#
If India was a person, she'd be in severe danger from COVID-19.
#
She's got comorbidities.
#
Some organs have failed.
#
Some organs never worked.
#
Some parts of her body are at war with others.
#
If she was an old woman sitting down to make a sweater, she'd be knitting holes.
#
But of course, India is a country, not a person, so I won't take the analogy too far.
#
As we hit the 73rd anniversary of our independence, it's worth looking back at this great nation
#
We take so much about our country for granted.
#
The poverty and injustice, the normalized excesses of our politics, our very existence.
#
Let's step back and take a deeper look.
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Welcome to the seen and the unseen.
#
Our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral science.
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to the seen and the unseen.
#
This episode is a bit like an achievement unlocked moment because from the time I started
#
the show, I have wanted to have Pratap Bhanu Mehta as a guest on the show.
#
We could never quite make it work so far, but here we are talking about the wide ranging
#
subject of India over the last 73 years.
#
People refer to Pratap as PBM and I refer to myself as a PBM fanboy.
#
I regard him as a finest essayist in our country, so far above the rest that there isn't even
#
This leads to one awkward moment for me every month.
#
During the online writing course that I teach, the art of clear writing, I teach the values
#
of clarity and simplicity when writing for a mainstream newspaper.
#
I tell my students, make it easy for the reader to process what you are writing.
#
Avoid long sentences, avoid words that are too big and so on.
#
Then at some point in the month long course, they ask me, so who are the writers you like
#
And the first name I take, of course, is that of Pratap.
#
And then they all jump on me.
#
He uses long sentences, he uses big words, he even uses adverbs, look, screenshot.
#
At that point, I have to take a step back and go into explanations like, yes, but he's
#
allowed to because he packed so much into so little.
#
And indeed, one of the reasons it's so rewarding to read Pratap is that he can go so much deeper
#
in an 800 word column than any other writer I can think of.
#
This demands that readers have a deeper engagement with the text.
#
So when you sit down to read Pratap, you're not skimming, you're diving in.
#
And that, to me, justifies the fact that the prose has a rhythm that I would otherwise
#
say is not quite suited for mainstream newspapers.
#
Anyway, matters of style aside, Pratap is the most insightful commentator on India that
#
He has an acute sense of the political and cultural DNA of this country.
#
And I have never read anything by him that does not increase my understanding of India.
#
That makes him the perfect guest, therefore, for this Independence Day special episode.
#
Before we get to our conversation, though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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If you enjoy listening to The Scene and the Unseen, you can play a part in keeping the
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The Scene and the Unseen has been a labor of love for me.
#
I've enjoyed putting together many stimulating conversations, expanding my brain and my universe,
#
and hopefully yours as well.
#
But while the work has been its own reward, I don't actually make much money off the show.
#
Although The Scene and the Unseen has great numbers, advertisers haven't really woken
#
up to the insane engagement level of podcasts.
#
I do many many hours of deep research for each episode, besides all the logistics of
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producing the show myself, scheduling guests, booking studios, paying technicians, the travel
#
So well, I'm trying a new way of keeping this thing going, and that involves you.
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My proposition for you is this, for every episode of The Scene and the Unseen that you
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enjoy, buy me a cup of coffee, or even a lavish lunch, whatever you feel is worth.
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You can do this by heading over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contributing an amount of
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This is not a subscription.
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The Scene and the Unseen will continue to be free on all podcast apps and at sceneunseen.in.
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This is just a gesture of appreciation.
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Help keep this thing going.
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Sceneunseen.in slash support Pratav, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
It's a great privilege being here and frankly, a little intimidating as well, but you know,
#
look forward to learning from you.
#
It's far more intimidating for me.
#
You know, I'll make a confession here that when I began this podcast three years ago,
#
I made a quick list of names of people I would want on the show and you were number one.
#
So finally, achievement unlocked for me.
#
Your encouragement means a lot.
#
Yeah, so let's kind of start by sort of talking about your early life.
#
Like what I'd be really keen on, like the Pratabhanu Mehta that of course we've never
#
met but the Pratabhanu Mehta that I know is of course a public intellectual.
#
I've read all of your columns and the impression one would get from that is that the moment
#
you popped out in the world, you were reading political philosophy and you know, speaking
#
in you know, long complex sentences.
#
But tell me a little bit about what you sort of were as a kid, what your influences were
#
and how your sort of intellectual journey made you those sort of political scientists
#
Oh gosh, you know there's that old joke, right, that the deepest influences are so deep that
#
you don't even realize they're influences, I'll probably get this narrative wrong.
#
I mean, it is true that as a child, I think my reputation amongst teachers was that one
#
thing I was absolutely reluctant to do was any physical activity.
#
So I would just sit in one place and sort of read a book or something.
#
I think one way of organizing, you know, my thoughts to this question you've asked is
#
maybe just pick out three or four key moments.
#
I mean, I am what is in our circles called an academic brat, which is grew up in an academic
#
So in that sense, I think all the incensed arguments about politics, political theory,
#
political philosophy were sort of in our years from birth.
#
It was an interesting household and in some senses, I think, even on my political views,
#
I think it's had quite a considerable influence, not in terms of specific beliefs.
#
But as I've grown older, I've come to realize that I think politics is almost as much about
#
a kind of temperament that you cultivate and the kinds of virtues you value.
#
I think most people in our family, particularly my grandfather, who was actually in politics,
#
active politics in Rajasthan for many years, but my father also and my mother had in full
#
measure, there was a interesting and easy kind of religiosity in the household.
#
I mean, this joke in a household is there isn't a place of worship we don't like and
#
But it combined that easy religiosity with also a deep kind of intellectualism about
#
And in some senses, I think the question, the metaphysical question in some senses, right,
#
what is the ground of being?
#
What is the nature of our consciousness?
#
That kind of hovered in the air in the household a lot, almost naturally.
#
I mean, apart from professional colleagues, apart from political scientists, there was
#
that sort of whole other kind of conversational idiom.
#
And the two things that I do think were important hindsight about that experience, I think one
#
was a very different view of what a religious life actually means and what it looks like.
#
I think my grandfather's two greatest attributes, one that a religious life has to be utterly
#
free from vanity of any kind.
#
And second, that the meaning of life in some senses has to come from a purpose that is
#
And one of the interesting things I found about genuinely religious people, I think
#
in ways that you come across is there is a kind of, I actually think in genuinely religious
#
people, there is a healthy skepticism about the world, which is to say that the lack of
#
vanity and detachment comes from, you know, the sense of, you might say, the transience
#
And that can be actually channelized into a kind of healthy distance and skepticism
#
I mean, you might say mysticism and skepticism are kind of two sides of the same coin.
#
So I think that sensibility, I mean, I don't want to put it in sort of philosophical propositions,
#
but I think that sensibility has remained, I think, quite powerful for me and defines
#
the way in which I think I relate to religion.
#
And I think it's a sensibility that's increasingly vanishing.
#
I mean, frankly, even the kinds of religious speeches that we encountered were far more
#
I think almost all of them subscribe to that gate line from Madhushala, so that sensibility
#
I think has remained important.
#
But it also, I think, convinced me that I think it's more a temperament, not so much
#
a kind of public philosophy you want to sort of articulate it in propositional terms, it
#
In fact, it becomes it's very opposite, right?
#
Because the idea is to give everybody the space to find, you know, the law of their
#
And understand it in non-instrumental terms.
#
So that was, I think, the first sort of, you know, formative moment in lasting influence.
#
The second is an interesting political memory.
#
And I know as we grow older, we sometimes exaggerate what we remember.
#
But this, I think, I can say with honesty that the emergency was a defining moment for
#
I mean, I was about eight years old.
#
The astonishing thing is we were living in Shimla at the time.
#
And I think the three things that were very much in the air, which we even grasped as
#
children very profoundly, right?
#
One was the potential violation of civil liberties, the threats that, you know, my father's colleagues
#
were being arrested, the potential threat of him being arrested.
#
You know, there were sort of clandestine information papers being passed because there was a complete
#
back out on news media, so, you know, this was like a cloak and dagger came, you know,
#
these papers would arrive and you were supposed to tear them up, otherwise it would be incriminating.
#
It, I think, was one moment which created a kind of instinctive anti-authoritarianism.
#
Maybe I had this anarchist fee in any case, an instinctive anti-authoritarianism.
#
Probably a little bit of a distrust of the Congress party qua organization, if not so
#
much its stated ideology.
#
And I think the third thing which had appeared in a small way in a state like Himachal, I
#
mean, you know, one doesn't associate these things with Himachal, but for the first time
#
there was a kind of nativist movement in Himachal, Himachal for Himachalis.
#
I mean, Himachal University, where my father was teaching, was a young university and had
#
created an extraordinary wealth of talent actually now that we look back.
#
But you know, there was a movement saying, look, Himachal should be for Himachalis.
#
And that in part prompted our move out of Himachal, you know, in a sense back to Rajasthan.
#
So I think that sort of anti-nativism, anti-authoritarianism, that instinctive I think came from the emergency.
#
The third moment, if I would say, I think was the departure to Oxford.
#
So I finished my schooling in Rajasthan, in Jaipur, and it was a nice kind of idyllic
#
I mean, I think, you know, Jaipur was a kind of manageable town.
#
The kind of freedom you can have when you can navigate the whole town on a bicycle and
#
not worry about safety or anything else is not a freedom we have experienced since.
#
I left for Oxford right after high school.
#
And I know people can have different experiences in Oxford, but for political philosophy, Oxford
#
between 1985 and 1988 was just an astonishing place.
#
I mean, I was lucky to have two extraordinary tutors, one who's been a kind of abiding friend
#
almost throughout life, Alan Ryan, the other was John Gray.
#
But apart from that, I mean, you know, Oxford had Jerry Cohen, Derek Parfitt, Amartya Sen,
#
Ronald Workin, Joseph Raz, and this is like, you know, one of those sort of one in a century
#
moments for political theory.
#
And it just reinforced in me, I think, the love of the subject that I had probably picked
#
My decision to go to graduate school was a very simple one, which is what kinds of books
#
Frankly, there was no other kind of forethought to it.
#
But more substantively, I think what Oxford did, which was, I think, interesting was,
#
you know, I think when I went to Oxford, the little of the intellectual milieu that I was
#
familiar with was by and large opposed to liberalism.
#
I wouldn't say it's anti-liberal.
#
But I think in Indian political discourse and political thought, there has always been
#
this construction of liberalism as somehow being associated with a selfish possessive
#
individualism, liberalism having no sense of community, you know, there's a standard
#
range of criticisms, right?
#
Liberalism really having no moral foundations other than self-interest.
#
And what I think Oxford did for me was revive a kind of interest in the deep moral foundations
#
of liberalism, which I think continued when I went to do my doctoral work at Princeton.
#
Alan Ryan was an extraordinary teacher.
#
I mean, I think one of the amazing things he did was, as a teacher was, you know, he
#
would always say that even reading is an ethical act in some ways, which is that it involves
#
a sense of fairness to other people's arguments.
#
And the ability to get inside other people's arguments, particularly people whose views
#
So you know, if you're giving a lecture on Marx or if you're giving a lecture on Hegel,
#
it should appear as if you were, you know, in a sense, incarnating them, right?
#
Rather than and that's a minimal kind of fairness.
#
And I think that's very much part of a liberal sensibility in some ways, talking of a kind
#
of temperament that, you know, I then went to Princeton and through a series of accidents
#
ended up doing a PhD on Adam Smith.
#
That's kind of a core journey from this kind of interest in liberalism and religion to
#
Adam Smith, Adam Smith in the Scottish Enlightenment and particularly on Adam Smith's moral philosophy.
#
And two things that struck me about Adam Smith at that time, which kind of drew me to him
#
was one, you know, now, of course, there's been a revival of Adam Smith and people take
#
his moral philosophy very seriously, but in the 80s, frankly, beyond reading excerpts
#
from The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith was not part of, as it were, the larger literature.
#
And I was very struck by two things in Adam Smith's sensibility.
#
One again, the same anti-authoritarianism.
#
I think people often forget that The Wealth of Nations is really also as much about protecting
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the state from concentrations of power as anything else.
#
The second was, I think, his attitude to history, you know, which has been nicely described
#
as skeptical bigism, which is the belief in the possibility of progress, but the deep
#
sense that a lot of progress is a series of accidents, conjunctures, sometimes bad people
#
do good things, sometimes good people do bad things.
#
And I think the Scottish Enlightenment, both Hugh and Smith, are absolutely wonderful at
#
So, you know, Smith can, for example, in his attitude to capitalism, he doesn't have a
#
single good moral word to say about owners of capital, but nevertheless, he says, look,
#
you know, there's certain good that comes from deploying it.
#
Or, for example, his classic discussion of slavery and American democracy, right, that
#
his prediction that a republic would be the last to abolish slavery.
#
So there was a kind of paradoxical historical sensibility, which seemed to me to be far
#
more defensible, I think, than a lot of, I think, approaches to history that try and
#
I mean, I like that intellectual effort, because sometimes saying it's a complicated can also
#
be an intellectual cop-out, right?
#
You just say there's lots of things.
#
But that kind of easy complexity, I think, that Smith had, I think, was hugely attractive.
#
I think the anti-authoritarian instincts again.
#
And I think it was at Princeton, although I did not end up working on this.
#
But also the much deeper engagement with modern liberalism again.
#
I think John Rawls' theory of justice was sort of our Bible.
#
And I went through a complicated relationship with that book.
#
I mean, I think at the time, partly because it was so dominant, you know, there was a
#
kind of natural young person's instinct to rebel against the hegemony of Rawls.
#
We would always joke, you know, write essays called Not Another Paper on Rawls.
#
But as I've grown older, I do think it's one of the most remarkable books ever written.
#
I think there's a very austere dignity to that book.
#
And it's almost deceptive.
#
I mean, almost nobody reads part three of the theory of justice, which is an astonishing
#
piece of moral psychology.
#
I mean, you don't have to agree with the specific principles Rawls advances.
#
But I think as an answer to the fundamental question of political existence, which is
#
how can you reconcile social cooperation with a recognition of our basic freedom and equality?
#
I think it's probably the most interesting framework with which to think.
#
The final thing I just say in this journey and as a moment, I think, was another teacher
#
I encountered at Princeton, George K. Tebb.
#
I mean, Alan also had moved to Princeton.
#
So there was kind of that continuity from Oxford.
#
And George K. Tebb was a remarkable figure in American political theory.
#
He's not much known outside academic circles, but really one of the truly great teachers
#
in American academia, very different from Alan's in the sense that much more combative
#
in his teaching style with very strong sort of views.
#
But the one thing which was his life's work, I think, and putting it in my words, I think
#
he put it a lot more eloquently, was I think hanging out with him nourished my instinctive
#
rebelliousness against any kind of collective pronouns or forms of collective identity,
#
where the very act of naming you in a particular collective identity actually can be antithetical
#
to your freedom because it benchmarks you.
#
If somebody says, are you a Hindu?
#
What does that actually mean?
#
Who benchmarks the content of what it means to be that?
#
He also used to make, I think, the important point, which is in some ways obvious but not
#
well recognized, is that when we get absorbed in a collective identity, the form of living
#
that we engage in also becomes a little bit vicarious.
#
There's a thrill to it.
#
Sachin Tendulkar's achievement becomes my achievement.
#
And frankly, there is no thrill more unmatched than that.
#
On the other hand, the fact of the matter is that it is his achievement.
#
That vicariousness also produces a kind of moral blindness, and that's the moral blindness
#
that in a sense licenses all crimes in the name of collectivities in a way that you would
#
not sanction if they were done in the name of an individual.
#
And particularly, I think, while I understand the historical importance of nationalism,
#
something we can talk about, but the fact that nationalism exhibits both of these traits,
#
I think it can be antithetical to freedom in the sense that it benchmarks people, and
#
it unleashes a kind of violent vicariousness, which turns ordinary people into, I think,
#
let's say, less empathetic towards otherness.
#
So I think that's probably, I think, the broad intellectual journey.
#
I think the last and final twist, I mean, talking about oneself is never hugely interesting,
#
I mean, I was in the United States for almost 17 years after Princeton went and taught at
#
I had walked into that job, again, almost accidentally with the encouragement of sub-professors.
#
The idea was always to come back to India.
#
I mean, one, I had this great sense that, look, the real stakes are actually in India.
#
I mean, at that time, America was characterized by a deep overlapping consensus.
#
I mean, it's hard to imagine that world now in this polarized...
#
And if you're interested in the future of political theory, India was the place in some
#
I mean, it was going to have exactly the role that 19th century Europe had, right?
#
The society of the future, all the big debates are happening.
#
And I think coming back, of course, also led me back to much deeper interest in Indian
#
politics and Indian traditions, which is something I never formally studied while I was in the
#
I mean, I always thought my connection to India was way too personal for me.
#
I didn't want to write on it as an academic subject for the American Political Science
#
Association and within those genres.
#
And the re-engagement with Indian political thought, I think, Ambedkar particularly was
#
a huge revelation who I had studied only personally before then.
#
And I think we all still study only personally.
#
One because of his absolutely unblinkered view of Indian society and almost every aspect
#
It's really a kind of moral clarity of take no prisoners, which is astonishing.
#
But I think second, I think he did put his finger on, I think, the original sin of Indian
#
civilization, which is caste.
#
And you don't have to agree with Ambedkar, but I think the fact that that legacy and
#
history informs not just social conflicts, but also frankly, our insecurities about religion
#
You don't have to agree with his claim that Indian metaphysics or Indian thought rises
#
and falls with caste, and if you take away caste, there's nothing else.
