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On December 6, 1992, a group of young men climbed on top of a mosque in Ayodhya and demolished
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It was a symbolic moment for our country, but I'd argue that it wasn't a seminal one.
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It wasn't a turning point.
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There were forces that happened to be gathering strength at that point and what was destroyed
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that day would have been destroyed anyway.
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There was a cultural movement that had been on the rise for a century.
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There was a political movement that was on the upswing and about to become unstoppable.
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December 6, 1992 was just one milestone in the journey that has brought us to December
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In these 28 years, our politics has changed, our society has changed, our country has changed.
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And it's worth looking back at how all this happened.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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If modern Indian politics has been taken over by the jugalbandi of Narendra Modi and Amit
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Shah, this pair of politicians was enabled by an earlier jugalbandi before them, that
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of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Hadwani.
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For decades, Vajpayee and Hadwani fought what appeared to be a losing battle until they
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No matter which side of the political spectrum you're on, this is a fascinating story.
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To understand India, we have to understand the rise of Hindu nationalism and the rise
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My guest today is Vinay Sitapati, author of the marvelous book, Jugalbandi, the BJP before
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Vinay has been a lawyer, a journalist and a political scientist.
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And when you read his book, you will find that he is a fine historian and writer as
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Jugalbandi looks at the evolution of political Hindu nationalism through the prism of the
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partnership between Vajpayee and Hadwani, a friendship that spanned decades and was
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even a bit of a bromance actually.
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The book busts the simple stereotypes that linger around both men and gave me great insight
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into the RSS, the motivations of Hindu nationalism and how this was a bottom-up movement in which
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the politicians were merely rational actors responding to incentives from the demand side
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of the political marketplace.
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And that remains the case even in this age of Modi and Shah.
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Before I begin my conversation with Vinay though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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What are you waiting for?
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Vinay, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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Thank you very much, Amit.
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You know, before we start, and I must say I enjoyed reading your book enormously, tons
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of insights in there for someone like me.
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Let's talk a bit about your personal journey though.
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You know, this is, of course, your second biography.
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Your first one was of B. V. Narasimha Rao, but let's even sort of go a little further
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You know, what did you want to do when you were growing up?
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You've described yourself elsewhere as a child of liberalization in the sense that your dad
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shifted from a PSU to a private sector company and all of that.
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So tell me about the young Vinay.
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What did he want to do?
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What were the different sort of routes you took through your life?
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Well, Amit, you know, like when I had to apply for like a, you know, like a master's degree
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or PhD, you have to write these personal statements, right?
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And I realized that it was came to my personal statement that there wasn't a narrative.
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I was just kind of following instinct.
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So I think your listeners, you know, won't get like, you know, like that I write my books,
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I make sure there's a narrative, right?
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Like Vajpayee is born and then, you know, Advani is born and then they kind of move
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up with the arc of history.
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Now, unfortunately, that's not the case with me.
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So, you know, to give you a sense, I'm 37.
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So I'm a child of the 1990s and, you know, my father had, you know, he worked for Exim
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Bank, which was a PSU and then he left in the early 90s to start off on his own as a
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And I remember it was a very dislocating time for all of us, you know, that in Nehruvian
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India, if you were a government employee, you know, you had a nice house, you know,
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you had like a car and a driver, you know, it was all as long as you're in government
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It's a pretty comfy life.
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Then he made it out on his own and, you know, this was a rough and tumble of the early private
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And I still remember, you know, we didn't have a car and okay, whatever, but, you know,
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when you're a kid, you know, people, kids talk, they make jokes, you know, it's a, it's
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And so it stayed with me and I couldn't quite understand it or I couldn't quite make sense
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of it at that time, but I knew that there was a shift, for example, I remember some
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So I'm, you know, born and brought up in Bandra and from Bandra.
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And I remember McDonald's coming for the first time, you know, in Linking Road.
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And we all went there and there was this huge line, you know, and it was so long the line
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that they had dedicated, you know, a server to come with the menu.
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And so you can order while you're in that line and that line kind of snake through Linking
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And again, like I couldn't mix, you know, I remember Baba Sehgal and you know, that kind
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And again, you know, it's not that I could make sense of it at that time, but I remember
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looking back and there was something dislocating about it, you know, and it took me a while
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to realize that my immediate story is also the larger story of many Indians during that
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Then the other sort of, again, in the early nineties, you know, something that I grew
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up with was the rise of the BJP.
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You know, in 95, the Shiv Sena BJP comes to power for the first time in Maharashtra where
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I was and it ended basically a total hegemony of the Congress.
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So even the non-Congress governments in Maharashtra until then was broadly sprinter groups, broadly,
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And I remember very clearly the Bombay riots, you know, immediately after the demolition
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of Babri Marjid whose anniversary is right now.
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So this is, you know, just soon after December 6th, 92 and I remember, you know, we were
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on this side of the Mahim Creek in Banda Reclamation and I remember we could all get on to the
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top of our building and look at the timber yards owned by Muslims on the other side of
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And again, I couldn't, you know, this, you know, whatever, I was a kid.
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So none of this kind of, you know, made sense to me at that time.
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But looking back, I think some of it may have lingered, you know, and my first book was
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definitely a way to make sense of liberalization and I focused on a person, Narsimha Rao and
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sort of the core of the argument of the book is that liberalization wasn't fated to happen.
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You know, McDonald's, it wasn't an inevitable march of history that McDonald's would open
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But it was, there was a lot of political maneuvering, right, done by the prime minister of the day
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that allowed it to happen against the arc of history.
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So in some sense, I was pushing against those who say that with the collapse of the Soviet
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Union, you know, with, you know, the decline of the Indian economy, you know, this was
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You know, and so that was the argument for that book.
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And for this book, you know, I guess, you know, I was looking a little more at Hindu
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nationalism, a little less as a biography.
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So as you've read, I mean, firstly, it's a biography of a relationship, right?
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It's not just a biography and the relationship itself is a symbol for the larger question
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Like what is Hindu nationalism and why the BJP wins?
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So in that sense, this is more of a kind of a classically academic or scholarly question,
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which is, you know, what explains the hundred year story of the BJP?
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But even so, I can, you know, I do sense looking back that, you know, that it's not a coincidence
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that these are my two books and I was a child of the nineties.
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No, no, that's fascinating.
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And you brought memories stumbling back because when McDonald's opened here, I remember sort
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of being in an auto going through linking road and realizing that the line to McDonald's
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That was because I was part of the line that was part of the, well, you alone didn't make
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it stretch all the way to car, but yeah, you were one of the sort of unwashed masses.
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You know, and I mean, I didn't join the line that day, but I joined the line some other
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Also, it's actually the washed masses because you know, McDonald's at that time was an upper
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You know, it's not, it was, it was an upper middle class idea, whereas in the United States,
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the people who go to McDonald's tend to be poor, right?
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Particularly in that the time period you were looking at that line, it was the aspiration
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for upper middle class India.
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Well, you know, if I have to quibble with that trivial point, I could also say that
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number one, you know, people down the line might consider it offensive that you are implying
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that they don't wash in that washing, you know, goes up in frequency with the classes.
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And also, you know, what you, you know, if a future biographer of yours is to, you know,
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really investigate your life, I'm sure he'll in hindsight, stick a narrative to it just
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as you know, all biographies have to have and a little bit of that is emerging now.
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So you know, taking off from what you just said, I sort of have a question there that
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as you said in your first book, one of the points that you were making is that liberalization
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wasn't inevitable, the things that happened weren't inevitable.
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Now, one of my frequent bugbears often is that we don't think probabilistically about
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the world in the sense that whenever something has happened, we assume that it was inevitable.
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While obviously at any given point in time, we only have a sea of probabilities ahead
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But in hindsight, there is an inevitability.
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And that can lead us to underplay both the role of chance and the role of individuals.
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Like, you know, there's one sort of common strand in history that you must have grappled
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with about how, you know, there's no such thing as a great man theory of history.
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And it's all, you know, there are larger currents which determine how the world's move.
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But the more I read of history and including much of what is in this book, it just strikes
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me that chance events really make so much of a difference.
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Like you've brought up various counterfactuals in your book, which we'll discuss when we
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And it seems that the history of the country could have been different had we proceeded
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down a slightly different line.
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So what is your sense of this, and this is really a dual question.
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One is that there are, I suppose, different academic approaches to history.
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And is it then you sometimes find that you have to set those aside when you are actually,
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you know, performing the task of writing history or doing history, as it were?
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And what are sort of your views on all this?
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I mean, would you also tend to say that chance is actually the biggest determinant, you know,
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of what really happens?
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Well, that's a very good question, Amit, and as you can see in both this book, as well
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as the Narsimha Rao book, I spend a lot of time playing up the role of events and individuals.
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I wouldn't call it chance alone, right, because events happen for a variety of like, let's
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But as you read in the book, the emergency has played a huge role in socializing the
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RSS and BJP of that era, don't I mean of that era, right, into respecting civil liberties,
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you know, because they realize that, look, if we put people in jail, they can also put
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us in jail, you know, and the law is what kind of comes in between that.
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Or, you know, in the book itself, I point out the murder of Mahatma Gandhi.
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And I'm quite clear that the institutions of Hindu nationalism, namely Hindu Mahasabha
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at the time and RSS didn't play a role, but the ideology totally did in the sense that
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the RSS criticism of Gandhi was shared by Godse, 100 percent, right.
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It's just that the RSS didn't want to take any violent action, you know, to act on that
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But as a consequence, the Indian state came down very hard on the RSS, very, very hard.
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Even today, even today, almost what 70 years later, the RSS remembers that period between
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February 1948 and I think July 1949 as its most traumatic period.
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All the pracharats were thrown in jail, the head of the RSS, Golwalkar was thrown in jail.
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And you know, it's sort of it pushes the RSS, which until that time was an anti-political
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organization, which was critical of electoral politics into creating a political party,
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the Janssum, which is a precursor of the BJP as political insurance.
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So that's again, just one example to show exactly the point you're making.
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At the same time, I mean, I, you know, I'm a trained academic, right, like I have like,
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you know, like, you know, given that the academics don't make much money, I tell them my larger
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family look at five degrees, you know, and that's taught me something and it's taught
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me that structure demographics also make a difference, right?
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So to give you one example, I point out that a lot of events in the 1980s, Rath Yatra,
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for example, helped in the mobilization of the BJP, but fundamentally the rise of the
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BJP began as a set of demographic anxieties, right, which are bottom up.
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So for example, Hindu fear of all castes because of the Khalistan movement, because Khalistanis
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were targeting Hindus as Hindus, right?
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And the upper caste North Indian fears because of the extension of OBC reservation in Northern
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Or this worry that Saudi petrodollars is going to fuel conversions in India, exemplified
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by the controversy surrounding the 1981 Meenakshi Puram conversions in Tamil Nadu, the small
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So these are not just events and individuals, right?
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These are like larger forces that are reshaping India.
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And I think that, I mean, I'd love to discuss this, that my dual training as a journalist
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and an academic makes me alive to both, you know, and this book is both, you know, so
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if a journalist reads it, what she or he will find nice about the book is it talks about
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like these larger structural stories that journalists don't focus on, right?
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And in academics, what they like is that it focuses on events and individuals which normally
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And I think it's a serious error on the part of academics that they don't do this.
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And you know, I mean, I'm not a historian, I'm a political scientist, right?
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So this, I mean, I'm looking at a hundred year political history of the BJP, but my
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training is as a political scientist.
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So I'm interested in causation, right?
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I'm not just interested in narration.
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So the end of the book, as you'll see, I give you a set of arguments, right?
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For why, like what Hindu nationalism is, no, it's not fascist, it's majoritarian and also
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why the BJP wins, right?
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And the 1980s itself, I give you a complex set of causal arguments because causation
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And if causation matters to you, like, you know, what causes the rise of the BJP rather
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than just give a description of the BJP and say, you know, like I keep telling my students
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that, you know, when you're explaining anything, it can't be a Gujarati thali with like a hundred
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You have to say that, look, the BJP rose because of A and B and not C and D. That's very important
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That you also have to exclude the arguments that you don't think work.
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Otherwise, it's a bit of a pop out to say that, look, there's a bit of everything, right?
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But if you have that kind of mentality, then you should be open that look occasionally
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Occasionally, individuals matter occasionally structures matter, right?
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Like to give you an another example, unrelated to India, I mean, let's look at the Brexit,
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The decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.
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A lot of that is explained through personalities, you know, the personalities of the time to
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just looking at these larger structural reasons, globalization, decline or white working class
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And if you are a social scientist who is honest or wants to be honest about not like peddling
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your pet disciplinary lens, but finding an answer to the truth, you have to be kind of
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ecumenical about the approaches that you use.
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That's how I came to it.
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I mean, in fact, I would say that, you know, I began my career as a lawyer in the sense
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I studied at National Law School, Bangalore, Harvard Law School.
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And I then, you know, worked as a journalist with Indian Express.
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I would say the best political newspaper in India in English.
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And then I've also been an academic.
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So I luckily for me, like this three careers that I've had has given me, you know, bullshit
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detector about what is what any of those sort of professions can add value.
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And what is just the added the added ingredients to the profession that has nothing to do with
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So for example, lawyers are trained to write petitions in a certain kind of way.
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Now, it's not very well written.
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If you look at, you know, Supreme Court judgments, they're not well written.
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But one of the reasons they're written using a lot of jargon is to prevent non lawyers
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Otherwise, the lawyers, why would you go to a lawyer?
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You can write your own petition, right?
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You have like entire disciplines like to focus on jargon, because if they, you know, if they
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were very clear about what they were trying to say, people will say, why are we paying
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You know, why are we paying the salary?
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So it's given me, I think, luckily for me, I and so I don't have to, you know, put myself
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I mean, and I'm very proud of that.
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I think you're like that.
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You know, somebody says, are you a blog blogger?
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Are you an advertising?
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You know, I don't think you think of yourself that way.
