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No man ever steps in the same river twice, an old saying goes.
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Historians know this better than others.
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Most of us normal folks look back on the past as if it is an immovable block of events.
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Through the lens of the hindsight bias, it appears that everything that has happened
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But every historian knows that like the present moment, every moment in time was once in a
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state of flux, full of possibilities, everything up for grabs.
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And yet we take it all for granted, geography, culture, politics.
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The historian Ram Guha once wrote about how easy it is to look back and feel secure in
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the fact that India is a democracy, that the centre did hold, that we are still one nation.
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But in the years just after independence, it was all an open question.
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Was there such a thing as a coherent idea of India?
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Could the union stay together?
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And while India is a fixed notion in our heads, lines on a map, a list of states, an anthem
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and a flag, it is true that our country has been in churn throughout its 73 years of existence.
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And perhaps now more than ever.
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As we celebrate one more republic day, let's take stock of our republic.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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It's a year 2020, 70 years after our republic came into being.
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And looking at the present time, I feel cause for both hope and despair.
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Hope because I see young people throughout our country animated with the same spirit
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that inspired our freedom fighters, a spirit I had once thought we have lost forever.
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And despair because we face an existential crisis and a danger of losing the values that
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our founding fathers and mothers embraced for the nation at its birth.
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It seems to me more than ever that perhaps every conversation we have today has more
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value, more urgency than it would have in some other time.
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There's so much to make sense of and to put in context.
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My guest for this episode is Ram Gohar, whose books have taught me so much about this country
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Ram's been on The Seen and the Unseen before in a two part series to speak about Mahatma
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Gandhi and those episodes will be linked from the show notes.
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Before we begin this conversation though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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One of the great pleasures of my life is getting to hang out with very smart people.
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Many of them work at the Takshashila Institution in Bengaluru, which also supports The Seen
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Some of the brightest people in the policy world work here.
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And every time I'm in Bengaluru, I feel so stimulated by the conversations I have.
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I'd be happy to be a fly on the wall here forever.
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I can listen into Takshashila conversations from wherever I am and so can you.
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The Takshashila Wongson geeks have a fantastic daily podcast called All Things Policy, in
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which they discuss everything from nuclear submarines to privacy laws to macroeconomic
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The conversations are nerdy, funny and always insightful.
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Listening to All Things Policy always leaves me feeling smarter.
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So do search for the show on the podcast app of your choice, All Things Policy.
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Ram, welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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You know, these days you're sort of, you're speaking a lot, you're out in the public spaces
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During the CAA protests, you were also famously kind of arrested.
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You've sort of spent your life and perhaps it's a cliche, but a historian is normally
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thought of as a sedentary figure who's involved in ideas and spends time in libraries.
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And now it almost seems that there is a more activist spirit in the things that you do,
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much like the people you have written about like Gandhi.
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You know, Abit, when I was young, I participated in a lot of demonstrations on two issues in
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One was the whole question of interfaith harmony.
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I was in several marches and protests in Delhi in 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, in the years leading
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up to the Babri Majlis and after.
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And the other theme on which I did take part in street protests was the environment, you
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know, destruction of forests, devastation of Adivasi lands.
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I was also part of the anti-nuclear movement, which failed to prevent a nuclear plant coming
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up for the Western Ghats in Kerala, a movement that was led by the great Kannada writer and
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polymath Shivaram Kalanth.
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So in my 20s and 30s, I protested.
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Then I started writing, focusing on books, whatever I had to say was in my columns.
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But two years ago, actually, I joined a protest against a steel flyover that would have devastated
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the heart of central Bangalore and my wife and I came out and I thought that's it.
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You know, it's my city is being devastated and it was clearly a Ponzi scheme in which
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politicians and contractors, incidentally of the Congress Party, not of the BJP.
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To clarify to your listeners who think I'm always only against the BJP, there was a
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Ponzi scheme of the Congress Party aimed to make money before the election.
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There are some listeners who seem to think the contrary.
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So my wife and I were there, you know, as middle-aged citizens.
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My wife is a native of Bangalore, I lived there many years protesting and that caught
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some people's eye and I thought that's it.
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Then, of course, this thing happened and this thing happened.
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It's really as a biography of Gandhi that I feel so awful about the CIA and what it
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represents is discrimination against Muslims, the way it was bulldozed through the kind
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of distorted codes that are used.
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And I had a vague inkling I would be detained actually.
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I told my wife that it may happen and I told her something else.
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I said, look, don't worry because the Karnataka police is not the Tamil Nadu police, not even
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So I had a vague inkling.
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I didn't think it would happen, but it happened and I'm proud that I did what it was a modest
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act of individual satyagraha, shall we say, and I was certainly inspired by the students
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and I was particularly inspired by the students of Jamia and particularly horrified like many
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people all over India were by the vandalizing of the library.
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Let me just tell you one interesting kind of amusing and I suppose even informative
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When the Jamia library was vandalized on the 15th, I got a SMS, a message from a historian
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in Delhi asking for a clarification, a factual clarification.
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This historian asked me during the Quitted India movement when students participated
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and in the anti Indira Gandhi pre-emergency struggle when students participated, did the
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police ever vandalize a library?
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So this is a query to me as a historian, as someone who'd written both about the 42 movement
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and the students movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan.
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And I replied to this friend in Delhi simply, no, because Indira Gandhi and the Viceroy
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were authoritarians who read books.
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Now it was partly a joke, partly serious, but I think many people were horrified by
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what happened at the Jamia library.
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And I think that led to shortly afterwards, there was a protest in Bangalore, which I
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And then of course, this is this whole, the 19th, which became a very, very big thing.
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And the 19th was the 70th anniversary of two events.
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That's why it was chosen to recall why the 19th of December, which I think future historians
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may write about in some detail, was the day on which there were anti-CA protests all over
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In Delhi, there was a big one in Kolkata, in Mumbai, a huge one in Mumbai, and so on.
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And the 19th of December was chosen by the organizers for two reasons.
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I think the principal reason was that it was the 92nd anniversary of 19 December 1927 was
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the day on which two revolutionaries, Ashfaqullah Khan and Ram Prasad Bismil were hanged by
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the British, a Hindu and a Muslim.
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So that was one reason it was chosen.
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And the other reason it was chosen was because on that same day, 19 December 1947, Mahatma
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Gandhi assured the mayors of the Mewat region, or what is now Haryana, that they would be
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safe and secure in India.
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And they faced horrific ethnic cleansing, particularly in the in the princely state
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And Gandhiji went to Mewat and told them that he would lay his life on the line for them
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So it was a very important, it was two major anniversaries on that day.
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That's why you had these countrywide protests and they were amazing.
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I mean, it was truly amazing what happened everywhere.
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I could say a little bit about the politics of the Bangalore protest, if you wish.
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So this is kind of a sociological point, you see, the 15th Jamia was vandalized.
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That evening, there were auto attacks on the AMU.
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And I think the government and particularly the Home Minister believed that nothing would
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You know, it would just die down because we've attacked two Muslim institutions, AMU and
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Jamia and sab log chup honge.
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But people were outraged as I've explained, young students all over were outraged by the
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attacks on these two universities by the pulling out of women from the library of the vandalizing
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And you will recall that in the 16th, 17th, tens of thousands of students from totally
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previously apolitical institutions such as the Institute of Technology, the Institutes
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of Management, the National Law Schools, Christ College, all protested, right.
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And then the 19th was announced.
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Now, it'd be interesting to know who chose the 19th.
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These are the two reasons people chose the 19th.
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I mean, I heard of the 19th from Jogendra Yadav, but there would be other people on Twitter,
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but there would be other people who'd been involved.
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And when it was announced that there'd be a countrywide protest on the 19th, the Home
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Ministry in Delhi, it is my view that the BJP in Delhi, whether it's the Home Ministry
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or the BJP in Delhi said that in BJP rule states, there will not be a chua racha.
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And it was a really diabolical plan.
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So there was going to be Section 144 in Karnataka on the 19th, the 20th, and the 21st imposed
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from Delhi, I'm convinced, probably over the heads of the advice of the Karnataka government,
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And maybe even sections of the Karnataka BJP did not want it.
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And the idea was it'll be imposed on the 19th, the 20th, and the 21st of December.
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And the 22nd was a Sunday.
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On 19th, at midnight, Section 144 would be lifted, and on the 22nd, the state apparatus
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would have been brought out for a pro-CAA BJP rally in Bangalore.
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And it went completely all right, because we protested, and there was a major kind of
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And when some people got arrested, more people came.
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And finally, Section 144 wasn't really implemented in any serious way after the first round of
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And several thousand people came to the turnhole.
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But it's the kind of diabolical mentality of the ruling regime, that 19, 20, 21, Section
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And it will be lifted on the Sunday when people will be bussed to show some kind of manufactured
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So I think this is the kind of things that prompted all of this.
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And it's very heartening.
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You mentioned in your introductory remarks the students.
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Now, one of the very interesting aspects of these protests, which started, I think, with
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Jamia, was that the kind of iconography of these protests.
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Who are these people upholding, Ambedkar, Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh?
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Normally one doesn't see these people together.
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I mean, normally, you know, the kind of presentation is Ambedkar and Gandhi were rivals, or Gandhi
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and Bhagat Singh were rivals.
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But it's very interesting that the students have brought these three people together.
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And I think there's a reason for this.
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Ambedkar, because he gave us our rights.
