
#
We have to now get this done.
#
Then you had the Congress party, which is in power, which says that, listen, it's an
#
issue on which we have not managed to sort of deliver.
#
And now, you know, Tarun Gogoi was a three time chief minister.
#
So he was fairly strong politician.
#
He felt that, listen, we could actually shepherd a process like this through.
#
Then you have the, you know, BJP and others who come in and make this an important sort
#
And then subsequently, you know, the issue comes up before the Supreme Court and the
#
Supreme Court takes charge of the process.
#
So that's how the NRC actually ends up playing out in the context of Assam.
#
But what, and it's also noteworthy that a number of intellectuals of Assam, of all political
#
persuasions, especially liberals, Marxists, you know, people like Hiren Gohen and other
#
very respected people actually said that maybe this will allow us to put this question behind
#
But that has proved to be totally a false hope because what has happened is that you
#
eventually have today about 1.9 million people who have not been able to, you know, prove
#
that they are citizens.
#
The government has not told us what the sort of religious compositions of these numbers
#
are, but the numbers which are doing the rounds are that maybe about a million of them are
#
Because Muslims in Assam, because they knew that this was coming, have been actually much
#
more diligent about trying to do this and been more organized in some ways.
#
And you know, now you have a lot of million Hindus who cannot prove it.
#
And you did not have the Citizenship Amendment Act, which was passed in time for this to
#
happen for them to get this backdoor entry into it.
#
And that is the reason now the same party which has spearheaded the movement and won
#
power in Assam on the basis of the NRC saying that, you know, we are going to do that, which
#
is a BJP and you know, it's its ideologues in Assam have said that, you know, we don't
#
accept the result of this NRC.
#
Assam should have an NRC as part of a national NRC.
#
And before the national NRC, you're going to have the Citizenship Amendment Bill passed
#
And that the Citizenship Amendment Bill solves the problem of the many Hindus who do not
#
have papers because here you can just de facto assume therefore that even if they don't have
#
the papers, they're refugees.
#
But the current agitation against the CAB is precisely for that reason.
#
Now, see, the Assam movement has never been particularly conceived of itself as a Hindu
#
As I said, their problem has been with their identities have been conceived of in contradistinction
#
to Bengalis of various kinds.
#
It is Hindu Bengalis from the older lot as well as Hindu Bengalis who came from East
#
Pakistan, many of whom are settled in the Barak Valley.
#
So for the people of the Ramaputra Valley, you know, the fact that, you know, that is
#
There is the various forms of Muslim migrants from East Pakistan, Bangladesh, who have come
#
in over a period of time, right.
#
So the Assamese demand today in protest against the CAB is actually not a Hindu versus Muslim
#
one primarily, though there are obviously like all movements, they have various strands
#
But the main strand is of saying, listen, the CAB cuts against the promise of the Assam
#
In the Assam Accord, you said that, listen, these are the three principles by which you
#
are going to determine who is a citizen and who is not.
#
So why are you creating a back door to allow more people to become citizens?
#
That may serve your Hindutva agenda in the broader sense, it may, you know, help you
#
give you a shot in the arm in Bengal, but it's going to sort of once again put us into
#
Jopadhi because our problem is that we are more concerned about number of Bengalis speakers
#
in the state rather than about whether they are primarily Hindu or Muslim.
#
So that problem has a history.
#
And I just want to step back here for a second.
#
It's very easy for liberals to sort of look at the protests in Assam and say that, oh,
#
you know, they're being xenophobic because they're against migration.
#
But I just want to shift the frame of reference slightly.
#
For example, right now we have this default frame of reference that we belong to India.
#
And when we look back on what our freedom fighters did in the 1910s or 20s and all that,
#
it seems very virtuous.
#
But if you shift the frame of reference, you know, one step upwards to the British Empire
#
as such, they looked at those acts as seditious for them.
#
Bhagat Singh is not a freedom fighter, but a terrorist.