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And that's quite liberating.
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Yeah, in retrospect, at least in my case, it seems like a feature and not a bug.
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But at the time, who knows?
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I do intend to, you know, explore more of your personal journey and obviously will get
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deep into the book as well.
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But before that, you know, there's a question I'd save for, you know, in part of in my list
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of closing questions, which are more broad, but it kind of comes up.
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So I'll mention it again.
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And this actually goes contrary to the last point that I raised.
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And it's a question about whether there is something specific in the drift of political
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movements that is inevitable.
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And the question sort of struck me first when I was reading about what happened right after
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Gandhiji's assassination, where, you know, obviously, Gotse had once been part of the
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RSS, but not for a long time.
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And, you know, it's very clear the RSS had no role to play.
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And secondly, while the RSS was banned, the Hindu Mahasabha wasn't banned, partly because
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of course, Shyamaprasad Mukherjee was in the cabinet, but also because the past that we
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realized that even though these people were in the Hindu Mahasabha, they were a sort of
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an extremist faction of it.
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And therefore, you know, there's no need to blame the whole party or the movement for
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Now, you know, when I look at modern times, what also appears to me to be the case is
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that within the BJP also, you have sort of this move towards the extremes in the sense
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that you get from Shyamaprasad to Vajpayee to Advani to Modi to Shah to perhaps Adityanath
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And this seems to be a drift that, you know, when you think about it is perfectly rational
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because you can't whip up your foot soldiers with moderation, you whip them up with by
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getting more and more extreme, even within a party, that's perhaps how you compete.
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Even within social media, when you look at how ideological echo chambers are formed,
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and what you need to raise your to signal your virtue in those echo chambers that you
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belong to, it seems that a drift towards extremism is inevitable.
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So in any ideological party or group, do you think the drift towards extremism is inevitable
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or am I just or is it just the availability heuristic that these examples are coming to
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my mind because I've just read your book?
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No, no, you're definitely onto something, right, which is that that has been the general
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trajectory you see of the BJP.
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So I think that's like a fact, right?
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So let's just see why that is the case.
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One is I don't think it's a it's a constant move towards extremism, because even in this
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100 year history, you've had a lot of ups and downs, right?
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So to give you an example, between 1986 and 1995 or 1994, the BJP was in a more quote
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unquote, extremist or radical mode.
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But after that, between 95 96, all the way to I would say even 2014, it wasn't a much
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more moderate mode, right?
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So you do have a little bit of a yin and yang, right?
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And I argue that a lot of that has to do with electoral politics in the sense that you're
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trying to understand what the mood is of the voter.
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So you have these ups and downs.
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So that said, I think that this general trajectory of talking about about the BJP or Jansang
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BJP has a lot to do, Amit, with, you know, and I make this point immediately in the book
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that the especially after the murder of the Mahatma, Hindu nationalism is on back foot,
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you know, it is untouchable, you know, nobody wants to, you know, have anything to do with
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And so I think that is the period that socializes Vajpayee and Advani, you know, that between,
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you know, after the murder of the Mahatma, Hindu nationalism has to always kind of, you
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know, whatever its private feelings, right, it has to kind of merge with the larger parliamentary
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And I think today you have a very different majority that Narendra Modi enjoys, like at
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the height of his power, Vajpayee only had 170 to 180 seats, right, something like that.
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This is in the, you know, the 98 and 99 elections, Narendra Modi has a clear majority, he doesn't
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need the Shiv Sena, he doesn't need the Tata, he doesn't need a single ally, right.
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And a lot of it has to do with that background and really to understand Advani and Vajpayee,
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you have to understand that the circumstances that they were doing politics in broadly required
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a Hindu nationalism that had to appear moderate, right.
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There were, of course, exceptions like the Rath Yatra, et cetera, et cetera.
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I think those times have changed now.
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So I won't, you know, and who knows, you know, in the future, if you have certain demographics
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changes where the Hindu voter is much less radical, you may have a much less radical
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Hindu politics, because you've seen that before, Amit, like, you know, I argue in the book
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that the 1920s were a period where you had Hindu and Muslim anxiety and sort of the core
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argument of the book is that it's driven by the introduction of elections, right.
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But what you have is a moderate Hindu leader, namely Mohandas Gandhi, who is a Hindu leader,
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I, you know, I can't stress that enough when he passes away in 1948 when he's murdered.
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Muhammad Ali Jinnah now in Pakistan famously says a great leader of the Hindu community
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I mean, Gandhi's language, his dress was a, you know, all of that was Hindu, except he
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That was, and he was able to moderate those fears.
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But in 1980s, you know, when you had Hindu anxiety, once again, in the air, you didn't
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have a moderate Hindu leader.
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So therefore you have, you ended up with much more radicalization.
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And that just goes back to the first thing we were discussing, Amit, that, you know,
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to understand politics, you have to, it's a complex game, you have to understand this
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interaction between, you know, so the nature of the voter matters, but leaders can often
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sort of tampen that down or exaggerate it.
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And there's no simple answer to that question and you have to look at focus at particular
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events to see what is going on there.
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So just kind of thinking aloud and carrying on from there, you know, while you point out
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that there was an ebb and flow from say the 80s onwards until now, it is also the case
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that that ebb and flow might have been in the politics itself.
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That is in the supply side of the political marketplace, but in the demand side of the
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marketplace, it just continued down the road of extremism in the sense that the reason
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Vajpayee was replaced was because he didn't get that.
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He was moving towards this moderate path of Gandhian socialism, as he called it.
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And then, you know, after 84, he had to be replaced because they did so badly.
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And you know, then Advani was forced to take the party in the sort of other direction.
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And I'm also struck by this interesting Amit Shah quote from your book where Amit Shah
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in 2019 is asked about the difference between the pair of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani
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and himself and Narendra Modi.
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And you quote him as saying quote, they never believed that fully waving the Hindutva flag
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This is a difference between us and them.
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So in a sense, you know, even the move towards Hindutva that, you know, Advani and Vajpayee
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seem to go towards seems kind of reactive to what they feel will win them votes and
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a correction of their previous mistake at not recognizing that.
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Whereas, you know, Shah's drift seems to be that he and Modi are more of true believers
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So I think that's right.
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But that still goes to the demand, at least in part, Amit, the demand side part of the
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The creation of a unified Hindu vote bank today, right, which is that is really the
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big story of 21st century India, where the BJP is not an upper caste party, because an
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upper caste party could get 20% of the votes.
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And many of my left liberal friends go on and on about how and I'm saying, look, if
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it's a thing, they don't know if it's an upper caste party, that you're not going to be in
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a single election in India.
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You can't, you know, and if you wear a mask for 100 years, you end up with an OBC prime
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minister and a Dalit president, and that consolidation that the BJP is having, for example, in the
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2019 elections, Modi won more Dalit, OBC and tribal than anyone else, right, than anyone
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else with a plurality than anyone else.
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This is the big story to me of the 20, you know, of the late 20th and early 20th century,
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because that changes the nature, radically changes the nature of politics, including
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the supply side, you know, lot of the supply of politics in India is premised on the fact
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that no group in no voting group in India is more than 15, 16%, you know, and a lot
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of the politics is based on that presumption and the kind of internal party coalitions
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you can get or external coalitions.
#
Now, given that, you know, that social reality is changing in India, you're going to get
#
a very different form of politics.
#
Part of the reason that social reality has changed is a hundred year project of the RSS,
#
because as I point out, you know, from the 1920s itself, Savarkar understands that the
#
social unification of Hindus has an immediate electoral benefit.
#
So in other words, political individualism, right, can be used if you have a social majority.
#
So part of it is the work of the RSS, et cetera, et cetera, but part of it are ground up courses
#
like urbanization, right, where you have, you know, Hindus of various castes moving
#
from the village to the city and their caste identity gets diluted just a little bit, but
#
their religious identity gets heightened.
#
You know, you're seeing that.
#
And that is not that is likely to be a modernization story, which is a bottom up story rather than
#
And so while I hear you, right, that leaders matter, I mean, I mean, I mean, this is my
#
second kind of biography.
#
But in this book, I'm much more alive to the fact that, you know, the story of Hindu nationalism
#
is a story of Indians and of Indians changing as much as it is a supply side story.
#
So I'm fascinated by something you just said, which is, of course, I mean, one is a tourism
#
that caste identities do get diluted a little bit when you come to cities because larger
#
economic networks, the greater costs of discrimination and all of that.
#
But you also said that religious identities get heightened.
#
Is that sort of because of the ghettoization that can sometimes happen within cities or,
#
you know, can you explain that for me?
#
You know, I mean, one of the things I take very seriously as a researcher is that if
#
you haven't researched something, don't give young, you know.
#
And this is something that I have as a kind of background music in the book.
#
And it's based on secondary sources.
#
It's not primary work that I did.
#
Like I did like about 200 interviews.
#
You know, I did a lot of archival work, both, you know, the party archives as well.
#
But this is something that I frankly, I don't think there's very good material to understand
#
Still, it's a reality that is unfolding in our eyes.
#
So I have some access to secondary literature, but I, you know, I would rather like, you
#
know, tell the listener something that I know confidently rather than speculate.
#
So, but, but so I can sense it.
#
And I think we, you know, academics typically take about 10, 15 years after you send something
#
to come up with the answer.
#
But I think it's the, it's the big question in India today, you know, which is the social
#
basis for the dominance of the BJP and too many people who tend to portray Modi as just
#
a fascist, you know, as just like, you know, an event manager, they miss that this is the
#
raw power of Hindu nationalism.
#
And I think, you know, maybe this is the next project that I focus on, which is to look
#
at the social basis of Hindu political unity as it were.
#
But at least for me, I mean, it's a bit early for me to sort of speak confidently.
#
I'll take this opportunity to book a session with you in advance for 2035.
#
So when you have figured this out, kindly, kindly come on my show and let us all know.
#
Let's now, you know, after these little digressions, and we'll come back to this to discuss all
#
of this in much more detail.
#
I want to go back to your personal life because it strikes me that, you know, the work one
#
does is shaped by the training that one gets and the experiences one has.
#
And that in turn, then, you know, the work one does shapes one as a person.
#
So now you've done all these different things.
#
You're first trained in law, then you go into journalism, then you go into political science
#
and all of this, then you write these books.
#
What's been the impetus behind all of this?
#
Like have there been these big problems driving you or have you just moved on from interest
#
to interest at different points in time when you've fallen in love with something else
#
Like why did you become a journalist?
#
Why did you then stop being a journalist?
#
Give me a sense of that journey.
#
Oh, it's love and passion.
#
You know, it's not like logically done.
#
So for example, after this book and already like it's sales-wise doing very, very well,
#
even though it's been only a week, there'll be tremendous pressure on me to write on like
#
Sonia Gandhi or something like that.
#
And look, if I don't have passion about it, or if I don't see a light at the end of the
#
tunnel, I just, you know, because here's the thing, you know, when you, when a book comes
#
out, you know, I keep telling my students also, you get all this publicity, you know,
#
you get to come on podcast shows, but that's really like one month of fun for three years
#
of like really boring work.
#
So unless you're driven by passion, you know, for the subject itself, you can't sustain
#
You know, I mean, readers come to know, you know, they come to know very quickly whether
#
you're trying to sell them a lemon, or you're actually passionate about a subject, you know.
#
And even if people disagree, if they realize that you're genuinely motivated, they can't
#
read us again, and readers can sense this very well, you know.
#
So I've always, I mean, at least the way I've seen myself is that if I like an idea, I try
#
For example, you know, given my academic career, you know, the logical pressure should be,
#
I should, you know, publish in obscure journals, you know, I should that kind of thing.
#
But if it doesn't give me happiness, I find I'm not very good at it.
#
So I might as well do something I'm passionate about because, A, I can sustain myself and
#
I think, you know, I went into National Law School, Bangalore, because, you know, frankly,
#
after my 12th standard, I didn't, you know, the first question from middle class background
#
was, do you want to be an engineer?
#
Do you want to be a doctor?
#
And, you know, if you don't want to be any of this, you know, how about a chartered accountant,
#
How about a little bit of added flavor to your life?
#
And I didn't want to be any of this.
#
And then my dad was totally chilled out on these matters.
#
He got the National Law School, Bangalore entrance test, and it had a lot of GK, you
#
And I always like quizzing and stuff like that.
#
I said, look, if the entrance test is any judge, this is what I want to do, you know.
#
But I always thought of it, I mean, as a good undergraduate degree and a kind of a refuge
#
from, you know, being forced to become an engineer in some sense.
#
And the benefit of National Law School, Bangalore, is that by the time I joined it, thanks to
#
liberalization, et cetera, there were these fancy corporate law jobs, which at that time
#
were giving something like a lack of month at that time, right, or maybe a little less.
#
And so that gave me confidence that, look, even if I fool around this, that I don't want
#
to do, you know, maybe I won't get a great corporate law job.
#
Maybe I won't be unhappy, but it gives a sense of security, right?
#
And these kinds of security is very important when you want to pick, especially in India.
#
So I finished law and I've done quite a few internships when I was in National Law School,
#
And I mean, I've gone to court and I've done a corporate law internship, I've done a litigation
#
Then none of it really excited me, you know, and I think I must really thank my parents
#
that, you know, that, you know, when relatives or friends would ask, what do you want to
#
And I didn't have an answer.
#
It did not make my parents anxious, you know, they just let me kind of breathe.
#
But the one thing that law taught me, Amit, was the focus on getting facts and sequence
#
For example, you just pointed out, you know, the way I asked the question, who killed Mahatma
#
Now, my legal training has hugely helped that, which is to look at the judgements, right?
#
To make an assessment of the difference between Hindu Mahasabha and RSS, right?
#
And Savarkar, because that's a separate question, right?
#
And look at the various, you know, forum in which Savarkar was judged, right?
#
Including in 1966, after his death, et cetera, et cetera.