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I mean, today there was a very good Twitter thread by Omer Ahmed, where he said that though
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Gandhi led the freedom struggle, it was Ambedkar who gave us our rights.
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And that's why Ambedkar, in many ways, predominates in these protests, right?
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But Gandhi, because Gandhi lived and died for Hindu-Muslim harmony.
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And Bhagat Singh, because he represents the idealism and the spirit and the unquenchable
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So it's a very interesting juxtaposition, you know.
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And I think it's also kind of, I salute it, because we can draw from all these.
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It is, you can draw from Ambedkar and Gandhi and Bhagat Singh.
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And it's interesting to see who's not there.
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You know, Savarkar will never be there, or Golwalkar will never be there.
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So I think the students have been quite extraordinary.
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And 99% of them have been nonviolent.
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And whenever I've spoken, I've always urged the students to be nonviolent.
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I think that's where it must be resolute, courageous, but above all, nonviolent, not
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just in deed, but also in words.
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You know, I think one of the ways of shaming the ruling regime is to not to resort to
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their demonizing, abusing language.
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So I recorded an episode earlier today, we are recording this on Jan 23rd, I recorded
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an episode earlier today with Pranay Kottaswamy on radically networked societies.
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And he made the very interesting point that one of the fundamental clashes in all our
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societies, not just in India, is between a society that is in his words, radically networked
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by radical fundamentally networked, not the other sense of the term, and therefore fairly
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We are up against a state which is very hierarchical and top down where information flows slowly.
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So the term that Pranay in fact used was that we have a state which is a relic of the industrial
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age against a society which is a product of the information age.
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And listening to you when you were talking about, for example, plans from Delhi to sort
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of section 144 in the 1920 or 21st and all of that, it struck me that we also have a
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state with a tribal mentality against a society with a globalized mentality.
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Is that something that you would say is an accurate character?
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It's a very interesting insight.
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I mean, it's probably too early to say how this, you know, because the state has deep
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pockets and vast resources, including punitive resources, which the protest don't.
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You know, so even if they have a tribal mentality and they're not so agile in the way in which
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the protestors are, they have the resources to exhaust the protestors.
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So it's a little early to say this.
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It's a little early to be incredibly celebratory about these protests and where they'll take
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These things didn't come out in a celebratory way, but just in a way to try and understand
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Obviously, the state has the enormous coercive power and the monopoly on violence.
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Another thing that struck me when you were talking about the attack on the library in
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Jermia is something I read last night in a book by the Turkish author, Zeynep Tufekci,
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and which is called Twitter and tear gas.
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And she talks about all the protests of the Arab Spring across Tunisia and Egypt and later
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spreading to Spain and Turkey and so on.
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And there's one very interesting fact which just blew my mind, like my eyes popped out,
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which was that one common element to many of these protests, you know, whether it is
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in Istanbul or whether it is even the Occupy movement in New York, is that wherever you
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have these large gatherings in these parks or whatever become centers of protest, a library
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And I immediately thought of what's happening in Shaheen Bagh where, you know, there's been
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a spontaneous library springing up.
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And of course, you know, many things in common with what's happening right now, the role
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of the youth, the role of women and so on and so forth.
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But this really struck me because, I mean, are there sort of echoes of this through history
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that libraries have some kind of significance?
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Well, the echoes through history are possibly the reverse, that authoritarian regimes don't
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like books, don't like learning, don't like education.
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And certainly this regime doesn't, you know, as shown in the various education ministers
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it's appointed, in the ways in which ministers, including the prime ministers, fudge their
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qualifications, in the ways in which vice-translators are appointed, in the ways in which modern
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So authoritarian regimes, you know, don't like free speech, learning, scholarship ideas.
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I mean, that was true of Stalin, it was true of Mao and his cultural revolution in which
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all the professors were dismissed from their jobs.
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That is true of this regime.
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So I wasn't planning to actually ask this question during this episode, but it strikes
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me now, and I'll ask it anyway, since you're talking about authoritarian regimes and their
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sort of disrespect for learning.
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I'd written a piece a while back where I had speculated, I mean, it was based on a story
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that a friend of Narendra Modi told me.
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And the story basically was this, that once she was sitting at his place when he was CM
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of Gujarat in 2007, 2008, sometime around that time, and there was a gathering of seven
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or eight people, and the prime minister told them a story about how once when he was young,
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his mother was very ill, she had fever.
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So he went to switch on the fan and he flicked the switch on and he found that the fan didn't
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come on because there was no electricity.
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And at that time, apparently, Modi teared up genuinely because it affected him.
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And my friend's point was that Modi, because he does not read, which mind you, was not
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his fault, because obviously, he is not born to privilege and doesn't have access to books.
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Because he doesn't read, his understanding of the world is an experiential understanding.
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So he experiences what the lack of electricity can do.
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So when he is CM in Gujarat, he makes that a priority, power in every village.
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You know, he can see, he can experience the value of roads and cleanliness and water.
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So all of those, he makes a priority.
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But at a larger level, when you're actually governing a country, in fact, the higher up
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you go, you also need a great grasp of abstract concepts and to be able to deal with learning.
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And of course, while it's not his fault that he is not a well-read person, because, you
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know, he didn't have that sort of privileged childhood, one would then say that the requirement
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for a leader is to have the humility to surround himself with learned people and take the road
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In fact, you know, he is a phenomenally intelligent man.
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So first of all, I completely agree with you.
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I think I've also heard this from other people, that he saw his mother suffer, go far away
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for water, and so on and so forth.
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And this is part of his welfare agenda.
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I completely believe that.
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Based on seeing him interact and speak, I think he's a very quick learner.
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He is an autodidact who picks up things incredibly quickly, much quicker than any other politician
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I have seen, certainly much quicker than the likes of Rahul Gandhi.
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You know, you can talk to him on solar energy, and he will then pick up on the important
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aspects of solar energy, or agriculture, or infrastructure, or artificial intelligence.
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He's got a very amazing ability to pick up new facts, new things.
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But the real flaw he has, and I wrote a column last week in the Telegraph about this, is
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he doesn't, what you just said, he doesn't cultivate or trust advisers, partly because
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of this suspicion of acquired scholarship, you know, his notorious remark about Harvard
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versus hard work, but also partly because, you know, he can't build a team.
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Brand Modi is always more important than team Modi.
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You know, in that column I quoted someone who has worked with him, who said that the
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golden rule of working with Modi is, when you give advice, total obsequiousness, no
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All right, now that's, you know, it's like you can't run a large complex government in
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I mean, if you look at his first term, he had Raghuram Rajan at different points.
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He had Raghuram Rajan, Arvind Subramanian, Urjit Patel, and Arvind Palagriya, four top
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But none of them could work with him.
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I mean, Palagriya maybe, you know, could, but then left.
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Now he has none of them.
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He had people in the civil service who were capable in his first term.
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But in his second term, he doesn't have any, because, you know, if you only cultivate a
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certain kind of obsequiousness, you'll get that kind of advisor who's second guessing
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what the prime minister wants, who can never give you frank and open hearted advice.
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So I think that is really his great flaw.
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And apart from his sectarianism, which has been noted and widely commented upon, but
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apart from the ideology, I think it's a personality flaw, a person who cannot build a team, who
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thinks that a few bureaucrats will run the show for him, who consistently undermines
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I'll give you one example of this, you know, Arun Jaitley was very close to Modi.
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He saved his job in 2002.
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He advised him on many legal issues.
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They were very close, right, for, had been for many years.
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But he was still not willing to give Jaitley, you know, complete autonomy in running his
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Now it's well known, or it's overwhelmingly likely that Jaitley was not consulted about
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This has been spoken about.
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But there's another telling, smaller, but telling episode, which tells you how he did
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not even respect Jaitley in the way you should respect your senior cabinet colleague.
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Jaitley had gone for an IMF meeting in Washington when his betho noir, an arch enemy within
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the party, Subrahmanyam Swami was appointed a Rajya Sabha MP.
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So Mr. Modi was telling Jaitley, even you better watch out, I'll put someone at your
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You can't run a team like this.
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You just can't run a team in this kind of insecure, paranoid way.
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You know, I intended this episode and intend this episode to be more about the broader
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currents of history than individuals.
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But I can't help but follow up and ask another question, which is how much of, and this is
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not just in the context of Modi, but you know, I'll come to that.
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How much of history is determined by the happenstance of particular individuals and positions of
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And I'll break it up into two parts.
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One part is of course the present part, where it isn't necessary that the head of the BJP
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would necessarily be somebody like Modi when we've had leaders like Vajpayee before.
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And you have a current of events like what happened in Gujarat where, you know, the riots
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arguably helped him consolidate his position, Pramod Mahajan dying at a point where he was
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fairly strong influence in the party and so on and so forth.
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And eventually he comes to power.
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And the other element of happenstance, which I suspect that you'll have a strong opinion
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on is it strikes me that, you know, over the last year, I've done a number of episodes
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trying to understand Hindu conservatism and sort of looking at the history of this last
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And it struck me over this time that we were in a sense, very lucky to have Nehru as prime
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minister at the time he was, because it seems to me that a lot of the leaders around him
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in the Congress party were either conservatives.
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And I don't mean that in a bad way as you know, the current, but were Hindu conservatives
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leader, not Hindutva conservative leaders like, you know, Patel, Prasad, Pant and so
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And he almost seems like a force apart, even when it comes to the episode of the Ram idol
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being actually planted in the Babri Marjit, which was a Hindu Mahasabha plot.