#
Similarly, let's shift the frame of reference from the Indian point of view to perhaps the
#
Assamese point of view.
#
And here I'm going to quote a para from Sanjeev Barua, whose great book India Against Itself,
#
you recommended to me and which I'll link from the show notes, where he says, quote,
#
there is a long history of resistance to colonial and post-colonial rulers treating the territory
#
as land without people or land with barely any people.
#
Frontiers are not empty places.
#
It is unequal political power and often conquest that turns some people's lands into the frontiers
#
Efforts to reclaim their ancestral lands in the local past and to assert the historical
#
presence of political communities against the discourse of power have been dominant
#
themes in the politics of Assam and Northeast India for nearly a century.
#
And everything you're saying ties into that in the sense that you have these Assamese
#
people, they're being ruled by these colonial oppressors.
#
These colonial oppressors then foist, you know, a layer of administrators above them
#
who tend to be these upper caste Bengali Hindus from Silhet.
#
And then because they want to sort of cultivate Assam and get more agricultural revenue and
#
so on, they enable the large scale migration of Bengali Muslims now from what later became
#
And for them, it is all of these people coming into their land and intermingling.
#
And the questions that you have to ask is, and it's a similar question to what you ask
#
about Kashmir is that it's fine.
#
We can be proud of India as it is, you know, we managed to integrate so many states and
#
But on the one hand, what really was the will of the people?
#
Did we ever ascertain that?
#
And second, as in the case of Kashmir, though perhaps to a greater extent, who are the people?
#
You know, you have to keep then redefining that.
#
You know, so it's a much more complex problem that is there going back to as far back as
#
our very own freedom struggle.
#
And it's a quest for identity, which as Indians or as whatever other subnationalisms we might
#
But the Assamese haven't sorted out and that is a ferment that is there.
#
No, and you know, I entirely agree with you.
#
I think these are sort of projects and problems of subnationalism and the ways to cope with
#
it and what the relationship of these subnationalism movements of various kinds to Indian nationalism
#
is has never been a settled question.
#
But as I said, one of the things that the sort of founding generation of this country,
#
particularly with the constitution and the early years, attempted to do was to say that,
#
listen, we have to recognize these diversities and find various ways of this, right?
#
So you know, everyone today knows Article 370, thanks to its being sort of thrown into
#
the dustbin of history.
#
But there is Article 371 as well, right, which actually makes various kinds of exceptions
#
and various kinds of asymmetric provisions for various parts of India, including the
#
states of the Northeast, right?
#
In the Northeast itself, we've had various other kinds of things like the Inner Line
#
Permit System, right, which is there to prevent so-called outsiders from coming in, right,
#
and which gives this thing.
#
There's a sixth schedule of the Indian Constitution, right, which again says that for scheduled
#
tribes within certain areas of Northeast, there will be different kinds of provisions,
#
So the Indian Constitution as a document is actually built on these kinds of asymmetries
#
and an attempt to say that we need to have a flexible enough framework.
#
And what the Assamese today are demanding is that we respect their sub-nationalist sort
#
of agenda and history, not tear up the Assam Accords, which is an accord signed between
#
the representatives of the people of Assam and the central government of India.
#
Through a unilateral act, they say that it is opposed to federalism.
#
In fact, what is very interesting is that the earlier debates after independence of
#
Assamese and Assam's relationship to India used to be couched in the language of federalism,
#
in the language of political economy.
#
It was always felt that Assam is a state where resources are being extracted from, but production
#
There were all these debates about situating additional oil refineries within.
#
There was an oil refinery which the government of India in its wisdom decided would be in
#
Baroni, but through oil pipelines running through Assam and people felt very strongly
#
that why not development for Assam.
#
So issues of identity, therefore, I don't think are purely only about history.
#
They're also about your relationship to the larger entity that you're a part of.
#
What is the nature of your political economy which allows those things to happen?
#
At this point of time, because of a certain political conjuncture, we tend to view this
#
as primarily driven through these things.