#
That is definitely my legal training, you know, and I'm proud that both this book and
#
the Nasimara book is broadly bulletproof in that you can't, you know, I'm sure you have
#
disagreements, Amit, about the book, but there aren't facts there that you will, you know,
#
easy bloopers, easy facts, all of that is the obsession with legal training.
#
And to give you an example, Amit, lots of people read graphs of this book, including
#
four or five of my close law friends.
#
And these are friends who charge like 60,000 rupees for an hour of reading, you know, that's
#
basically, so their eye is very, very good for detail.
#
And I would say I'm a bad version of that, which is that I don't, I don't know, I like,
#
my value is not 60,000 rupees for an hour of reading, but certainly an eye for the detail
#
of the text, getting the facts right, crossing the T's, dotting the I's and look, you know,
#
as controversial topic like this, Amit, it's very important because ultimately it's what
#
builds credibility with the reader, which is to me, everything about writing a book
#
that, and I think my legal training is very, because I ran away from the law and et cetera,
#
But if I have to give my due to it, it's an obsession with facts, obsession with getting
#
it right, you know, an obsession with exercising judgment on facts that are not a hundred percent
#
because lawyers sometimes have to reconstruct a little bit based on a preponderance of evidence,
#
all of this, that sensibility is very much a lawyer's sensibility.
#
That said, I hope Amit, you know, you can tell your listeners that I don't write like
#
I hope you can say that that comes from my journalism.
#
I spent a couple of years working for Indian express and I was editing a lot of people's
#
So that part of the book, which is that, you know, you open the book and then I want you
#
to kind of not put the book down.
#
But all of that comes from, from journalism for sure.
#
No, in fact, I mean, I will in fact tell my listeners that this is a wonderfully readable
#
book and indeed, you know, unput downable for me.
#
I did read it in sort of two stretches.
#
My other question is that this book is also very interesting because it's simultaneously
#
a work of history and journalism in the sense that it's covering a political movement that's
#
been a hundred years in the making, but at the same time that political movement is at
#
its peak now and some of his protagonists are at their peak now.
#
So of course it's a, you know, it's a book about the BJP before Modi, but yet he does
#
play a significant part sort of towards the end of it.
#
Now, you know, in terms of you've already spoken about how your legal training helped
#
you in the work that you did and in the rigor that that gave you.
#
Now give me a sense of how you went about doing this book and how journalistic rigor
#
and academic rigor came together.
#
So what is, you know, in your process of writing the book, how different was it from how a
#
pure journalist would approach it or a pure academic would approach it?
#
The one could argue that in these days, neither of them can be pure, but you get what I'm
#
So let me first begin by saying that I think journalism really taught me two things, which
#
has helped me in this book and the previous one.
#
The first thing, Amit is that it taught me to, it really taught me that the story is
#
more important than you are, right?
#
Or that story is more important than I am.
#
And this is something that academics don't get, that the reality is not created in their
#
mind, in their university, in their ivory tower.
#
There is a reality out there and, you know, we have a variety of tools to try to understand
#
that reality makes sense of that.
#
We have to be very humble, very, very humble about that.
#
And so I told myself that, look, if I'm writing a book on a BJP, my view on the BJP is irrelevant,
#
And frankly, it's irrelevant to the reader.
#
That's not why the reader is paying this money and reading the book.
#
And I think that the phenomena is bigger than I am.
#
So to give you a very simple manifestation of that, you know, the only person who has
#
a bigger ego than a source is the secretary of the source.
#
And, you know, the B is a little bit of power, but we'll kind of make you know, if you're
#
the kind of person who bristles at that, you know, who doesn't like the fact that some
#
junior functionary is making you wait for like two and a half hours, you know, in a,
#
in a smelly anky room, then you shouldn't be in this business.
#
And I learned that from journalism a lot, you know.
#
I also learned, Amit, because when I worked for Indian Express, Shekhar Gupta was the
#
And I'm sure many of your listeners see Cut the Clutter, which is his iconic show right
#
But he used to do that with us, we were all junior journalists there and used to kind
#
of just walk into the newsroom and tell us story after story after story, you know, that
#
really taught me that, look, there is a way in which you can tell deeper truths about
#
Indian politics through an anecdotal story style.
#
And he really taught me the importance of having a worm's eye view, you know, that he
#
was in the room when Charan Singh was doing X, that kind of thing.
#
And of course, it doesn't tell you much, but it also tells you a lot of things that in
#
contrast to academia, it's very refreshing, it gives a freshness to it.
#
And it gives a sense that, you know, something that you asked Amit right in the beginning
#
that the moment matters, that in any given moment, you know, what will happen next is
#
A story is really that, right, that A happened, then B happened, then C happened, and A and
#
B and C need not follow chronologically, if they did, then it's not a story, you know.
#
So I think both that, I think expressed and journalism taught me to respect that the story
#
is bigger than you and your prejudices and the reader frankly doesn't care about me,
#
So that's why in the main body of the book, I don't use the word I at all.
#
And I know that, that lots of people are taught to do this nowadays, and I realized that then
#
you're just writing for five of your friends, you know, then just send a private email.
#
What are you writing a book for?
#
So I think it's, and looking back, I just, when I teach, I keep pushing this on my students
#
that look, it's a hard thing to tell people, right?
#
Your story is relevant.
#
And the second thing is, I think Shekhar Rukta taught me that to see politics like a worm,
#
you know, from the ground level, and that mattered hugely to me, right?
#
That said, I think journalists tend to be very bad readers of text.
#
So they're very good interviewers, but you know, when it comes to archives, when it comes
#
to looking at texts, when it comes to even reading newspapers, one of the things I do
#
in this book is from the late 19th century itself, I refer to a lot of newspapers.
#
Journalists don't typically do that very well, right?
#
And two is, I mean, I think journalists have a phobia from structural explanations.
#
For them, everything is, you know, it goes the other extreme.
#
Everything is about like, the person, you know, like, it's all about Vajpayee, or it's
#
all about Advani, right?
#
Or it's all about the particular head of the RSS at that time, rather than these boundary
#
ways, structural forces that also matter.
#
So I think academia has definitely taught me that.
#
And I studied at Princeton University, which is, I would say, one of the most boring places
#
And looking back, you know, it's not a party town, at least for graduate students, it's
#
It's like, not very close to a big city also.
#
Maybe New York is about an hour and a half away, two hours away.
#
But what Princeton really taught me is that you got to take like academia, not as a social
#
event, but like as a professional thing.
#
I think some people I know come into academia because, you know, they can wear like nice
#
kurta and they can wear it, you know, it's a, it's an act of being, right?
#
Why would you want to kind of wear a tie and sell soap somewhere?
#
And Princeton just drove that out of me, that it's a brutal place, like you have like, academia
#
is about producing, it's about writing books, it's about writing articles, it's about going
#
to the archives, it's about creating data in a thoroughly unromantic way, you know.
#
So it totally took out the romance from, from academia.
#
And I would say that on balance, it's a very good thing, you know, because this kind of
#
I mean, and if you don't have the appetite for that, then you end up making mistakes.
#
No, no, I love your book, not only for its fluid prose, but also for what you just said
#
that I couldn't make out where you stood on any of the issues and I didn't really care
#
because the story was sort of riveting enough to keep me going.
#
Now, before we actually get to the book, one sort of final question, which sort of intrigues
#
me because knowledge management is also something that I think about a fair bit, which is that,
#
you know, do you have specific systems of knowledge management because you're doing
#
a lot of archival work, you know, you're digging up a lot of old sources as academics would
#
at the same time, you're interviewing many people and you know, so how do you organize
#
When does narrative sort of start to take shape?
#
How do you avoid the danger, which you clearly have of having a preset narrative in your
#
head and then just finding the stuff that fits that all these, you know, these are questions
#
that I obsess about endlessly because the process creates the product coming, you know,
#
there are very few mistakes in this book because I created a process, what you call knowledge
#
management and there's no shortcut to that.
#
There's just no, it's not that it, you know, this, I think I said that, you know, when
#
she began writing God of small things, you kind of began and then she ended.
#
I don't think that works for most people.
#
I go over, I see mistakes.
#
So you create a process for me looking back, I mean, then, you know, when it happened,
#
it happened intuitively.
#
I would divide my knowledge management process into three phases.
#
The first phase is that I had this idea, right.
#
And I began reading a lot around it, keeping an open mind, but reading what others have
#
So for example, after the Nasima Rao book, you know, I said, maybe I should think about
#
And then I said, look, if you work on Vajpayee, I very quickly realized that Vajpayee and
#
Advani were two sides of the same coin.
#
So I was open enough that, okay, I was initially interested in Vajpayee and initially I got
#
this idea that Vajpayee was this grand figure, right, which look, he is, but I just, you
#
know, the book, as you, as you've read, is also critical of him, you know, it's not,
#
it's why he is this grand figure, he's a man who's highly complex, he has a lot of contradictions
#
So I'm glad I did that, which is I very quickly realized that it's actually a jugalbandi story
#
of Vajpayee and Advani.
#
And then I realized, I meant that unlike in the case of Nasima Rao, who I think was single
#
handedly responsible for liberalization, Vajpayee and Advani's relationship was, cannot be understood
#
without the context, which is the movement, which is Hindu nationalism and the rise of
#
Vajpayee and Advani mirrors the rise of Hindu nationalism.
#
So that's a, so that then that's what became the structure of the book.
#
But that was in my first phase of research where I'm kind of thinking about the idea
#
and I'm reading and constantly modifying what this original idea should be.
#
So while teaching, for example, I mean, I taught three courses at Ashoka University
#
that had to do with parts of this, of Hindu nationalism, so that at least I could read
#
what other people had written about it, right?
#
That took, I would say about a year or about seven, eight months where I'm just talking,
#
you know, I'm meeting for lunch, you know, many of the people who have come on your podcast,
#
like Pratap Banu Mehta, for example, and I'm just shooting the breeze, you know, I'm
#
like thinking about it.
#
And you know, when you're thinking about academic questions, you're both asking, is it a serious
#
And is it a doable question?
#
The doable is really important.
#
I mean, I have like the best research question, but I may not have sources, nobody will be
#
willing to open up, archive may be not there, in which case you should abandon the question,
#
So I spent about a year and at the end of that, I mean, I did something that I learned
#
for the Nasim Mara book, I wrote a draft table of contents for the book.
#
I said, look, it will be 300 pages, each chapter will be 30 pages and I wrote it.
#
Now this sounds absurd, right?
#
But what it did is immediately from this abstract idea, the book became like a physical thing,
#
And I said, look, ultimately, I have a physical thing, ultimately, it has to be 30 pages,
#
And I remember, you know, somebody telling me this when I was doing my PhD that, you
#
know, that the biggest advice he gave was thinking chapters, which is a nice advice
#
because otherwise you have the romance of an idea without how do you actually execute
#
Now, the key here, I mean, this is something that you pointed out, which is that you shouldn't
#
be too wedded to your initial ideas.
#
So while I wrote this table of contents, which is like a rough structure of what the book
#
is going to look like, I was very comfortable that the moment I found more evidence, I should
#
change chapters, remove them, et cetera, et cetera, right now, having done that, I mean,
#
what I did was that I went to the second phase, which is, I would call research, which is
#
I started both reading secondary material, which is books and articles written by others
#
and fitting them into these chapters.
#
So I used to have separate word documents for each chapter.
#
And then I have word documents for sections within each chapter.
#
Now, why this is helpful, I mean, there's two ways.
#
One is that when you're going to the archive, you're looking for something, right?
#
Otherwise, you know, you see, you know, you see, like, you know, 6,000 pages, you don't
#
know which needle to look in the haystack, right?
#
So you go in with a hypothesis.
#
And second is that when I'm reading something, I'm immediately being productive and say,
#
okay, you know, this chapter may be, yeah, this is going to come in this page, so it's
#
quite, you know, so it saves a lot of time.
#
Otherwise, I realized, I mean, from the time I was doing my PhD, that because research
#
tends to be open-ended, you could spend 50% of your time researching on something that
#
is only 10% of the book.
#
And some of that, quote unquote, wastage is inevitable.
#
You have to go down some blind alleys when you're doing research, but you should avoid
#
going down too many blind alleys, right?
#
That said, the biggest problem of this approach is that you may end up with a predetermined
#
So, you know, to use the popular phrase when it comes to writing, you should be happy to
#
The moment you realize, you know, you may have this great idea, you may have spent a
#
month kind of telling yourself, yeah, okay, this is how the VJP works.
#
But if an evidence points otherwise, you have to say, I'm sorry, I was wrong, you know,
#
and if you don't do that, then the leader is able to smell very quickly is, is your
#
opinions and conclusions driven from the evidence to provide, or are you trying to sell me something?
#
And in this age, I'm at the post-fact world, everybody is using facts to actually sell
#
And I think leaders are totally ignored from it, they're really irritated with it.
#
So I was very, very sensitive that the moment the evidence or somebody told me something,
#
some archives, some newspaper gave me a slightly different view, I should present it like to
#
I came in with the standard view that, you know, watch by the moderate Adwani, the heartline,
#
and I very quickly realized that Adwani's background is exceedingly complex.
#
He's like most of the listeners of this podcast, the Makali Putra, somebody who speaks English
#
He grew up to enormous wealth in Karachi, his family had a game room, huge house.
#
They had a Victoria house driven carriage.
#
He was playing tennis when someone told him about the RSS, who joined the RSS after a
#
And he wouldn't have joined RSS had it not been for the looming catastrophe of partition,
#
which splits his hometown and makes his rich family enter near poverty.
#
So immediately when I realized that, I realized that I had to change this original idea of
#
a classic jugalbandi between a moderate and a heartline, because it was much more complex.
#
So that's again, I think something where journalism has helped me saying that you can't be wedded
#
If you, you know, this is the famous John Maynard, King's land, right?
#
But when the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do, sir?
#
So that's the second stage, which is research, right?