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But when Nehru said, get the idol out immediately, you know, Pant was CM of UP, Lal Bahadur
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Shastri was Home Minister of UP and they ignored him because their sympathies lay with the
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So how much of our history is determined by this sort of happenstance?
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And in the case of Nehru, I've asked this to various people, I'd love to know what you
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Well, I think it's a balance.
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I think Marxist historians diminished the role of individuals in history, though ironically
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they exhort Lenin and Mao as great figures.
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I mean, the first great personality cult was of Stalin and then of course the second one
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The other biographically oriented historians, for example, in North America, where you have
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all these biographies of founders, you know, this great Washington, Jefferson, they're
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the people who changed everything.
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Obviously it's a balance, the social, political, structural forces that operate, that constrain
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what even the most remarkable individuals can do.
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But individuals in positions of power particularly can shape the direction a society, a government
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and administration, a regime takes.
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There's no question about that.
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Also, you know, the removal of individuals, I mean, you mentioned Pramod Marjan, right.
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Now, you're absolutely right.
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Now, if Pramod Marjan had been around, he'd have been a major challenger to Modi because
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he had very good relations, he was close to the Bombay moneybags, he had good relations
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across parties, he was very smart, he was self-made, he had an administrative experience,
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And similarly, if Tilak had not died when he did, maybe Gandhi would not have had the
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opening to become the leader of the freedom movement.
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So accidents of this kind do play a part without question.
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But of course, as Marx himself said, you know, men make history, but not in the circumstances
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So Modi could not have done what he did right early on to become prime minister, had the
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Congress regime not had the kind of, you know, problems that it did, right.
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But this is really, I mean, this is really a two-person regime.
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And there's not been a two-person regime in India, even Nehru, you know, trusted.
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Of course, Patel died, but he trusted his ministers, above all, he respected, he would
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take advice from professionals, you know, he would not decide, the government reserve
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bank, if he wanted to do something, he would consult the government reserve bank.
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On science policy, he would consult Bhabha, right, and so on and so forth.
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So this kind of absolute centralization of decision-making.
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I mean, one could argue Indira Gandhi, we have not noted since Indira Gandhi's time.
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Let's talk about broader trends now, in this, in an excellent speech you gave at the Kerala
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Lit Fest, where unfortunately, once, you know, Stray Line at the end got all the media attention,
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but I really enjoyed the speech, especially for the, and it will be linked from the show
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notes, especially for the meat of the speech, where you talk about how the notion of nationalism
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evolved around the world, but the divergent path that notion took in India, can you elaborate
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So, essentially, nationalism in 19th century Europe, where it was really first forged in
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a systematic way, was oriented towards, you know, making the citizens of a nation or a
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particular unified territory, protected by boundaries and an army, making those citizens
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come together on the basis of a single religion, a single language, and frequently a common
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So to be English, you have to speak English, minority tongues were obliterated or marginalized.
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To be truly English, you had to be a Protestant, which is why the king was also head of the
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church, and you had to hate France, right?
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Now, that kind of model of nationalism, of course, and I argued only partly in jest that
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Pakistan is really a perfect 19th century European nation.
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India, I think, again, very much because of Gandhi, and very much because of Gandhi's
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diasporic experience, where he recognized that the extraordinary religious and linguistic
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diversity of India, which he encountered in South Africa, was something that had been nurtured,
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initiated, and enhanced, and nationalism had to be built on shared values, not on shared
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identities, not on common religion, common language, common enemy, but on gender and
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caste equalities, economic self-reliance, nonviolence, Hindu-Muslim pluralism, Hindu-Muslim unity,
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Now, and the constitution, in many ways, takes that vision much further.
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I also argued that there were sections of the Indian left that did not subscribe to
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this because, I mean, their heroes were somewhere else, and this also got me in trouble in Kerala
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among the leftists because I said, you know, for them, it was always Stalin and Mao over
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And today, it may be Hugo Chavez, and I don't know who Hugo Chavez is dead, so I don't know
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who the hero of the global left is.
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Corbyn and Sanders, perhaps.
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I mean, Corbyn and Sanders.
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It's astonishing how some young Indian leftists revere Corbyn.
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I mean, the only thing that can be said about Corbyn is that he's a slightly better version
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I mean, he's a born loser.
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Basically, he's a born loser with huge flaws, huge flaws in his ideology, in his personality,
#
So, but this kind of sentimental looking outside, right, to heroes meant that the left was kind
#
It was great pity because they could have contributed a lot at this state within the
#
mainstream of the freedom movement.
#
On the other hand, more strongly and more viscerally and more effectively, the Gandhian
#
model of patriotism was attacked from the right by Hindutva, which actually prescribed
#
in a curious way to a European model of nationalism.
#
To be an Indian, you have to be a Hindu.
#
To be a true Indian, you have to speak Hindi.
#
And to be a truer Indian, you have to hate Pakistan.
#
You know, that's kind of the model of nationalism.
#
Hate Pakistan later, but hate Muslims to begin with, pre-independence.
#
Yes, yes, hate Muslims to begin with, but also actually hate Pakistan to begin with
#
because hate Muslims came from, why did partition happen?
#
Because the Muslims, we could not trust them, right.
#
So, I talked about this, why the Gandhian model of patriotism ceded ground to the Hindutva
#
model of Jingoism and why we need to reclaim it.
#
But I also talked about, you know, the failures of the left, the failures of Congress Party,
#
the growth of religious fundamental worldwide, and how this is played into the hands of Hindutva.
#
But, I mean, I am someone who has always called himself a patriot.
#
I mean, I don't believe you can be a world citizen.
#
I mean, I believe that you can be a citizen of Bangalore, of Church Street, where we are
#
talking, of the Contourment, of Karnataka, of India.
#
But because you can identify with your locality, your town, your taluk, your district, your
#
watershed, you can even be a citizen of the Kaveri Delta if you live there, all right.
#
Because the Kaveri Delta may spill over more than one state.
#
But world citizen is an abstract idea.
#
I mean, I, in the last, absolutely in the last paragraphs of India after Gandhi, I quote
#
Holden, who was a British scientist who became an Indian, and whom Saban Sivaramanian recently
#
And he says, you cannot be a world citizen because there is no world government.
#
And one of the chief duties of a citizen is to be a nuisance to his or her government.
#
That's one of the chief duties of a citizen.
#
That's what the citizens of Shaheen Bagh and a hundred other places are doing.
#
They're being a nuisance to the bad policies of their government.
#
Another remark relevant to that is by Benedict Anderson, the great theorist of nationalism.
#
And he says, a true nationalist will feel a sense of shame at the crimes committed by
#
But again, one of the aspects of the Gandhian model of nationalism, which actually come
#
more from Tagore than from Gandhi, or two aspects of the Gandhian model of nationalism,
#
which come more from Tagore than from Gandhi, are the openness to other civilizations.
#
So when Tagore says, a glory in the lamp, a glory in the illumination of a lamp, lit
#
anywhere in the world, right, that is that you learn from other cultures.
#
You're not, no nation is a frog in the world.
#
You learn from other cultures.
#
And Tagore also famously said, nationalism is, quote, the particular thing, which for
#
years has been at the bottom of India's troubles.
#
So, and also the sense that no nation is perfect.
#
It's always, you're always trying to redeem yourself by improving yourself.
#
You know, you're not flawless in the way in which, Hindu probably believes ancient Hindus
#
You know, they invented everything.
#
And they even claim that the caste system came with the Muslim, which is totally absurd.
#
You know, it's been there forever, right?
#
They claim that we practice, that Shivaji practiced perfect gender equality, which is
#
So I think these are aspects of the Gandhian model of patriotism, not just religious diversity,
#
religious pluralism, not just caste and gender equality, but the ability to reflect on your
#
flaws, your failures, to overcome them, to look at what our other countries are doing,
#
And this kind of, you know, you can also learn from other states.
#
India can learn from Tamil Nadu, Tamil Nadu can learn from Kerala, UP can learn a hell
#
of a lot from Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
#
So I think these are aspects of patriotism, I think, that are glossed over in the kind
#
of jingoistic, hyper-nationalistic Hindutva view of what it is to be an Indian.
#
So I have a follow-up question, but before a follow-up question, an interesting anecdote
#
for my listeners that the last time you and I recorded Ram, I happened to mention to you
#
at the end of the recording that, you know, Church Street is of course the best street
#
in the world for me, and part of that is because it has Blossoms, which is the best bookshop
#
And you responded by saying, Blossoms is the best bookshop in the country, it's not even
#
the best bookshop in its own street.
#
Yeah, it's a joint best, I think.
#
So my follow-up question is this, that your thesis was that there was a kind of European
#
nationalism which is bound up in love for a particular, you know, identity, a land,
#
a language, and a hatred for the other, and a religion, and that has now taken form in
#
India in the form of Hindutva, which is inspired by that.
#
And you pointed out that Gandhi's kind of nationalism was sort of different.
#
Now I have two questions.
#
One is that, is it the case that during the freedom struggle, that there were contesting
#
notions of nationalism, not just these two, but various others?
#
Because I mean, Bose had his own notions, Gandhi had his own notions, Motilal Nehru
#
had his own notions, and you have all of these different notions, and we could be in hindsight
#
saying that, oh, okay, this is one of them.
#
You're right, you're right.
#
So you mentioned three people.
#
All right, now, Bose, Motilal Nehru, and Gandhi himself.
#
So there were things that, you know, Bose, Motilal Nehru, and Gandhi, all completely
#
believed in Hindu-Muslim harmony, totally shared it, right?