#
But I think if you want to look ahead and think of what might be solutions to the problem
#
which are more consonant with the kind of liberal constitutional structure that we adopted,
#
then we may have to think about other things.
#
This is not just the talk of academics, so to speak.
#
There's a very important article written by Mr. GK Pillai, who was a former home secretary
#
and who knows the Northeast very well, when the NRC exercise had concluded in Assam.
#
And he says that, listen, when there are so many people who have been determined to be
#
effectively not citizens of India, it is not a problem only for Assam.
#
It is a problem for all of India.
#
And we have to help Assam deal with this problem, by which I think he was hinting that maybe
#
other parts of India should be more welcoming of these people.
#
We have to give them various kinds of long-term work permits effectively to stay in India,
#
find other parts of citizenship to them if they don't want to go back.
#
Now we cannot just say that, listen, what are we going to do with these people?
#
And this idea that we are now taking as almost fait accompli that all of these people have
#
to be herded into these various kinds of detention centers in Assam and coming up elsewhere with
#
the NRC being nationalized, it's an extraordinarily sort of illiberal solution to a problem.
#
These are kinds of issues which state after state is grappling with.
#
If there is one issue which is, I think, most liberal societies are confronted with, it's
#
This is our immigrant problem.
#
We have to think about it in more careful terms rather than succumb to this nativism
#
of saying that, listen.
#
So yes, there is a problem that the Assamese believe.
#
Now the BJP, I think, has compounded its own problems in Assam in an important way, right?
#
Because on the one hand, when it came to power in 2016, the BJP presented itself as a Hilongi
#
government, right, as a government of the sort of native Assamese, ethnic Assamese,
#
But then its core base had always been in the Barak Valley where they were Bengali Hindus.
#
That has always been where their thing is.
#
Now in order to paper over the cracks of these things, it latched onto the NRC bandwagon
#
and aggressively pushed it.
#
Then now that the NRC is backfired because perhaps up to a million Hindus are out of
#
this charter, then you bring the CAB.
#
But the CAB then means the Brahmaputra Valley is now saying that, sorry, this does not fly
#
with us because you are going back on everything, right?
#
So there is a contradiction in the BJP's own stance and which is why I think they are now
#
at a fairly tricky point in the way that they cope with the particular issue in Assam itself.
#
But there is another very interesting provision to the amendment bill and now they act as
#
it stands amended, right?
#
So the bill actually says very clearly that none of these provisions about these various
#
kinds of things will apply to the areas where the inner line and the six scheduled areas
#
of the constitution, right?
#
Now this is, I think, intended as a swap to the other smaller states in the Northeast
#
where also the BJP has been making some intros, right?
#
So the inner line, as we know, is a, you need permits, et cetera, to sort of move in there
#
and it gives various kinds of rights to the indigenous, effectively tribal, they are the
#
scheduled tribes, right?
#
Six scheduled inner line, inner line more so.
#
Now the inner line currently is, was originally operational in Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram
#
You know, as this bill was being tabled in parliament, the inner line has been extended
#
to include Manipur because they have a BJP government there and the BJP government, they
#
are saying, why should we then, because the concern is that somehow if the inner line,
#
if this provision is not there, all of those naturalized citizens who are Hindus, if they
#
don't find place in Assam, they'll have to come to this other states of Northeast, right?
#
So there is a huge concern.
#
But actually speaking, even this is a bit of an eye wash.
#
What it does is to allow the BJP to say that we are taking into account the concerns of
#
the smaller states, but actually it doesn't change a thing in reality because between
#
the inner line and the sixth schedule, they already turn on the difference between the
#
indigene who are the scheduled tribes and others who are Indian citizens normally so
#
So unless and until there is some extraordinary way by which those who are being naturalized
#
as Indian citizens can also become scheduled tribes, they are not going to be able to get
#
any more or any less benefits than other Indian citizens in that area will.
#
So the provision is just random political posturing.