#
But it's hard to deny the fact that we are so anxious about its status has something
#
to do with, in some sense, its caste.
#
And the second thing about Ambedkar is that he's the first and only thoroughgoing modern
#
constitutionalist in the Indian tradition, who just says, look, we have to act as if
#
You don't have to give arguments for this.
#
In fact, anybody who demands arguments for this is probably already playing mischief,
#
Who's talking the language of modern constitutionalism, he has none of Nehru sentimentalism.
#
He, I think, very clearly sees the limitations of this extraordinary nationalist project,
#
which at one level was trying to create the space for an Indian way of thinking, right?
#
But I think Ambedkar's question was very simple.
#
What you need is liberty, equality, and fraternity, and everything else follows from that.
#
But if you start at the identity end of the story, what is an Indian way of thinking,
#
then you're down the path of self-destruction.
#
So I guess it's all of these elements, and I'm not sure these different elements can
#
be easily reconciled, but that's how at least I see kind of my journey not well exemplified.
#
I won't hold any of these people responsible for my feelings, but at least those were the
#
deep moments of engagement.
#
I think Ketab and Ryan just heaved this eye of relief that they won't be held responsible
#
You know, there's a lot to unpack here, and I'll kind of go through the different stands
#
One, I was struck by what you said about the role that religion played in your life in
#
the sense that we often think of religion and rationality as two things which are completely
#
And as you pointed out, and you know that a true religious person may have that sort
#
of sense of distance from the material world that he can then be more dispassionate about
#
it and therefore more skeptical, which was fascinating for me.
#
So while I don't really want to get too much into the personal, but I'm kind of fascinated
#
by the role of sort of religiosity in sort of shaping the way you think, are you a religious
#
I mean, the short answer is yes.
#
And I have no hesitation saying that the only reason I hesitated for a second is that, you
#
know, Wittgenstein has this wonderful line that he once said that, you know, I was going
#
to write that I'm writing to the glory of God, but a statement like that can be misunderstood.
#
And what he meant by that was not that there's a kind of vanity in saying, you know, I'm
#
religious or that, you know, you want to look good in the eyes of people who are not.
#
I think it was the profound sense that he had that the conditions of making religion
#
intelligible in an intersubjective way no longer exist.
#
So when somebody says, are you religious or are you X or Y, one is actually not sure what
#
set of expectations is being actually packed into that claim.
#
So that's, that's the, and one of the problems in a sense, I think challenges religion in
#
And in that sense, I think, you know, it is intention with the world is that those conditions
#
of intelligibility exist even less and less.
#
I mean, you are an imaginative kind of interlocutor.
#
You can imagine 25 other contexts in which saying I'm religious might evoke associations
#
that you yourself do not have about that term, right?
#
And I think that also in a sense exemplified, I think, Kate's point about sort of the act
#
of naming public identities in this way that identities are best, you know, if they're
#
kind of background facts about you, which is the ground on which you stand and that
#
gives you a freedom to act, but they become perversions if they become a kind of exhibitionist
#
goal in some ways that you have.
#
I was also kind of struck by the serendipitous nature of this conversation itself because
#
in you know, two of my recent episodes, I have sort of examined authors that you just
#
I had an episode with Russ Roberts where we spoke a lot about Adam Smith, particularly
#
a theory of moral sentiments.
#
And in my last episode with Karthik Muralidharan, we also discussed roles a little bit.
#
I gave my contentious gyan on why libertarianism can be derived from roles.
#
But that's sort of a separate matter.
#
I was also, you know, very struck by your quoting Alan Ryan on how reading can be an
#
And it also strikes me that, you know, when you join the academia, for example, the one
#
thing that you're of course doing is that you are, you know, being introduced to frames
#
of looking at the world.
#
But at the same time, as you kind of figure that out, and I think what happens when you
#
discover frames to look at the world is that every frame that sort of, you know, and different
#
frames will seem complete in and of themselves and therefore they are very seductive because
#
a very complicated world and the complicated processes of history can be, you know, suddenly
#
seem intelligible and you are like, okay, you know, this explains the world so beautifully.
#
And then you define yourself and all of that.
#
And it seems to me that you haven't done that.
#
You haven't not just chosen sort of an ideological collective like that, but you've kind of remained
#
open in the sense that it is therefore sort of hard to pin you down and say that, oh,
#
you know, BBM is this or that or, or whatever you're examining everything critically.
#
One, how difficult does that become within the world of academia because surely there
#
are pressures that you see around you to conform to a particular ways of thinking.
#
And part two then is that when you come back to India, I've noticed that a lot of the frames
#
that you could carry with you to look at the world, for example, the frame of left and
#
right in politics, don't really apply to India.
#
And you have to then sort of discard bits of that and start, you know, constructing
#
your own frames as it were, or figuring all that stuff out for yourself.
#
So what was that process like?
#
Oh, that's a fascinating question actually.
#
It says a lot about the state of academics.
#
So I think two things, right?
#
One, as I say, I think as an intellectual enterprise, I think the search for parsimony
#
and a master key is very worthy.
#
In fact, you need space for people doing that, right, and for that kind of grand theorizing
#
I mean, it really moves the horizons of our thinking, right?
#
But I think it's important to remember that theory is not the world in some ways.
#
I mean, I think that's something kind of...
#
And you know, one of the most important things, I think, again, coming back to Adam Smith,
#
right, is that it's interesting both in his moral theory, but also in his theory of science.
#
The one thing that he recognized was the power of the imagination a lot more.
#
In fact, he says, look, we are neither creatures of reason in some sense of passion, we are
#
more driven by imagination.
#
And imagination does have a way of kind of putting together contradictory things in a
#
way in which reason does not, right?
#
So in that sense, I think just being alive to the complexity of reality, that theory
#
Like every lens, the critical thing is under what conditions.
#
And reality is one of those things where under what conditions pretty much changes instantly.
#
I mean, a philosopher once made this very nice distinction that, you know, when we are
#
academics, we have to think in terms of other things being equal, right?
#
That's how economists think often, right?
#
All our models are other things being equal.
#
When we are doing pure normative theory in philosophy, that's why other things be equal,
#
Here are the arguments.
#
When you deal with reality, it's all things considered in some ways.
#
So I think that's, I think, one, one, I think, important element.
#
I've always been struck by a line of Neil's boards, you know, which was that the opposite
#
of truth is falsehood, but the opposite of deep truth is another deep truth.
#
That there is something to, you know, I think that that's it.
#
But the second thing I think, which is important, and this is something I do think academics
#
sometimes underestimate is that the world of politics is different from the world of
#
And I think it'd be disastrous for the world if the world of politics was simply the world
#
of a particular set of ideas writ large.
#
I think politics begins, I think, in the fact of disagreement.
#
Frankly, if we didn't disagree, we wouldn't actually need politics in a, in a deep sense
#
The disagreement can have many sources.
#
I mean, it can be in ideas, it can be reasoning, it can be come from your positions, it can
#
be come from who you are, right?
#
And the task of politics, in a sense, is to recognize this plurality.
#
I mean, and which is why when academics think that the purpose of politics is to, in a sense,
#
enact a particular idea, whether it's Marxist on the one hand or libertarian, it's that
#
moment where you cease to be political, in some senses, I mean, it's as oxymoronic as
#
you might say, Christian politics might be, I mean, you know, the answer to the question
#
before it's been asked.
#
Politics also operates in the realm of legitimacy rather than the realm of truth, right?
#
Which is, you and I might disagree, I might be more centrist, you might be more libertarian.
#
At the end of the day, the political job is, can we find a way of actually living together
#
in a way in which both of us feel we have space, but also in some ways, right, our core
#
sense of being is recognized, right?
#
Now, that's a very different problem from the intellectual problem of what is the truth.
#
I mean, you might well be right, you know, in the way you reason, I might well be right,
#
but that is actually not the political problem.
#
And dismissing disagreement simply as a function of lesser reasoning, right, and that's very
#
tempting for academics to do, you know, where the answer to every disagreement is, if you
#
only thought enough, you would come to my point of view.
#
That actually, I think, strikes me as just a misleading description of the human condition.
#
Now, you mentioned kind of conformity and the pressure to conform, I think, in academia.
#
I mean, I think academics can also function like collective tribes.
#
Often the pressure to conform is not what people think it is, which is particularly
#
in the social sciences and humanities, it's actually not political views, it's actually
#
I mean, you know, various departments like to reproduce their own sort of method of inquiry
#
And I think a lot of the kind of most pedantic and frustrating disputes in academia are actually
#
over that institutional control, right?
#
But I think coming to more substantive things, I think, look, I think you obviously have
#
to have some set of values and, you know, the joke about liberals that they can't take
#
their own side in an argument, I think is a telling joke in some ways.
#
I think that certainly applies when it comes to worldviews and you have to be open to receptivity,
#
but you have to have some baseline moral values, right?
#
Some things that allow you to draw a red line.
#
Now when people speak of conformity in academia, I think, you know, you can at one level take
#
the most egregious examples of woke politics.
#
And certainly there's a lot more of that these days.
#
But I think it is, one has to say, I think a fact, and probably a progressive factor
#
or productive fact, that almost all moral theories have to operate within a broad plateau
#
of freedom and egalitarianism, at least moral egalitarianism, right?
#
So often when people complain that there's conformity, and I think, you know, what they
#
want to say is that there are certain kinds of hierarchical conceptions of our relations
#
to each other that are no longer considered socially acceptable, right?
#
So for example, I mean, you obviously can't defend racism and caste in the way you do
#
and often there's a passive aggressive way of rearticulating them in a kind of different
#
language, right, in which you can play a victim, right?
#
So to the extent that there are certain core moral propositions of that kind, and those
#
have to be exhibited in the way in which you treat and respect people, those will be the
#
basis for, I would say, certain kind of conformity, because those are the basic elements of that
#
social contract, right?
#
That's what gives predictability, you know.
#
So for example, freedom of expression, right, ideally should just be that, that it's a core
#
norm that all of us respect and none of us sort of, you know, violate.
#
Now often what happens with freedom of expression is all sides weaponize it, right, in the sense
#
that it's a convenient tool when you want to use it for your side, it's inconvenient
#
when you want to extend the same courtesy in some senses to other people, right?
#
So that kind of, I think, building off a little bit of a consensus, okay, what are these moral
#
I'll just give you one example, I think, which is illustrative of this.
#
So I use this example often, but because it's so vivid, in this context, it might make sense.
#
So you know, I often used to get this criticism, and I'm sure you've heard it many times that
#
liberalism and libertarianism and all of these nice things that you guys talk about are basically
#
foreign imports, right?
#
These are ideologies born in the West, they might not have applicability in India.
#
And I remember once having this conversation with a group of members of parliament from
#
all across the political spectrum and some very strident ones who, the context was private,
#
so they were having a no-holds-barred discussion, each had their own victim narratives.
#
And in the course of that conversation, I just happened to ask them this question.
#
I said, can all of you recount an instance where you resented something because it had
#
been imposed on you without your consent?
#
It could be in a familial context, you know, your parents ask you to do things that you
#
did not agree to doing.
#
It could be in a political context, you were asked to conform to a law that you did not
#
And how did you react to that?
#
And most of us, well, sometimes we have to go along, but that sense of resentment is
#
Often, in fact, some of them said, we resent things just because we are being forced to
#
do it, even if we agree with that, right?
#
And it struck me then that actually all that liberalism requires is an extending of that
#
courtesy to everybody else, right?
#
That very elemental experience that all of us have of feeling resentful if we are being
#
coerced, if you could just extend that courtesy that maybe others are feeling that way as
#
I said, that's all it takes to get liberalism off the ground, you're actually all liberals
#
when it comes to yourself, right?
#
You all want to claim those freedoms.
#
Just extend that courtesy.
#
Extend that courtesy not just to other groups, but importantly, groups need to extend that
#
courtesy to individuals within it, right?
#
So groups will often say, minorities will often say, majorities will often say, please
#
don't impose a particular set of norms on us, right?
#
Well, extend that same courtesy to individuals within that group, right?
#
So in that sense, I think you have to kind of link it back to a certain kind of moral
#
And that was, I think, again, one of the interesting things about Adam Smith, that at the heart
#
of liberalism was a certain kind of moral psychology, right?
#
If you've ever experienced this elemental resentment and you can extend the courtesy
#
of understanding that others might be feeling the same, you're on your way to being liberal.
#
And it's nonsense to say that the West always had it or we don't have it.
#
We just need to be a little bit more self-conscious about it.
#
And I have a big question, which I'd save for later in the podcast, but I'll bring it
#
But before that, a quick observation that, you know, it often strikes me that all ideological
#
differences really come down to differences about means, you know, the ends we can agree
#
We all agree that, you know, nobody should be poor, that, you know, we should find ways
#
of doing something about the genetic lottery and sort of equal opportunities for all and
#
We all kind of agree on that, that disagreements are about means.
#
And what I would say, you know, everything that you just said, where you use the word
#
liberal, one could just as well in modern times, because liberal means so many things
#
to so many people, use the word libertarian, because this is also sort of a spiel that
#
I, you know, give my friends of all ideological persuasions that no matter what ideology you
#
profess to believe in your personal life, you're libertarian.
#
If you go out for a meal with a friend, you won't force her to, you know, eat what you're
#
eating, you won't force her to pay, and so on and so forth, blah, blah, blah.
#
But then, you know, what is sort of natural to us in the personal domain, that coercion
#
is bad and consent is important, we suddenly forget about it when we abstract it out to
#
But this observation itself might be completely moot if my next question has any sort of
#
sense to it, which is that what I have sort of been thinking about over the last few years,
#
watching what's happening in the world around us, both in the US and in India, is that I've
#
been wondering how much ideology is about ideas and how much it is about tribalism.
#
For example, you mentioned that politics begins with disagreements.
#
Now, many of those disagreements might, on the surface of it, be about ideas.
#
But to what extent are those ideas, you know, not causes but pretext, to sort of use a phrasing
#
that you've used in one of your pieces in another different context, which I've picked
#
For example, I look at the US, and I see what Donald Trump has done to the Republican Party,
#
where people who would call themselves conservative five years ago are, you know, have become
#
They have completely been transformed by circumstance.
#
Similarly, in India, you know, one of our mutual friends, Suyash Rai, once said something
#
very interesting to me after demonetization, we were both kind of cribbing about how it,
#
you know, the damage that it caused.
#
And I hope you won't mind me quoting this private conversation.
#
But he basically said, Amit, I am afraid of communists, I am afraid of classical liberals.
#
And what he meant by that was that so many people who call themselves classical liberal
#
and said, oh, we supported Modi in 2014 for, you know, more free markets and all of that,
#
were completely forgetting the principles that they once professed allegiance to, and
#
completely forgetting all of those principles now that they had chosen a tribe.
#
And what seems to have happened with many people like that here, what seems to have
#
happened with, you know, say Republicans in the US, and really what seems to be happening
#
with people across all stripes is that I am more and more coming to the conclusion that
#
ideology is kind of contingent, which is why, you know, within academia, you'll have, you
#
know, pressures of, you know, becoming someone with a much more leftward tilt, and so on
#
And actually, deep down, it's something else, you're choosing a tribe to belong to, you're
#
adopting that ideology, but you don't really give a damn about the principles like again,
#
you know, you said just now that you spoke about how liberals, you know, treat freedom
#
of speech as something contingent again, where, you know, they'll invoke it when it's, you
#
know, for example, there are liberals in India who, you know, when the right wing uses certain
#
laws against them, like sedition or 295A or whatever, they'll say, oh, horrible laws,
#
but they have no issues using 295A themselves when they want to, you know, for example,
#
all the vicarious thrill that was there on Twitter and social media when Arnab Goswami
#
was sort of prosecuted recently for laws which should not exist, right?
#
And which liberals agree should not exist.
#
So my deeper sort of concern there is, and I'm sure you've thought about it is that to
#
what extent is ideology therefore contingent and all of this is just a sham, you know,
#
and if that is the case, if at the heart of this is a kind of tribalism, which we choose
#
to dress up in different ways, then you know, what is the point of this whole political
#
Wow, that's a really big question, Professor, meandering into it, I think, to a few different
#
So one is, I think we have to be clear about the sense in which ideology matters, right?
#
I mean, so there's a couple of technical meanings of the term ideology, where it just doesn't
#
refer to just ideas people have.
#
I mean, I do think there is, for example, I think some analytical power to Marx's conception
#
of ideology, right, where in a sense, what ideology does is it defines the horizons within
#
So in a capitalist order, you cannot think outside of the horizons of competition and
#
private property, right?
#
And in that sense, I think there's a certain kind of power to that system that all differences
#
That's a core institution of the society that in some senses permeates, you know, everything
#
right or wrong is a different matter, but to that extent, I think many would argue ideology
#
In fact, ideology often matters precisely when it's not most clearly articulated.
#
That's actually its power.
#
But I think coming more directly to your question, I do think there is something about the social
#
science vocabulary that has, I think, narrowed our horizons of politics, I think, immensely.
#
And again, that's something that was quite remarkable about Smith and, you know, if you
#
read David Hume's History of England, for example, right, we always used to set this
#
exam question for students that the key to a political thinker is not his arguments or
#
The key to a political thinker is trying to figure out what do they fear most, right?
#
And at that level, political politics operates at a deeply psychological level, right?
#
Those who fear anarchy, right?
#
And that's a fear about the world.
#
That's not a fear about abstract ideas.
#
Yes, in principle, we all want to be libertarian or we all want to be actually, frankly, I
#
wouldn't mind an anarchist world where all authority was completely spontaneously generated,
#
Yet temperamentally, you fear that world either because you think it's not possible or because
#
you think in some senses, it will put you in jeopardy in ways you can't imagine, right?