#
Why Gandhi differed from them?
#
Bose, like Gandhi, believed in gender equality, in fact, in a more radical way than Gandhi.
#
I mean, he started up within the regiment, for example, right?
#
Gandhi's, I think Gandhi's originality lay in two things.
#
One, his attack on the caste system, and particularly untouchability.
#
I mean, I know, I believe he's been unfairly demonized by the Ambedkarites, you know, with
#
the virtue of hindsight.
#
I mean, Ambedkar was a great leader, a great prophet.
#
He was the emancipator of the untouchables, and, you know, not just the Dalits, but all
#
of India owes enormous debt to him, but you should not polarize Ambedkar against Gandhi
#
when it comes to the question of caste and untouchability, because if Ambedkar was a
#
great emancipator of the Dalits, the greatest leader to emerge from within the Dalits, no
#
upper caste Hindu did more to challenge untouchability than Gandhi, right?
#
And that, the sin of untouchability, Gandhi recognized in a way in which Bose, Motilal
#
Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, Bhagat Singh did not.
#
He called untouchability diarism of Hinduism.
#
He compared it to general diar, you know, where Hindus would treat other people as being
#
inferior to them because of the caste in which they were born.
#
He compared it to general diar, and finally nonviolence.
#
I think that's, of course, the major departure that he had from Bose.
#
So there was a shared common ground between Gandhi and many of the others, you know, Srinivas
#
Sastry, who was a great liberal, Tej Bahadur Sapru.
#
But I think nonviolence, economic self-reliance, and above all, the attack on untouchability,
#
I think sets Gandhi apart.
#
And finally, two other things, two other things, two other things set Gandhi apart.
#
One was his ability to have a debate, reflect, change his mind.
#
I mean, if you look at how his views on caste became more radicalized, it was because of
#
his exchanges, first with Narayana Guru, the great Malayali reformer, and then with Ambedkar.
#
So his ability to grow changed his mind.
#
And the second truly remarkable thing about Gandhi, which in a way brings us back to Modi
#
and Nehru, is that Modi and Nehru left no second rung, they had no successors.
#
Gandhi left a whole team.
#
I mean, I wrote a, you know, I wrote a piece to coincide with the 150th anniversary of
#
Gandhi's birth, which I called the 12 Apostles of Mahatma Gandhi.
#
I could have called it 24, right?
#
But I chose 12 people, you know, so in government, Nehru, Patel, Rajindra Prasad.
#
In opposition, Kripalani, Jayaprakash Narayan, Rajaji.
#
In social work, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Madhula Sarabhai, you know, Jesse Kumarappa,
#
Then I talked about Gaffar Khan, I forget who the 12th was, because, you know, but there
#
could have been many, many more, you know, Zakir Hussain in education.
#
So Gandhi was a great team builder.
#
You know, he nurtured people.
#
He identified talent when Azad, you know, he identified, met people, identified that
#
talent, nurtured that talent, and then set them free.
#
He told Kumarappa, the work of village renewal is yours.
#
He told Zakir Hussain, the work of education is yours.
#
He told Nehru and Patel, the work of running an independent India is yours.
#
Now, that kind of extraordinary ability that Gandhi had is given to very few, is given
#
There may have been there in, you know, there may have been some great entrepreneurs who
#
built teams of that kind, but political leaders who nurtured talent in that way, and, you
#
know, Gandhi died, but the country continued because of all these people who were there
#
in public office, in the civil society movement, in universities, all inspired by him.
#
In fact, as an aside, you know, just regarding the dichotomy and possibly the false dichotomy
#
between Nehru and Ambedkar, I've been reading this book by D. R. Nagraj called The Flaming
#
Between Gandhi and Ambedkar.
#
D. R. Nagraj's book is a wonderful book.
#
D. R. Nagraj, by the way, was a close friend of mine, and I miss him almost every day.
#
And he was the most brilliant intellectual of his generation.
#
We are speaking in the Takshashila office in Church Street.
#
I met him for the last time in Koshy's, which is down the road, the day before he died.
#
I mean, he was an extraordinary man.
#
He was going to contribute enormously to our cultural and intellectual life, had he lived
#
another 10 or 15 years.
#
He had a wonderful, subtle mind.
#
He bridged the vernacular and the cosmopolitan, the civilizational and the kind of, you know,
#
ground-up view of peasants.
#
He came from a Viva's background.
#
He knew several languages.
#
He was a theorist, but deeply grounded in empirical reality.
#
And his student, Prithvi Datta Tandashobi, fortunately has edited two outstanding books
#
of his essays, one of which is Flaming Feet and the other I think is called Listening to
#
One's Loom, Listening to the Loom.
#
But he was truly, I mean, I said I miss him and my understanding of Gandhi and Abedkar
#
is deeply indebted to what he wrote and to our conversations in Koshy's Cafe.
#
Those books will be linked from the show notes.
#
So I have a follow-up question on nationalism and at one level, I would even perhaps respectfully
#
dispute your terming Gandhi's view of the world and all of the other great leaders that
#
we spoke about is nationalism itself.
#
I'd call it patriotism.
#
Yeah, I'd call it something else.
#
Yeah, what do you call it?
#
Yeah, I'd call it patriotism or I'd call it whatever, but because for example, and there's
#
a larger sort of question I'm coming to, you know, Popo once described nationalism as something
#
that, quote, appeals to our tribal instincts, to passion and to prejudice and to our nostalgic
#
desire to be relieved from the strain of individual responsibility, which it attempts to replace
#
by a collective or group responsibility, stop quote.
#
And I was kind of thinking about how the only kind of nationalism which has any kind of
#
resonance and which is on the resurgence today is a model of that 19th century European nationalism,
#
which is all over the world and which is in India.
#
And there's a very interesting book by the Israeli scholar Yael Tamir called Why Nationalism?
#
And she points out a couple of things here.
#
She says that one, this kind of nationalism is inevitable because only the stat she gives
#
is only 3.3% of the world's population actually lives outside their country of birth.
#
And you know, which is a surprise to me because I have lived and traveled in globalized cities
#
And she therefore says that that nationalism is necessary because it, quote, endows a state
#
with intimate feelings linking the past, the present and the future, stop quote.
#
And she makes a distinction I found very useful in thinking about it between thick identities
#
and thin identities, where I think she would hold that a humanist liberal like me who sees
#
himself as part of a globalized world, but that identity is too thin and thick identities
#
which are bound by communities and cultures and ways of doing things and norms and conventions
#
And therefore it is necessarily the case that that kind of nationalism will win out over
#
I think Israel is a very special case because of the persecution of the Jews and they had
#
to find a homeland because they were so brutalized and, you know, subject to really so almost
#
I think Yael Tamir lives and teaches in London, but I think my talk was called patriotism
#
So I believe there are two, I mean, these are two, two you could say cousins, both from
#
the same offspring from nationalism.
#
One takes the path of openness, dialogue, diversity, and the other is like the hardline
#
kind of, you know, jingoistic model.
#
And I said that patriotism is suffused with love and understanding and jingoism by revenge
#
Now, I also believe to expand on a point I made briefly, that you can have overlapping
#
You can be a church seat patriot, a Bangalore patriot, I mean, even Israel, Israel is much
#
You can be a Haifa patriot, you know, and I gave a dead desert patriot identify with
#
the land and also, but you can't really be a global citizen in that sense.
#
I mean, that, you know, you can't be a cosmopolitan with all over the world.
#
And because particularly because of that figure, she quoted 97% of the world's population continues
#
to live in the nation state in which they were born.
#
So that's where they have to claim their rights from the state.
#
You know, a Columbia professor can say, I'm a world citizen, right?
#
The resident of upstate New York who has never had a passport, right, has to be an American
#
citizen demanding that his or her government treats him or her fairly and, you know, respectfully.
#
So I think the globalized left and the cosmopolitan liberal have underestimated the force of not
#
just the force, the importance and the legitimacy of nationalism.
#
Now I mentioned Benedict Anderson.
#
Now I'm not sure what was Popper Jewish almost certainly he was.
#
His grandparents were Jewish, but they were not devout.
#
Now this is very interesting.
#
Because Benedict Anderson says in his book, it says somewhere, the great theories of nationalism,
#
Eric Hausbaum, Ernest Gellner, Hans Kohn, Anthony Smith, were all Jewish and Jews are
#
congenitally suspicious of nationalism in the way in which Popper was also Jewish is
#
because they suffered so much from nationalism.
#
You know, it's like, and hence they have to then find a state of their own, right?
#
But to be an Indian, I mean, there is a choice, there is a choice between a capacious, open-minded
#
dialogic form of nationalism and a hateful, visceral, vindictive, vengeful form of nationalism.
#
There is a choice between Gandhi and Golwalkar.
#
You know, there's a choice between Ambedkar and Savarkar.
#
These are choices that are there for us.
#
We must not say nationalism is tribal, nationalism is bad, nationalism is a Western invention.
#
No, because I think most ordinary people want to know.
#
I think what the anti-CA movement has done is brought back the idea.
#
I mean, Indian flag, I mean, in a few years, the Indian flag has gone from being imposed
#
by the Supreme Court to being claimed by ordinary people.
#
And the preamble is being read all over the country.
#
And the flag, I mean, the symbol is in the flag.
#
What is the symbol of the flag?
#
The symbol of the flag is between Gandhi and the flag.
#
If you read Gandhi on the flag, it is the saffron is Hindu, the green is Islam, and
#
the white is all the other religions who are being protected by the two larger ones.