#
It's just a random political posturing which is there just to buy time.
#
And the reality is that you can only buy this much time because the peoples of those areas
#
are highly sensitive to these problems, which is what I was saying that this attempt to
#
play these various kinds of religiously driven politics in the Northeast can actually end
#
up tearing the region apart in very important ways.
#
And I think we have to be mindful of what exactly is happening there.
#
So even as we are focusing on the protests which are happening in other parts of India,
#
let's understand that Northeast of India is also at a very crucial point in its history,
#
just like Kashmir is, in a sense.
#
And there I think there is a very important parallel at least to my mind between what
#
happens in the case of Assam and the Northeast and what's happening in Kashmir, which I think
#
is fundamentally a problem of the BJP government's approach to federalism.
#
Article 370 also came out as a result of a compact between the Constituent Assembly
#
of India and Sheikh Abdullah and his colleagues.
#
It was negotiated over five months.
#
That was unilaterally torn up and thrown in.
#
Much the same is what the Assamese fear are happening with the Assamese courts.
#
Now this is a fundamental problem of federalism.
#
In the 370 case, it was very sad to note that many parties like DDP, etc., which were created
#
on the platform of federalism, actually ended up supporting that.
#
A lot of others have supported the current sets of bills.
#
But of course, a lot of other states now, 11 by last count, have said that they're not
#
going to allow the NRC to happen.
#
So in a sense, this is an issue as much about federalism as about other kinds of questions
#
of equity, other principles which are at the front of the constitution.
#
And my question to you would be, look, whatever I've written and read about Kashmir and after
#
the episode that you and I did together, my sense was that what has happened in Kashmir
#
this year is irreversible.
#
I think we will suffer the consequences for decades because of the sort of alienation
#
that you've definitely created among the people there with these four months of internet block
#
out and by gifting them what Mr. Shah calls normalcy.
#
Give me a sense of how close are the events in Assam, if not the rest of the country,
#
also close to reaching a sort of an irreversible stage where you can't turn the clock back,
#
where you've created schisms and you've created fault lines or deepened fault lines to an
#
extent where it's very hard to undo the damage?
#
No, I think definitely in the context of Assam and the Bhramaputra Valley, we have turned
#
the clock back to a situation which was much more violent.
#
People who might have read newspapers in the early 1980s would routinely come across news
#
about what is happening in Assam and that was a very important, very agitated period
#
There's the infamous massacre in Nellie, 1983, where maybe up to 3,000 migrants were effectively
#
seen as illegal migrants were set upon by a group of indigenous plains tribals and massacred
#
There are people like Shekhar Gupta who were reported from there who still refer to that
#
as a touch point in terms of their memory.
#
Imagine if 3,000 migrants were massacred, not in Nellie, but in Delhi.
#
Yeah, again, we'll have to check the exact number, but I think the official figures are
#
lesser, but the unofficial toll puts it at 3,000 and the fact that we might actually
#
be looking at going back to a period of such intense ethnic hostility and rivalry to me
#
is a very dangerous sign of what is to come and see, ultimately, as I said, these are
#
things which can only work if we have a degree of patience and political judgment to understand
#
that this is a very diverse country.
#
If we believe that, listen, there is one agenda which is going to be set, whether it is ideological
#
or political, and that we are going to ram this through, then I think invariably there
#
The Indira Gandhi years of Indian politics are an object historical lesson for us in
#
that context, the extraordinary centralization of power under Mrs. Gandhi led to various
#
kinds of physically various movements, the Punjab, Assam, all of these began in the context
#
where you had a central government which was abusing constitutionally vested powers, in
#
her case, particularly with Article 356 and the imposition of president's rule, and of
#
course subsequently the emergency provisions and the imposition of the emergency and all
#
the other brutality which went with that.
#
Now, if you want to keep this country as a broadly functioning federation, then I think
#
that degree of excessive centralization is always going to be problematic, and the dialectic
#
between excessive centralization and devolution of powers to provinces is a much larger one
#
playing out throughout modern Indian history, going back at least to several centuries.