#
Those who fear, I mean, classically, right, the fear of equality has come from two sources.
#
It has either come from a fear of existing groups losing privilege, right?
#
That's been the sort of almost always the classical thing, you just don't ask these
#
questions where we got our wealth from, right?
#
Or secondary, I think, you know, particularly in the 19th century, the fear of equality
#
was the fear of conformity, right?
#
I mean, that's the fear that runs through Mill and Tocqueville and so forth that actually
#
goes back to Plato in some ways, right?
#
That somehow what particular interpretations of equality will do is license the kind of
#
It will disable or disempower the individual, right?
#
Because equality will unleash the thought that one opinion is as good as any other.
#
If one opinion is as good as any other, the paradoxical psychological thought it unleashes
#
is that I then take my cues from people who have the more numbers, right?
#
So a lot of actually politics is actually trying to figure out what those fears are.
#
In a colonial context, right, I think Jawaharlal Nehru's poignant description, most people
#
did not agree with Gandhi's ideas.
#
I mean, I don't think it was ever a congressman who was a Gandhian in any deep sense.
#
What he did tap into, right, was in a sense exposing that fear we had and finding a vocabulary
#
in which to express it and confront it, right?
#
I think you can see this on debates over secularism and religion, right?
#
I mean, I think a lot of our fears about religion in public sphere are frankly psychological.
#
I mean, it's, you know, you just associate religion with the fact that if you actually
#
raise the stakes of politics, it's true that you might make better people, but it's also
#
true that you could end up licensing worse evil.
#
So I actually do think, and a lot of successful politicians, frankly, I think their big trait
#
is kind of instinctively grasping or sometimes creating these fears in some ways, right?
#
What do I need to make you afraid of?
#
And if I can, you know, give an answer to that fear, right?
#
So that's, I think, one thing.
#
I mean, you can even see it in debates in India, right?
#
I mean, I think I'm sure one of the questions that, you know, you have thought about deeply,
#
you know, when we ask this question, why isn't the Indian state more liberal?
#
Why have debating ideas taken hold?
#
Behind it often is not the cogency of the argument.
#
Behind it often is the social experience of distrust, right?
#
I mean, India has experienced a sort of century of low growth.
#
The only forms of capital that you have actually experienced are the usual forms of capital,
#
That, you know, the money, the local moneylender that exploits you.
#
What kind of imagination does that create about markets, right?
#
And you're overcoming, and that's where experience does matter.
#
I mean, I don't want to sort of fetishize experience and often it's very irritating
#
when somebody says, look, my experience against your argument, I mean, you know, well, sometimes
#
you can misread your own experience.
#
Nevertheless, I think experience is important because it does point us in the right direction,
#
which is, and I think those conversations are harder to have.
#
Frankly, the argumentative conversations are easier to have.
#
Here are the three best arguments for the difference principle or, you know, here are
#
the three best arguments for why the price mechanism is a wonderful information aggregating
#
It's harder to convince people who actually never seen that work, right?
#
I mean, you know, who might benefit from this?
#
And I think that I think is probably to me the core of politics, as Hobbes rightly said,
#
you know, his support of the state was also, you know, fear and I were born twins.
#
I mean, he literally made fear itself that category, right?
#
But in all kinds of other ways, I think, asking this question, what do people fear most?
#
I think is often an, it's an instructive question, even if it's not an easy question to answer,
#
because often those fears are unrecognized even by the people who are actually exhibiting
#
them in, you know, in some ways.
#
The second thing I'd say about politics and again, going back to the category of the imagination
#
in some ways, right, you know, I frankly have to say the political science is completely
#
mystified by a very basic question of political science.
#
What makes for credible leaders?
#
I mean, the kinds of leaders people give their allegiance to sometimes in the face of incontrovertible
#
evidence that they are incompetent, you know, sort of boggles the mind.
#
Because in a sense, the reverse is the case, I mean, I think, intellectuals are particularly,
#
I think, prone to misrecognizing leaders, partly because we are good at reading arguments,
#
we are not good at reading human nature, we are not good at reading the proteaness of
#
people in some ways, right?
#
You know, which is why I think there is always this gap, I mean, I think it can be a good
#
faith mistake, sometimes you think a particular leader or a particular political party might
#
actually carry out your agenda, you're probably projecting, in some senses, your arguments,
#
But in thinking about the elements of leadership, right, I think that that point about vicariousness
#
I think actually becomes important.
#
There are some leaders who produce a kind of affect, you know, which makes people feel
#
I mean, there's almost this temptation to say, yes, I know he's committing a crime,
#
but at least it's a crime in the cause of greatness.
#
There are other leaders who are completely truthful and matter of fact, but that's precisely
#
the point, which is, they are boring, I mean, by the way, the Scottish Enlightenment used
#
to think boredom was as good an explanation of social change as any, often that, you know,
#
something too familiar breeds contempt, we need to be jostled out.
#
So you know, politics, and then there's, of course, interests, which should never be discounted.
#
Nobody wants to risk even under more circumstances.
#
I think most of us are natural Pareto optimists, which is show me an outcome, which shows me,
#
which guarantees me that I'll not be worse off here than now, right.
#
So politics, in a sense, works in the kind of deep crucible of, you know, the variety
#
And I think one of the mistakes of contemporary social science is to reduce that expansive
#
vocabulary of moral psychology, which the 18th century had, which some of our texts
#
like the Mahabharata have pride, vanity, jealousy, envy, resentment, you know, vicarious elevation.
#
These are all not things that can simply captured by reduced either to interest or to ideas,
#
you know, in some ways.
#
I mean, sometimes you might change your mind just because your friend has done better on
#
a particular idea, which you might have agreed with, I mean, you know, as the great line
#
from Phoenix goes, you know, those, you know, fail, title, that first up at all these other
#
So I think that moral psychology, I think, is much more central to politics than we think.
#
And the tribalism that you're pointing out, I think, comes from that, right?
#
I mean, what are these tribal instincts?
#
I want my site to win or lose is more important, because the thrill of winning or losing is
#
more important than what we will achieve.
#
Often that tribalism is a cloaked form of making an argument that you could not make
#
straightforwardly in moral terms.
#
So when you think of ethnic nationalism, for example, right, majorities, minority complexes,
#
A white majority thinking that it's going to lose in a sense, it's cultural supremacy.
#
You actually can't state it in moral terms, in that sense, we are operating within a,
#
you know, a moral horizon of freedom and equality.
#
And so you then kind of re-articulate it in roundabout ways, right?
#
And behind a lot of that tribalism is exactly that fear.
#
So lots to unpack there again, now, before we, you know, get down to talking about India,
#
and you know, how we fared in these 73 years, which is, of course, the theme of this episode,
#
a small observation and a big observation, and I'll ask you to react to them.
#
And this small observation is really just sort of elaborating on what you said about
#
There's this great book by Arnold Kling called The Three Languages of Politics, where he
#
talks about how, you know, one of the reasons why we are so polarized is that we are always
#
talking past each other, never to each other.
#
And you know, we are talking past each other because, you know, progressives, conservatives
#
and libertarians, as it were, will have a different set of horizons and first principles
#
Progressives will care about equality, conservatives about tradition, libertarians about freedom.
#
And therefore, you can talk about exactly the same thing and argue for an hour and you're
#
not addressing each other at all, you're just talking into the air.
#
So that's a book I'd recommend for my listeners.
#
My other sort of observation from, you know, all of what you were saying is that it has
#
often seemed to me that the great battle in our civilization over the last 200, 300 years
#
since the Enlightenment is that through our culture, we are figuring out ways to mitigate
#
our hardwiring, using nurture to sort of mitigate nature.
#
And sometimes, of course, a lot of the time, culture, nurture reinforces nature, but sometimes
#
So for example, we are hardwired to think of the world in zero-sum ways because we are,
#
you know, our instincts were formed in times where we lived in small tribes and there was
#
We think of the world in zero-sum ways, we think in tribal ways.
#
We have a distrust of the other to play to the sort of the theme of fear, which you were
#
We admire strong leaders, which is why I think, you know, you were talking about a great mystery
#
of political science, what makes for a credible leader.
#
And I think one of the things we are hardwired to is look for macho posturing, look for that
#
kind of signaling, which is why, you know, a Trump or a Modi will do well.
#
And yet through our culture, we also, you know, we are that unique species which can
#
actually fight its hardwiring in a sense through culture.
#
And that's the whole battle.
#
And it's, and it seems to me that because intellectuals are in a sort of an ivory tar
#
where they don't have to engage with the real world so much and politicians do, I think
#
politicians get human nature much better, which is why politicians might often use ideology
#
to cloak the things they do or what they want to happen, but they get these primal fears.
#
They know how to exploit them.
#
You know, what you sort of spoke about, you know, experience versus argument.
#
So they have that experience of human nature, their incentives are tailored towards acknowledging
#
human nature and, you know, catering for it while, you know, intellectuals within the
#
academy, for example, might not have those same kind of incentives, their incentives
#
might be to signal something to their peers and not to actually make an impact in the
#
And therefore it strikes me that any intellectual who really cares about her ideas almost therefore
#
is forced to simultaneously become an activist because otherwise your ideas have no impact.
#
There's no question at the end of this.
#
I'm just sort of thinking aloud, taking off from what you said.
#
So you know, how would you sort of kind of react to this?
#
No, you know, you said actually something quite important and I want to just kind of
#
build on that, particularly in the role of a politician.
#
I mean, to me, politicians have two qualities, which often academics don't, or at least academics
#
who have been professionalized, I think, in the cultures of professionalization that we
#
now produce in some ways, right?
#
I think a lot of the great 19th century thinkers did in some ways.
#
It's quite remarkable how much they did.
#
I think the two qualities are one, as you said, which is the difference between being
#
good at arguments versus actually being able to observe human beings, read as it were the
#
text of human life and actual live living beings, you know, to decipher what Kant called
#
the crooked timber of humanity, right?
#
The second thing, and I think this is the most important thing about politicians to
#
me, and why they are absolutely indispensable, is that the politician's central job is a
#
job of kind of social mediation.
#
The example that you just read, you may like liberty more, I may like equality more, we
#
may disagree about the means.
#
Now somebody has to mediate between us, by mediate meaning create enough structures of
#
cooperation that, you know, we don't kill each other, but hopefully, despite these differences
#
can do collectively things together, right?
#
And often what people think of as a vice in politicians, which is their swaying to public
#
opinion, politicians can do U-turns quite easily.
#
I think in terms of the vocation, that's exactly what you want them to do.
#
I mean, I would be very afraid of a politician who just says it's my way or the highway.
#
I mean, I want a politician to have some core baseline moral values, right?
#
And that's at a very kind of high level of constitutional instruction.
#
Okay, I don't use violence, I don't use coercion.
#
But beyond that, precisely because of the variousness of human nature, the variousness
#
of our histories, and the differences in ideas, no society could function if you did not have
#
somebody doing this job of social mediation, which is why I'm actually, I mean, I'm very,
#
very clear that if intellectuals enter politics, they should enter as politicians.
#
I think the idea that, you know, you're carrying some special authority into that realm because
#
you're an intellectual, I think it's just preposterous.
#
You're just another citizen and you need to take on the role of a politician, not that
#
The point you made about, I think, activism, I think is an important point, I mean, because
#
that's often the form in which now I think intellectual engagement engages with the public
#
And there also, I think, I would actually, I think, make a distinction, which is it is
#
an intellectual's job, I think, to state how they see the world as clearly as it is without
#
fear or favor, and in a sense, that's their biggest social role, but they should offer
#
it in the spirit that once you have made an argument in public, it is just one argument
#
I mean, I am not a big fan of claiming authority in politics, because partly that mitigates
#
against the principle of equality, that mitigates against the idea of legitimacy.
#
But yes, I mean, given that we have the luxury, somebody has given the time and is paying
#
us to read books, can we advance a few more arguments that other people might not have
#
had time to, but you should not do it with the expectation that you will win.
#
In fact, I think the best you can offer is a well-thought-out provocation.
#
Have you thought of this, that way that Hindi song goes, kya tumne kabhi socha hai, you
#
I think that's the core job in the sense of an intellectual.
#
I think when you become an activist, I think there are two kinds.
#
One where there are certain core values that I think intellectuals do want to defend, right?
#
So you might be an activist in the cause of free speech, there might be an academic constitutional
#
lawyer who's working on environmental regulation or something.
#
That kind of activism, I think, is compatible with the academic vocation.
#
I mean, it's just an extension of the good faith arguments you're making.
#
What is, I think, not compatible with academic vocation is that you want your group or your
#
And that group becomes, you know, it's the danger of any form of collective power.
#
Again, as Adam Smith reminded us, it takes a life of its own, right?
#
Just because I was with you in a trade union, just because I was with you on this particular
#
cause, actually that solidarity then begins to trump, as it were, the commitment to truth.
#
And to that extent, I think intellectuals do have to remain detached from collective
#
I mean, I do think it's running a risk once they say, we've become part of this organization
#
or that organization, or, you know, it's even the danger, for example, in these collective
#
letters that academics write a lot, you know, where you have to get everybody on a common
#
platform, but getting everybody on that common platform is exactly the kind of exercise or
#
a loss of your independence, right?
#
Now, in some cases, those are necessary.
#
Obviously, if your colleagues are being arrested on trumped up charges, maybe you do want to
#
come together, some kind of solidarity.
#
But I do think intellectuals need to be wary of all forms of power, including the power
#
of intermediate collectivities of which they are part.
#
No, in fact, when you said that, when I sort of phrase that thing about, you know, intellectuals
#
if they want their ideas to have an impact are forced to be activists, I think I meant
#
activists in a really broad sense, which includes politics.
#
And the thought that strikes me there is that that process of trying to engage with the
#
real world, even if you enter into that process with the intent of furthering your ideas and
#
you're driven by your ideas, ultimately, you have to cater to interests and leave ideas
#
aside, which is why I often say that politics corrodes character.
#
Once you are in politics, the sort of the compromises you make along the way changes
#
who you are, if you were that person to begin with, because we are all so self-illusional
#
that, you know, who knows?
#
So, so, yeah, that's that's sort of can I take issue with you slightly?
#
I mean, I understand what you're saying.
#
And I think I think as an empirical description of politics is right.
#
But I think the very trait that you're describing also makes politics the toughest in the highest
#
I mean, you know, the kind of politician who can both socially mediate, understand difference,
#
understand the complexities of power and yet retain something of a core compass, right,
#
that all of this mediation is in the service of.
#
I mean, it's a very rare politician, right, but but that's what actually makes politics
#
the most difficult job, I think, of any precisely because you, in a sense, have to, you know,
#
keep both sides of that, right, that at one level, you're not a creature of your own will.
#
That's part of your job is to respond to other people, right.
#
And yet you have to have a certain kind of moral compass and core code with it.
#
So we need to encourage politicians of those kinds.
#
I mean, I would hate to end this conversation with cynicism about politics, because if you
#
think it's indispensable, I think we need to ask, you know, what kinds of character
#
are better suited to the kinds of politics you want?
#
In fact, I love your description of politics, and it's fairly obvious that politicians are
#
Like if they didn't exist, we would have to invent them, whereas, you know, it is contentious
#
whether intellectuals are necessary.
#
But can you name any politicians like that who you think retain their integrity in the
#
face of pressures which would force others to compromise?
#
And the reason I'm hesitating is I think it does say something about the contemporary
#
moment as well, right, which is, and how we, in a sense, judge people, right.
#
So one of the things that makes politics hard, I think, at this moment, and has probably
#
also paved the way for a certain kind of populism, authoritarianism, fascism, is this kind of
#
interesting asymmetry between truth and doubt or credibility and lack of credibility.
#
And what I mean by the asymmetry is this, which is in order for cynicism to win or in
#
order for us to pull down somebody, all you need to do is find one flaw, right?
#
Obama got Libya wrong, right?
#
It's quite, it's kind of no-brainer, easy to say that, right?
#
Or maybe Obama got Syria wrong, right?
#
So the standard by which you can actually show that the politician was not true to his
#
core principles, it's a very low bar, right?
#
I mean, we're all fallible human beings, right?
#
And I think one of the peculiarities of this moment is that, on the one hand, almost any
#
politician will be destroyed by that skepticism very easily.
#
I mean, it just takes like one instance.
#
Oh, you said this when you were 17 years old, there you go, right?
#
For your detractors, that's enough, right?
#
And I think it's that fact that has also paved the way for its complete opposite, where the
#
only way in which you can hold on to a belief in politician is complete blind faith, right?
#
It's the flip side of the same coin, right?
#
Which is you just go in and say, look, I'm going to be completely impervious to the facts
#
You know, as one of my colleagues, Nilanjan Sarkar has written, the politics of Vishwas
#
I've given my faith to this person, come what may, they said red is blue, red is blue, they
#
say two plus two equals five.
#
And I think both of these are two sides of the same coin.
#
So when we judge politicians, I think one of the things we have to, I think, be more
#
conscious of that it is an art and it is something that requires the hard historical work of
#
In a sense, a moral indictment of a politician is easy, right?
#
It's the easiest route to moralize about.
#
But what does political judgment mean, which is how would you rate their capacity to make
#
decisions in the face of all this complexity, not just complexity, but the fact that you
#
actually don't know, I mean, you know, if Obama says, I veer more leftward in healthcare,
#
do I jeopardize the possibility of even passing a moderate package?
#
How could anybody know what that possibility looks like, right?
#
So I don't think we have the kind of appropriate kind of conversation about what those standards
#
And which is why I was hesitating that, you know, I can think of any name, I can put out
#
a name and, you know, I think it'll be immediately clear to most people that, you know, here
#
are the three flaws, here are the three big mistakes, you know, so and so made.