#
I mean, it's a beautiful image, that's a Gandhi's image of the colors of the flag.
#
That is the understanding of the colors of the flag, right?
#
Now, so I think these are things which shows that, you know, nationalism, I mean, it may
#
not matter to intellectuals.
#
It may not matter to global travelers, to entrepreneurs who travel around the world,
#
but it matters to ordinary people.
#
I mean, I have two thoughts here.
#
One is, of course, that we are hardwired for tribalism and nationalism plays into that.
#
But my other thought, and this is where I'll be a bit of a skeptic with, you know, when
#
you talk about a good nationalism and a bad nationalism, it almost seems to me like…
#
I would say good and bad, I would say…
#
Yeah, more accommodating and more hateful.
#
But the issue I'll take with this is that any kind of ideology which is based on identity,
#
isn't it necessarily exclusionary?
#
No, if it's based on values.
#
But then it's based on values, it's not based on…
#
Yeah, but it's a value within the boundary or controlled by the state, you know.
#
I mean, I can't demand rights from the Bangladeshi government.
#
The Bangladeshi citizen can't demand rights from my government or from the Indian government.
#
If you live in a world of territorially bounded nation states, you have to choose between,
#
to use your phrase, good and bad nationalism, all right, a nationalism of values and a nationalism
#
I mean, you have to choose between that, right?
#
But if they're completely open borders and there's a world state, you know, who knows
#
when that will come, you know, climate change will take care of all of us before that can
#
Maybe then, maybe then you can talk about, you know, something else, right?
#
But where you have passports, where you have national armies, where you have national currencies,
#
you have to think of what kind of nationalism you want.
#
So what you're really saying is that nationalism based on identity is almost inevitable if
#
not necessary as Thamir would have held.
#
And what we need to do is layer upon it a system of values which can make us more…
#
There are values that are a combination of universal values and particular values, in
#
the sense that a resident of Israel doesn't really have to bother about, has to bother
#
about gender equality, but not about caste equality, right, if you know what I mean,
#
I mean, they all, fine, they can all speak Hebrew, but in a country like India, which
#
has 14 classical languages, should we all be speaking Hindi, right?
#
So it has to be a blend of local things determined by a local cultural context and two or three
#
other universal values.
#
I mean, individual freedom, gender equality, non-violence are universal values, right?
#
Those are universal values.
#
So I'll now ask you to expound on patriotism, but before I do that, I'll read out one
#
of my favorite passages from an essay that Orwell wrote on it, where he gives a distinction
#
between nationalism and patriotism, and he says, quote, by nationalism, I mean, first
#
of all, the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole
#
blocks of millions of tens of millions of people can be confidently labeled good or
#
But secondly, and this is much more important, I mean the habit of identifying oneself with
#
a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other
#
duty than that of advancing its interests.
#
Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.
#
Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged,
#
but one must draw a distinction between them since two different and even opposing ideas
#
Patriotism, I mean, devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which
#
one believes to be the best in the world, but has no wish to force on other people.
#
Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.
#
Nationalism on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.
#
The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not
#
for himself, but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.
#
And in your excellent speech at the KLF, you also expounded on the sort of the different
#
elements of patriotism.
#
So there is obviously a strong resonance between what Orwell is saying and what I'm, you know,
#
what I said that, you know, I've read Orwell all my life.
#
I mean, between my MA and my PhD, a Bangalore friend, Meera Rao, gifted me four volumes
#
of his collected essays, so six months before my PhD, all I read was Orwell.
#
So quite a lot of Orwell seeped into me.
#
But there's a, still I'd like to elaborate on Orwell's as he says, he says somewhere,
#
you know, nationalism is about defending, advancing the interests of the nation.
#
Yeah, I'll just read that out.
#
The interests of the nation.
#
Interests of the nation or something like that.
#
Identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good or evil,
#
recognizing no other duty than that of advancing his interests.
#
So the interests of the nation.
#
Now, what Gandhi did, there is a subtle difference between Orwell and me, between a British patriot
#
Is the interests of the citizens.
#
You know, Orwell talks about a land and a kind of mystical attachment to the land because
#
England is a island and far away and it was never colonized, right?
#
Indians were talking about, in some ways, Indian patriotism is actually more advanced
#
because they're talking about the interests of the citizens because we are building it
#
I mean, we have to get rid of the British and then cultivate these values and virtues
#
So what we're talking about, you know, is not the interests of the nation, but the interests
#
of the citizens of the nation, which is, which sometimes may be congruent and in many other
#
times may not be congruent.
#
And Hindu Tawai is only about the interests of the nation.
#
I mean, that's, but I think, you know, also I think a very interesting difference between
#
British patriotism, even of the best kind of the Orwellian kind.
#
I mean, Orwell may have been a Republican, is that we are Republicans.
#
We don't believe in inherited status.
#
You know, nothing offends me more than one, not many things offend me, but one thing offends
#
It's hell of a lot when people, including people in the Congress party, like Jyotish
#
Ritsha's Indian cabinet, Amrita Singh, in private want to be addressed as Your Highness.
#
Sometimes in public too.
#
They claim that they are, you know, because of the royal heritage and British patriots
#
are, see the monarchy as part of their patriotic tradition.
#
It holds them together.
#
It's been there for centuries.
#
But we, I mean, why it's 26th January is so important is that it denotes the time when
#
India transformed itself, was no longer a dominion, but became a Republic, right?
#
In a Republic, every citizen is equal, right?
#
It's like the French and the Americans had true revolutions.
#
The British never did because they never got rid of their royalty, right?
#
We had a true democratic revolution in the same way as when the Constitution came into
#
And the Republic implies that every citizen is equal.
#
Of course, in theory, that's not true.
#
You're still entitlements of birth and privilege and caste and class and gender.
#
But broadly, I mean, I would say, you see, I mean, I obviously, I agree with much of
#
what Orwell says, but we had to struggle for our, the freedom struggle and Britain never
#
had a freedom struggle.
#
And the great thing about the Indian freedom struggle, this is where I want to bring up
#
You know, Sunil Khilnani, in a review of my Gandhi biography, had a wonderful phrase.
#
You know, he often comes up with profound insights and this was in a book review of
#
He said, Gandhi was battling the British, but he was also battling India.
#
That is the darker side of India, oppression of women, oppression of caste, a hatred of
#
It's a fabulous phrase.
#
You know, Gandhi was battling India too, right?
#
It was a battle against India as well as a battle against the British.
#
I think it's in that struggle, in that struggle against the more unpleasant, unappealing
#
sides of Indian tradition that Indian patriotism was born.
#
You know, for the Hindutavadi, Indian tradition had no unpleasant and unappealing sides.
#
It was always fabulous and we were always better than the rest of the world, right?
#
And I think the great thing about the freedom struggle and the great thing about people
#
like Gandhi and Ambedkar and even Nehru was they recognized that Indian society was deeply
#
The way we brutalized our women, the way we treated our low caste, the way we were not
#
open to modern learning and science and were self-satisfied about our past achievements,
#
our past civilizational achievements, this self-critical aspect of the freedom struggle
#
I think is incredibly important to remember and renew today.
#
And that's actually just a fantastic quote by Sunil Killani, which you pointed out and
#
I'm going to ask my follow-up question based on that after we take a quick commercial break.
#
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Welcome back to The Scene India On Scene.
#
I'm chatting with Ram Guha and we are taking stock of our republic, as it were.
#
And you know, you quoted Sunil Khilnani, you know, who said these words in a book review
#
of your book on Gandhi, where he said that India was not just battling the empire, Gandhi
#
was not just battling the empire, he was also battling India.
#
And my question here is, and again, this is something I've tried to explore over multiple
#
episodes with multiple people, is that there is a notion that the constitution that we
#
got was a liberal constitution, though to my mind it's not liberal enough, but whatever,
#
the constitution that we got was a liberal constitution, but imposed upon an illiberal
#
And therefore, can that imposition be liberal at all?
#
Taking that thought further, it is held by some now that what has happened today with
#
the BJP in power, with Modi in power, is that politics has caught up with society, that
#
this is always how our society was.
#
So now I have a couple of questions that are following up from this.
#
It's a very good question.
#
It's a very good question, where you say that it was a liberal constitution imposed
#
on an illiberal society.
#
Now Gandhi recognized this.
#
Gandhi recognized that, and Ambedkar and Nehru, all recognized, which is why they spent the
#
decades leading up to independence, trying to reform society, particularly Gandhi and
#
Ambedkar on the question of caste, Gandhi and Ambedkar on the question of caste, and
#
Ambedkar and Nehru on the question of gender equality, recognized that this was an illiberal
#
Now, as a historian, I'd like to reemphasize that Gandhi was absolutely alert to this.
#
What did Gandhi's early death, premature death, lead us off?
#
Now, again, I'd like to give some historical facts that would not be known to your listeners.
#
Had Gandhi not been murdered on 30th January, 1948, what would he have done in the following
#
He was due to go leave for Sevagram on the 2nd of February, to have a meeting with constructive
#
Now, push back one day, 29th January, 1948, Gandhi said to casually, he said to some people,
#
we must think of disbanding the Congress and making it Lok Sevak committees.
#
He didn't mean disband the government.
#
He meant that while the government will run, while Nehru and Patel, people like Nehru and
#
Patel will be in government, he placed them there, he blessed them as running government,
#
we will have a countervailing force in civil society, composed of freedom, people from
#
the freedom movement, who are temperamentally not interested in administration, but in reforming
#
on the ground an illiberal society, right?