#
So in that sense, we have to learn something from our own history.
#
And you know, two sort of related questions here.
#
One is that we had almost at some point assumed that recently, especially after the election
#
results were out, that the BJP have gained some kind of intellectual hegemony in India,
#
that finally their side of the story, that their ideology has sort of won the day.
#
And when we were sitting earlier today at Carbox, which is actually in Santa Cruz, but
#
it's okay to call it Carbox, you mentioned to me that you disagreed with that thinking
#
and you wouldn't call it a hegemony.
#
Can you elaborate on that?
#
Well, I mean, the argument about hegemony is basically to say that, listen, you have
#
a political party which commands the consent of a majority of people in this country, right?
#
And every hegemony is always partial.
#
In fact, by definition, Antonio Gramsci, the person who kind of came up with the modern
#
sort of notions of hegemony, the Italian Marxist thinker, Gramsci is one of his important points
#
about hegemony is that hegemony is always the interest of one group, which is laying
#
claim to represent the interests of the rest of the society, right?
#
To the extent that you are able to persuade the rest of the society that their interests
#
are actually best represented by your interests and your platform, you have commanded hegemony,
#
The other way of thinking about hegemony is that consent in a hegemonic system always
#
is greater than coercion.
#
So you don't need to use the tanda, so to speak, to keep people in check, right?
#
And in some ways, electoral systems, automatically democratic parliamentary systems like ours
#
and also other kinds of systems which based on electing leaders do confer a degree of
#
legitimacy because we believe in the legitimacy of the process.
#
We may dislike this or that party, but we will always accept the outcome.
#
To that extent, there is a mechanism for legitimation for gaining hegemony, which is there.
#
But the discussion around hegemony and here there have been very interesting writings
#
by Yogendra Yadav, my friend Vinland Vaishnav, others have written about this particular
#
thing is to say, you know, what is the nature of that kind of hegemony and to what extent
#
have they actually managed to do it, right?
#
And I think the second sort of victory in 2019 and the increase to a 300 plus majority
#
effectively was seen as a great approbation, right?
#
And again, I don't want to minimize the scale of that victory.
#
I mean, I think getting, you know, 35 percent plus vote share in a first pass the post system
#
is a formidable achievement for most political parties.
#
So I wouldn't want to minimize that even one bit.
#
But I think from there to suggest that, listen, hegemony is kind of more or less in place
#
because, you know, 370, just look at it, people just applaud what they are doing, was to perhaps
#
misunderstand the challenges of hegemony, right?
#
And to understand that hegemony is a very friable project.
#
And what seems as commanding concept at any point of time can always be shown up to be
#
And I think this moment to me is important, not because I don't know what the political
#
future of this country is and so on.
#
But to me, what it suggests is that we may have exaggerated notions of the BJP's hegemony,
#
the way in which the law enforcement machinery has been used even in the recent past, not
#
to mention the way in which the media has been suborned for a while now and other institutions
#
have been let loose on political opponents, you know, et cetera.
#
I don't want to say anything about the judiciary, suggests that, you know, actually speaking,
#
the margin of coercion seems to be greater than the margin of consent out here.
#
And the BJP simply cannot take consent for granted.
#
It cannot assume that just because it is one majority, a thumping majority, no less, on
#
the basis of a political platform, that every bit of that platform is ticked off by the
#
people irrespective of whether it cuts against their fundamental rights and what the protections
#
of the constitution are.
#
I think that in that sense, this moment suggests to invoke a phrase from the great historian
#
Ranjit Guha, there is dominance, but perhaps without hegemony.