#
And then what I have learned to do is to start writing quicker rather than later, because
#
there is this sense I realized that perfection is the enemy of production and a lot of academics
#
and researchers are saying that, look, I have to now read four more books before I start
#
Or I have to look at interview team of people before I start writing that will never happen.
#
You spend your whole life, you know, trying to this, this mythic sense of completion.
#
So what I learned was that, and I, and my brother who's a, he's an NBA, he works for
#
He's a big influence on my life and he's extremely focused on delivery and he's saying, look,
#
write the chapter he told me and whatever you haven't done research, leave it blank
#
so that when you go for your second round of research, you're only looking to fill in
#
And I found that a very, very helpful technique because right with the material you have,
#
let's say it's about 70% of the material that you should have, but you know, to use
#
a consultancy speak ring fence, the problem.
#
So right there, the paragraphs, which are hollow and then do a second round of research,
#
because once you have written, you can see, really see the holes in the chapter.
#
And when you do that, it may change even more.
#
So I would broadly say that, you know, when you said knowledge management, these are the
#
three different phases.
#
And at least so far it's, it's helped me in good stead, but you know, in some cases I
#
So hopefully the next book will be a refinement of this process.
#
So that's a fantastic quote about perfection being the enemy of production.
#
You know, I teach a writing course where I constantly sort of tell my students that,
#
you know, for anything you do in life, there are these two imperatives, getting it done
#
And your first priority has to be to get it done.
#
And once you get it done, then you edit, edit, edit, then you chisel it down and get it right.
#
And very often just getting it done, the process of iteration and reiteration will get it right,
#
but that's the only way to do it.
#
So that, uh, stacks a chord with me.
#
My last sort of question about your working methods before we get to the book itself is
#
what is the process like of then getting people to talk to you about this period, uh, of time
#
and some of whom I presume are people who would even in the current day be fairly important.
#
You know, how do you get access?
#
How do you get their trust?
#
And then is there a sort of this psychological pressure that these people who have trusted
#
you and been so nice to you, you have to make them look good also.
#
And you know, how does that whole, uh, process, uh, sort of, uh, work?
#
Yeah, there's no psychological process for me to make them look good because their narrative
#
will already make them look good.
#
You know, everyone in their story, I mean, is the hero or heroine of their own story.
#
Those, some people do it, obviously some people aren't even aware that they're doing it, you
#
So this is like, you have to deal with this and you are, and it's hard, but you know,
#
this is the, this is, it's a, it's a, it's a hard question because there's no simple
#
If it was simple answer that, you know, anybody could see this podcast and become the world's
#
And I'm not a good journalist, but my two years in journalism made me look at the best
#
and look at how they try to answer this, this question, right?
#
Like, how do you cultivate a source?
#
How do you make people trust you because in India, especially there's no shortage of people
#
Everybody wants to give yarn.
#
The issue is, do they trust you?
#
And luckily for me, my first book, uh, I had again interviewed a ton of people and I was
#
very careful about it in that I sent out emails to everybody after, you know, just before
#
the book was coming saying, look, this is the paragraph you have been quoted.
#
So not only do they tell us that permission for their courts, I gave them the two sentences
#
about the two sentences below.
#
And I think that, you know, this is the, you know, from whether it's Prime Minister Manmohan
#
Singh or it's like the doctor of Narasimha Rao, I use the same rule.
#
And I realized that that means credibility that people realize that, look, speak, I don't
#
So I write down, so I have nothing to hold on.
#
So later on, if they deny, I'm screwed.
#
That helps build trust.
#
And so when really their consent happens, when I send them an email later and they say,
#
yes, quote ABC and don't quote XYZ.
#
And this happens all the time.
#
I mean, and also people speak very freely, but seven, eight months later, when I'm actually
#
sending them the codes, the thing, their life circumstances have changed.
#
Suddenly they develop cold feet.
#
And I think one of the things I regret in the book is the number of names I could tell
#
you would add even more credibility to the book.
#
You know, like I would blow your mind up, but I just, and you know, I'm just, I'm just
#
bursting to tell you that, you know, you know, there are already, there are maybe about less
#
little less than a hundred names that are quoted, but the hundred names that are not
#
quoted, maybe even more like, you know, juicy, but I just can't do it.
#
You know, if I do it, nobody will talk to me for my third book, nobody.
#
And the other thing I've noticed that happens is that if you don't know somebody, so definitely
#
my previous book added to the credibility that, look, I'm not looking for a gotcha moment.
#
I'm not looking to track you.
#
And then you come in the newspaper, that kind of thing.
#
But equally in India, somebody has to vouch for you.
#
So, you know, I meet an older person or something like that who may not have heard of my, the
#
previous book, somebody who they trust has to trust me.
#
That's the only way they do it.
#
I mean, yeah, maybe it's just an Indian trait, because that's in some sense, the heart of
#
my book that Indians lack teamwork and the BJP does it well, that everybody's suspicious
#
of somebody, you know, of somebody just coming and asking you questions.
#
I mean, look at how rudely Indians treat salesmen, Eureka for salesmen who ring your bell, right?
#
And come to try to sell you something on your door.
#
We don't like strangers.
#
So you have to have somebody to vouch for you.
#
And then the third thing I realized, I mean, is that you have to come from an interview
#
You know, you can't use the source of the interviewer for the basic material.
#
Then people begin to respect you.
#
They said, okay, he's come prepared.
#
You know, so I would say, you know, these were some of the skills I use, but I don't
#
there's no formula for this.
#
It's the same question of asking any relationship with your spouse, with your friends, with
#
How do you build trust?
#
And frankly, for me, 50% is building trust with the source and 50% is building trust
#
And it's actually the same thing, which is that, you know, everybody realizes that you
#
Everybody realizes that you come in with biases, but be honest about it, come well prepared
#
and don't try to take advantage of somebody's being nice or trusting you.
#
And then in India, that is such a deficit that even if you do a little of it, then,
#
you know, people then want to tell you everything about your life.
#
And I actually want to leave for lunch, you know, so, but there's no formula for that.
#
And definitely that comes from my journalism.
#
Also, the other thing that I sort of wanted to ask you was that that comes to mind is
#
that you've mentioned about how, you know, perfection is the enemy of production.
#
So obviously your first impulse is to get it done, you know, to get it out on paper.
#
What's your process like after you have a first draft done?
#
Like one thing you mentioned is you've got paragraphs and you've got holes in them or,
#
you know, within a chapter, you've got holes, you know that, okay, that's where I need to
#
go back and get the research done.
#
But once you have all the material and you've gotten that first draft, what's the process
#
Do you ever end up restructuring the book itself or the chapters themselves in significant
#
How much time do they take vis-a-vis one another?
#
You know, I mean, I spend a lot of time thinking about the editing process because, you know,
#
my wife teaches creative writing exactly what you do.
#
And she's drilled into me that, look, the first draft is actually quite liberating because
#
it's going to look nothing like the final draft.
#
So don't worry about putting something on paper because have the confidence that it's
#
only draft number 18 that is going to go.
#
And there's a huge difference between draft one and draft 18.
#
So that's actually quite liberating, right, because otherwise you're worried that if you
#
put something on paper, it has to be perfect, it doesn't.
#
And I've really learned a lot from that idea of hers and it's like, I, you know, I write
#
and look, when I think I may not, you know, you don't begin at the beginning, right?
#
The human mind is not, doesn't begin a story at the beginning, you typically begin the
#
And so I write it and then only later I, you know, find out what should be the first paragraph
#
that kind of draws the reader in.
#
I'm sure you've done exactly this when you went click info, Amit, that you have to edit
#
The material is there, but you want to kind of make the bread rise just a little bit.
#
And that's your job as an editor.
#
And I think in Express, I wasn't just a journalist, I was also like a copy editor where I was
#
editing other people's, you know, op-ed paid submissions.
#
So I shouldn't change the voice of that person, but how do I kind of have a better beginning,
#
George Orwell has been a huge influence on, of me, of this, he has a, I think politics
#
in the English language, an extraordinary essay where he tells you that, you know, what
#
to avoid, which is don't use a word if it's not required, right?
#
Make sure that every, you know, sentence follows from the previous one.
#
And another one of my writing gurus has been V.S.
#
And if you look at, forget his politics for just a second, but he's one of the great stylists
#
of the, of prose in the 20th century.
#
He used to write very short sentences and each sentence, you know, he made sure that
#
the, every sentence had a next sentence that followed from that, that, and if you remove
#
that sentence, the paragraph would fall.
#
That was the test, right?
#
That if you have a sentence there that maybe you can remove the sentence and it will still
#
sort of tell the reader the same thing, then you should remove it.
#
So, and that's what makes it kind of sparse.
#
And then it forces you to, you know, because what is the leader getting in return?
#
The leader is getting in return the confidence that every word the leader has been forced
#
to read has been worth it, you know, that the writer has spent a lot of energy, not,
#
you know, sending the reader down random rabbit holes that I'm not a very good writer in the
#
I'm not a natural writer.
#
So I'm a bit of a defensive writer.
#
So what I try to do is have use writing as a very light scaffolding so that I can tell
#
You know, I also know that about myself, that look, I'm not like the, you know, world's
#
That's another thing that George Orwell stressed on, you know, and as far as possible, if there's
#
any meat that I try to avoid starters and on three and that kind of stuff, I give you
#
the main course, right?
#
And in other words, the sentence must be saying something.
#
The other thing on editing, I've learned a lot from BS Naipaul is that every sentence
#
must be capable of a couple of meanings, right?
#
That's the power of a sentence.
#
You know, I'll give you one example, I mean, which is that you must have noticed that the
#
book begins with an organization, a story of like an event that is being organized,
#
which is the 1995 November BJP national executive in Bombay in Shivaji park, et cetera, et cetera,
#
And Malakshmi race course.
#
And I spent time on the logistics, you know, that there were, you know, 10,000 people to
#
These many people were coming by boat, you know, I do that through the book, right?
#
But what I'm trying to do is give you the flavor of a movement that is obsessed with
#
this stuff without ever seeing it.
#
Of course, I begin the story with Vajpayee Advani and Advani, I'm announcing Vajpayee
#
Prime Minister, but I deliberately spend a lot of time telling you, for example, you
#
know, I'm just opening the book here and, you know, to give you this particular detail,
#
which is that over 120,000 delegates attended.
#
This is the November 1995 event, BJP event in Bombay, some even by ship from the Andaman
#
and Nicobar Islands, right?
#
So this sentence has two meanings.
#
One is, of course, it's a fun fact.
#
But the deeper point I'm taking is that these guys win because they're obsessed with this
#
If I was writing a book on the Congress, I would not have this sentence.
#
Congress also does organization.
#
Congress also has events, right?
#
People do come from Andaman and Nicobar Island, but it's not central to the self, you know,
#
the self-knowledge and the self-impression that the Congress has of itself.
#
That, you know, like a lot of sentences, if you play it right, you're saying something,
#
but you're also telling them something deeper.
#
And that only comes through editing.
#
It only comes through, like, you know, going through multiple drafts.
#
The other thing I've learned, Amit, again, this is thanks to my wife, is that I try to
#
So, for example, I tried to avoid saying it was a watershed moment, because a watershed
#
actually is a certain visual where, you know, the river comes from the mountain and at some
#
point it hits a plane and at the watershed, the river can go in multiple directions.
#
So the technical use of watershed is an event, right, that can go in multiple directions,
#
Whereas we use watershed today to mean an important event.
#
That's not what it means.
#
So if, but because it has become an overused cliche, then we keep using it without thinking.
#
So the other thing I've learned is when I detect a cliche, I remove it, and I try to
#
look for a synonym or I like to look for another thing that communicates, and, you know, there's
#
all these thesauruses and dictionaries online, so life is quite easy.
#
But none of this is conceivable in the first draft.
#
This actually happens in the eight, nine, ten draft.
#
And my only hope is that the leader realizes that all this effort is to make her happy,
#
you know, and that to me, I'm very clear that, you know, I have one boss in this book and
#
No, I mean, everything that you said strikes such a chord that all my writing students
#
and listeners of this podcast will be wondering if I sat down in advance and trained you to
#
But then, you know, as you said, your wife is a writing teacher, for example, you know,
#
when I used to be an editor in Prakriti and elsewhere, whenever someone new would write
#
for me, I'd first make them read politics in the English language because it's just
#
Yeah, it's not fixed at all.
#
And Orwell's essays, in fact, are, you know, what I consistently cite as my Desert Island
#
And it's an interesting bit of trivia for you since you mentioned Active Boys.
#
In his essay, Politics in the English Language, Orwell warns against using passive voice twice.
#
And one of those times he does it in passive voice.
#
Yeah, it's just a moment of irony, which I and even what you know, what you said about
#
The interesting thing about and of course, cliches are bad because they don't invoke
#
a fresh image and the reader's eyes glaze over, but they can also be inaccurate.
#
Like you said, watershed moment.
#
And the cricketing example of that would be the ball sped to the boundary like a tracer
#
And if anyone's actually seen a tracer bullet, they don't go the way Ravi Shastri thinks
#
So that's exactly right.
#
That's exactly what that does.
#
Amit is what you mentioned that if you're trying to communicate something using a fresh
#
image, the reader's eye doesn't glaze over.
#
The reader pauses to see.
#
So the image has that double power, you know, so from a diluted image, you end up with a
#
very concentrated image because the reader hasn't heard that before.
#
So, you know, just what would you say just as an exercise that if the ball went very
#
fast to the boundary, what would be a fresh image that communicates exactly what the ball
#
What you know, because you're the cricket man.
#
Well, right now I can't think of something off and because I'd actually have to see it.
#
I don't want to comment on a hypothetical ball.
#
But the classic example I give is that sometimes an adjective in a particular context can be
#
For example, all cover drives will be described as elegant.
#
But the point is that you can say that Virat Kohli played an elegant cover drive or Rahul
#
Dravid did or Mark Ward did.