#
And so in that sense, you know, I think it's coming to our debates, for example, about
#
Nehru, for example, about Modi, for example.
#
Of course, Nehru had deep flaws, I mean, you know, you and I can recount lots and lots
#
of political instances, sometimes even constitutional instances.
#
But is the life judged as a whole, right, where the sense is that despite these mistakes,
#
the movement is in a sense towards a particular constitutional and democratic sensibility?
#
You know, I think he's probably done as good as any democratic statesman has in some senses
#
You can think of Roosevelt.
#
At one level, it's very easy to indict Roosevelt, I mean, his entire New Deal was founded on
#
a very sordid compromise with the racism of Southern Democrats.
#
You know, he left that structure of racism in the South intact.
#
But what's the counterfactual here, right?
#
If he had pushed too hard on that, would anything have been possible at all?
#
So I think we need a much more nuanced historical conversation.
#
I mean, you know, we probably need a few historians in the room to work it out, you know, come
#
So what might be interesting politicians to look for?
#
No, you know, I didn't mean my comment on sort of politicians not being true to an ideology
#
as an indictment of any sort.
#
You know, the imperatives of politics and the importance of politics and the role that
#
great politicians have played and of course, the point you made about Nehru is well taken
#
that people contain multitudes and in our modern times, sadly, we, you know, try to
#
look for simplistic binaries to, you know, discuss everything with and those simply don't
#
Now, this is an Independence Day special episode, we are supposed to talk about India and we've
#
spent more than an hour entirely my fault because I love digressing, I think it's a
#
We are talking about India.
#
I'll be in a different form, I'll be in a different form.
#
So we'll take a quick commercial break and after we come back, we'll actually get down
#
to the brass tacks of our independence.
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Welcome back to the Unseen on the Unseen, I'm chatting with Pratap Bhanu Mehta.
#
This is our Independence Day special episode in the year 2020 in case you're listening
#
to this in 2050 because I keep telling my listeners that I am trying to create episodes
#
for the listeners of 30 years later.
#
So please don't be offended if you are listening to this in the present moment.
#
You know, let's what has always kind of fascinated me, you know, we look back at history with
#
the hindsight bias and we think that, okay, this is what India is.
#
It was inevitable that we would turn out like this, that we would be this kind of democracy
#
and we'd have this kind of constitution.
#
And I think that's something that we need to keep revisiting because as you yourself
#
pointed out, very often, you know, everything is so contingent, you have just a chain of
#
contingent events happening and then suddenly, you know, here we are and it all seems inevitable
#
What I'd like to talk a bit about is, you know, the founding idea of India, like one
#
of the sort of themes that I've explored over the last year and a half or so and I've asked
#
this question to many guests and I'd be interested in knowing what your answer would be, is that
#
at some level, it seems to me that our constitution is a relatively liberal constitution.
#
I say relatively because obviously it's not nearly as liberal as I would like it to be
#
in the classical sense, but it's a relatively liberal constitution put together by an unelected
#
liberal elite and imposed upon an illiberal country and that, you know, one, there is
#
a dilemma of whether such an imposition can itself be called liberal in any way, if it
#
And the other thought being, I mean, the couple of other parallel thoughts that then come
#
up is that in today's moment, has politics finally caught up with society in the sense
#
that our politics is finally reflecting the preferences of a majority of the people or
#
what the culture really is like?
#
And yeah, broadly, what are your sort of thoughts?
#
And therefore, taking off from that, is it therefore a liberal failure to not create
#
Because what often, you know, one of my favorite quotes, if I make merchandise for the show,
#
I'll probably make a t-shirt with that quote is by Andrew Breitbart, where he says politics
#
is downstream of culture.
#
And I think this is something that without, you know, making a value judgment on whether
#
the conservatives are right or the liberal elites are right or whatever, forget the value
#
judgment, but just, you know, should a society have a constitution that doesn't reflect what
#
And is that the case to begin with?
#
What are your thoughts on all these?
#
Actually, the Andrew Breitbart's thought, actually, the RSS has had grasped this way
#
That's one thing they're right about, actually.
#
So I'm tempted to say, how many hours do we have to answer this question, but it has one
#
And to answer it, if you allow me, let me broaden the frame a little bit, because one
#
of the, I think, frustrating things about thinking about India is, and this is something
#
we share with the United States, you know, we often think we are sui generis, I mean,
#
you know, there's a particular distinctive Indian destiny that comes into it.
#
But I think a little bit of comparative perspective is, I think, very important to answering your
#
And the way I put it in this way, which is, it depends how you tell the story of this
#
So I'd like to tell the story two ways, right?
#
One, look, we often forget that it is indeed very rare for constitutionalism to succeed.
#
80% to 90% of constitutions that have been created since the 18th, 19th century actually
#
collapse very frequently.
#
I mean, we forget France went through hundred and thirty, forty odd years, so many different
#
republics before it stabilized, maybe still not stabilized, right?
#
So in that sense, I would not, I think, underestimate or be entirely cynical about that founding
#
But in that comparative perspective, it actually looks, doesn't look half bad as at least
#
providing a modicum of hope to proceed forward.
#
The second thing, and this is where I think the comparative perspective is, I think, the
#
most helpful, is let us ask the question, what are the sources of illiberalism that
#
jeopardize this constitutionalism?
#
I'll come about its legitimacy later, I mean, you know, whether it was passed by an unelected
#
And let me be a devil's advocate for a minute and say that, actually, I don't think India
#
I don't think this narrative that, you know, the West was uniquely fitted to be liberal
#
by the middle of the 20th century, India is a traditional conservative society and not
#
I actually don't buy that narrative, to be very honest, and I don't buy it for two reasons.
#
One, the biggest source of challenge for liberalism, to be honest, globally, has not been the abstract
#
debates over freedom of expression, liberties, and so forth.
#
Those have incrementally advanced, I mean, you know, it's not clear that late 19th century
#
England was any more liberal than in some senses we are, I mean, you still have to kind
#
of sign the Confession Act for various things, right?
#
The real challenge to liberalism has been from nationalism.
#
And it's a very paradoxical challenge because at one level, the nation-state is the political
#
form in which modern constitutionalism flourishes, right?
#
But the modern nation-state requires a theory of membership.
#
Who belongs to this political community which we are trying to be liberal?
#
And the disquieting answer is that absolutely everywhere in the world, there is almost no
#
exception to this, has the answer to that question not been accompanied by serious forms
#
of exclusion and violence, right?
#
Most European nation-states that we think of it now have kind of relatively homogenized
#
by the middle of the 19th century.
#
You know, the French expelled the Huguenots and the Protestants, England kind of took
#
care of the Catholics and the Jews.
#
I mean, you know, they in a sense accomplished that exclusionary process.
#
The United States, right, of course, still hasn't accomplished that process.
#
If you look at the late 19th century, right, one of the most sobering facts is that every
#
single transition from empire to nation-state, right, when the Habsburg Empire dissolves
#
into nation-states, when the Ottoman Empire dissolves, when the British Empire dissolves,
#
not a single empire accomplishes that transition without incredible ethnic bloodshed and violence,
#
And to me, that is still, and even if you look at contemporary debates, you know, the
#
heads has an interesting paradox just today, right, I mean, even as obdurated judges, Justice
#
Arun Mishra has passed a judgment saying women have to have equal rights and property, right?
#
You know, to that extent, you might say the constitutional promise of equality is actually
#
working out and yet it's the same Supreme Court, right, which will absolutely excuse
#
anything in the name of nationalism, the bridge of civil liberties, right?
#
So to my mind, the single biggest source of liberalism that has haunted all liberal societies,
#
India is actually not an exception in that, right?
#
And that's an undertow even the West feels now.
#
You know, Michael Mann has this very powerful article, The Dark Side of Democracy, which
#
actually shows post-19th century how European nation-states became more homogenized and
#
in each case, accompanied by ethnic cleansing.
#
In fact, genocide as a category at some level is a product of a democratic imagination because
#
you target people simply for being who they are, not, you know, because ethnic demography
#
matters to democracy, right?
#
Now India's illiberalism, I would actually also argue comes from not just nationalism,
#
that's one dimension of it, but also this unresolved dilemma in representative democracy,
#
And the unresolved dilemma is this, which is how is power going to be shared once you
#
institutionalize a democracy?
#
Now there's one simple answer you can give, which I'm sure you and I would probably prefer,
#
which is, look, give everybody the equal vote, one person, one vote, have a constitution
#
that safeguards our basic rights and, you know, on checks and balances, on with it.
#
But this solution has proven to be elusive in societies that begin to see themselves
#
as marked by ethnic or religious majorities and minorities, right?
#
Because again, going back to the fear, right, the fear of the minority is that the majority
#
is ethnically numerically preponderant, so it will exercise more power.
#
Even if you give all these nice checks and balances, right?
#
And from 1857 onwards, I think this came into the rise of Hindutva as well, the big debate
#
in India was how is representative power going to be organized?
#
We do, you know, almost 70, 80 years of negotiations around these questions, right?
#
And particularly around the Hindu-Muslim cleavage, there's the Dalit representation story as
#
well, which we can talk about separately, but I think for the Indian purpose, I think
#
the Hindu-Muslim cleavage is the most important.
#
You try different solutions, right?
#
You say, look, there are certain issues on which we will give minorities the veto.
#
Well, if you do that, it sets up a majority backlash.
#
Why should minorities have veto in excess of their political power, right?
#
You try and create representative government compatible with different system of laws.
#
So you, you know, in fact, one of the things if India had remained united, we probably
#
would have been a more conservative country because the irony is that the most people
#
who were in favor of a united India, the condition of it being a united India, as Ambedkar pointed
#
out, was that each community gets to govern its own laws, right?
#
So from the Minto-Morley reforms onwards, this constant question, right, how will power
#
be shared between Hindus and Muslims?
#
If you give the Muslims more protection that they feel they are adequate, you have a reaction
#
from the right that says, look, this is a betrayal of the principle of equality, right?
#
If you don't give them adequate protection, right, you obviously set up different kinds
#
And the fact of the matter is that we never resolved that question.
#
And frankly, it could not have been resolved because I think that true to that American
#
constitutionalism grasp, which is that once you pose the question in terms of a permanent
#
majority and minority defined in ethnic terms, there is no solution to, there's no equilibrium
#
The only way you can overcome this is by saying there are no permanent majorities and minorities.
#
These are all contingent coalitions and so forth, right?
#
Now it's the failure of that negotiation in part, right?
#
That's actually the backdrop of partition in political terms.
#
There is, of course, a much more visceral ethnic and religious dimension to it.
#
And often those ethnic and religious issues were tested, right?
#
Those become tests for the representative government, you know, if Congress wins in
#
UP, will it do Goraksha or not, right?
#
It's a majority testing its power and a minority fearing it.
#
So in that sense, I think the failure of the Indian nationalist movement, while it did
#
a remarkable job on almost every other aspect, I think India was brilliant, for example,
#
in its thinking about the language question.
#
We did not take a ready-made European model saying that the language of the ruler and
#
the rule, the language of different provinces should be the same.
#
I think when it came to this particular cleavage, frankly, we could not buck the trend that
#
every other society has done, right?
#
And that's the trend that still casts a kind of shadow on contemporary politics, right?
#
You know, so to that extent, I mean, to me, India's constitution, the founding moment,
#
one should not forget that it happened in the shadow of partition.
#
It happened in the shadow of a massive failure of that nationalist project, which wanted
#
the strategic unity of the subcontinent, which thought that there was a traditional cultural
#
narrative of syncretism, right, that could actually overcome these religious divisions.
#
And they completely missed the fact that, and this is something I think we also miss
#
in contemporary discourse, that traditional discourse of syncretism, even if it was only
#
imagined, right, could actually not work in the context of modern democratic realities,
#
Older forms of toleration don't require great social mobility.
#
We often don't compete for the same things.
#
Societies are segmented, hierarchical, right?
#
Now you're all competing for the same power.
#
In that same power, demography becomes important, right?
#
So why the census became such a political issue?
#
Why it's very important for the BJP, the number of Hindus versus the number of Muslims?
#
Technically in a liberal society, why should this even matter?
#
I mean, we don't care what your private religion is and what your private identity is, right?
#
So to that extent, I would argue that, you know, I don't think the story is as much as
#
simply a straightforward story of there was a deeply liberal conservative society here.
#
I think the bulk of the problems actually came from apodias that are internal to liberal
#
Now there is a second way in which I think your narrative has something to it, which
#
is if you shift the frame from nationalism and the sharing of power between communities
#
to what we might call social conservatism, right?
#
India was a conservative society, but conservative we simply mean in basic terms, which is more
#
and more individuals were governed by traditional norms of occupation, caste, identity, family,
#
Now one of the tasks of the modern state is the way it sets itself is to disembed individuals
#
from oppressive social structures of power, right?
#
And again, going back to the question, what do you fear more?
#
The Indian state was founded on the fear of social power, because social power, as Ambedkar
#
Social power meant sort of patriarchal families, right?
#
Social power meant the power of, you know, ostracism, all those kinds of things.
#
Now the Indian constitution in part promised that charter of reform, that slowly and gradually,
#
The most obvious ways to do it was caste, temple entry, the abolition of untouchability.
#
But again, there are two different liberal approaches to this.
#
And I think again, as liberals, I think we are torn about this, right?
#
One is what you might call a rationalist approach.
#
The rationalist approach says that every institution in society must look like or embody the basic
#
liberal norms that we expect in our constitution.
#
So you might say Article 14, 19, and 21 should govern every institution, right?
#
A temple is legitimate only if it doesn't discriminate or exclude, right?
#
A family is legitimate only if it treats people equally, right?
#
So that's the rationalist, where in a sense, all civic associations, intermediary sources
#
of power should also conform to liberal norms.
#
There's a second conception that's a little bit more pluralistic that says that, look,
#
you know, these associations and these intermediary sources of power have complex histories.
#
They're expresses of people's identities.
#
We may not like them, but they are part of, you might say, a more basic freedom of association,
#
So if a church doesn't ordain women as priests, I mean, that's its business.
#
You know, if people want to go to temples that discriminate against women, that's their
#
Now, in a way, what the Indian constitution was, was a kind of compromise between these
#
And actually, you can see the tension even in, for example, the Shabri Mala judgment.
#
You know, in a sense, in the Malhotra's judgment, forget the religious argument for a minute.
#
In a way, it seems to be saying, look, why should every intermediate institution society
#
correspond to what you expect of public institutions, right?
#
Now the argument there is that, look, and this is your point about culture in some ways,
#
that your public opportunities are deeply structured by these private and civic associations
#
And it's obvious in the case of, for example, gender, I mean, right?
#
If you can't imagine in a patriarchal society, civic equality for women actually being realized
#
other than in a national sense.
#
The question is, in a sense, you know, how much do you want to use state power to create
#
this reform or how much do you want to do the work of culture to do this?
#
And ideally in a liberal society, you'll get that balance just right.
#
Because having a pure rationalist view does raise questions about the concentration of
#
power, you know, risks different kinds of liberties, right?
#
Now what has happened, I think, interestingly, is that the reformists, right, the Congress
#
Party, once it acquired state power, it in a sense completely gave up that social work
#
of reform, which is what it had been doing as a nationalist movement, right?
#
You know, it now has state power, it doesn't need to do this stuff.
#
Interestingly, what's interesting about the RSS, in a sense, is that that's the space
#
it began to occupy, right, very, very powerfully, right?
#
I mean, it's extraordinary how many so-called, quote unquote, progressive positions the BJP
#
has managed to appropriate, right?
#
Because what the Congress ended up doing slowly, I mean, obviously, in 1950, there was the
#
It in a sense just became comfortable with the status quo, right?
#
I mean, why do we want to politicize any of this stuff, right?
#
So if Muslim personal law doesn't get reformed, that's fine, right?
#
You could have created a process of incremental reform.
#
And that reinforced the first dynamic about exclusion, because the competition then became,
#
which communities does the state intervene in most, right?
#
That's part of the BJP narrative, that the state deprived the Hindus of their associational
#
rights, but it protected minority associational rights.
#
Now, I don't think the motives were sinister, I think the motives were just more a combination
#
of inertia and why spend political capital on this, but it had that net effect, right?
#
So to that extent, I think, again, the Indian constitution is the trajectory is no different.
#
I mean, let's not forget, right, Switzerland gave women the vote only in 1970.
#
That social work is, it's going to be a long haul.
#
And to be honest, I am surprised, you can look at it this way, which is that, yes, there
#
is a lot of deep exclusionary practice in civil society, but at the normative level,
#
it's very difficult for anybody to stand up and justify this, right?
#
You know, in some ways, and that you have to say is an achievement, I think, of that
#
constitutional imagination in some ways.
#
So I would submit that in comparative perspective, I don't think India looks terribly different,
#
I mean, this is part of the process of democratization and modernization.
#
And I think we are at this particular conjecture where these two questions have come to the
#
Quite possible that the BJP is in principle and why a lot of Hindus support it.
#
They actually don't experience that authoritarianism, right, in relation to where they stand, right?
#
But obviously, minorities will feel it.
#
And we've basically decided that, in some senses, we can create a national narrative
#
without giving minorities a place in it.
#
So I think that's a thing.
#
I'll just make one last comment.
#
I know this answer has been too long, which is much more of an empirical comment.
#
And in the spirit that you asked the question of thinking about counterfactuals.
#
So I often, in class, pose these two counterfactuals to students.
#
One is a counterfactual, let's say, in 1914 or 1915, somewhere in that decade, the British
#
just suddenly had a brainwave and decided to leave India.