#
So Gandhi's clear understanding was constructive work is as important as politics.
#
It goes back to the 1920s, and he was going to go to Sevagram on the 2nd of February to
#
meet social workers, to tell them what could have been done or what should be done to keep
#
the government honest, to keep it on its toes, right?
#
And if Gandhi had not died, if he had lived under a few years, you would have had a spread
#
of the social reform movement within society.
#
Gandhi recognized that you can't simply trust the state to reform society.
#
You have to have on-ground reforms by activist individuals working non-violently, you know,
#
going from Mohalla to Mahalla.
#
You just can't have a law saying, untouchability is abolished.
#
You have to go have people going from Mohalla to Mohalla, village to village, saying, open
#
everywhere to every person.
#
You can't just have a law saying women are equal to men.
#
You have to go travel around and, to use a later phrase, conscientize ordinary folks
#
about the importance of giving women equal rights.
#
So Gandhi absolutely recognized this.
#
Now among the tragedies of Gandhi's death, premature death, was that Gandhi had not had
#
clearly anointed his political successors.
#
He had said, Nehru and Patel will succeed me politically.
#
But he had not anointed his successors in the social work field.
#
And through a, I mean, this is a, maybe because separate discussion, but through pure accident,
#
Gandhi died and Vinoba Bhave appointed himself.
#
And in my view, he gave that social reform movement a totally wrong direction and a spiritual
#
and mystical direction, rather than focusing on proper ground level constructive work.
#
So I think Gandhi recognized this.
#
Gandhi is, again, this is the difference between Gandhi and people like Mohs and Bhagat Singh,
#
who said political power first and foremost, get rid of the British as early as possible.
#
On the other hand, Gandhi said, we must prepare ourselves for independence.
#
To go back to what Khilnani remarks, his battle was against India too.
#
And he would have, even after independence, Gandhi would have continued the battle against
#
India at the level of everyday life.
#
And that's what we missed.
#
And here I have to say that obviously I agree completely with Gandhi.
#
I mean, one of my favorite quotations about politics is by Andrew Breitbart, which is
#
quote, politics is downstream of culture, stop quote, which is that, you know, unless
#
you change the culture, you cannot change the politics.
#
Now, what seems to have happened is that one, the political infrastructure that then was
#
shaping the constitution and the country who are today disparagingly termed as liberal
#
elites basically framed the constitution that at that time was out of sync with the culture.
#
And what also seems to have happened that that fight, and it wasn't just Gandhi's fight,
#
I'm sure a lot of people cared about it, of bringing about a liberal society.
#
Essentially, some would argue pessimistically that it has failed.
#
And because it has failed, today we have the kind of politics we have.
#
And tangentially, the other contestation, like I did an episode with JP Narayan, the
#
great political thinker, and his point was that India is not necessarily an illiberal
#
And to some extent, I get where he's coming from.
#
I call it an illiberal society because of the way women are treated and the lower castes
#
But at the same time, our traditions of tolerance and diversity are such that it strikes me
#
that it's both and that the so-called conservative government in power is actually in one sense
#
a radical government because they're going against our traditions of tolerance.
#
I mean, as in, you know, you know, this whole question of Ayodhya, one temple, one holy
#
city for the Hindus and so on, I mean, absolutely, absolutely.
#
So would you say that Gandhian struggle has finally lost today?
#
You know, I would have said it two months ago.
#
I would have not said it's lost.
#
I would have, what I would have said, Amit, is, and I have said it in print, is to invoke
#
my friend Gopal Krishna Gandhi, who is only incidentally a grandson of Gandhi, but essentially
#
a scholar and thinker and profound modern interpreter of Gandhi's thought.
#
And Gopal Gandhi often used to say to me in private, and particularly in the 1990s, the
#
brutal decade that saw the demolition of Babri Masjid and so on, he used to say to me, like
#
the Buddha, India will kick out Gandhi.
#
And like the Buddha, the rest of the world will affirm Gandhi.
#
So I knew that Gandhi would never die.
#
I mean, that, you know, there would be people in Eastern Europe, in Latin America, everywhere
#
else who would pick up Gandhi and renew his ideas.
#
But maybe I thought, like Gopal, that Gandhi's influence was steadily diminished within India.
#
The last two months, and particularly the protests against the CIA, because of these
#
two aspects of Gandhi that they brought, one is Hindu-Muslim harmony and individual civil
#
disobedience, you know, and collective and collective.
#
And the photograph of the young girl offering a rose to the policeman was so Gandhian, correct?
#
And individual in the sense that it is not organized, contrary to what the BJP says,
#
this is totally spontaneous.
#
You know, I mean, I said the day I was detained and came out in an interview, I said that
#
in the detention center, there were 400 people, students were overrepresented, and the Congress
#
Party was underrepresented, even though, you know, Karnataka is the god of the Congress
#
I mean, it's pretty strong here, it's the middle opposition party.
#
So I think these two aspects of Gandhi have come back in India through this, the current
#
wave of protests, you know, spirited coming out in the streets non-violently, and you
#
know, this whole, I mean, that great, the slogan, I don't know who coined it, in Bombay,
#
jab Hindu-Muslim razi kya karega Nazi?
#
Yeah, the name escapes me, actually, somebody put this up on his Instagram and then it got
#
Jab Hindu-Muslim razi kya karega Nazi?
#
Now it's that kind of sharp satire.
#
The phrasing is not Gandhian, but the sentiment is totally Gandhian, the sentiment, the phrasing
#
is too satirical and sharp to be Gandhian, right?
#
So this aspect, you know, I mean, Hindu-Muslim, Sikh, Isai razi, you know, I mean, the, the
#
whole Rangar Radin Shaheen Bagh by Sardars, you know, that's fabulous, I mean, that's
#
like, that's just wonderful, right?
#
So I am now hopeful that Gandhi has not been forgotten in his home line.
#
I mean, two months ago, I would have thought that it's elsewhere that people are, you know,
#
I mean, the Prime Minister quotes him totally cynically and instrumentally.
#
I mean, the Prime Minister can write an article on October 2nd in the New York Times and not
#
mention Hindu-Muslim harmony, which is what Gandhi lived and died for.
#
You can mention Einstein praised him, Mandela praised him, all kinds of stuff, right?
#
So but I think ordinary people and admirably not only Gandhi, but also Ambedkar, also Bhagat
#
So I had a thesis last year and I wrote a piece on this where I was sort of looking
#
at politics through the lens of economics and trying to examine why is it that during
#
our freedom struggle, we had so many great leaders and people often bemoan that we don't
#
have leaders like that anymore.
#
And to me, the economic answer boiled down to incentives that at that point in time,
#
all the leaders that we had, they weren't motivated by the lust for power because there
#
was no power to we had, they were motivated by abstract ideals and that idealism took
#
them there and it was that kind of person who got attracted.
#
And in the modern Indian state where the state is such a rent seeking predatory behemoth,
#
it attracts the kind of people who will lust for power and who will go on.
#
Now what has given me hope in the last couple of months, as you said, is that that kind
#
of spirit, that kind of idealism seems to be reappearing in the public spaces right
#
now, but is not yet there in politics, but is reappearing in public spaces and maybe
#
out of the crucible of this future politicians will emerge.
#
But at the same time, I sort of look at the political marketplace and we'll talk about
#
the BJP and the Congress, but the example that kind of struck me was that in Delhi,
#
the Aam Aadmi Party made the perhaps practical, perhaps cynical decision to not fight this
#
battle for principles just because they are running an election on governance very soon,
#
extremely soon and therefore not to get involved in all of this.
#
But what they have done because of this is that they didn't speak out against 370.
#
In fact, they supported the abolition of 370.
#
They have completely ignored this issue.
#
So what is therefore happening is that in the political space, there is no one speaking
#
up for these principles anymore because the incentives of, oh, I have to win the next
#
election is coming into play and they're behaving rationally.
#
We can't judge them for this.
#
But how do we get past this?
#
You know, it's hard to say.
#
I mean, it's very, very hard to say how society has transformed themselves and I mean, the
#
last time we had a movement of this kind, you know, India against corruption, it gave
#
birth to the cult of Kedriwal who threw everyone else out of his movement and his party, right?
#
But I think there's, I think because there's so many young people and across India, it's
#
I mean, the media is focused on Delhi because the media is in Delhi and Shaheen Bagh is
#
in Delhi and Damia is in Delhi.
#
But all over, you know, if you see the scenes from Bihar today, you know, something from
#
Rangalan, Kerala, Kerala, of course, Kerala, of course, but many Bombay, I mean, I think
#
the BJP's hubris in not striking a deep relationship has been good for Indian democracy, whatever
#
else, you know, and it did pluralism.
#
I mean, it's made, you know, just as an aside, Eric Holtzbaum in his memoir, in Interesting
#
Times, has a kind of a throwaway line where he says, there are many ex-communists, but
#
have you ever met an ex-fascist?
#
Now, I thought that's quite a profound line, but I think in Maharashtra now there are quite
#
I mean, if you look at what the Shiv Sena is talking about now, right, which is great,
#
I mean, if the Shiv Sena has abandoned his hardline Hindutva, I know much more hardline
#
even than the BJP, right?
#
And now I was told, I don't know, that the preamble is going to be read out in every
#
school in Maharashtra, right?