#
And the truth is it's accurate because all their cover drives are elegant, but it doesn't
#
convey the particulars.
#
They're very different from each other.
#
And that's a writer's job to get to the heart of the difference.
#
So I try as much as possible to avoid adjectives and adverbs, you know, describe it, you know,
#
don't say that he ran quickly, right, say that, you know, when he ran, the floor was
#
peaking or the floor made a lot of noise, something like that.
#
So I tried again, this is all defensive writing because, you know, if you're a great writer,
#
you don't need to be told all this, you have an intuitive rhythm.
#
So I and again, when I in my first graph, and I'm sure it's the same with you Amit,
#
So we use cliches, you know, when we speak, our first reaction is imprecise.
#
But in all the further edits, I move it further and further away from the original bad way
#
in which I tried to communicate it.
#
So in that sense, it's a, it is highly constructed, you know, that, that sense of, that sense
#
of sentences that I try at least to incorporate, by the way, thanks for this Amit, because
#
I obsessed hugely about the writing process, right?
#
And it's very, very important for me that a book like this is read, you know, far beyond
#
the confines of, of even the people who see this podcast, you know, who are a very small
#
intelligent subset of policymakers or people interested in policy.
#
So I wanted it to be even broader, right?
#
And at least so far, we're able to do it that, you know, right now on Amazon, I'm competing
#
with like word power made easy and Dale Carnegie, right?
#
And to do that, especially for a topic that is this difficult that you have to obsess
#
extra on the writing side.
#
No, that's especially important because you know, one thing again, my last compliment
#
of your book, because I don't want to embarrass you, but you know, Orwell once said good
#
prose is like a windowpane, which means you should not notice it.
#
It is just meant to show you what's on the other side.
#
And that's one of the qualities of your book.
#
The being a writer myself, I actually noticed quite a few superb sentences which you came
#
up with, but in a writerly sense, they don't draw attention to themselves.
#
But I noticed that maybe I'll get the chance to quote a couple of them as we go along.
#
And the other thing that you said is also resonant with me because one of the things
#
that I sort of emphasize when I talk about writing is that especially in India, the way
#
we speak English, we've internalized a lot of bad habits.
#
And the first task is to become mindful of them and eliminate them.
#
So in fact, one of the exercises I give my writing students is to write a specific piece.
#
Whatever the theme is, but without using adjectives or adverbs, which they complain about a lot.
#
This is why Iriyamit, I think we are on like a little literally like 100% in the same mind
#
Verbs are your best friend.
#
On that note, we will take to, you know, give you an active voice sentence.
#
We will take a commercial break now.
#
As many of you know, I'll soon be coming out with a four volume anthology of the scene
#
and the unseen books organized around the themes of politics, history, economics and
#
These days, I'm wading through over three million words of conversation from all my
#
episodes so far to curate the best bits.
#
And for this to happen, I needed transcripts.
#
And that was made possible by a remarkable young startup called Tap Chief.
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Maybe they could solve your problem too.
#
Welcome back to the Seen and the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Vinay Sitapati about his wonderful book, Jugalbandi, about the BJP
#
before Narendra Modi and honestly, tons of insight even on the current BJP, all of which
#
comes from the context that we get.
#
So I kind of want to go to the context that you sort of set in the start of the book about
#
Hindu nationalism and the Hindu movement itself, where you point out that what any nationalism
#
has to contend with is thinking of people, territory, state, and you speak about how
#
there were notions of Hindu territory from the Vishnu Purana onwards.
#
But you know, as far as the Hindu people were concerned, there's no canonical book or institution.
#
You just have a bunch of, you know, a plethora of cultural practices, as you put it.
#
And you know, of course, there are arguments about historians, whether there was an actual
#
Hindu consciousness till our colonial overlords came and sort of spread that narrative.
#
Now, you know, and the closest thing that came to a Hindu state was, of course, Shivaji's
#
Now, I want to sort of go to 1906 and 1909.
#
And one of the very interesting things that you point out, and again, it's an event in
#
history that has massive consequences and has literally shaped our country even today,
#
which is the British conception of the sort of elections that they would have in India.
#
And therefore, the demographic anxiety that they lead to among Hindus here, can you elaborate
#
So, Amit, you've asked two questions, right?
#
One is the debate on who is a Hindu, what is Hinduism, right?
#
And why this is a very tough question to answer.
#
The second question you asked is, what does elections do to that, right?
#
How does elections put unique pressure on trying to answer this question?
#
To come to the first one, Hinduism has, you know, 3,000 castes, you know, as many sub-castes,
#
so many different languages and dialects, right?
#
So it has a lot of internal diversity, both theologically as well as in practice.
#
To add to that, it doesn't have a Quran, it doesn't have an authoritative textbook.
#
And this cannot be emphasized.
#
Some people say it's the Vedas, but the Lingayat community of Karnataka is an anti-Vedic movement,
#
And it also doesn't have an authoritative institution, unlike the Vatican.
#
So therefore, a clear answer, an authoritative answer to the question, what is Hinduism or
#
who is a Hindu, is not available.
#
Nonetheless, I push back against, let's say, Marxist scholars, like, you know, who argue
#
that therefore there was no such Hinduism until the late, until British rule.
#
You know, so they say that there is Christianity, there is Islam, but there is no such, that's
#
And it's not true because A, the core part of Hinduism has been, as you mentioned, sacred
#
geography, the idea of a Thebes Thang, which is the snowy mountains on the top and the
#
oceans below, you know, and the Indus on one side, and that is therefore, it is recorded
#
But even earlier, when you had Greek and Roman visitors to India, they very clearly had a
#
sense that on this side of the Indus lies a very particular civilization.
#
So one of the things is that while Indians don't have a group consciousness that we are
#
Hindu or we are Indian, any outsider was able to say that this is a distinctive civilization.
#
And even the word India comes from the word Indus in that sense.
#
So I push back against the idea that there is no such Hinduism.
#
But nonetheless, because of these factors of Hinduism, the lack of an authoritative
#
institution and the lack of a text, what is Hinduism or to put it differently, Hindu group
#
consciousness has been harder to identify, right, that you are a Hindu, I am a Hindu,
#
and therefore I should give you a job, right, because that means answering the question,
#
what is Hinduism, to which there are multiple answers, even though, you know, there is unity
#
in diversity, to articulate it by Hindus themselves have been very hard.
#
The first articulation of that happens by some scholars argue that it's the Vishnu Puranas,
#
right, around the fourth century AD, where you have a recognized architecture of Hinduism
#
with the sects of Vishnu, Shiva, and Devi, the sacred feminine, you know, Jai Mata Adi,
#
Others say it's really the advent of Muslim group, which, you know, created a Hindu consciousness.
#
And a third group, the more Marxist group says it's British group, right.
#
But whichever side you buy, I am much more inclined, by the way, to buy the idea that,
#
you know, at least from the Vishnu Puranas, you have an architecture that resembles today's
#
Whichever argument you buy, it's pretty clear that by the late 19th century, to have the
#
quest for a Hindu identity, thinkers like Vivekananda, Bude Mukhopadhyaya, reform movements
#
like the Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, are obsessed with the question, what is Hinduism, right.
#
And I buy the argument that that is in some sense a response to British rule in India.
#
But what this idea of who is a Hindu, what is a Hindu doesn't have, is an idea of a state.
#
So if you look at, you know, Bankeen Chandra's, you know, famous book, which had Vande Matram
#
in it, he doesn't think of an alternative to British rule.
#
He is very happy with British rule at the end of it, right.
#
So there's no articulation of what a Hindu state looks like.
#
That begins to happen, as I argue, and that leads to the second question that you ask,
#
only when the British introduce elections, because the moment the British introduce elections
#
in India, it's very limited, very halting, begins in the late 19th century.
#
But really, you know, with the Minto Maldi reforms of 1909, and the Montaigne-Chen's
#
reform of 1990, it's clear to all Indians that look, one day we will have universal
#
adult franchise, and one day the British will be.
#
So it's a slippery slope to parliamentary democracy.
#
This creates amid, and this is a core argument, and is the core original argument of this
#
book, panic among Indians, absolute panic, right.
#
The Muslim League is created out of the sense of panic, it was largely created by the rich
#
Zamindars of United Provinces, what is today Uttar Pradesh, many of them were Muslim, right.
#
And they had already seen that limited elections in the late 19th century had reduced their
#
numbers to something closer to what their numerical strength was, which was 25% in pre-partition
#
And they understood very clearly that once you get into this business of 1% 1 vote, you
#
will end up with the word majority and minority.
#
Now, in India, the word majority and minority is, every child knows the word, even if you
#
don't know English, but we forget that word exists only in the context of elections, otherwise
#
why does numbers matter?
#
Elections and 1% 1 vote is the only principle where group size makes a difference in the
#
kind of power you use, and today we take it for granted.
#
In the early 20th century, it wasn't for granted, those were not the ways in which we thought
#
So the Muslim League is created with the specific intent of lobbying the British to reduce democracy
#
defined as 1% 1 vote, right.
#
They want parity between the 75% Hindus in India and the 20-25% Muslims, roughly.
#
They want parity, right, which would mean as Savarkar correctly understood that three
#
Hindu votes is equal to one Muslim vote, right, and they are successful because right in the
#
beginning when the British begin to introduce this sort of elections, they are separate
#
electorates for Muslims, which is only Muslims vote for only Muslim leaders, right.
#
So Hindu Mahasabha is created as a response to this, the first national Hindu party, and
#
their argument is, look, you know, once you begin to do this, the voting power of a Hindu
#
becomes much reduced as a Hindu as an individual, which is why, and this is a core argument
#
of the book Amit, I argue that Hindu nationalism was very comfortable with elections.
#
Because Hindus are a social majority in India, right.
#
So when you read or hear about the BJP, even today, one of the incongruencies you see is
#
this is a party obsessed with creating a social majority, right.
#
At the same time, it is politically liberal, at least if you hear their words, right.
#
So for example, the idea that you should remove Article 370 and, you know, Kashmiris and the
#
rest of India must have exactly the same rights is a form of political liberalism that every
#
Indian should have the same right, but underpinning that idea is an idea that Hindus are a social
#
majority, right, that Indian Hindus have about 100 times as much voting power as the Muslim
#
Kashmiri Indians, right.
#
And therefore equalization will help empower a Hindu social majority.
#
And the game, Amit, and I argue that that's also the game behind the creation of the RSS
#
is to make sure enough Hindus vote as one.
#
The hundred year project of the RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha, the Jan Sam is to create a Hindu
#
vote bank and Narendra Modi is the apotheosis of that hundred year idea, which is created
#
Why does this idea matter even today?
#
The idea matters even today because too many critics of BJP, you know, say, oh, they're
#
fascist and think about non-democratic means to get rid of them.
#
The only way to defeat Narendra Modi is on election day.
#
There's no other way to defeat it.
#
They are obsessed with election.
#
They are constituted with elections.
#
In fact, the BJP leader offline, I'll tell you the person to add for credibility.
#
Unfortunately, I can't tell you online at this point, but let me put it this way.
#
Imagine the most important BJP leader who you think will say this is likely to be that
#
person told me that, you know, I win elections in order to worship God.
#
So you worship God through winning elections.
#
And I, you know, the argument here is not that the BJP is a religious force in that
#
It's based on social identity.
#
You have that obsession with elections, like just now, Amit, while we are recording this,
#
the Hyderabad municipal elections are going on, municipal elections, and you had Narendra
#
Modi going there ostensibly to see some vaccine, but really to campaign for it.
#
Yogi Adityanath has gone.
#
And at the very same time, Rahul Gandhi and his mother are holidaying in Goa.
#
And I think his sister is holidaying in Himachal Pradesh.
#
I may be wrong on the facts a little bit, but roughly, why does the BJP do that?
#
Because elections constitutes them, but that's, I'm not giving them a free pass by saying
#
I'm just saying that what do you think will happen if in a group based society where Indians,
#
every part of an Indian life is based on groups, you suddenly introduce a principle of one
#
It's not that overnight Indians are going to become like Swiss citizens who vote on
#
Instead, the game is who is a Hindu?
#
How do we redefine that?
#
And it's not just Hindu nationalists who are doing this.
#
You have the creation of a Dravidian identity in Tamil Nadu, which is a majority identity,
#
Kashi Ram understands that you can create an anti-upper caste identity, which is the
#
Bahujan identity, which is about 80% of India.
#
So democracy in a group based society incentivizes politicians to constantly expand group size
#
to conjure up majorities so that they can win elections.
#
And in that sense, the BJP is a natural product of what you get when you introduce elections
#
No, that's fascinating.
#
And I'm going to sort of try to unpack that layer by layer.
#
But first of all, you just gave us two examples of sentences that do two things that both
#
tell and show, you know, when Narendra Modi going to a municipal election or Rahul Gandhi
#
holidaying in Goa, both tell you a mundane fact, but also show you something larger within
#
But if I was writing this, Ameet, just to tell your listeners who are into writing,
#
I would just tell you these facts, you know, and put it in a way.
#
And the facts would speak for themselves.
#
Yeah, put it in a way in which the facts speak for them.
#
But that happens only in draft number nine or 10, you know, you know, you're intimidating
#
everyone with all this talk of draft number nine or 10, or I'll get it right in draft
#
18 and all of that to sort of go back to this narrative.
#
And you know, another interesting thing that strikes me, and this is again, sort of how
#
circumstances can shape history that, you know, in 1906, you have this talk of elections
#
and therefore as a, you know, to protect their standing within the elites, a Muslim League
#
Similarly, in 1909, you have the Minto Modally reforms.
#
And you know, suddenly Hindus realize three votes are going to be equal to one.
#
And then you have various other things happening as a response to that, including the Hindu
#
Massacre in 1915 with Lala Lajpatra and Mother Mohan Malviya because, and they are a pressure
#
group within the Congress to begin with.
#
And then a number of interesting things happen, as you point out in the book, and you know,
#
I've spoken about on previous episodes and all of that.