#
We just quit it, you know, to hell with it, we don't want an empire, right?
#
Would an Indian constitution have been possible, right, without that 30, 40 years of the kind
#
of social mobilization work that the nationalist movement did, actually creating an organizational
#
form, right, that was, in a sense, appropriate to the modern world?
#
Second counterfactual is, I think, the assassination of Gandhi, which is, if Gandhi had not been
#
assassinated and the RSS had not been temporarily delegitimized as a result, would the right-wing
#
challenge to Nehru in the 1950s have been even stronger than it was?
#
It was actually quite strong.
#
I mean, we underestimate how strong it was.
#
I mean, not just Karpatri Maharaj in the reform bill, but even within the Congress party,
#
I mean, you know, frankly, people like Govind Ballampant and so forth are actually frightening
#
figures in the history of Indian communism, right?
#
And would the new republic then have, in a sense, been split, not being able to consolidate
#
enough power, in a way that so many countries around the world have found themselves, right?
#
I think that's also an interesting counterfactual to think about.
#
And I want to come back later to a version of the second counterfactual, and we can talk
#
But there's a lot to unpack, so a couple of observations and questions.
#
One is, you know, it's quite a stunning insight, in a sense, that genocide is incentivized
#
Because as you pointed out, and you in the past quoted Syed Ahmed Khan quoting John
#
Stuart Mill, talking about how democracy is all about demography.
#
You know, the potency of the terms majority and minority would not matter anywhere except
#
in a democracy, because, you know, it is so critical there.
#
And therefore, you know, one thought that strikes me then is that in any democracy is
#
this kind of majoritarianism politics inevitable at some point?
#
The other sort of threads I want to unpack is that, you know, one of the sort of conflicts
#
at the start, which I don't think we quite figured out either way, is with regards to
#
the Constitution, that what is the aim of the Constitution?
#
Should it protect individuals, or should it transform society?
#
And you know, and obviously, my bias would be that it should protect individuals.
#
And if you try to transform society in a top-down, coercive way, it's only going to end badly.
#
But leave that whole argument aside.
#
And it seems to me that like you pointed out, that the Constitution was partly shaped by
#
the contingencies of partition.
#
In fact, the historian Gyan Prakash in an episode we did on the emergency spoke about
#
how, you know, so many of the centralizing impulses of the Constitution came about because
#
the country was being torn apart by violence.
#
So those people sitting in that room in Delhi obviously wanted to centralize more power.
#
But it then also strikes me in the narrow context of the relationship between the majority
#
and the minority, that we took a protective role towards the minorities, but a transformative
#
role towards the majority, and the classic example of this, and this is something where
#
I think I sort of totally understand the RSS point of view.
#
The example of this is a Hindu court bill, that with the Hindu court bill, you're trying
#
to transform Hindu society, but you're not doing something equivalent for Muslims.
#
And obviously then, you know, when you have all this talk later on of pseudo-secularism
#
and pandering to minorities and all of that, those seem to be legitimate grievances.
#
And it is kind of irrelevant whether you should have any court bill at all, whether you should
#
reform none of them, whether you should reform both of them, it doesn't matter.
#
But the bottom line is that at that moment, we are not treating them equally.
#
We are saying that, you know, in one case, the Constitution is saying, hey, we'll protect
#
whatever your customs and whatever they are.
#
And even there, we are not really protecting individual rights, we're just looking at them
#
But in the other instance, you are saying that, hey, no, we are transformative and we
#
And I can see why, you know, this can be just so powerful by itself as a motivating factor.
#
But my broader question is that, how do you then look at, you know, this conflict between
#
should we protect or should we transform?
#
Because they are in conflict with each other.
#
Because every transformative act that you try to do involves coercion and involves sort
#
of not treating citizens equally and all of that.
#
And I can understand that when you look at society at that point, and you see so many
#
things wrong with it, you know, with caste, to begin with, that's obviously number one,
#
but so many other things.
#
And your instinct is that this is horrendous, we must transform it, how do we do it?
#
Oh, now we have the power of the state with us, our colonial masters are gone, let's use
#
the power of the state.
#
But I think one of the lessons of history is that top down coercion really doesn't work.
#
What you need is social transformation coming from within the kind of transformation that
#
in fact, Gandhi would broadly have sympathized with, where Gandhi's whole thing was that,
#
no, let's go into the, you know, the villages and the interiors and change society from
#
within, even if that is too idealistic in a short span of time.
#
And I think it seems that we rely too much on the transformative nature of the Constitution,
#
we did a halfway and inept job there, and didn't bring about any social change either.
#
So what are your sort of thoughts on that?
#
Okay, no, that's a very powerful question, and I think I agree with much of what you
#
But again, I think it just helps to broaden the frame a little bit, I think just to, I
#
think, put that narrative in perspective, right?
#
And I'll first maybe spend a couple of minutes on the historical narrative and then come
#
to the deep philosophical point you raised about, is this Constitution protective of
#
group rights and plurality in some ways, or is it a constitution of freedom in some ways?
#
So at one level, I think the narrative you're describing, right, that has got entrenched,
#
and I think there's some power to it, that the Indian state was seen to act asymmetrically
#
towards communities, right?
#
Now we can wind the clock back to the 1950s and think of a different kind of counterfactual,
#
but I do think it's worth, again, remembering two things, and I'm stressing this because
#
I think it's going to come up again in our contemporary context.
#
So there is no question that we need as a society a consensus that there are certain
#
basic norms of individual freedom that apply to all communities.
#
I think if Section 295 has to go in the Indian Penal Code, offences to religion has to go
#
I mean, I actually don't think a modern state should have a category called offence to religion.
#
Doesn't matter what the religion is in some ways, right?
#
When it comes to personal loss, for example, which is the most contentious issue, again,
#
I think the shadow of partition did make a difference, which is I think Nehru's concern
#
that not just that minorities feel safe, but remember, you still haven't solved the question,
#
which is who will be exercising power when these personal laws are being reformed, right?
#
And personal laws do sort of affect the most kind of intimate aspects of a particular culture's
#
So there's always much more at stake.
#
Now, if you had created those relationships of trust, right, let's say even now, I'm all
#
for a uniform civil code.
#
I think it's high time we had it.
#
And even within a uniform civil code, that can be, you know, interesting creative solutions.
#
But the question is, who do you trust to come up with the content of a code that is actually
#
just and fair to all communities?
#
Will the content of that code, right, could it unwittingly have a Hindu majority in human
#
So, you know, going back to the question you asked at the beginning of this program, the
#
missing element in this debate has been what are the conditions of trust under which reforming
#
all our personal laws can be a common project?
#
The misleading part is there is the state and the state reforms Hindus and it doesn't
#
reform, you know, Muslim personal law.
#
Even that's strictly speaking not true.
#
I mean, I think, you know, for political reasons, Rajiv Gandhi overturned the Shah Bano judgment.
#
In fact, we often forget that the Supreme Court shortly thereafter in Daniel Latifi
#
kind of reinstated the original Shah Bano judgment without much fuss.
#
So there are possibilities to reform even there.
#
The issue is that the state has always been because it's, in a sense, seen as a function
#
And the more you make it a function of majority power, right, the less reason people have
#
to trust that what comes out of it, right, will be actually fair and just.
#
So I think, and one of the reasons why we want to lower the temperature of religious
#
politics in India is because that's a necessary condition for paving the way for having this
#
debate in a rational, constructive manner that look in the 21st century, right?
#
Family relations cannot be constructed on certain legal lines and so on and so forth.
#
So absolutely, I think that's one.
#
The second thing, I would go even stronger than you.
#
I mean, to me, the Congress party's unconscionable sin is that it actually paced Indian Muslims
#
in the worst of both positions.
#
On the one hand, it empowered the most reactionary elements in that society.
#
I mean, what is the Indian, all Indian Muslim personal law board?
#
I mean, it's just astonishingly obtuse organization, I mean, seriously, you know, but who sustained
#
You don't have to have an either-or solution.
#
You don't have to say the state comes marching in, but you can create an intelligence politics
#
where these spaces get opened up.
#
And people forget, for example, there is an alternative Muslim women's personal law proposal
#
on the table, right, which is way more progressive, right?
#
But it was in the Congress party's interest to keep the Muslims backward and with their
#
Because at some point, they did decide or they thought that you needed them as a kind
#
of electoral coalition.
#
I think there the BJP's diagnosis is not wrong, right?
#
That ethnic identities work as electoral fodder only when there is a kind of collective risk
#
If they all become individuals, we actually don't have that role.
#
But in the process, you know, when we're talking about the 1950s, I don't know if you've ever
#
read Paul Brass's biography of Charan Singh.
#
It's an astonishing book, actually, one of the best kind of a North Indian politics.
#
But you know, the UP government in the 1950s created an active program of de-Muslimizing
#
So if you look at the statistics, right, Muslim under-representation in police, Muslim under-representation
#
in public institutions of the state, Muslim representation in politics, this was not just
#
So you ended up in this bizarre situation where at one level, Muslims were becoming
#
more marginalized, economically more disempowered, and in a sense, in some states, they've actually
#
fallen behind Dalits, which is saying quite something, right?
#
As a result of active choices the state made on education or not giving education, as a
#
result of the kind of cop-out attitude we have towards Madrasas, but at the same time,
#
And this is the point Paul Brass makes very powerfully.
#
You had politicians like Govind Banapant.
#
You had politicians like Charan Singh, who were electorally secular, but administratively
#
and ideologically common, right?
#
Rajiv Gandhi, I mean, this is one of the most disastrous episodes in modern Indian history,
#
because here is a government with a 400 seat majority.
#
Frankly, the modern contemporary debate on free speech starts with the banning of satanic
#
verses, which kind of then sets the paradigm for competitive victimization.
#
The overturning of Shahbano, and Congress got it into its head that somehow it could
#
appease both Muslim nationalism and Hindu nationalism together, right?
#
The net result was you simply created collective insecurity all around, right?
#
Now my plea to the RSS, my plea to the BJP, since they are the hegemonic story, is that
#
there is a lot of truth in your critique.
#
Many of us shared it, I mean, you know, this piece we wrote 20 years ago, Congress, Secularism
#
and Freedom, which actually just made this point.
#
But in order to overcome this legacy, the first step has to be, in a sense, the recreation
#
of a kind of civic trust, where these conversations do not stoke fears in all sides, where it
#
doesn't happen in a context where one group says, look, now we have the power, and in
#
a sense, we can have them.
#
Frankly, if liberals in the left are feeling it, think about it.
#
Muslims might be feeling it, right?
#
So the diagnosis had the truth to it, right?
#
But it's in a sense, turning the remedy into a kind of poison, right, which is in some
#
sense is more divisive.
#
Now, coming to your theoretical question, which is, you know, what is the vision of
#
the Indian constitution?
#
I would put it this way, that I actually do think the long-term vision of the Indian constitution
#
is the emancipation of individuals from all forms of intermediate social hierarchies.
#
I think it recognizes the fact that that can't be done simply through law, right, because
#
you have to actually deploy state power, right?
#
You have to post policemen to make sure that people are allowed to enter temples or not
#
allowed to enter temples, right?
#
And I think their concern for India's diversity in politics, that they hoped that it would
#
come out through a negotiated process, right?
#
As you said, you know, there'll be social reform movements, and that's exactly the thing
#
that we completely stopped.
#
I mean, Congress party abdicated it, not just because it had the state power, but I think
#
even in some senses more broadly.
#
And the social change that did come about, right, was a social change that came about
#
for other secular developments as the economy goes more complex, certain identities wither
#
away, you know, in some instances, you know, so forth.
#
So I think that was the vision, which was a kind of a mediated transformation mission
#
towards individual rights.
#
I think the mistake that we have made, and this is again an exercise I set our students
#
in class sometimes, that there are a couple of clauses.
#
For example, if you think of the clause of protection of minority institutions, right,
#
which can probably be articulated in more individualistic rather than collective terms,
#
and you get the same result, right?
#
In fact, I think in the TMFI case, I mean, I think the debate between Rumapal and Vareva
#
was actually very instructive, where one interpretation was that the minority clauses in the Constitution
#
are clauses that are setting off exceptions, right?
#
The other interpretation of that clause is that it's not setting up exceptions, it's
#
just a signal to minorities that these clauses will also protect you.
#
So for example, I think on, for example, the freedom to run institutions, a simpler approach
#
is, and which is, I think, compatible with the text of the Constitution, should be simply
#
to say that, look, so long as you're not taking state money, and you're not doing any other
#
kind of fiduciary harm to any other constitutional provision, any group should have the freedom
#
to run its institutions its want, and if you have that provision, minorities will automatically
#
But I think the way in which we've developed that Constitution law, we unnecessarily give
#
this kind of indication that these exceptions are being carved out, right?
#
But you can achieve those same goals better with, in a sense, freedom.
#
I would also say this about our discourse on diversity, for example, and one of my kind
#
of worries about a lot of my friends actually, you know, our circles, as it were.
#
So we like to celebrate India's diversity, it's an astonishing country in some ways.
#
But diversity is also a conceptual trap, because, you know, diversity is quite compatible with
#
each person being boxed into a particular identity.
#
We need to defend freedom.
#
If individuals are given freedom, lots of new forms of diversity will emerge, right?
#
Maybe identity categories that we think are salient right now will cease to be salient
#
five, ten years from now.
#
And that's all for the good.
#
So I think that self-conception that in order to oppose the mono ethnicity of Hindutva,
#
what you need to propose in its place is diversity, I think is a can be conceptually misleading,
#
because diversity is also compatible with a certain kind of fixity.
#
I think where you and I will probably agree is that we just need to go back to a, you
#
know, basic jurisprudence of individual rights and dignity, protect those freedoms, and all
#
the diversity will come in its wake.
#
This episode of The Scene in the Unseen is one where you actually come out as a closet
#
libertarian quite clearly.
#
No, one of the sort of constant bugbears that I have, and it's not just with regards to
#
the constitution, but politics today, even more so today, is that we think too much in
#
terms of groups and not individuals.
#
You know, like that old saying goes, an individual is the smallest minority.
#
And the moment you sort of put a label on an individual that you are X or you are Y,
#
it constrains individual freedom, even in the ways that you think of yourself, like
#
these structures matter so much, which I'll kind of come back to.
#
But before I ask my other big conceptual question about the founding movement, I want to also
#
go back to the counterfactual, because, you know, the more that I read the history of
#
that period and even before, it seems to me that all the tall leaders of the Congress
#
were Hindu nationalists of a sort, from, you know, Patel to Prasad and Panj Shastri and
#
In fact, there's this, you know, the interesting incident in Uttar Pradesh when, you know,
#
activists of the VHP installed the idol of Lord Ram within the Babri Masjid, and at that
#
point Panth was Chief Minister and the Home Minister of UP was Lal Bahadur Shastri, and
#
Nehru was aghast and he sent orders that immediately removed the idol and blah, blah, blah, and
#
they prevaricated and then inertia took over and it never happened because it didn't want
#
But what has also struck me reading the history of that period is that Nehru in that sense
#
was a man apart in both good ways and bad ways, not just one or the other when it's
#
so easy to think of him in binary terms.
#
And therefore, the counterfactual that fascinates me is what if Nehru didn't exist, you know,
#
or what if for whatever reason, like, you know, there was a point in 1950, he got frustrated
#
and he said, I want to quit and all of that.
#
And what if for some reason, he wasn't the person sort of shaping all of that?
#
Is that something you've thought about or how do you think we would have taken shape
#
And you know, what are the possibilities?
#
No, we actually have, you know, my one of my colleagues and friends with Rangsham Mukherjee,
#
the historian actually poses, there's also an interesting counterfactual if Nehru and
#
Bose together had split with Gandhi, which they had come very close to.
#
And on ideological grounds, they were all on the same side.
#
I think it was Nehru's filial piety towards Gandhi that kind of kept him in place.
#
You know, I think what would have happened to the Congress party, right, in some senses
#
But I think in particularly in these times, though, I think it's worth remembering one
#
very big thing about that generation, right, is yes, they disagreed.
#
Many of them were Hindu nationalists.
#
But it is remarkable that they all recognize greatness when they saw it.
#
And it is remarkable that they continue to agree to work despite their differences.
#
I mean, I think the Patel-Nehru relationship, contrary to what the BJP says is, you know,
#
my colleague Srinath will point out, is very complicated.
#
I mean, Patel has the greatness to recognize Nehru's indispensability, right, you know,
#
in some senses at one level.
#
And Nehru, in turn, at different points, has the openness to say, yes, you know, I can
#
talk to Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, yes, Ambedkar needs to be part of that, K. M. Munshi, one
#
of the most fascinating figures in the kind of constituted assembly, right.
#
So, you know, there's that old saying, right, that often what builds nations is not the
#
consistency of their ideologies.
#
It's in a sense, the sensibilities and temperaments of the people who come together to build it.
#
And I think there was something about that generation that actually trumped a lot of
#
I mean, you know, they didn't all walk out in a half.
#
They did see the constituent assembly as a joint project.
#
Yes, it was not representative in terms of mass franchise, but Congress did bend over
#
backwards to make sure that you had the Ambedkar's and the K. Munshi's in very critical drafting
#
roles in the Constitution, right.
#
So I think that sensibility, not to take away anything from Nehru, but it is one thing I
#
would give all those others credit for as well, that despite themselves, right, including
#
Rajendra Prasad, despite themselves, they actually did see not just Nehru, but I think
#
it was a kind of tacit acknowledgement that Nehru stands for more than Nehru the person.
#
There is an implicit constitutional vision here that can be shades of disagreement over,
#
And I think what reconciles, I think, this fact, the kind of how can you be Hindu nationalist
#
in Congress is, as I said, I think, because it's so much outwardly directed.