#
So I think these things are happening, and whether they translate into diminished returns
#
for the BJP in the ballot box, whether they translate into true pluralism and tolerance
#
and governance, we don't know.
#
But the last two or three months have been the most hopeful in India for a decade.
#
Well before, I mean, I think from 2010-11, Malmohan Singh lost the plot in many different
#
I am not one who is nostalgic for Malmohan Singh's regime, his first term was okay, second
#
He demeaned the office of the Prime Minister in many, many ways, including in his utterly
#
shameful comment that I'd be honored to serve under Rahul Gandhi.
#
He prepared the way for Narendra Modi by comments of that kind.
#
So I'm really the last, I'm the most hopeful I've been in a decade, I'd say.
#
And let's kind of talk about the BJP because it's very interesting that again it might
#
seem from this vantage point that it was inevitable that it would end up here with Modi and Shah
#
doing the things that they are doing.
#
But it wasn't inevitable long ago.
#
You once had a Prime Minister in Vajpayee who many regard as one of the best we have
#
had, a far more cultured man than the people in charge today.
#
And you know, what does the evolution of the BJP tell you and also there is a dichotomy
#
here that on the one hand, the BJP is a one party driven by ideology, which is the ideology
#
of this Hindu Rashtra and blah, blah, blah, which comes from its parent, the RSS.
#
But on the other hand, they are brought to power and are expanding by the will to power
#
where they are doing mergers and acquisitions and expanding vote base and all of that.
#
And you know, so what gives, are they at some point going to become an efficient vote gathering
#
machine much like the Congress once was and ideology doesn't matter or is this ideology
#
actually going to play out in the ways that in the last year it seems certainly it's accelerated?
#
No, I think the ideology is, has accelerated, there's no question about it, it's become
#
more strongly ideological in its second term and it's done things that I mean, I'm in
#
some ways because it's shown its naked ugly face, you've had the pushback because they
#
thought that with Kashmir and Ayodhya was not enough, we should also have this third,
#
you know, radical move.
#
But I think the way the BJP has transformed and I'm not the first to say this, I mean
#
people like Suhas Palchikar and others said it before is that it's become a high command
#
party, which it never was.
#
I mean, it's sort of mimicked what Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi did to the Congress
#
in the 70s, that they converted a decentralized diverse party with many vigorous state units,
#
district units, important state leaders into this high command party.
#
I mean, in that column, I mentioned that I wrote about Modi not trusting advisors.
#
I mean, why didn't they take Shivarat Singh Chavan and Raman Singh into this cabinet, right,
#
because they have to push everyone down, Modi and Shah have to control everything in the
#
way in which Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi did and later Sonia Gandhi and Ahmed Patel
#
I mean, same with Sonia Gandhi, Ahmed Patel are the same and even now, if the Congress
#
wants to revive itself, it has to rid itself of that culture, I mean, it has to give people
#
like Amrindar Singh and Sindhara Maia and Bhupesh Bagel much more space than Mr. Ahmed
#
Patel and Mrs. Sonia Gandhi are willing to give them, right.
#
So this transformation of BJP, right, that it's not a grassroots party, it has become
#
a high command party and, you know, this may, of course, it's already had some diminishing
#
You know, very, one very interesting, I mean, these are things that have to be empirically
#
It's also become a cult of personality party, which it never was before.
#
It was always against Yakti Pooja, right.
#
Even in Vajpayee's time, there was a three murti, Vajpayee, Advani, Joshi, right.
#
It was always against Yakti Pooja and now it's a cult of personality and it's a cult
#
of personality promoted by the prime minister and endorsed by second-in-command.
#
Who thinks, rightly or wrongly, that Modi's name wins elections.
#
So he has also abandoned this, RSS believe in collective leadership and it's all cult
#
Now, this has had diminishing returns in the sense that in Jharkhand, for example, the
#
argument was that when social reform was done by the Malmohan Singh regime, so Mandrega,
#
it was Dharma, if Raman Singh implemented Mandrega well, he would get some credit.
#
But now if Raghuveer Das implements, you know, Swachh Bharat well, he'll get no credit because
#
it's only Modi's photograph everywhere, you know.
#
So this is the kind of, the Khayikabad culture and the cult of the personality are transforming
#
the BJP in ways in which actually maybe sowing the seeds of his long-term decline.
#
That's the hopeful part.
#
You know, obviously, the not so hopeful part is that while adopting a high-command culture,
#
while promoting and embellishing a cult of personality, it is not abandoned but rather
#
consolidated its hardcore sectarian ideological bigoted beliefs against minorities and that's
#
But electorally, I think they may have, they may still win state elections, they may win
#
back Rajasthan in four years and so on and so forth.
#
But I think once you undermine state units in the way that they're doing and local leadership,
#
you know, you catapult people from the top that, you know, Haryana will win the election,
#
Amit Shah will decide, Maharashtra will decide, Amit Shah will decide, it won't be the local
#
That's what Indira Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi used to do and see what happened to the Congress
#
In fact, when I was a child, I remember seeing this very striking image of a group of, of
#
a chronology, chronology, Samjhi, of a chronology of mafia dons from one to another.
#
And the first guy was five foot six and everyone who succeeded him, which was basically a second
#
in command taking charge after he died or whatever, was shorter than him till you got
#
to a guy at the end who was four foot nine, which kind of seems to speak to the tendency
#
of some leaders to always appoint people next to them who cannot threaten them.
#
And, and, and, and which is why you have these different parties.
#
I mean, I mean, what Modi should really have done, Sivaraj Singh Chauhan, Raman Singh and
#
Vasunda Raje into the cabinet.
#
And they would completely have deferred him, they didn't, they don't want his job.
#
They know he's the supreme leader, but they are three competent and experienced administrators,
#
Surely you want them in your team.
#
Are you so insecure that you must only have, you know, Raja Sabha MPs like Nirmala Sitharaman
#
and Jai Shankar and others to just, you know, who are todies to you.
#
I mean, it's, it's a mystifying.
#
The other tendency which people have pointed out about the BJP is that each leader seems
#
to make the leader before him seem moderate, like Vajpayee to Shyamaprasad and Advani to
#
Vajpayee and Modi to Advani and maybe Amit Shah.
#
No, I don't think Vajpayee was less moderate than Shyamaprasad.
#
Shyamaprasad was essentially, no, no, no, no, no, I don't think so.
#
But certainly Advani, Vajpayee made Advani seem moderate and you know, Advani made Vajpayee
#
seem moderate and Modi makes Advani seem moderate.
#
And Shah will make Modi seem moderate.
#
And then Adityanath or whoever.
#
And then the successor then has to become more strident to appeal to the base or something?
#
You know, there's one aspect of what's going on in our country today, which I think insufficient
#
attention has been paid, is the regional diversity.
#
Modi is an all-India leader, but Adityanath cannot become an all-India leader.
#
Not because he doesn't have charisma, but his charisma is of a kind that will appeal
#
in UP and Bihar and not in Maharashtra and in Karnataka and in Kerala.
#
Whereas Modi had a, this is something that Modi shared only with Indira Gandhi and Nehru,
#
that his charisma, you know, went across state boundaries for whatever reason, you know.
#
You felt this guy is for all of India, maybe not for the Muslims, but for Hindus everywhere
#
But Adityanath went to Kerala to lead a march and to return within one day.
#
So I think it would be interesting to see, he clearly is positioning himself as some
#
kind of successor in the short to medium term.
#
I mean, if you look at it, what he's been doing in UP.
#
But I think this kind of pan-Indian appeal that Modi has, which even Vashma didn't have
#
in the same way, you know.
#
Vashma was a great coalition builder, a great team builder, but he didn't have that kind
#
of vote-gathering ability that Modi had, even still today has, and only Nehru and Indira
#
Yeah, and now we inevitably also have to turn our attention to the Congress.
#
And you know, my sentiment of the Congress is the way I see the nation today.
#
Our big problem is that Modi is in power.
#
Part of the reason for that is that there is a terribly weak opposition.
#
Part of the reason for that terribly weak opposition is that our largest opposition
#
party, the only other national party, has been crippled by the feudalism within the
#
So if you oppose Modi, you have to oppose that feudalism.
#
You have to therefore oppose the family, and you've got a lot of flak for it recently,
#
and I absolutely felt for you, and I share your views on this.
#
And to me, what I tell my friends is, whatever anger you might have against the family for
#
all the harm they've done through the decades, the point is, and this is something that I'm
#
sure you'd feel visibly, that the Congress was once a vessel for really great leaders,
#
and that organizational infrastructure still exists.
#
So if only the spaces are for new leaders to come up, that's where the hope lies.
#
No, there still are some good leaders in the Congress, and they're not the normal leaders
#
whom Delhi people talk about.
#
They're not Sindhi and Pirate, they're not Sindhi and Pirate or Shashi Tharoor, no, no,
#
As far as I can see, there are three leaders of the Congress who are, I think, are actually
#
One is Amrinder Singh, the other is Siddharamaiah of my state, and the third is the most interesting
#
because he's the youngest, and he's from a Hindi-speaking state, is Bhupesh Bagheera
#
of Chhattisgarh, who in a year in power has actually grown enormously, and it'll be interesting
#
to see whether the high command in the family sees him as a threat, which they very well
#
But he's so, I think, not Kamal Nath, none of these people, but I think Amrinder and
#
Siddharamaiah are strongly rooted in their state, you know, they have stoked regional
#
pride in a very strong way, they're seen as tough, authoritative, and with a mass connect,
#
And Bhupesh Bagheera is a very interesting character, and if I, if Sonia Gandhi was vice,
#
she would make him the next Congress President, someone like him, the next Congress President,
#
because that's the only way you can take on Modi.