#
No, and in fact, you know, that video, which, you know, all of us have seen, which, you
#
know, of Ram Guha being surrounded by those three uniformed cops and sort of dragged away
#
by the arm was at first heartbreaking, but also heartening because then it shows you
#
the power of ideas, you know, that three uniformed men need to, that there is so much fear in
#
the establishment that they are striking out with, that they feel the need to strike down
#
with the force of the state, with coercion, as you said, and you cannot take consent for
#
granted and what is even more heartening, and this is what I want to sort of ask you
#
about next, as we have spoken about students movements in past episodes.
#
And this is so incredibly heartening that you have the opposition parties who are pretty
#
much absent from the fray, or who are unable to say anything new or original, who are unable
#
to oppose in constructive ways.
#
I mean, all of this is happening in a week where Madhya Pradesh, I think offered that
#
if you give blankets to cows, you get gun licenses, some nonsense like that, and that's
#
a Congress rule state, which is why I say the Congress is a party of Kamal Nath, not
#
Rahul Gandhi, because in practice that is what they are.
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But leaving that sort of rank aside, it's just incredibly heartening to see so many
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students come together and these are spontaneous demonstrations in some cases, like in Delhi,
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for example, the mobile internet was shut down in large parts in Bangalore section 144
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In fact, 144 was imposed in all of Uttar Pradesh, 200 million people, which is mind blowing
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and I think pretty unprecedented and, you know, it's beyond colonial and it's just
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No, and I think it's also an important moment in the history of student movements and, you
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know, in the context of 20th century India itself, right?
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Because these students have been a part of much of the mobilization around the nationalist
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movement which happened from 1920 thereabouts, right?
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So they were in the non-cooperation movement, Gandhi called on them to sort of leave their
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They were part of the civil disobedience movement.
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They were very fundamentally a part of the Quit India movement of 1942 and, you know,
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we have some very fine historical accounts of their involvement in those things.
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Post-independence, you know, there was the sense that, listen, now it's time for students
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to focus on national development and their own betterment and, you know, these kinds
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Ambedkar's warning about, you know, why don't you give up the grammar of anarchy?
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We have one freedom now, as if.
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Yeah, but that was especially applicable to the students.
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In 1955, I think, there was a, you know, student unrest and a couple of students were shot
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down in Patna and Jawaharlal Nehru actually goes there and he says that, you know, it
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is one thing to engage in intellectual politics, but this kind of demonstration, dharma and
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all that stuff is unacceptable, right?
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So there is this, you know, standard reflex that, listen, you guys should contribute to
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the nation rather than, you know, so the metaphor of discipline.
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At which point the student should have said, okay, boomer to him.
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Well, yeah, so those kinds of, you know, it is a, let's put it this way.
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I mean, you know, that strain of thinking has been quite ingrained in post-colonial
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But that has never stopped students' movements from being important, right?
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If you think of practically every major state reorganization movement, right, around linguistic
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nationalism, sub-nationalism, you know, questions of regional identity and so on, you know,
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whether it is the Samyug Maharashtra movement, whether you think of, you know, the Andhra
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movement, which began with, you know, this thing, if you think of, say, the anti-Hindi
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agitations in Tamil Nadu, think of Assam, which we have spoken about.
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All of these were, you know, students were pretty much, you know, front and center, right?
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But from the late 60s, there is a certain turn in this kind of student.
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And in fact, I think from that point, you should perhaps start calling it as youth sort
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of movements and youth politics, because the youth as a category come into its own really
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from the late 1960s, right?
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Because that is when your, you know, your institutions of higher education start getting
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There is an expansion of campuses, more people staying on campus, so campus issues become
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Even now, the precursor to this was like things around what is happening in campuses, JNU,
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It is not just that, you know, this happened today, right?
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So those kinds of issues.
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So in a sense, the youth as an autonomous kind of force in Indian politics really, again,
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just like as it happens globally everywhere, you know, 67, 68 thereabouts is very important
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And particularly in the context of West Bengal with the Naqsalbari movement, there are a
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lot of young students who move out, go to the countryside to agitate, you know, spread
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the flame of revolution, etc.
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There's a huge crackdown upon them.
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But that is an important moment, right?