#
I mean, I think one of the interesting things about 20th century Hindu nationalism is that
#
internally, it has also always tried to place itself as progressive, right, I mean, it has
#
to be at the kind of cutting edge of global, and, you know, take Savarkar, for example,
#
I mean, you know, in the relationship between Hindus and others, Savarkar has an edge.
#
But he is internally a reformer in some sense, isn't that, I think there are a few, I think,
#
go with Balapad, for example, who are, I think, genuine conservatives, which is what they
#
want to preserve that sort of older Brahminical hierarchical order.
#
So the success of that generation of Hindu nationalism was that they did create a certain
#
kind of at least internal peace with modernity, that, look, this is the trajectory inevitably
#
we'll have to go down, right.
#
As I said, I think the problem was that it was quite compatible with a certain kind of
#
prejudice and hostility to Muslims.
#
And by the way, you don't have to be Hindu nationalist to have that hostility, prejudices,
#
you know, I mean, you know, many liberals can have that, right.
#
And not being able to disentangle the ideological and constitutional aspects from where does
#
the shading to just becoming a prejudiced against the other, I just don't like you for
#
It's nothing, you know, it's nothing that you do.
#
You're just very being poses a threat for me, right.
#
I think that's just an autonomous dynamic.
#
But yes, I mean, too, you're right that I think Nehru became that kind of indispensable
#
figure where even these Hindu nationalists sort of recognize that for the kind of progressivism
#
they had in mind internally, it needed to be embodied in a figure who was, you know,
#
more constitutional in some ways than they were.
#
No, and I did, you know, when I framed the question, I didn't mean the term Hindu nationalist
#
in a pejorative sense, but in these modern times, it comes across like that somehow.
#
So my next question, and this might be a little long winded, I'll begin by quoting something
#
that you have written in your excellent book, The Burden of Democracy, where you wrote,
#
quote, if the faith reposed in democracy was unique to India, the style in which government
#
was imagined was anything but the entire colonial state apparatus with its laws, conventions,
#
ubiquitous rules, faith in the impartiality of the few good men that comprise the state
#
was taken over almost intact.
#
To be sure, the state was now to be used for nationalist friends to secure India's territorial
#
integrity to spread and implement the development mission of the new regime.
#
But the relationship between the state apparatus to whatever ends it was going to be displayed
#
and democracy was going to forever remain contentious, stop quote.
#
And again, when one looks at the Constituent Assembly debates, you have Somnath Lahiri
#
pointing exactly this out, where he talks about, you know, the fundamental rights, the
#
way they've been framed with the caveats immediately following where Lahiri says, quote, I feel
#
that many of these fundamental rights have been framed from the point of view of a police
#
You will find that many minimal rights are conceded and are almost invariably followed
#
by a provision which takes away a right almost completely, stop quote.
#
And my sort of question here is that does the design of the state then shape the culture
#
and shape society itself?
#
For example, in the same book, you later talk about how the structural inequalities within
#
society can shape the self and I'll quote that bit as well, quote that inequality and
#
our relations to the state are not simply structural injustices, they also profoundly
#
shape our sense of self and the social possibilities.
#
It is a peculiar sense of the self in relation to others that social inequality and the state
#
have produced that gives Indian politics its texture, stop quote.
#
And this is sort of, you know, it is my thinking that the design of the state that the founders
#
chose a lot of it through inertia where you just take took over the colonial apparatus
#
and took over, you know, so much of the IPC and didn't have didn't safeguard fundamental
#
rights strongly enough in the constitution.
#
What that did was that it centralized power, it made the state very powerful.
#
And I, you know, so I think the point of view of a citizen, I think of the matrix of possibilities
#
for how an individual can get ahead and what happens in those sort of what the design of
#
the state then almost incentivizes is that you get ahead by manipulating the state by
#
getting yourself in rent seeking positions by using the coercive power of the state to
#
your ends and not so much through voluntary action within society, which is a positive
#
You know, Jagdish Bhagwati once pointed out, I think around 2000 that, you know, China
#
has a profit seeking mindset and India has a rent seeking mindset and mine, you know,
#
one of the conjecture, one of my conjectures for why that might be so is the design of
#
our institutions where the easiest way at least for many decades to make a fast buck
#
to get ahead in India was to become part of the state apparatus and use some of the coercive
#
power of the state, which is a zero sum game rather than rely on voluntary action within
#
society, which is basically what actual free markets instead of the markets we've had for
#
most of this time would enable.
#
So what do you think about this?
#
Like is the design of the state something that has fundamentally changed society and
#
shaped culture itself, just by the way it was conceived or not conceived in the sense
#
that we just took over the colonial apparatus?
#
Oh, this is a large and profound question.
#
And I think I'll divide the answer into three different aspects of the state because I think
#
the logic operates differently.
#
But I do have to say, I think, you know, while I understand the spirit of Jagdish's court,
#
I think it's hard to argue that China is also not frenzied, in fact, maybe they're smarter
#
about how they do it, but the scale is actually of a different, staggeringly different order.
#
So I think I'll divide your question into three different bits, three different parts
#
One which I think you began alluding to, which is in the realm of civil liberties, right?
#
We retained large parts of the criminal code, IPC, section 295.
#
We retained sedition law, I think, most candidly.
#
The Supreme Court's great alleviate to the state over Armed Forces Special Powers Act,
#
the early judgments in Gopalan.
#
Now there, I actually do think that even though it was only episodically used, the culture
#
and opening that we created for easy violations of civil rights, I think then set a template
#
that which is used later on.
#
And you could argue, look, again, don't make this judgment in hindsight, you've just come
#
We can't even actually, in a sense, imagine, I mean, and Nehru says this, I mean, the last
#
parts of discovery of India, there's this extraordinary, none of us have any idea what
#
India is going to look like, right?
#
I mean, we just suffered this extraordinary trauma, which they weren't in a position of
#
But I don't think that excuses the full extent.
#
I do slightly disagree with you a little bit on this whole question of sort of the limitations
#
to rights in the Indian constitutions, particularly in freedom of expression and so forth.
#
Because there are two ways of looking at that limitation, right?
#
One is that, you know, you could actually say that, look, and I think that was the intent
#
behind those limitations is, inevitably, these things will end up coming to court, right?
#
And somebody will say something even, you know, outrageous.
#
And I think, as Madhav Khosla's book has pointed out, that one of the reasons you probably
#
have a little bit of excess codification in the Indian constitution is because the framers
#
wanted to make sure that there were only particular kinds of limitations and questions that generally
#
the judges actually asked.
#
It's not just sort of random, you know, there's the reverse danger, right?
#
And by the way, I mean, if you take free speech, for example, I mean, just to, again, put it
#
in perspective, you know, the American constitutions record, even till the late 50s, was as appalling
#
as the Indian states was.
#
I mean, you know, pacifists were still being arrested in the 1920s, 1930s.
#
So it's, I think, a tricky thing.
#
But I actually agree with you.
#
I mean, I think on a couple of things like sedition and so forth, there's just no excuse
#
for what we put in the text of the constitution.
#
And I think then creating a culture, I think, in the judiciary that frankly does not ask
#
any questions of the state when it comes to the exercise of executive power over civil
#
It didn't ask it in the 50s in the emergency and suddenly not asking it now.
#
I think there's a second dimension to the state, which is the way you are coming from
#
where I have most sympathy with your argument.
#
I think Jagdish's position, you know, no matter what anybody says, most of us are supporters
#
of the 1991 economic reforms, where it was certainly the case that the state created
#
this absolute intricate and self-reinforcing web of patronage and corruption, which corroded
#
political and social life and stymied economic efficiency in ways that we cannot even imagine.
#
Now, again, I think a little bit of historical perspective, which is that some of it, I think,
#
When we look, we forget in 1947, right, when India had a foreign exchange crisis, there
#
is virtually no domestic capital to speak of.
#
I mean, capital, as we understand it, doesn't in a sense exist, right, in some senses, right.
#
There's no market in some senses that we speak of, right.
#
And there are no capabilities, because the one thing the British colonialism was not
#
was a development colonialism.
#
I mean, I think my old teacher, Mr. Atul Kohli, has argued this very powerfully.
#
I mean, the British state was interested in keeping order, extracting enough, using tariffs
#
and other things to give Britain a trade advantage, and that was about it, right.
#
There was no serious developmental investment.
#
So to that extent, it was inevitable that the state would have to be the locus of some
#
kind of collective action, because development requires us doing things, not just letting
#
people free to do things.
#
I mean, it's okay to say that, you know, you have the freedom to invest, but if there is
#
zero capital, right, where do you go?
#
But even there, I would support you, which is I do think, at least even as early as the
#
late 50s, and I think direction should have been clearer, that particularly in domestic
#
industrial production, the license per metrage, as we call it, needed to be, in a sense, dismantled.
#
It also had the consequence of becoming enmeshed in our electoral economy.
#
So, you know, those were the rents that then sustained political coalition and so forth.
#
So I think on that, I'm in agreement with you, and I think my big worry is that we are
#
actually going to go back to the bad old days of the 70s.
#
I think there's going to be too much sort of, in some sense, discretion in the allocation
#
of capital of the kind that we witnessed in the 70s.
#
But the third area, and to me, this is the biggest, frankly, failure of the industry,
#
because other ones were correctable in some ways, was in order for markets to function,
#
right, there need to be certain baseline necessary conditions in place.
#
If India has to be competitive, you need logistics, you need energy, you need education, right?
#
Even Hayek thought you need public health, right?
#
And the irony of the Indian state in the 1950s and 60s was that the place where it needed
#
to have a more effective capitalizing world was the place where it unconscionably failed
#
And actually then creating decades of distrust about the state.
#
So you've got the worst of both worlds, right?
#
You didn't get the efficiencies of an entrepreneurial culture, but you did not get, I mean, and
#
this is one difference between India and communist China, but one difference between India and
#
the Soviet Union and other communist countries, you actually did not for years and years shoo
#
IITs apart and so forth, get the human capital infrastructure energy base.
#
I mean, one thing we forget about the Chinese state, that's what it does, right?
#
And it's not just a free market, it did manage to educate its population faster than we did.
#
It did manage to create the collective goods that are required for competitiveness, particularly
#
I mean, even now, the thing that worries me is nobody asks you what makes an economy competitive,
#
It's energy costs, logistics costs, right?
#
These are the basic places where I think the state needed to have a role.
#
And these are the places in which the way which the state ended up being designed was
#
I think education being the prime example where it wasn't so much that, I mean, and
#
I lay my cards on the table in this, which is, I actually do think you need good and
#
effective forms of public education.
#
There are very few examples in the world of societies sort of not being able to or being
#
able to educate their population without public education.
#
But the form in which you design the education system where, for example, teachers unions
#
got enmeshed in the political process, I mean, it was a disaster waiting to happen.
#
And in some senses, a lot of the privatization that happens in India does not happen because
#
of the first principles that you are talking about.
#
It's simply, okay, because they're state failure, let's go to the market, except that the conditions
#
for making the market succeed, right, as Adam Smith said, light but effective regulation
#
still, you know, don't exist in many areas, right?
#
The last and final thing I'd say about this, and I think for those of us who are particularly
#
worried about economic reform, as I'm sure you are, right, you know, the challenge which
#
we haven't solved is the relationship of Indian capital to Indian politics, right?
#
So one, I'll be very honest with you, I think the Indian capital itself has been a relatively
#
I mean, even now when their back is against the wall, I mean, you know, 3% growth, as
#
Marx would have said, they're just not thinking as a class for itself, sometimes which they
#
would actually, I mean, at least on their own terms, right?
#
But I have something more in mind in the relationship between capital and politics, which is because
#
politics depended on certain forms of resource generation.
#
The close connections between capital and politics ended up undermining both, right?
#
A lot of reforms didn't happen because incumbent capital didn't want it.
#
I mean, that was Indira Gandhi's model in some ways, right?
#
I mean, it wasn't that she was anti-capital, it's just that like the builders are, you
#
know, periodically throwing up money.
#
I was once reading the KGB archives, published archives, just kind of randomly, and an extraordinary
#
fascinating thing in the 70s, right, where, you know, Pranab Mukherjee, Raghu Ramayya,
#
Star Wars of the Congress are kind of mediating with the Russians on the rupee ruble trade
#
for the supply of tobacco, right?
#
I mean, you know, and you can guess what the main objective of that mediation was.
#
So in some senses, the Indian state has always thought it necessary to control capital enough.
#
What happened in 1991 was we unleashed liberalization in some sectors because we said there are
#
rents to be collected elsewhere, factor markets in particular, and now what you could do in
#
factor markets was just mind boggling, right?
#
And that's the crisis that came to haunt us in UPA too, right, where just at the moment
#
when Indian capital was being legitimized, finally, right, you suddenly have this public
#
perception that Indian capital is broken all the way down because factor markets are broken.
#
I mean, this is one thing which very few in India paid attention to, and I think Jagdish
#
Bhagwati there was right.
#
I think Arvind Subramaniam originally was right, which is we just didn't pay enough
#
attention to finance and the way in which the structures of financialization, right,
#
create this deeply unhealthy relationship between state and capital to the point where the capital
#
itself can't be a counterweight to the state because it's so dependent on it.
#
And frankly, we are entering an even more exalted phase of that again.
#
I mean, I think what you're going to get in the next five, 10 years is you're going to
#
get greater and greater consultations of capital, in part produced by unfair regulatory arbitrage
#
And because capital allocation is actually what matters to markets, it's going to distort
#
the opportunities of lots of small, medium, genuine entrepreneurs, right?
#
So we just haven't got that state-capital relationship right.
#
And I think, to be honest, I think the problem is at both ends because it's also that incumbent
#
holders of capital will continue to subsidize, not just because it's in their individual
#
interests that I can understand, but I think even in the way in which they articulate what
#
their demands are, right?
#
And it's going to, therefore, both going to distort our politics and the structure of
#
So I have four observations to make on these very insightful thoughts of yours.
#
But before that, first, I'll just inform my listeners that I had a great episode with
#
Madhav Khosla on his book, India's Founding Movement, and we discussed this there, and
#
I'll continue to be a little skeptical about the rationale of those caveats about limitations
#
I'm not quite sure of that, but leaving that aside, observation one, I'm kind of struck
#
by the paradox that we have both lost faith in the state, and yet, you know, there's almost
#
a religion around the state in the sense that, one, we don't expect the state to do anything
#
We kind of exist in spite of the state because there is no rule of law anywhere, for example.
#
And that might be one reason, for example, that the performance of the current government
#
The approval ratings are super high because people just have completely disassociated
#
what is happening in their lives and the governance they are getting with whoever is in charge.
#
But at the same time, that's paradoxical because whenever anything goes wrong and an Indian
#
wants something to change, their instinctive response is that the state should do this,
#
that the state should pass a law or the state should fund this or whatever.
#
And this is a paradox I kind of struggle to get my head around.
#
There's a disconnect here.
#
My second observation is that, you know, what you said about education, in fact, I just
#
had a great episode on this with Karthik Muralidharan, which was 20 minutes long last week.
#
And you know, one of the things I'd like to say is that I don't think there is a binary
#
between public education and private provision.
#
What I have always been in favor of is that by all means, we have public education, but
#
also allow private education, you know, allow private entrepreneurs to set up schools for
#
profit, don't set conditions, and all of that just make it easy for them, which doesn't
#
mean you do away with public education.
#
And my contention is that just as we saw in 91 that you freed up telecom, you freed up
#
airlines, and we can see the difference that competition made in those areas where you
#
can buy a mobile phone today for 600 rupees and access is so democratized and easily available
#
and nobody misses MTNL.
#
I suspect the same would happen to education, but even if it doesn't keep the public education
#
going, you don't need to constrain private entrepreneurs.
#
And I think this was one fundamental flaw in the design of the state that even back
#
in the day, fine, there is no capital, you need to build industries.
#
But you don't stop others from doing all this stuff, you leave that space open for them.
#
My third observation was what you said about capital and politics, where first I'd like
#
to draw the distinction that what is good for capitalists is often not good for the
#
people that, you know, Milton Friedman drew a distinction between pro-business and pro-markets.
#
And I remember Ram Guha once making the argument in his book India After Gandhi where he spoke
#
about, you know, the Bombay Plan and how sort of, you know, in the 40s, so many businessmen
#
were for Nehru's state-led model.
#
But the point is, of course, they would be, they wanted protectionism, they wanted to
#
protect their sort of area, which is why, you know, what is good for big businesses
#
not necessarily good for markets.
#
But the other point there about money and power that is something that I feel fairly
#
strongly about is that, yes, of course, there is a vicious circle between money and power.
#
Money will always chase power and use it to generate more money.
#
That's the nature of the game.
#
I think there is only one way to break that, which is not by demonizing big money, but
#
which is instead by reducing the power of the state to the extent that it no longer
#
makes sense for big money to chase that power.
#
Instead a big industrialist will say, how can I make money?
#
I have to make it by creating better products and by competing better because I cannot use
#
the coercive power of the state to stop my competitors or do anti-competitive things.
#
That was observation number three.
#
I'm sorry if this is a bit...
#
And my fourth one is really a sort of a question that comes from this question of the design
#
of the state, which is that when the BJP took over in 2014 from the Congress, at one level,
#
it seems like a very fundamental shift.
#
I phrased it perhaps almost too grandiously by saying that politics has finally caught
#
up with culture or whatever, you have referred to it as something that could reverse India's
#
progress to a point where the damage may be irreversible.
#
But my larger sort of observation here is that just as independent India led to a takeover
#
of a colonial apparatus by rulers with a different color of skin, similarly it might be the case
#
that in 2014 what simply happened was that the BJP took over an identical state apparatus.