#
And you know, it's one is a whole Khilafat movement, which really makes no cohesive sense
#
because you know, one party to that, you know, the Ali brothers and all that are agitating
#
for this larger Muslim Ummah and the other party Mahatma Gandhi is talking about an Indian
#
state and the two don't sort of go together.
#
And many people view that as appeasement or selling out or, you know, what the hell is
#
And eventually that drives the Mahasabha away from the Congress as well.
#
And in the 20s, because of what is happening because of this, what you call the demographic
#
anxiety, you also have the different strands of Hindutva come together.
#
You know, there is Savarkar and one could argue that, you know, if you look at Savarkar
#
pre-imprisonment, he's actually always, he's never saying anything anti-Muslim, but then
#
he's radicalized in his time in prison by the torture that he receives at the hands
#
of Muslims who are sort of, you know, the Pathan's and so on who are, you know, carrying
#
out the torture on the commands of the British and that kind of radicalizes him.
#
So that's another interesting circumstance.
#
But the two interesting things that happen in the 20s obviously is, you know, Savarkar
#
writing Hindutva and then the formation of the RSS and because both of them are sort
#
of political and both of them, as you point out, are a response in part to this demographic
#
anxiety, you know, both of them therefore tend to be inclusive.
#
How do you build the largest political movement that you can?
#
You bring everybody under one umbrella and you, you know, Savarkar, of course, besides
#
being an atheist and a lover of beef was also sort of, you know, against caste and the RSS
#
you point out was actually when you look at Hindu organizations, the RSS was fairly radical
#
because they didn't care about caste either.
#
They just wanted to bring everybody under the Hindu umbrella.
#
So tell me a little bit about this and why does this, you know, impression persist among
#
the elites today that the BJP is a casteist party when clearly as you know Prasanjha wrote
#
in How the BJP Wins, he quoted a Dalit scholar as saying that they are the Dalit party of
#
They get more Dalit votes than everybody else.
#
So you know, why does that impression persist?
#
And tell me then a little bit about, you know, how the sort of the evolution of this sort
#
So that's a good question, but that has a complex answer, right, which is the question
#
you're asking is that the relationship between Hindu nationalism and caste and that's a complex
#
I think that the headline news for me, you know, which is something you just said, which
#
is that given that traditional Hinduism is so hierarchical, Hindu nationalism is the
#
most progressive element of traditional Hinduism when it comes to caste, right?
#
On the other hand, traditional Hinduism was very accommodating of multiple sects, multiple
#
religious practices, you know, the apocryphal stories of when Arab Muslim traders landed
#
in Kerala, local Muslims only helped build the mosque, right?
#
On the other hand, Hindu nationalism is much more exclusive and regressive when it comes
#
So this is the many of the critics of the BJP just don't understand this, that if it
#
was just in upper caste body, it would get 20% of the vote, you can't win.
#
So it is this mix of being a progressive force for Hindus or let's say the most progressive
#
Let me qualify that while being an out and out exclusive force for Muslims, specifically
#
also Christians, also Muslim, that's what gives it this edge.
#
And of course, the core argument of the book is that edge is defined by democracy.
#
That once you introduce elections as an incentive to create majority.
#
So as Hindus are post-independence, about, you know, 80% of India, you just have to unite
#
half of them and part of uniting half of them is to pick on another.
#
But half of them is also to organize meals between Brahmins and Dalits, right?
#
So for example, the critics today are right in criticizing the BJP for these anti-love
#
And because there's no empirical evidence that this is true at all.
#
But what they omit is that the VHP has spent a lot of time financially encouraging inter-caste
#
So in a local village, you know, boy and girl of a different community try to marry.
#
Sometimes it's the local VHP person you have to go to to protect yourself against the against
#
And if you don't see this, then you're living in fool's paradise.
#
And I think many of the critics of the BJP, you know, they get very comfortable saying,
#
oh, they're fascist, which means you don't have to mobilize against them on the ground.
#
You don't have to actually convince your fellow citizens that look for somebody else.
#
Instead, you can write not op-eds in like fancy newspapers and foreign news.
#
It may help your career, but it doesn't change BJP at all.
#
But you know, the deeper question you asked amidst the relationship between caste and
#
the BJP and Hindu nationalism is conflict.
#
The RSS is created not just as an upper caste organization, but as an organization created
#
by a few families from one specific or a couple of specific communities within Maharashtrian
#
Brahmins, the Karadhe and the Deshas Brahmins communities.
#
And I think that every single Sarsan Chalam ahead of the RSS, except one, has been a Marathi
#
So that tells you that the critics are not wrong in saying that the BJP originally is
#
even today, if you look at the data, the heart of the BJP is still upper caste consolidation.
#
So I don't want to go away from that.
#
But if you wear a mask for a hundred years, I mean, that mask looks like your face and
#
you know that the outreach that they've been doing even in the 1930s itself, back then
#
itself would say as an RSS member was part of the anti caste or temple entry movement
#
Now you can say that today's Dalits find that patronizing by saying that what do you feed
#
Well, when Mandal Commission is announced on August 1990, I have a whole chapter on
#
Advani has is under a lot of pressure from his upper caste base to oppose Mandal Commission
#
But actually he supports them.
#
He asked for an extension of quota for the upper caste war, which is what Narendra Modi
#
has literally done now, but otherwise he supports the Mandal Commission and had he not done
#
that, had he opposed it, the BJP would have remained an upper caste party event against
#
Right today as Prime Minister, Narendra Modi has done as much for reservations, right?
#
As any Prime Minister that India has had, maybe Bharati Singh again, that's not a coincidence.
#
If you don't like the BJP, at least understand your enemy, right, and understand why is it
#
that a P seller son from an oil pressing OBC caste in Gujarat, right, who doesn't have
#
a strong family background, joins the RSS, not just for social mobility, but for a sense
#
of brotherhood and fellow feeling, I'm referring of course to Narendra Modi.
#
If you don't understand this part, which goes along, what is an advertised rebuff to Muslims
#
right from the beginning of the RSS, it's very hard to defeat it, you know, and this,
#
you know, the idea, as you know, Amit, and as many of your listeners know, many Indian
#
Muslim communities have practices that are practicing that, that mean on the ground are
#
Hindu, they operate on the many of these communities, Boras, Pujas, et cetera, et cetera, Jinnah's
#
own community, you know, they live their lives on the border of, you know, Islam and Hinduism.
#
The RSS doesn't like that because just like they want to dilute the boundaries within
#
Hinduism, they want to erect strong barriers between Hindu and outside, because if you
#
don't do that, you can't answer the question who is a Hindu or what is Hinduism, and if
#
you don't have a clear answer to that question, how are you going to get all these people
#
So right in the beginning, I have a story in the book that Hegdewar notices that there's
#
a Muslim Sufi shrine near Nagpur, which are also attracting Hindu devotees.
#
He doesn't like that, you know, he pushes, so, and my job, as you notice in the book
#
is not to support the BJP or to oppose it, and I hope I have succeeded in that, that's
#
not my game here, but I have to say the truth, right, and the truth is that from the beginning
#
it has been suspicious of Muslims, and from the beginning it has tried to reach out to
#
No, and you know, the most fascinating phrase from this conversation so far is what you
#
just said about if you wear a mask for a hundred years, it becomes a face, which leads me to
#
the sort of the meta musing that is there anything called a face or, you know, is it
#
all just a succession of masks, but leave that aside, I mean, you know, the other thing
#
I'd also sort of like to point out to my listeners as well, reading this book, I had a sense
#
that this is a very fascinating companion book to Akshay Mukul's book on the Gita Press,
#
because that is about the social and cultural movement of Hindu nationalism while yours
#
focuses on the political side of it, and for me the two sort of come together very well.
#
No, but just, can I give you just a little bit of a counter, because, you know, I read
#
the book, I cite the book, I love Akshay Mukul, and he's also been on your podcast, right,
#
but just to push back just a little bit, see his evidence for, is the, you know, the Gita
#
Press is, I think he looks at Kalyan, which is the magazine of Gita Press, and definitely
#
many of the views there are regressive, right, my only pushback is that's not Hindu nationalism,
#
right, so really, if you want to look at where, what political Hinduism is doing, you look
#
at the RSS mouthpiece organizer, right, look at some of the BJP magazines, right, and that's
#
the point that I'm pushing that when it comes to caste issues, especially, or even gender,
#
but mainly caste, the Hindu nationalism or the institutions of Hindu nationalism, like
#
the RSS or the BJP or the Jansa are far more progressive than the Gita Press is, the Gita
#
Press is really the organ of traditional Hinduism, right, and so that's one, you know, debate,
#
I would say, me and Akshay Mukul have that, look, he's right, right, but in many ways,
#
the RSS and BJP want to go away from the stuff that is appearing in Kalyan, because if Hindu
#
nationalism becomes the description that Akshay Mukul has from the Gita Press, how on earth
#
is it going to get votes, you know?
#
No, no, that's absolutely a fair point, and the picture is vast and complex, so, you know,
#
the elephant will have a leg, the elephant will have a tail, the elephant will have a
#
trunk, tell me now a little bit about, many people today speak of Hindu nationalism as
#
if it is one thing, but of course, you know, the RSS is going in one direction, Savarkar
#
is going in another direction, in fact, there are clashes between them, because Savarkar
#
of course is political, in 1942, he wants the RSS foot soldiers to help him in the elections,
#
and the RSS just says, no, and get lost, and in fact, that is at the point where, you know,
#
shortly after that, Nathuram Gotse starts his magazine, where he rails against two things,
#
Mahatma Gandhi and the RSS, that's right, agrani, agrani, so, so tell me a little bit
#
about this sort of very interesting relationship between the RSS and Savarkar and how they
#
view each other, and of course, the Hindu Mahasava as well, which is very prominent then,
#
but doesn't seem so much now in hindsight, but because it's almost disappeared, but at
#
the time, that was like, another prominent sort of force.
#
Yeah, it was the first national Hindu party. Yeah, absolutely. So, Amit, the larger question
#
that you're asking is that, you know, Hindu nationalism, as you said, you know, speaks
#
in many voices, right, then how is, but it's nonetheless, Amit, and I can't emphasize this
#
organizationally united, that the Hindu nationalism today is basically comes out of an organizational
#
constellation with the RSS as the sun. There's no two ways about it, you know, and you have
#
plenty of quote unquote Hindu organizations like the Karni Seva, which I would not call
#
Hindu nationalist in that sense, because it doesn't arise out of the RSS. You may have
#
some similarities in thoughts, this, that, but they are not right, or no shortage of
#
akhadas, you know, who have like similar views to like the BJP, but they are, they don't
#
report to Modi, and there's no way Modi can reach out to them. So Hindu nationalism organizationally
#
is actually quite clear. What is Hindu? If you tell me the organization, I'll tell you,
#
is it Hindu, like Hindu Mahasabha today is outside the pain. Hindu Mahasabha, for example,
#
you know, they celebrate Ghotse's statues. The RSS is furious with that, but you can't
#
say anything because the Hindu Mahasabha today has nothing to do with the RSS. Yet, as you
#
pointed out, they speak in different voices, and no, this is really the heart of the book,
#
which is, that's why the title jugalbandi, which is that the power of Hindu nationalism
#
is that just like in a jugalbandi, you have people playing different instruments, different
#
music, nonetheless, you're able to make music together. And RSS celebrates that. So, for
#
example, right now, just to give you one more example, before we go to the Savarkar Bolwarkar
#
question there, but something to sort of link your listeners to today, many of the labor
#
reforms that the Narendra Modi government has made is opposed by the RSS trade union.
#
How do you make sense of it? They opposed it. How do you make sense of it? Both are
#
part of the RSS, right? Narendra Modi is ex-prachara. BJP is very much part of the RSS family, right?
#
But you have to, and the answer is that the RSS is always seamless like an Indian family.
#
In Indian family, the, you know, legendarily, the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law don't
#
get along. Brothers may be fighting, right? The father and the daughter may be having
#
some issues, but nonetheless, at the end of the day, you stay united. And again, you know,
#
we can discuss in detail. The heart of this book's argument is that the reason the BJP
#
wins, there are many reasons, but I would say the cutting edge reason is that even when
#
they disagree, they don't stick, right? And the reason they do that is from a very early
#
age, they taught a certain version of Hindu history, where you have these different battles
#
where Hindus lose on the battlefield because at key moments, they stab each other in the
#
back, right? This is the key. And so that becomes an organizational ethic for today.
#
Now, coming back to the question that you asked on Savarkar and Golwarkar, you know,
#
people whispered about it, but I think I'm one of the first people to point out that
#
they didn't like each other. They didn't like each other, one for the reason you mentioned,
#
which is that Golwarkar wanted nothing to do with politics, right? Because he was more
#
focused on the social aspect of Hindu nationalism, which is creating a common Hindu social identity.
#
But as I pointed out, that itself is spurred by elections. Otherwise, why do you care
#
whether 40% of Hindus think alike, except you want to make them into a vote back, right?
#
There was a Savarkar who straight up wanted to contest elections. He became the head of
#
the Hindu Mahasabha. He wanted to win elections and he kept losing and he kept losing because
#
the Hindus of that period voted for the better Hindu leader, better, I mean, electoral Mahatma Gandhi,
#
right? And that was Savarkar's huge anger. He hated Gandhi, not because they were different,
#
but actually they were pretty similar in that they were appealing to him, right? It's just that
#
Gandhi was able to get the Hindu vote while not being anti-Muslim. So that was Savarkar's game,
#
right? But what, so that was definitely one reason for the difference. But another bigger reason is
#
that they were very different personalities. Now this obsession with unity that the RSS has,
#
with teamwork over all else, means that these kind of brilliant geniuses, you know, who are
#
primer donors, don't have a place in it. I point out in the book that it is descriptively accurate
#
to say that the RSS, you know, doesn't have too many smart people in it. And I mean it in a very
#
descriptive sense, because, you know, think about any organization, Amit, that you've worked in,
#
you'd always have these, you know, brilliant jerks. This is, I'm sure in Cricket 4, you also
#
found these guys. They're very good, you know, they're very bright, but it's impossible to work
#
with them in an organization. The RSS is obsessed about beating these people out. You know, so people
#
like Subramanian Swami, M. L. Somdi, who was a road scholar, Balraj Madhok, who I spent a lot of time
#
with, very bright, much brighter than the average RSS pachara, you know, a genuine thinker, right?