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That's also incidentally an important moment in Pakistan.
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And the student movement in Pakistan actually deposes Ayub Khan in 1969, as we've sort of
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discussed in that episode on Bangladesh.
#
But you fast forward to late 1973-74, right?
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You have students' movements in two states in India, in Gujarat, the Nandan Maan movement
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and then in Bihar, both of which are, again, you know, start around student issues, then
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morph into bigger things.
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And then ultimately, Jayaprakash Narayan, you know, comes in as a person who's providing
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The two of the young leaders who came up in the student movement in Bihar were Lalu Prasad
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If you think about Indian politics today, practically every major leader that you can
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think of has entered politics in that crucible of the period between 1974 and 77.
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It's as true of Congress party as it is of the opposition.
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In fact, Jayate Lee being a student leader and Sushma Swaraj, Mr. Modi himself, you know,
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You look beyond, look at the OBC leadership of North India, as you've talked about, right?
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Lalu Yadav, Nitish Kumar, come to my state, Tamil Nadu, I mean, Stalin, who was the chief
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minister of the, you know, was his father, but, you know, he was in the forefront of
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the agitation, got beaten up, was in custody and so on.
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All of these leaders actually came to the fore.
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So in a sense, that was an extraordinary moment where this conjuncture of youth movements,
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the anti-emergency, subsequent anti-emergency protests and, you know, that period really
#
created a new set of leadership with new sets of ideas and so on.
#
If you fast forward to 1990 or thereabouts, you know, people of our generation, we will
#
remove the anti-Mandal thing, right, which is not a progressive thing as perhaps you
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and I will think about it, right?
#
But what is interesting about the current moment, I think, is that its scale and scope
#
It is much more spontaneous, less organized, less dependent on any kind of external direction,
#
at least until this point of time, on what, unlike this thing, right?
#
So in that sense, I think it was Pratap Bhanumaita, who wrote in his column, day before yesterday,
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that this is the largest student sort of movement we've seen since 1974 and I think he's right.
#
Which of course was followed by the emergency then.
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But, you know, again, history, you know, may not repeat itself, it may rhyme.
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But the reality is that, you know, in that sense, this has been quite a striking thing
#
And I think, again, you know, we should not be parochial, just look at Indian history.
#
But I think look around, I mean, see what has happened in the Arab Spring in various
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countries in the world, right?
#
Because this is politics driven by, you know, various forms of connectivity, which simply
#
were not available to an earlier generation, right?
#
I mean, the speed with which, you know, even WhatsApp messages are going around saying,
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are you going to this protest?
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Here is a list of lawyers.
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If you get caught up, just call one of these guys.
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And the globalized spread of ideas and just to see some of the placards, like one particularly
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memorable placard in Bombay was, jo Hindu Muslim razi to kya karega, Narji?
#
And of course, you know, as with many of these movements in the past, but more so today,
#
the presence of young women in such large numbers, you know, and leading the formation
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of ideas, it is very interesting.
#
But at the same time, you know, I think history, including Indian history, suggests that student
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movements always have had their limitations.
#
So it is important to recognize those as well, you know, not to assume that, you know, there
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are some kind of inbuilt problems, which is that, you know, the historian Eric Hobsbawm
#
used to say the problem with student generations is that they only last for three or four years,
#
So you won't have a permanent leadership structure emerging and something building over time.
#
These kids will be gone in a couple of years.
#
They'll be doing jobs, they'll be doing MBAs.
#
But you know, this is not just a student movement, but a youth movement.
#
That's what I was saying.
#
As I said, I mean, you know, it's a youth movement, which has also galvanized so many
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And I'm also struck by the different ways of protesting, especially by the women.
#
For example, one, there is that iconic video of those, you know, first there's this guy
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who's trying to stop his lady friends from, you know, going out against the police and
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And the cops come and drag him away.
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And then all these women go and surround him and they, you know, save him from the Lattis.