#
In fact, the cause under which all of these people, Varavararao and all these guys have
#
been arrested are laws framed by the UPA, which many of them were arrested under in
#
And therefore it is really same old, same old.
#
It's a different bunch of people with slightly different imperatives, but the fundamental
#
flaw, which was a flaw in the conception and design of the state still remains.
#
So I think two observations, I broadly agree with you, but I think the readers will have
#
more fun if you disagree a little bit, at least the nuances, I think two things.
#
So one, I think on your last point, which I think is fair enough, I do think one of
#
the things we need to reflect about the fact is that the BJP did not need to create any
#
new law to, in a sense, impose its authoritarian or communal designs.
#
But I think there is a second part of the culture story that we often don't reflect
#
on now, which is every constitution needs to be made to work.
#
I mean, if only design produced, and in fact, the more I study public history, I used to
#
actually believe a lot in institutional design and still do obviously design matters, internal
#
incentives matter, structures of accountability matter.
#
But one of the sobering lessons of history is you can have all those design features,
#
but if the aims of that constitution are not internalized by its principle functionaries,
#
it's not going to work.
#
And I think the Indian Supreme Court is a perfect example.
#
I mean, it's one thing to say, look, there is a law, sedition law still on the books.
#
It's another thing to say when the Supreme Court says, we are not going to give you a
#
habeas corpus herein for a year.
#
I mean, there's no conceivable constraint there.
#
I mean, now you can theorize post-retirement appointments, although I don't think, frankly,
#
So I actually do think that we are in this interesting moment.
#
And one of the reasons I worry about a lot of the institutional design stuff is that
#
sometimes it actually displaces individual responsibility as well.
#
It becomes a convenient excuse.
#
I mean, even the Supreme Court throws its hands up and says, this is how the constitution
#
Of course, it's not like that.
#
You can do habeas corpus herein tomorrow and, in a sense, render a judgment.
#
And constitutions are often, in a sense, destroyed by their elites, to be honest.
#
I mean, the masses have certain grievances.
#
And I think what we are witnessing in this sense is, for a variety of reasons, that elite
#
destruction where even the most independent of institutions on paper are caving in ways
#
that actually don't make sense.
#
Even the United States, for example, is having the similar challenge where constitutional
#
law scholars will say, we can't go into class now and tell our kids what is the American
#
So I do think we need to think about that aspect, going back to the human nature point
#
of view, which is that, think about the role of officials and all of this.
#
The second thing I think I wanted to say, I agree with your point about schooling and
#
It can be done in a way in which it is neither, either or.
#
But on this rent-seeking bit, and I think you're exactly right, which is that, on first principles,
#
if you keep the state out of business, business can be kept out of state.
#
But here's the second sobering lesson, which is that if your image of where you can keep
#
the state out is licensed per matriarch, kind of restrictions on production and restrictions
#
on pricing, you're absolutely right.
#
But any modern business is enmeshed in a different set of regulatory imperatives.
#
So think of environmental regulation, for example.
#
Now you could, in principle, come up with a quotient solution, come up with a tort law
#
But again, there is no regulatory place in the world where the state will not have to
#
stake some decision, land as a scarce resource in some ways.
#
Zoning is a state decision.
#
I mean, we forget how much of the US political economy is simply a function of zoning.
#
You have to do some coordination function in zoning.
#
Now what has unfortunately happened is that the weight of that corruption has shifted
#
to all of these areas, or there's greater weight in these areas.
#
These are always corrupt in some ways, right?
#
Environmental regulation, factor markets, all of that.
#
So even if all that you're saying is correct, I think in large areas of where you can think
#
of deregulation, there is still enough important areas left which are fundamental to business
#
is being able to operate, but also social good needed to be protected in some ways.
#
That I don't think simply liberalization is going to be the whole answer.
#
And that's exactly what we saw post-91, that I don't have to pay money now to get a phone.
#
I don't have to pay money to get an industrial license, but I do have to pay money if I want
#
to produce my water, or things of that kind.
#
So we need to think smartly about where do we need to produce regulation, and simply
#
the narrative that if we simply got the state out of it, is actually not going to tell the
#
No, I actually agree with you, and this is probably where I come out of the closet as
#
My purest friends would say, well, I'm not saying that there should be no state regulation
#
in areas like the environment, for example, because it's very obvious that that's a place
#
where you do need the state, and even Corsion Solutions won't always work, but those are
#
sort of kind of exceptional cases.
#
Let's take a quick commercial break, and then when we come back, let's get down to talking
#
about Indian politics itself, and how it has evolved in all this time.
#
And I'm Amit Varma, here to tell you about a new weekly podcast that Vivek and I have
#
launched called Econ Central.
#
In Econ Central, we will help you make sense of the economic news of the last week, and
#
we'll also try to explain complex subjects in a simple language.
#
We will also take events outside the world of economics, like from politics, sports,
#
literature, and explain them through the lens of economic thinking.
#
Why is the stock market going up and the economy is going down?
#
What's the deal with high petrol prices?
#
Should we boycott Chinese goods?
#
What does free speech have to do with incentives?
#
Why are the roving bandits of Uttar Pradesh in competition with the biggest protection
#
racket out there, the Indian state?
#
All this and more in our new weekly podcast, Econ Central.
#
Econ Central launched a few weeks ago and is free on all podcast apps.
#
You can browse our archives at EconCentral.in.
#
Econ Central, you have an incentive to listen.
#
Don't forget the URL, EconCentral.in.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm still talking with Pratap Bhanu Mehta about the state of our democracy, 73 years
#
after we became independent, and I want to talk about politics right now, and I'll quote
#
again from your book, The Burden of Democracy, where at one point you said, quote, the imperatives
#
of seeking sustainable majorities, most observers argue, moderate even the most radical of movements,
#
giving Indian politics a largely centrist caste, stop quote.
#
And this is both, I would find profoundly true, and also is being profoundly challenged
#
And I want your response to both of those.
#
One, I think it's obviously profoundly true because as we were discussing before the show,
#
the lens of left and right don't necessarily matter in India because all parties when it
#
comes to are sort of left of center when it comes to economics, which is to say that they
#
are statists and they believe in the heavy hand of the state, and equally are right of
#
center when it comes to society, as we can see in these modern times with even the Congress
#
and the Ahmadmi Party pandering to the same sort of voter base which the BJP seems to
#
So in that sense, yeah, they are kind of similar perhaps because, you know, being skilled politicians
#
they have an acute sense of what the culture is like and maybe as that changes over time
#
supply will adjust automatically to demand.
#
But the other aspect where it is being challenged is that what I find in modern politics, and
#
this is possibly something catalyzed by technology, is that there is a tendency to make people
#
So a couple of things here, one, I think what technology has done is that it creates what
#
Cass Sunstein calls group polarization, which is, you know, one, there might be preferences
#
that you do not state in public because they're not considered polite or acceptable, which
#
could involve bigotry or sexism or whatever, but when through social media you see that
#
enough people share that, you get emboldened and you form what is called a preference cascade,
#
which is why a lot of parties and politicians don't need to dog whistle anymore.
#
They can just straight up say the most outrageous thing.
#
But the other thing what happens is that our tribalism expresses itself in our forming
#
these echo chambers and these sort of tribes online, and that drifts towards the extremes
#
automatically, because how do you lift your stature within your in-group?
#
You do it by signaling how much of a true believer you are, which could be by, you know,
#
a lot of virtue signaling, abusing the other side, not arguing with usually abusing if
#
it's social media or even attacking adherents of, you know, even attacking people in your
#
own tribe who to you are not pure enough, you know, and or fail some essential purity
#
test and therefore you raise your own status within your in-group.
#
And what this seems to do is it seems to have an influence within not just on social media,
#
but an influence on politics where everyone is driven to the extremes.
#
So in America, you have a Trump on one extreme and you have the rise of woke politics at
#
the other extreme, which is also looking at, you know, neo-Marxist narratives of oppression
#
And, you know, looking at group identities rather than individuals, you have an extremism
#
And similarly, what, you know, in India, they're all cut from the same mold.
#
But what we have seen within the BJP or the Jansung as it was before is that an observation
#
commonly made is that each leader seems, you know, makes a previous guy look moderate.
#
So Vajpayee made Shyama Prasad look moderate, Advani made Vajpayee look moderate and so
#
on to Modi and Adityanath and God knows who next.
#
And it almost seems inevitable that then within a party, within a tribe of true believers,
#
the only way to raise your stature is not by seeming moderate because then you can be
#
accused of being a sellout or whatever, but by being more extreme than the last guy.
#
And therefore everybody is driven to these extreme fringes.
#
And this is quite the opposite of what you call, you know, the centrism, which you said
#
would come through pragmatism is now actually, you know, just going in the opposite direction.
#
What are your thoughts on this?
#
This is a big question.
#
To be honest, I think one has to kind of acknowledge that, you know, we still don't fully know
#
the dynamics of the moment we are in.
#
I mean, I think a lot of clarity will come in hindsight, but I think two or three observations.
#
One, I think it's probably always a good rule when thinking about politics to first begin
#
about what objective facts might have changed.
#
I mean, I think the point about social media and the generation of a certain kind of discourse
#
is a very important one and I think I'll build up to it, but you know, when we thought of
#
the centrism of Indian politics and I think there is a little bit of a difference between
#
India and the US, the outcome might seem similar.
#
In hindsight, I think the centrism was premised on two facts about social power.
#
So the first fact was that Indians may not be individually liberal in the way that you
#
had kind of described, but the sources of social power are fragmented enough that no
#
force can kind of concentrate them, right?
#
There are some traditional lines in which they are fragmented, region, caste, even religion
#
under certain circumstances, right?
#
The good thing, you know, as the Rudolfs many years ago, the original proponents of the
#
centralist thesis said, you know, these natural sources of social power, while they're illiberal
#
internally, they also act as a certain kind of break on the centralization of power, right?
#
So the first question for me to ask is what has happened to these natural breaks, right?
#
And we always used to say, look, even the old congressmen dominated had to be a coalition
#
of all of these, right?
#
You had to build a kind of dominant caste, class, region, religion coalition.
#
What is it about this moment that the BJP can, in a sense, override them in some ways,
#
And create this mega majoritarian coalition.
#
And that, I think, has to do with some profound changes in Indian society, and some are actually
#
I mean, they're the unintended consequences of good changes.
#
So one, I think what has happened is, you know, the regional parties, in a sense, have
#
also declined in a manner of speaking.
#
I mean, there are regional parties, there's DMC, there's DMK, there's a whole bunch of...
#
But they have declined in the sense that, you know, a lot of their edge came from the
#
imminent prospect of a kind of North Indian, Hindi hegemony being imposed.
#
And the BJP is sometimes internally divided on this, but for the most part, they have
#
managed to neutralize that fear, right?
#
I mean, occasionally people tried, and frankly, I think it's much more fashionable in our
#
circles to make this out.
#
The result is every regional party thinks that whoever is at center, we can do business
#
So I think that's what happened to region.
#
I think caste is in, I think, an interesting position where, for many decades after independence,
#
caste was a mobilizing force, and sometimes in a good way, I mean, in the sense that the
#
demand was a demand for a certain kind of inclusion, right?
#
It's not a sort of exclusive demand in some ways.
#
It's just saying, give to us what everybody has, right?
#
But the logic of caste inclusion was agglomerative, right?
#
So when the Dravidian movements first started, you had to build bigger and bigger coalitions.
#
When the BSP came up in the north, the object was to agglomerate Dalits so that they become
#
a cohesive social movement.
#
Mandal did that to the OBCs, and those agglomerative movements required two things.
#
A, they required a lot of work of culture.
#
Most of these came about after years of social movements, right?
#
And second, they required a focal point around which to mobilize.
#
So in the south, it was kind of anti-Brahminism, simplifying it a little bit.
#
In the north, it became reservations, Mandal became another focal point.
#
Now we are at an interesting inflection point where both the energies of the social movement
#
have disappeared, right?
#
Again, BSP, once it came to power, the social movement kind of dissipated under it.
#
But also the agglomerative potential of a focal point has dissipated, which is now the
#
demand for reservation is demand for subdivision, right?
#
EBCs, Jatas versus Chamars, non-Yadavs versus Yadavs in OBCs, right?
#
And there isn't a single straightforward focal point, which in a sense unites this agglomerative
#
And I think the BJP has been very clever in grasping that.
#
So when in a state like UP, even the Yadav vote is split three ways, you actually know
#
that the agglomerative power of that mobilization is gone, right?
#
Now the good news in this is that what it shows, and you can do a similar thing for
#
in a sense class-based thing.
#
So when the Rudolfs wrote their book, you know, the farmer's movement and the labor
#
movement were the kind of two big poles of it, right?
#
Now India actually doesn't have a farmer's movement anymore, let's be very clear, partly
#
because the contradictions of different kinds of farmers, partly because agriculture has
#
become unrenumerative and the fragmentation of thought sizes, the desire of people to
#
move out, because of the party politicization of local panchayats, right?
#
None of these basic social identities that were kind of agglomerative forces for mobilization
#
exist anymore, at least not in the same form or same power.
#
They may crop their head up if somebody poses a real existential threat, right?
#
And that's what the BJP has been very clever at neutralizing.
#
So what I think happened to centrist politics in India, let's call it there for want of
#
that, and partly because I think they were reading too much social science, they all
#
became socially deterministic.
#
India's natural checks and balances, not caste, class, religion, region, class, you know,
#
I mean, nobody can take over the system, right?
#
And as I said, I think that there is something kind of interesting about this moment because
#
it has embedded, I mean, you know, you can't even think of class terms, gradient producers
#
are both consumers and producers.
#
You know, they can work different ways in different contexts.
#
Now once this disembedding happens, then it opens up the space for the creation of a new
#
kind of agglomerative force, right?
#
And one thing I think Mr. Modi grasped and BJP grasped is that identities are not natural
#
They have to be created through the work of mobilization, tapping into fears, propaganda.
#
The left, it's been its biggest failing always, it's always socially deterministic, right?
#
I mean, class will read this off, caste will read this off, and it got together all the
#
I mean, it got, it has a social movement like the RSS.
#
Whatever else you might say about the RSS, it is actually a social movement.
#
You know, even in this age of social media, one of the things we forget that how much
#
the BJP relies on sheer human power, right?
#
Door to door campaigning.
#
I mean, last election, you know, we were visited by the BJP guys six times.
#
I don't think I saw a Congress worker, right?
#
So it's kind of got that base.
#
Modi is in a sense, recalibrated that identity into this collective narrative of sort of
#
And then, of course, he played the card of the decline of the old regime very well, that
#
became a symbol of plutocracy, corruption, dynasty, decrepitude, and frankly, that old
#
order has no fight left in it.
#
I mean, there's just, right?
#
So I think, and in that sense, I think India is a little bit different, which is that what
#
the BJP has, in a sense, managed to do is its version of what the Congress did between
#
1920 and 1950, right, which is created a generative newly generated social identity.
#
Now, it needs the other little, you know, occasion.
#
And as I said, it smartly fuses lots of elements, right?
#
I mean, I joke because one of the things about India is that, you know, it can be totalitarian,
#
you know, 9am to 10am, it can be democratic in the afternoon, it can be anarchist in the
#
evening, it can be oligarchic sometime in the day, right?
#
So he can play the liberal card when he wants to put the luck, he can play a dog whistle
#
card when he's campaigning in Bihar, right?
#
So I would still argue, actually, that that driver is actually what led breakdowns and
#
the challenge for any opposition is that once politics operates in this way, the entry costs
#
Because now you can't do what the Congress was trying to do the last election, you know,
#
some of the Dalits will get upset and somehow you just hope the big mollies get upset enough
#
and you know, the tunnels get upset enough, right?
#
Because you have to do this in national scale.
#
Now, national scale requires resources of a different order of magnitude.
#
It requires control in some senses of a propaganda, information machinery, where BJP has a natural
#
I mean, basically, it's cornered all of television media, it manages to control most of print
#
media in connivance with Indian capital, right?
#
And it's interesting that the BJP, when it started out as an insurgent group, used social
#
But contrary to what people thought, traditional media still remains important for it.
#
I mean, it's important that Ram Madhav appeared in the pages of Indian Express, right?
#
It's important that, you know, scripts go out to television producers all the time,
#
And because Mr. Modi is in a sense kind of both presidentialized the election in ways
#
which we did not think possible, the entry barriers for somebody to dislodge are now
#
going to be just that much higher, right?
#
So I actually do think there's a, and as I said, part of it is a result of those complex
#
development processes that happened in the last 10, 15 years, that we actually did see
#
a little bit of that disembedding from that sociological fatalism.
#
The polarization in the social media and forms of communication stuff, I think that you're
#
talking about, I think is interesting and I don't claim to understand the dynamics of
#
I mean, is this just a passing phase or a kind of permanent feature?
#
As I said, the one thing social media does manage to do is because of this asymmetry
#
between truth and doubt, I think it's much easier to bring down reputations because all
#
you need to, and in a sense, create that platform for a kind of pervasive cynicism.
#
Each of us has a skeleton in our closet.
#
That seems to be the one common thread across social media, right?
#
The way you argue is in a sense you impugn somebody's credibility, right?
#
Now on the polarization and echo chamber story, the other important feature of social media,
#
which I think is more important than I think the echo chamber dynamic, because echo chambers,
#
you could in principle correct, I mean, you do exist in other spaces as well other than
#
social media because you will be interacting with different kinds of people.
#
The important part of social media is that it completely raises the distinction between
#
So the kind of conversation I think that might have been okay in private, you know, you sometimes
#
even use inappropriate words, you sometimes, you know, say things for the heck of it.