#
But just will not subordinate the self to the organization. In contrast, someone like Atal Bihari
#
Vajpayee, also very bright, but not an intellectual, knew that when what he wanted, the RSS was
#
unwilling to do, he would, as I say in the book, sulk on mute, but he wouldn't leave the party.
#
And I think Savarkar was a little different. He was a bit of a primer donor. So even today,
#
when I talk to people in the RSS, I mean, Amit Shah has his photograph, you know, in his drawing
#
room. Advani has his photograph in the drawing room. But they also see him as a little bit of a
#
warning that, you know, if you want to succeed in India, you know, you may have Savarkar's grand
#
ideas, but you can't behave like him. Yeah. No. And that's like one of the sort of fascinating
#
strands is this whole RSS's organizational ethic where you never speak out against your own
#
organization or against your colleagues in public. I'm sorry to interrupt you, I mean, externally.
#
Exactly. Plenty of situations where internally there's a far more robust debate happening,
#
at least in the period that I'm writing about, that happens in the Congress. The Congress,
#
they talk about democracy, democracy, there's zero internal democracy, right? Whereas, you know,
#
I point out that when Vajpayee government was in power, there was no shortage of his own cabinet
#
ministers like Murli Manohar Joshi, Ram Nayak, from his own party who opposed his policies and
#
spoke up in cabinet. You know, I ended my last sentence by saying in public, you did not wait
#
for that. But yeah, I completely agree with you that the Congress is the opposite ethos. It might
#
seem there is no dissent, but that is because it is not allowed. There is no internal dissent either.
#
And that's a whole sort of different story. And the examples you pointed out that the people who
#
spoke out like Balraj Madhok and Subramanian Swami in the seventies basically left the party. So
#
Vajpayee knew that even if he disagrees, he's got to hold his peace and sort of bide his time.
#
Now, tell me a little bit about how this ethos comes from their reading of history,
#
specifically you point in your book to the third battle of Panipat in 1761 as having a profound
#
lesson for the whole Hindu nationalist movement. And this sort of this particular organizational
#
ethic that you stick together as a team, no matter how much you disagree in private also comes
#
directly from there. Tell me a little bit about the importance of that. Well, so let me tell you,
#
let me tell you the research answer, which is how I got to the answer, right? Because rather than
#
just tell you the answer, how I got there. So I've been, you know, I interviewed about 200 people
#
for this book, many of them from the RSS BJP. And I was, I mean, I was, I was struck by how they
#
kept referring to history. Of course, it was their version of history. So, you know, at my university,
#
if I asked a historian, you know, they will say, where's the footnote? That's not the point. In
#
fact, many of them like, not just he did write historical fiction, for example, KM Munshi,
#
Amit Shah, you know, one of his favorite books is KM Munshi's trilogy on the last Hindu king of
#
Gujarat Sidra Jai Singh. It's not a historical book. It's like, you know, will you call Amit Tripathi,
#
who I like a lot, his writing, he's not a historian, right? You can say at the most
#
is historical fiction, but that forms the basis for, you know, what the RSS reads and understands
#
about India. And so I had, you know, this was, I was in Chandrapur, right? This is about a couple
#
of years back. That's about an hour, about a few hours away from Nakhpur. And I just visited the
#
family home of Mohan Bhagwat, who is the head of the RSS. And I spoke to his brother, Ravindra,
#
who is the only person in the family who has given me permission to quote, right? And, you know,
#
he spoke a lot about Shaka and, you know, he's a very low key lawyer, by the way, another sign
#
that, you know, if you go and meet like the brother or a sister of a top congressman,
#
they'll be living in style, you know, but the, you know, the brother of the, you know, the,
#
what many people think is the man who really runs India is living in a low key style and low key
#
house and going to a trial court. And it's a very different ethic. So the one thing is that I have
#
to prevent myself, and this is an aside, I mean, of not becoming too admiring of the RSS, because
#
many of the views which I disagree with was at odds with their personal austerity, you know,
#
which I, it's very hard not to admire. And then I meet people in the Congress who in many instances,
#
I may even agree with, but then I see all of them that, you know, they may be wearing these like,
#
you know, kurta pajamas, but they have like a 30,000 rupee pen, right? And I'm like, you know,
#
like, what kind of hypocrisy is this? And I think most Indians, you know, that's the flavor of the
#
Congress that irritates them, right? Then a massive hypocrisy between the frugal talk and the actual
#
flashy lifestyle, right? The RSS is the reverse. So anyway, we have spoken a lot about the shakhas.
#
Now, for those of you listeners who don't know it, the shaka is the principal unit of the RSS.
#
You go for about an hour to an open ground and with about 20, 30 people, you perform group exercises
#
for half the time. And for half the time, you have an intellectual conversation, a ball date,
#
or somebody talks, that kind of thing. And he was talking about the shaka. And then I did something
#
that I think academics shouldn't do, which is that instead of actually going to a shaka at that time,
#
I went on YouTube and saw a lot of shaka videos, you know, which I shouldn't, you know, I should
#
have gone to shaka, but I was like obsessed and no, why not easy? All these amateur videos put up
#
by RSS guys on shaka. And you know, my Western training, Amit had taught me to see these shakas,
#
you know, the marching as a sign of martial valor because part of the Western theory on the RSS is
#
that, you know, Hindus have a psychological feeling that they're unique compared to the more
#
martial Muslim. So, you know, this is a way to man up Hindus, right? There is some truth to it,
#
but I saw it and I realized that it was more than just, you know, marching. It was actually
#
synchronization. It was teamwork. And Amit, I'm sure that in the corporate organization that you
#
have worked, you go for these corporate retreats sometimes, right? And you play, and I know it's a
#
bit boring, but I think you place these games, right? To build team building. That's what an
#
RSS shaka is. And in a flash, I understood Amit that the reading of history actually becomes an
#
organizational form that the purpose of the shaka is to tell young Hindus, this is how you work in
#
a team. This is how you coordinate. This is how you stand on each other's shoulder and break the
#
dahi handi, right? So there is a martial element, but the core element is teamwork, right? And look,
#
nothing I had read prepared me to understand this, but once I saw it, it was there all over the
#
place. You know, it's one of those hidden in plain sight that the history lesson and, you know,
#
frankly, the RSS is obsessed about it. So, you know, one history lesson that you mentioned was
#
the third battle of Panipat, which was fought between M.H. Shah Abdali from Afghanistan and
#
the Marathas. Now this is particularly important because in the 18th century in India was the
#
Maratha century. And many of your listeners will know the Marathas control from Tanjore all the
#
way to Delhi, right? This is the Peshwa, the Maratha Empire that sort of succeeds Shivaji.
#
And the British is a presence in India, but it's a minor presence. And the RSS believes that had
#
the Marathas not lost in the third battle of Panipat because they got annihilated. And that,
#
and not just they got annihilated, even M.H. Shah Abdali was so badly loosed, he has to leave
#
India. And so the RSS version is that this created a power vacuum in India that neither had M.H.
#
Shah Abdali nor did you have the Marathas into this power vacuum, crept the British, not just
#
my view in the 2019 elections and literally what Amit Shah said. And again, if anyone was
#
paying attention, they should have said, why is this man whose popular impression is that, look,
#
he doesn't read, he's not a cultivated man in that sense. He's actually referring to very precise
#
historical examples when he's talking about defeating the Congress in 2019, right? And
#
immediately those two things struck me, Amit, that I would say it's the inside of the book,
#
which is that the, the reading of history has created a key cause where whatever they do,
#
they don't split because their view is that Indians always split and they're not wrong in
#
that Amit, that, you know, anyone who works in India realizes that we are lousy team players,
#
lousy, you know, you have like, I'm sure in your time in clicking for wherever else you work,
#
there would have been five, six different factions, you know, people who are like,
#
you know, have lunch together. Other people have large meetings, you know, they will say yes,
#
yes, but then behind your back, they'll say, no, no, you know, like everyone who's listening to
#
this podcast will like sympathize with this problem that you deal with Indian groups,
#
you deal with factions, right? The RSS is understood and they spend all their time trying
#
to solve this problem. That's why they really know that if you look in India, it's a massive
#
competitive advantage. Parties are splitting all the time. Today, the Congress is one Congress
#
versus Congress couple simple is saying something. Chidambaram is saying something. It's not even as
#
the RSS points out that having a single cast party or, you know, bill prevent this Samadwadi
#
party is a Yadav party, but the uncle and the nephew are at loggerheads, right? Bahujan Samad
#
party is a Jatav party, but Mayawati will never promote another Jatav. That's why Chandrasekhar
#
Azad Rawan wants to set out his own party because if she does that, then her whole bank gets cut.
#
This is the water that we drink that we don't like behaving properly in a group when it comes
#
to achieving a goal. The RSS is absolute genius has been to understand it. It is an exclusionary
#
version, right? And the point is not whether the history lesson is accurate. The point is that that
#
history lesson has become a very powerful tool for organizational renewal because when it comes
#
to the third battle of Panipat, the RSS analysis is the Marathas lost because they were fighting
#
with each other. The Rajputs and the Jats did not spell the Maratha army was not a centralized
#
command. Unlike the RSS today, it was a Confederacy where the Peshwas were normally in charge,
#
but you had the Holkhas, you had the Sindhyas, you know, or you had the Bhoslees. For them,
#
this is the analysis of the deepness of the Hindu past. And I would say that the moment that just
#
struck me that after that conversation on Shaka, seeing this on YouTube, you know, and then linking
#
it to Israeli, that kind of thing takes three years to get. So, you know, to the researchers
#
who are listening amongst you, that insight, right, is not a simple insight. You have to immerse
#
yourself, you have to speak to people. And then one day in a flash, something strikes you. And now
#
when I say it to RSS people, he is saying, yeah, it's true. In fact, you know, I got one of the few
#
reviews that have already come, the book is very early, has been from an RSS gentleman who says
#
that, look, he's the first English speaking guy to understand us, even though I am critical, right,
#
because this is their self image. And it's, and I sometimes, and look, once a book like this comes
#
out, people will say that, oh, this is obvious, this, that, or we should have found this earlier.
#
But sometimes insights don't happen that way, right? That first time someone comes up with an
#
idea, you'll always say, oh, we should have known this 50 years earlier, but that never happens like
#
that. No, and it was fascinating to me, not just, you know, the third battle of Panipat in 1761,
#
but even, you know, that whole sense of how so many contemporary grievances can be in some way,
#
you know, given an origin story or given that huge story in history. For example, you point out about
#
how Amit Shah, of course, grew up in a household where he was surrounded by books and was well
#
read. And one of the other books by K. M. Munshi, which was a big influence on him, and pretty much,
#
you know, generations of Hindu nationalist leaders was one about the sacking of Somnath by-
#
Yeah, by Mahmud of Ghazni, which is, you know, which is an interesting example of how,
#
you know, history can be weaponized and history can shape the psychology of people and just how
#
they look at the world. And it also kind of strikes me, and, you know, we'll take an aside,
#
and I'll ask you this now instead of at the end, that, you know, does it also work the other way,
#
that does the politics that you have then affect the history that you do? And you've managed to
#
keep it out of this book to the extent that I have absolutely no idea what your political leanings
#
are like. So is that something that you consciously, you know, warn yourself about in terms of even the
#
facts that you choose to gather and so on? And then do you sort of, you know, between the first and
#
the 18th draft, as it were, do you take, you know, not just yourself, but even your prism in a sense
#
out of it? Is that something that you thought about?
#
I try my best, that's exactly right. I try my best to do that. Because look, the book I'm writing
#
on the BJP before Modi is the most polarizing question in India right now, right? I don't want
#
to add fuel to that fire. Otherwise, every morning there are like a million people on Twitter
#
who are doing this. I don't want the book to fall prey to is it a pro-BJP book, is it an anti-Modi
#
book, you know, that's very, very hard to do. It's very hard to do. And especially when, like,
#
the book is not an oblique intervention, it's a central question, which is what is Hindu nationalism
#
which is what is Hindu nationalism and why do they win? So the challenge before me was how do I make
#
a such a political polarized topic, non-political and non-polarized in a way in which you can read
#
the book, whether you hate the BJP or like the BJP, and this will help you understand it.
#
And, you know, I just did a video interview with Barkha Dutt and she told me, look, this book
#
didn't make me angry. She told me offline, you know, and she said, I like that about the book.
#
And I hope that's how other people read it. This book is not going to get your BP up and,
#
you know, let's take on Modi or let me become an internet buck. This is not, it's got a lot of
#
masala. So you enjoy yourself, right? But I wanted it not to be an intervention that becomes a
#
political football. And at least it's a very early days, but so far I've been able to do it.
#
But yes, I obsessed about this. I spent a lot of time, you know, thinking about how I should move
#
my, you know, how I should move my views on the way. On the other hand, I mean, while I didn't
#
want to be controversial, I had a fidelity to the truth. And sometimes the truth is confidential.