#
You know, several things have changed, you know, in the popular perception of the Congress
#
One is, you know, Sonia Gandhi, 20 years ago, many ordinary Indians were sympathetic towards
#
They said, here is someone who's known to horrible bereavements, you know, the brutal
#
murder of her adored husband and her revered mother-in-law, and yet she's come to serve
#
She was hardworking, unlike her son.
#
She had political acumen, unlike her son.
#
But today, she's seen in a different light.
#
20 years later, she's not seen as the scourgeous, sacrificing person, but as someone who simply
#
wants to promote her son.
#
That's how she's seen, right.
#
So even Sonia Gandhi is bad news electorally.
#
She may be better news for the Congress Party than her son, because she's a more adroit
#
tactician and a better equal, and because coalition partners trust her, you know, Sharad
#
Pawar will go and meet Sonia Gandhi.
#
He will not go and meet Rahul Gandhi, right.
#
To that limited extent, she has done some damage control.
#
But she cannot be the future of the Congress Party.
#
The family cannot be the future of the Congress Party if the Congress Party wants to mount
#
an effective opposition to the BJP.
#
And I think that's something which I have said many times before.
#
It so happened that when I said it in Kerala, it got much more flagged than ever before,
#
because I think partly because people felt this is not the time to say it.
#
When there's an all-India movement against this nasty regime, and of course I yield to
#
no one in saying it's a nasty regime, why is he diverting attention by talking about
#
That's why it got so much flagged.
#
But I think the closer we come to 2024, this question will have to be posed more and more
#
That elections, national elections today are about ideology.
#
We can fight Hindutva ideologically.
#
They're about organization and coordination.
#
The opposition needs better organization and coordination.
#
But they are also increasingly presidential and hence about personalities, right.
#
So I think that's a question that will come.
#
And we'll see how it unfolds.
#
There's also a question of deeper party cultures.
#
Like I remember watching this interview of Mahua Moitra a while ago.
#
And whatever one thinks of her, she's a young leader who's captured the imagination.
#
And in that, Mahua Moitra said that she was once part of the Congress 10 years ago.
#
But she left because she felt there was an ingrained sexism and that people were condescending
#
towards her and were not letting her come up.
#
And therefore, she had to make a space somewhere.
#
And my argument always has been that if the Congress can just get past that feudal culture
#
and make space for new leaders, nature abhors a vacuum.
#
I completely agree with you.
#
And my other sort of follow-up question is that, like on the one hand, of course, just
#
to go back to the criticism that you received for a moment, I thought what a lot of people
#
were doing were creating these false binaries where on the one hand, there's Modi, on the
#
other hand, there's the opposition, including Rahul, and if you're criticizing Rahul, you're
#
And I think absolutely the opposite is true.
#
They're both part of the problem.
#
My other question here is that if we look at Indian political parties...
#
And I always say that we can't look at Indian politics through the standard prism of left
#
You know, we are mimicking the West in that frame of thinking, but that frame is not relevant.
#
And the reason is that if you apply that frame, you will find that every Indian party in its
#
economics is left of center in the sense it is statist.
#
And in its approach to society and culture is right of center in terms of denying freedoms
#
and you know, the things that Kamal Nath has done as a CM of MP, is the cow protection
#
This then points to a fundamental problem in the culture itself, right?
#
So where is our hope going to come from?
#
Well, that's very true.
#
I broadly absolutely right that when it comes to economics, leftist or statist, more statist,
#
at best, welfarist, most often statist.
#
And with a few crore in favor, 20 capitalists are the open market for everyone.
#
And when it comes to, you know, culture and freedoms, they are authoritarian.
#
Yeah, I mean, this is partly, you know, I don't know, it's partly our diversity, our
#
size, our poverty, our feudal heritage.
#
So change will be slow and incremental, but I think young people...
#
For example, one way in which India, and that's why Rahul Gandhi is not liked, India is now
#
more democratic, less feudal at the level of how people think.
#
I mean, I've said this often before, that why is MS Dhoni an icon?
#
Because he's not Gavaskar, English speaking, from Mumbai.
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Why is Samyant an entrepreneur and an icon?
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Because they're self-made, they're not, you know, sons of Ambani's and Bajaj's and Birla's.
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So there is a churning going on.
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You speak to the aspirational energies of...
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So the economic growth, urbanization, you know, social media, the influence of the world
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is leading to a kind of, in some ways, I mean, look at the transformation in my life, which
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is attitudes to sexuality and gay rights.
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I mean, it's fantastic, right?
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You couldn't have thought of this when I was young, I mean, homophobia was everywhere.
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I mean, my mother thinks it's absolutely okay to be gay, right?
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I mean, she's 93, right?
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This kind of thing is...
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She's not alone in this.
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People recognize that these are freedoms which people must enjoy, you know.
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So I think they are kind of...
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I mean, India's always moves in different places, even if the state wants to curb dissent
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and diversity and individual freedoms, I think the world is changing in that direction.
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I've taken a lot of your time.
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Initially, let me inform my listeners, I'd initially asked around for three hours of
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this time because I thought we'll do a really nice leisurely episode, but you've been traveling
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a lot and you're a bit tired, so we'll sort of wind it up at the 90-minute mark before
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we go sort of, you know, just looking at India now, I mean, you're not just a person who's
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lived his whole life in India, you have actually lived a significant part of your life in an
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India that goes before all of this in your deep studies of history and so on.
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And you have sort of, in a sense, you're a prominent public intellectual and in a sense,
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you are out there in the public square as well today, you know, shaping the discourse.
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Just looking at what's happening now, if I were to say that, what is your greatest cause
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for fear or what could happen, say, by 2030?
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And what is your greatest cause for hope?
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What is the India you are afraid could happen and what is the India that...
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No, I think, as I said, I'm more hopeful now than I've been for a long time.
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I think we have lost a lot of time and ground in the last 15 years.
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To go back to what I said today, I think Manmohal Singh's second term and the two terms of Modi
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have set us back a great deal, economically, institutionally, socially, morally, culturally,
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But three months ago, I may have thought to be going to descend into full-fledged authoritarianism.
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That's not going to happen.
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I think the young have seen to that and also what happened in Maharashtra has seen to that
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because a large state going out of the BJP or state of that kind means federalism is
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a bulwark against full-fledged authoritarianism of the right, right?
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We have half of India's outside the BJP and even if four years later, the BJP reclaims
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MP in Rajasthan, even if they are re-elected in UP, the south and the west and now increasing
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the east, in the northeast, for example, there's a great amount of discontent.
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But I think this, I'd say, if you take the medium term view, not the very long term view,
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I think Manmohan Singh, a big one, Narsimha Rao, Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh won, elevated
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You know, I've always been sceptical of India, but in different ways, despite their flaws,
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they were not perfect prime ministers, they made many flaws, but overall, the balance
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That is, a country as large, as diverse, as complex as India can progress only incrementally.
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You can't have a great revolution where you remove inequality, become a world power, and
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you know, economic growth is 10% all the time and there's no Hindu-Muslim conflict, there's
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no caste atrocities, but Narsimha Rao, Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, term one, took us to a
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level where I would say we were becoming a wealthier, a more secure, a safer, a more
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comfortable place to live in, right?
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Manmohan Singh too, and the two terms of Modi have set us back, quite a lot, right?
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And so in that sense, we have lost quite substantially in the last 15 years, we would have by the
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time Modi completes the second term.
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But you know, if I'm allowed to, you know, quote myself, you know, in India after Gandhi,
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I kind of sort of said India is a 50-50 democracy, right?
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You remember that, right?
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Now, last year, I said, after Kashmir, I said we are 40-60 going towards 30-70.
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I think now we're up to 35 or 40%, right?
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So, but in that sense, we could have crossed the hump that those three prime ministers,
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Narsimha Rao, Vajpayee and Malmohan Singh, were leading us to cross the hump.
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And now we've gone back somewhere, you know, we're just muddling along in the middle as
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But the last few months have made me more hopeful.
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I mean, I don't think we are going into the abyss as I may have thought three or four
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It looked very, very dark three or four months ago.
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The ball of fear is broken.
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I mean, if you look at the jokes about our ruling duo, I mean, they're delightful.
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I mean, you know, Modi met some students, he doesn't have, he won't meet the students
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protesting the seat, but he'll have these curated, specially curated meetings with students
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and he was going to tell them all the exams.
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And this great cartoonist, Satish Acharya, had a cartoon which said, you know, if I fail,
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So, the ball of fear is broken and I think that's great.
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No, in fact, that's one of the things that gives me hope, all the art and the humor.
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Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely.
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I mean, there's a kind of book that will be written on the music, the poetry, the poems,
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the art, the cartoons, the graffiti, the slogans that have emerged from this movement.
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I'm sure, you know, there'll be, there's a great book, a young anthropologist will write
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And I think these are very heartening signs.
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And people keep asking me for transcripts of the show and my reply to them now is hum
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kaagas nahi dikhayenge.
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Thank you so much for coming on the show.
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I've always learned so much from your books and from our conversations.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you can follow Ram on Twitter at Ram underscore
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You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in and thinkpragati.com.
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The Scene and the Unseen is supported by the Takshashila Institution.
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Do check out all the public policy courses at takshashila.org.in.
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Thank you for listening and hey, go out to a protest somewhere.