#
And the other very striking image of this young girl with a placard and the placard
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says that my father wants me to study history, but I want to make it.
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And she's offering a rose to the sheepish policeman.
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Those are beautiful images.
#
And, you know, I think there is one thing that these young people have realized and
#
made us all realize, I think, which is, I think Gandhi would have thought of it as this
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fundamental point, which he used to say is abhaya, to be fearless, right?
#
I think what has, and this is the reason I say that, you know, the hegemony of the BJP
#
seems more friable and brittle than what we thought.
#
Because today it is a state which is scared and the citizens are standing up.
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They are fearless, like you said.
#
So again, I will say that, you know, it's important to understand that this is going
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to be a long drawn out process.
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You know, I think this kind of people coming out, standing up for their constitutionally
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guaranteed rights, their, you know, cherish notions of what it means to be an Indian,
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et cetera, is important.
#
But there is also a danger that I increasingly find with our world of social media that,
#
you know, we can become something of an echo chamber.
#
I mean, let's also understand that there must be a lot of people out there who do not accept
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what is happening, who may think that these laws are right, who in due course will be
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mobilizing as we've already seen ABVP and other student groups trying to mobilize.
#
At this point of time, as you're saying, yes, I think it has come as a surprise, if not
#
a shock that things could sort of snowball out of control so quickly.
#
But I think the success of this moment will also, you know, as you said, have to be measured
#
through various yardstick.
#
And you know, as a former army person, you know, I'm always aware of the coercive sort
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of power which the Indian state wheels, you know, have had an insider's view of what that
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No, and maybe this can be a crucible through which future leaders can emerge.
#
And also, you know, I used to worry about liberal elite echo chambers, but a hundred
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thousand people at Azad Maidan is not an echo chamber.
#
But all I'm trying to say is that, you know, it puts paid to this idea that, listen, you
#
know, in a sense, the ideological battle is over, right, that the battle of ideas and
#
Now it is all about striking these low kind of compromises to which coalition government
#
can stop whom where I think that story will continue.
#
As you said, you know, the fate of the opposition and that of the Congress Party is a discussion
#
But at this point of time, you know, I think it's definitely heartening to see that there
#
But I think, you know, we have to remember one thing, you know, see, democracy is a very
#
peculiar form of a political system, you know, because, say, unlike older forms of systems,
#
there is no divine right to rule.
#
There is no divine, the sanctioned ruling class who can tell you what you do.
#
Unlike, say, the socialist regimes of the 20th century, you don't have an ideology which
#
is going to prescribe to you what you have to do.
#
So democracy is fundamentally about learning from our own experience.
#
And I think history and our experience is very important.
#
I think it's important constantly to revisit that, to learn from it and to make history
#
And on these wise words, since we are running out of studio time, we could have spoken for
#
another couple of hours.
#
And I'm going to have to thank you for coming on the show.
#
It's always such a pleasure and such a learning experience for me, Srinath.
#
It's always great to be here and to have this opportunity to have a sustained conversation
#
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, listen, I recommend you listen to another
#
podcast, it's called Interpreting India, and in fact, it's hosted by Srinath.
#
It's done by Carnegie where he works.
#
So do a Google search for Interpreting India and check that out.
#
That's worth listening to.
#
You should also head on over to Amazon and buy Srinath's accident books.
#
My previous episodes with him will be linked in the show notes at seenunseen.ie and check
#
You can follow Srinath on Twitter as SrinathRaghava3, that is a three instead of the N at the end.
#
So at SrinathRaghava3, you can follow me on Twitter at Amit Sharma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Seen and the Unseen at seenunseen.in and thinkpragati.com.
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The Seen and the Unseen is supported by the Takshashila Institution.
#
Visit takshashila.org.in to find out more about their many public policy courses.
#
For one of their postgraduate courses, which starts in January, in fact, I teach a module
#
on how to write an op-ed.
#
So if you want to become a master at it, that's something to consider.
#
Thank you for listening.