#
Once you have put it out in your social media, that actually defines your identity in some
#
The bad tweet that you made will in a sense, right?
#
Now the minute you make your identities public in that way, it automatically congeals them
#
and sees them because you have no other option but to defend yourself to death and you know,
#
the tweet becomes you, right?
#
Rather than look, okay, I said this, you know, my own reflection, I've changed my mind, right?
#
So in some ways, the performative aspect of this where it has actually made visible are
#
impulsive thoughts, right?
#
I mean, philosophers used to have a joke, you know, I think Wittgenstein's advice that
#
when philosophers meet each other, they should raise their hands and say slow down, you know,
#
before you say something.
#
In a sense, social media, your performance in a sense becomes your identity and defines
#
And to my mind, I mean, this is just anecdotal thing, but when I see, you know, I find the
#
echo chamber issue less significant, I mean, people still talk to enough different people
#
and obviously they've seen the other echo chambers, I mean, they're responding to them
#
I think it's just the fact that once you've taken a position in public, you know, saying
#
sorry, withdrawing is simply not an option, right?
#
The second thing, which is, as Plato said in democracy, the most corrupting thing is
#
of course the desire for agglomeration and popularity, right?
#
If what I'm after is more attention, right?
#
Then I have to probably differentiate and say the most outrageous things possible.
#
The problem is I may be doing it for a pretty, it might almost be a game in some cases, right?
#
But that in then some senses becomes you, right?
#
It's an interesting question, you know, how even I'm sure you've experienced this, your
#
perception of people's arguments and work changes because of what you've seen on them
#
on social media, right?
#
And I think there's a good reason liberalism insisted on the distinction between public
#
Not just because the private is a space where you shield yourself from a kind of public
#
gaze, but because private is also a space where you can churn and form before you actually
#
appear in public, right?
#
And that distinction is completely gone.
#
I mean, we are quite happy making ourselves, you know, I don't want your nighttime thoughts
#
to be transparent to me, frankly, right?
#
But once they are, that's who you become in my eyes.
#
That's a fascinating insight.
#
And I've just finished writing this essay called Meditation on Form, not published it
#
yet, but it'll come in my newsletter, where I am speculating on how the forms that you
#
write and read shape not just the content, like it's of course a trivial matter that
#
writing for Twitter will make your content more concise or more simplistic or whatever,
#
but also shape the person.
#
And one way of doing that is that, you know, I thank God that Twitter was not around when
#
Otherwise, what I would have done is I would have tweeted the kind of nonsense I used to
#
think then, I would have doubled down on it, and I would have become that person.
#
So that's a great insight that you just shared.
#
And of course, the other thing that I think the other profound way in which social media
#
has changed us all is that, you know, 20 years ago, there was a broad consensus on the truth.
#
You got your mainstream newspapers and whatever, and there was a broad sense.
#
And now it's just everybody choosing her narrative, and then you just listen to the sources that
#
I have a couple of questions for you based on what you were talking about, you know,
#
caste and the BJP, and sort of on that.
#
One is about the BJP itself, which is that what they have done is that, and whether we
#
attribute this political genius to Hamid Shah or Modi or it's a combination or whatever
#
is a different matter, but what they did was that they played identarian politics brilliantly
#
in the sense that, of course, all our politics has been identarian, but they manipulated
#
it brilliantly in the sense that they could go inside UP and they could say, okay, you
#
know, the Yadavs are gone to us, we'll go for the non-Yadav OBCs, we'll go for the
#
In Maharashtra, we'll go for the non-Maratha OBCs.
#
So they really figured out which end of the market they want, and they went for that with
#
And one of the things that they managed to do in that process, as Prasanjha wrote about
#
in his book, How the BJP Wins, and I had an episode with him as well, is that they became
#
the de facto Dalit party of India.
#
Now, whatever activists may say, the bottom line is that more Dalits have voted for the
#
BJP than their opponents, both in 2014 and 2019.
#
They've managed to agglomerate that identity within their larger umbrella or whatever they
#
stand for, which is, you know, very interesting to me.
#
So the two questions related to this that I sort of have is that, one, within the BJP,
#
as we see them today, we see two conflicting impulses.
#
One impulse is the practical impulse of politics, where you do whatever it takes to become power,
#
which includes mergers and acquisitions, where you'll buy MLAs from the Congress, and you
#
might have abused them during the election, but you buy them and you form the government
#
And that's a practical impulse of power politics.
#
But the other is also the ideological impulse of being true to their core social movement
#
and whatever that was, which also you see expressed in ways that I hardly need to elaborate
#
So one question, what do you kind of make of this?
#
And if it is a movement from the latter towards the former, that is, if it is going to become
#
more and more pragmatic about retaining power, then does that dilute the ideological edge?
#
Or since the ideological edge is a dominant strain in the culture, anyway, it doesn't
#
And the other question on caste is that the sort of direction we took at our founding
#
moment of saying that we will transform society from the top down.
#
You know, caste is, of course, we would agree, one of our most grievous problems, if not
#
the original sin of Indian civilization, as you put it.
#
But was the right way to solve it the top down approach that we took, which instead
#
seems to have entrenched a certain kind of toxic identity politics, which just makes
#
divisions worse and doesn't actually help with the problem.
#
So let me begin with the caste question first, and then we'll come to the BJP because I think
#
this, so, you know, I mean, and I think this is something I think we have to acknowledge,
#
That, I mean, we can debate the merits or demerits of reforming it through the state,
#
but the fact of the matter is that reform of that social system did have an element
#
that would have involved the state.
#
So first of all, you need a legal structure that outlaws certain forms of discrimination
#
And in a sense, a lot of the focus of the debate over caste focused on one instrument,
#
which was reservations.
#
And I don't want to use this episode to kind of debate the pros and cons.
#
I mean, I think the reservations for Dalits were not only justified, but I actually still
#
think it continued to be justified.
#
We can have an argument over that.
#
I think what the expansion of reservations to OBCs in the form that they took in Mandal
#
did was that it actually one, it took out the specificity of the Dalit experience.
#
And in a sense, the entire discourse became about sharing a particular small pie.
#
In fact, it let the upper cast of the hook in some ways, because the core of a society,
#
right, which is you shall not discriminate against people for who they are.
#
That question kind of dropped out of our consciousness.
#
We kept saying, look, but we've given reservation, we don't discriminate, hello, wake up, right?
#
So I think that's one thing to, I think, bear in mind.
#
But I think the larger context why the reservation debate took the form it did, and frankly there's
#
a lot of bad faith in our part, is the state took on that instrument, in my view, not because
#
it wanted a top-down transformation of society, but because it wanted a cheap and ineffective
#
transformation of society.
#
So reservation is cheap.
#
It actually doesn't cost too many resources.
#
Whatever institutions you have, you just kind of allocate.
#
What we did not do, which would have taken collective action, was actually make education
#
I mean, frankly, if Dr. Ambedkar's plan looked in 10, 15 years, I mean, it took India almost
#
65 years to achieve universal enrollment, right?
#
So reservation was not about top-down transformation.
#
Reservation was simply a very cheap way of India's elites satiating the demand for representativeness.
#
I think fully well that one of the advantages of doing reservation is that you take your
#
attention of these other things.
#
I mean, in my knowledge commission days, we used to often ask politicians, right?
#
I've been always amazed by the fact that whenever there's reservation, of course, there's a
#
focal point mobilization, right, for and against.
#
Which was the last political party, I mean, I can think of maybe Kamraj as an exception
#
in Tamil Nadu, maybe AAP briefly in Delhi now, that actually got really upset about
#
the quality and accessibility of education to its constituents.
#
Which OBC or Dalit party, right, asked the question, what is the nature of quality education
#
So frankly, reservation was our cheap way of warding off the problem.
#
And the biggest casualty of this, I mean, one is the one you alluded to, which is does
#
it entrench identities in a particular way.
#
But I think the even bigger casualty was a permanent distrust.
#
So and I have to say that I cannot in good conscience give an answer to this question.
#
If you go and talk to Dalit students and OBC students, many of whom are quite willing,
#
not just willing, but quite happy to envisage a world where reservations were not necessary.
#
They of course understand all the arguments that we make, look, isn't it better to give
#
Isn't it better to do A, B, C?
#
But we can't look them in the eye and say with a straight face that anybody actually
#
intended to do that, right.
#
So and to me, that's actually the vicious circle.
#
That's the trust deficit that is now in a sense so deep, right.
#
That it will take, you know, 10 year performance by a state to show, look, we can deliver all
#
of these things that are yours by right, such that these things become kind of unnecessary.
#
So I think that's one thing I do think we have to in some senses acknowledge.
#
And that's why I think many Dalits are able to also participate in this promise of delivery
#
story, right, because from their vantage point, what they have experienced is something that
#
doesn't inspire trust in the state.
#
It also, by the way, doesn't inspire trust in political parties.
#
So for all of the Congress's reliance on apparently on Dalit words, the fact of the matter is
#
its culture was deeply, deeply exclusionary in all kinds of quotidian ways.
#
I mean, I have stories from Jagjeevan Ram, even as late as the seventies of kind of,
#
you know, his cultural experiences in the political party called Congress.
#
So I think we will have to, in a sense, now demonstrate by action.
#
It's not just a question of abstractly saying, we'll get you education, we'll give you all
#
these means to participate.
#
Where do we go on reservations?
#
I mean, I think there was no doubt that we need forms of affirmative action.
#
But there were different ways of designing it.
#
One proposal, I think I'm very attracted to is Rakesh Basant of IIM, Ahmedabad.
#
You know, he crunched some numbers and he basically said, look, parents education is
#
a good proxy predictor of whether the kids get educated or not.
#
So if both your parents are graduate, chances are you.
#
And he said, if you just made that a proxy criteria for reservation instead of caste,
#
you would actually cover all the groups that you actually do need to cover, which is some
#
kind, you know, Dalits and others, but it's self-liquidating in a nice kind of way, right?
#
So I think other than for Dalits, I think it is worth opening up the debate what kind
#
I think this 10% economic thing is, I think, beside the point, to be honest.
#
I mean, you know, now the Dalit case, I think, I do think is an exceptional case in India,
#
because it's the one community where all lines converge, right?
#
So, you know, OBCs can have a history of, you might say, educational backwardness to
#
use our official parlance, but not the history of humiliation and discrimination.
#
In fact, in some cases, they're dominant, not all of them, some of them, right?
#
Dalits are one group where every single historical line of marginalization, humiliation, a sort
#
of deep cultural aversion.
#
Not only was so deep, but I hate to say this, even in my experience, I still think there
#
are too many traces of it.
#
So mere presence is actually important.
#
I won't say this about any other group, but I think, yes, for the rest, I think we need
#
to think of, you know, what are better ways of achieving these objectives.
#
The BJP argument you made about sort of, you know, will the optionism tame the fanaticism,
#
That was always our hope, right?
#
And particularly when the polity was centrist, right, you know, I remember political scientists
#
used to joke, you know, even in the early 2000s that in India, any party that becomes
#
a ruling party will become like the Congress.
#
I mean, and it was meant as a kind of constructive joke that you have to sort of move to the
#
center and, you know, create a patchwork.
#
As for reasons I just mentioned, A, I don't think that's necessarily the case anymore.
#
B, you know, in the BJP's case, I would put the relationship between opportunism and the
#
ideological purity slightly differently.
#
See in every other political party, we see the opportunism as a betrayal of a principle,
#
So, you know, it's a practical compromise.
#
I think one thing we have not noticed in BJP is that in BJP, the opportunism is a ruthless
#
device for furthering the ideological agenda.
#
You first consolidate power by all means, only when you have consolidated that power
#
that you make the next move, right?
#
Why in a sense, we've been surprised over Ram Mandir, Kashmir, Triple Talaq, UCC, whatever,
#
you know, your pet issue, you know, CAA, whatever, right?
#
You can read it two ways.
#
You can read it saying there's an opportunist BJP that, you know, brings down governments,
#
that, you know, does horse trading, that issues electoral bonds, that favors certain parts
#
of Indian capital, and then there's this ideologically purist.
#
I think in their own imagination, the first is actually the means to the second, which
#
is the lesson they have learned is consolidate power by all means, then strike.
#
So the next item on that ideological agenda will come when they are in a position for
#
it in some ways, right?
#
And that's one of, I think, the macabre attractions of the BJP.
#
You know, you and I think Mr. Modi is compromising on principles.
#
I think his constituents actually don't see that.
#
I think they see it as he understands that Hindus need to acquire power by any means
#
whatsoever, in order for that ideological agenda to be fulfilled.
#
So I think the relationship is a little bit different in some ways, I think, you know,
#
in this party, and it's true of ideological parties, right?
#
Even of the far left, historically, it's been true, where because you are so sure of your,
#
the purity of your ideological objectives, it becomes easier to justify the ruthlessness
#
No, no, that's a great point.
#
And as we see after the 2019 elections, you know, 370, the building of the temple, blah,
#
blah, they're getting their kind of one by one.
#
We are already at, you know, the end of our sort of time.
#
So I'll ask you for some final comments as we move on that, okay, we've, you know, completed
#
73 years of our independence or whatever, but the fact is, it is with the hindsight
#
bias that India seems inevitable.
#
And it wasn't so at all in this shape, or perhaps in any shape, and yet here we are.
#
So looking forward, maybe if I ask you to look forward just as little as 10 years, given
#
what is happening in our democracy, given what is happening in our politics, and so
#
on, and leaving aside, you know, unforeseen events like pandemics and so on.
#
Looking forward 10 years, what gives you hope and what gives you despair, or what's your
#
best case scenario for India and what's your worst case scenario?
#
Okay, well, I mean, you know, looking into the future, you feel like lying, even if you
#
turn out to be right, because you have no basis for saying what you say.
#
I think two things, so let me return to the broader frame of the conversation we started
#
And so this is the widely optimistic scenario, okay.
#
This is like, I mean, and I'm saying optimistic, it's not just wishful thinking, but it would
#
go something like this, that look, there was a settlement that happened at partition, Pakistan
#
obviously did not fare well as a result of that settlement, and partly because the premise
#
of that settlement was bound to produce the kind of pathologies that you saw in Pakistan.
#
Once you have a religious state, once you believe in blasphemy laws, once you say it's
#
an Islamic state, even if Jinnah wanted it to be a relatively liberal Islamic state,
#
you're still benchmarking insiders and outsiders and you do talk Ahmadiya is what you do, and
#
the whole thing falls apart, right?
#
A little bit of that dialectic is beginning to be unleashed in India as well, in a sense
#
that, and the BJP actually does, we are doing the unfinished work of partition.
#
I mean, there's a kind of performative sort of admission in that we want to be kind of
#
Now, the widely optimistic scenario is that, look, we do have three to five, six years
#
of serious conflict around this, can't predict the scale of violence, but I think some violence
#
is going to be just in the nature of these things, right?
#
But what that does is that actually concentrates our mind back on why we were doing certain
#
things that we were in fact doing, and that one of the things that South Asia will need,
#
I mean, I actually do strongly believe, frankly, that India and Pakistan's trajectories are
#
I think we underestimate the degree, I mean, yes, they're diverging, India has done partly
#
better, but not as much as we like to think.
#
But we still haven't come to terms with, in a sense, the legacy of 1947.
#
And that's a legacy that distorts both our domestic politics.
#
In Pakistan, that's the impetus of creating a particular relationship between the military
#
And here now we are kind of using it.
#
So the optimistic scenario is that, look, we go back and rethink 1947 and say, I mean,
#
I don't mean we become one country, but that's not going to happen.
#
But we say that, look, the fundamental premise by which we defined our identity post-1947,
#
Pakistan explicitly, India in a fuzzy, modus vivendi way is no longer, in a sense, sustainable.
#
And it's running up against a second fact, which is important and I think going to be
#
very significant on an optimistic side, is that while intra-religious conflict, or rather
#
inter-religious conflict has occupied our attention, actually the fault lines on freedom
#
and oppression are within each of our communities.
#
The fact of the matter is young men and women in both communities are looking for different
#
kinds of liberation, sometimes pathologically, right?
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That sociological dynamic is also going to research itself at some point, right?
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And the advantage of that dynamic is that it actually gives people in different communities
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a similar language to talk about, right?
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That we are actually all kind of oppressed by some of the traditional structures we inherited.
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So maybe what has happened is that that deep freeze in which we had put this conversation
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in 1947 is actually finally bubbling up in a pathological way.
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There will be some conflict, it will work itself out and we will actually realize that
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the subcontinent needs to be the zone of shared freedom that you and I want it to be.
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That's the only rational way of resolving these conflicts.
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If identity is the basis for doing it, it's a precarious, fragile, unfree existence.
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So that's the optimistic scenario, right?
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I think the pessimistic one is in a sense that, which is that the scale of the violence
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that we experience in interim, the scale of marginalization, you know, produces historically
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unprecedented levels of suffering.
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And so that process is really long run out.
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I mean, you know, the 30 years war was a 30 years religious war, right?
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You could say we had a kind of 10 year civil war in the 40s.
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We then sort of had a punctuated pause.
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Now we are kind of returning back to it.
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But you know, maybe you could stretch it out for 15, 20 years, but I hope the first one
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Even your first one has a lot of violence embedded in it.
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These are the times that we live in.
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Pratap, thank you so much for, you know, sharing so much of your time and so many of your insights
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It's a great privilege that you came on my show.
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So thank you so much for your patience.
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Thanks for you to your listeners as well.
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If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, you can follow Pratap on Twitter at PB Mehta.
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One word PB Mehta, you can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Seen and the Unseen at www.seenunseen.in.
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