#
So for example, on the Gujarat riots, I don't hold back at all, as you've read, right? I detail
#
precisely, not exactly what happened, you know, what, and, you know, and too often we ask is
#
Modi guilty, Modi not guilty. That's not the real question on the Gujarat riot. It was a massive
#
connivance and state failure that you have to understand in that sense, right? So, you know,
#
while I wanted to be quote unquote neutral, neutrality doesn't mean on the one hand, on the
#
other hand, right? Because then when you have violence happening, when you have murder happening,
#
neutrality is not that somebody said it's a murder. Other person said it was deserved. That's a very
#
wrong way to do it, right? But it's a tightrope walk. I mean, so there's no like template for how
#
to achieve this, but I, exactly what you said, I thought about it a lot. And I also, you know,
#
over time, Hamid, I've learned to respect the leader that the leader basically, you know,
#
once the leader realizes there's a relationship between the evidence you give and the arguments
#
you give, then the leader is able to forgive a lot, you know, even if the leader disagrees with
#
you completely, whereas very quickly a leader figures out if you have an agenda or an angle.
#
And that's what I try my best to prevent happen. You know, in fact, speaking of neutrality, there's
#
this famous thing, there's this famous cliche about journalists, in fact, a cliched story about how
#
if you are, if one person says it is raining and the other person says it is not raining,
#
your job is not to report them both. It is to go to the window and tell the reader whether it is
#
raining or not. That's right. Except in certain cases, you don't know whether it's a window or
#
a TV screen. So what do you do? So to get back to the narrative of the book, you know, we've spoken
#
about the difference between Savarkar and the RSS and how the RSS is totally uninterested in
#
politics. At one point, there's this juicy quote where Savarkar, you know, says to the RSS in 1942,
#
quote, what will you organize all these people for? Will you make achar with them? Stop quote. And
#
then you point out how the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the aftermath of that,
#
when, you know, the RSS is sort of ostracized and banned for a few months, while the Hindu
#
Mahasabha is not because they have a minister in the cabinet and all of that, makes the RSS realize
#
that no, they do need some kind of political presence as well. Tell me a little bit about
#
sort of this shift in the thinking and how it came about. Firstly, I mean, I think in this,
#
in the debate between Savarkar and RSS, I think the RSS has turned out to be right and Savarkar
#
wrong in that this, you know, let's just take Assam, right? A few years ago, BJP came to power
#
in Assam. Now the BJP came to power in Assam because for the last 20 years, the RSS has been
#
going there and marching, right? They had the shakhas, they've been putting money, you know,
#
and they don't put money in the shakha, people pay the money themselves, but they've been putting
#
like organizational energy into it. And basically, you know, tilling the land, creating, you know,
#
social unity among Hindus while demonizing Muslims. It's a both ways. That is also a jugalbandi
#
that takes, you know, that social transformation then becomes the underpinning for the BJP's rise
#
in Assam. Savarkar didn't see that. Like Savarkar just thought that it would be politics that would
#
unite Hindus together, right? Without that, there has to be an underlying social basis that also
#
pushes it. And we didn't discuss earlier that part of that social basis is bottom up, which is
#
organization, et cetera, et cetera. And I told you, I'm not quite sure about the data on that,
#
but the other is top down, which is what the RSS does, right? And that people tend to underestimate
#
that. Like even today, for example, Amit, and this is a good sign of the RSS that if you go
#
to any district in India and I go and sometimes I interview district collector, district magistrates,
#
who are the Raja and Rani's of the district, right? The collector and the collector will,
#
you know, even states which are under BJP, they'll say, we don't know who the local pracharak is
#
because you know, it's not, you know, whereas every time you have a new collector who comes
#
to a district or the local doctor, the local head of this, that the local head of a granite mill
#
will all form a queue to do salam, right? The RSS person never does it. And that's because the
#
RSS doesn't need the state. It's the BJP state that needs the RSS. That is remarkable, right?
#
I mean, I show you here in this book, the kind of personal sacrifices RSS people make without
#
accepting anything in return. And again, these are all things that other parties should take from it.
#
The BSP had this Bhaujan volunteer force, which was like the RSS. They don't have this. I met
#
people there. The Congress has a seva dal, which is absolutely pathetic. How many of your listeners
#
even know they exist, right? So on the first part that you asked that, you know, this debate
#
between Savarkar on a pure political project versus the RSS view, which is a pure social project,
#
which is a view that it had at that time, right? It's turned out that the social project actually
#
benefits the political project in a way Savarkar doesn't understand. That's the enormous power of
#
the RSS. The second part of the question you asked is that how does the RSS change its mind?
#
And the answer is the murder of the Mahatma. I point out in the book that the RSS had no
#
institutional role in it. In fact, the Bolshev act actually set back Hindu nationalism. I mean,
#
one of the counterfactuals that I say is that with partition, the Hindu Mahasabha and Savarkar's
#
criticism of Gandhi turns out to be right. That when you begin to appease the Muslim league,
#
what you don't, you don't get Hindu-Muslim unity, you get different countries. Objectively, the
#
Savarkar's view on Congress politics vis-a-vis Muslim league turned out to be true, right?
#
And with Hindu and Sikh refugees pouring into India after 1947, we see a jump in RSS membership
#
in Hindu Mahasabha membership. They could have come to power, I mean, far earlier in India compared
#
to 1996, they could have come to power far earlier, right? Why does that not happen? Because the murder
#
of Mahatma, who is a Hindu leader, is linked to the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha, at least ideologically,
#
if not institutionally, right? And the RSS is banned, Goldberg is in jail, all the pracharaks
#
are put in jail. On the other hand, they are able to notice that the Hindu Mahasabha, which is Savarkar's
#
political party, is not banned, right? Even though the groups that Madanlal Pahoa, Apte, Borse were
#
all Hindu Mahasabha members, right? And they also realize why, which is that the Hindu Mahasabha is
#
a coalition, is an ally in parliament, right? It's the industry minister, Shambhusha Mukherjee, who
#
is from the Hindu Mahasabha. And so Nehru and Patel realize that, look, it's a splinter group,
#
not the actual Hindu Mahasabha that's doing it. And the RSS realize and notice that the ban that
#
they were put through, which frankly is undemocratic, because if there's no evidence
#
to be, you know, to ban someone, to jail someone for this long, you know, while I'm very vocal when
#
it's the BJP that violates civil liberties, what the Congress did to the RSS at that time,
#
while had popular support, is to me at least a violation of civil liberties. But the lesson
#
the RSS learned, not a single MP spoke up in parliament in their favor. And even though they
#
wanted nothing to do with the state and government, the government wanted something to do with it,
#
which is why Goldberger reluctantly in 1951, agrees to the setting up of a separate political
#
party, the Jansa, with a lot of RSS members and the face would be Shambhusha Mukherjee,
#
who had since left the Hindu Mahasabha, to contest in India's first elections. So the RSS comes to
#
politics, because of Gandhi's murder and the and it's quote unquote oppression, that it faces
#
immediately after that. And very quickly, the RSS realizes that its social aim, and the political
#
aim of the party are actually quite united. What you said about, you know, the RSS's vision
#
winning out over Savarkar's is also echoed in, you know, one of my favorite quotes about politics,
#
which you know, all my listeners will groan now, because they know what's coming. But
#
Andrew Breitbart once said, politics is downstream of culture. And I think the great triumph of
#
Hindu nationalism comes from the RSS, recognizing the truth of this, in a sense.
#
And sorry to interrupt you again. That's also the failure of the Nehruvian idea of India,
#
because they didn't understand the sentence that you just said, that Nehruvian politics
#
was seen as unmoved from culture. A point that I repeatedly keep making,
#
you know, it's become another trope of my show that I ask my guests something I won't ask you,
#
because it's too much of a cliche now. And we have so much else to talk about. But was our
#
relatively liberal constitution imposed on an illiberal society and therefore was always that
#
top-down imposition was always sort of bound to fail in some way? But you know, having said that,
#
I can sort of contradict that immediately by pointing out that the first leader of the
#
Jainsangh, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, in many tellings comes across as a remarkably liberal
#
man. For example, he left the Hindu Mahasabha because he was upset that they would not admit
#
members of other religions, which he thought was completely pointless. And I did an episode
#
recently with Tripur Dhaman Singh on the making of the First Amendment. And there, if you just
#
look at all the arguments and what people are doing across sides, it appears to be Shyama Prasad
#
Mukherjee, who is a great liberal, and Nehru, who is the enemy of liberalism. And again,
#
all those arguments and all those quotes are in the public domain. You know, I was struck by this
#
very intriguing thing that you said about the Bharatiya Jainsangh when it was formed.
#
And this is possibly partly because even though, you know, Shyama Prasad wants to form it,
#
he asked Golwalkar, he says no, but then eventually, you know, enough of Golwalkar's
#
colleagues want it, so he agrees, and a lot of RSS people come in. And you speak about how
#
this represents a movement away from prima donnas and ideologues towards orators and
#
organizers. And prima donnas, you've spoken about before, but you speak about how temperamentally
#
they are dangerous for an organization. Ideologues, you know, you use the word theorems for them,
#
just as you do temperament for prima donnas. But the orators and organizers are interesting,
#
because this almost, in a sense, then presages the future of the BJP. Of course, today with
#
Modi and Shah, but even earlier then, with sort of Vajpayee and Advani, which is, you know,
#
the meat of your remarkable book. So let's talk about the two of them now and the very different
#
circumstances in which they kind of, you know, came to being. Tell me a bit about the early
#
Vajpayee, because, you know, he's born in Gwalior on Christmas Day in 1924. And you speak about how
#
Gwalior is a hub for a resurgent Hindu identity, in your words. And you also say that, you know,
#
Vajpayee's future and therefore India's future could have been different had he been born in,
#
say, United Provinces. So explain to me a bit of Vajpayee's background and how that sort of
#
shaped him and eventually, you know, led him to becoming part of the RSS. Well, I mean,
#
coming to the first part of your question, from the very beginning, Hindu nationalism has realized
#
that they need an orator and an organizer. So the first jugalbandi in that respect was
#
Shampeshad Mukherjee, who was, you know, the youngest vice chancellor of Calcutta University,
#
erudite man, etc., etc. He was vice chancellor at the age of 33. And no doubt many people will
#
point out that people at the age of 33 are still doing their PhDs in JNU. They will snark.
#
There you go, right. But his jugalbandi was very, so he was very consciously made the face of the
#
movement because they wanted somebody to speak in parliament. At the same time, you had Deendayal
#
Upadhyay was seconded by Guru Golwar Kaur, who was the head of the RSS at that time, to be the
#
Advani for Shampeshad Mukherjee. And then of course you have Vajpayee Advani. And now you have Modi
#
and Amit Shah. Point being that there's a bit of social engineering that there was a space for
#
someone like Vajpayee. And because Shampeshad Mukherjee dies young, right, or dies early,
#
there was a need to replace it. So that to understand Vajpayee's rise, you have to understand
#
Vajpayee's personality, etc., etc. But the fact that luck, and this is something you refer to
#
beginning, luckily for Vajpayee, the very traits he exhibited was something that Hindu nationalism
#
required hugely after the death of Shampeshad Mukherjee. But the sort of corollary to that is
#
if it wasn't Vajpayee, it may have been somebody else. That person may not have had the talent to
#
take the BJP to victory, you know, so many decades later. So Vajpayee, his family, he's a Kanyakubh
#
Brahmin. They are poor. They are originally from Bateshwar in what is today Uttar Pradesh. But I
#
think his grandfather moves to Gwalior, which is a princely state, is a princely state run by a Hindu
#
king, which is the Maharaja of Gwalior. He's a Maratha, he's a Sindhiya, right. Again, a progeny
#
of, you know, according to the RSS, you know, the person who made one of the mistakes in the
#
Third Battle of Panipat, right. And harsh critics would argue that even today, so many hundred years
#
later, you see a Sindhiya splitting the party. It's a bit mean, but you know, I am sorry for that.
#
So Vajpayee, you know, it's a very traditional Gangetic Brahmin family. He wears a sacred thread.
#
His brother also wears a sacred thread. And the RSS happens to come to Gwalior because it is
#
Marathi speaking, right. Otherwise, it wouldn't have come there that quickly. So very soon after
#
the creation of the RSS, you know, it's been able to percolate into Gwalior because the king of the
#
Raja of Gwalior is a Maratha, Marathi speaking, was part of the old Maratha Empire, right. And
#
that's also why Vajpayee Marathi is very good because if you go to Gwalior even today, you have
#
Marathi speakers and you have Hindi speakers, right. And the RSS comes there and he joins the
#
Shaka and he joins the Shaka because of his caste because, you know, he was a Brahmin and he joins
#
and that was the social base of the RSS at that point. And I also mentioned that on the first day
#
he's wearing a sacred thread, but very quickly he realizes that he doesn't want markers that
#
distinguish himself from other Hindus and he removes the sacred thread. And his own brother,
#
I don't think I mentioned it in the book, you know, in the first days in the Shaka, he cooks
#
his own meals because he doesn't want somebody who's not a Brahmin to cook his meals and within
#
three, four days he ends that. To me that's a wonderful story because it tells you that
#
compared to traditional Hinduism, the RSS again for electoral logic initially pushes you to be
#
much more progressive, right. And that is Vajpayee's trajectory and his father then becomes a teacher
#
in the Gwalior education system and employee of the Maharaja of Gwalior. He's a fantastic orator,
#
that is Vajpayee's great skill. He's a middle-rung poet, so people who say Vajpayee is a great poet
#
haven't read his poetry like I have, but what that gives him is a rhythm of sentences, right.
#
That mixed with Vajpayee's extraordinary political antinom and the fact that his father was also a
#
very good speaker gives Vajpayee's legendary quality, which is that he says a sentence that
#
the left says is in their favor and the right says is in their favor. This is Vajpayee's like
#
eternal quality, right. Like you say something in parliament and parliament will say,
#
wow, this man is one of us without irritating the RSS. Advani just can't do that, right.
#
So that's Vajpayee's kind of background and as I argue it's a background that is far apart from
#
the moderate personality he eventually gets. And what changes Vajpayee from a provincial
#
Gangetic Brahmin into this kind of liberal Aftal that like most liberal Indians kind of said right
#
man in the wrong party are two things. One is it's the influence of parliament. At the age of 34,
#
Vajpayee becomes an MP, again social engineering because Deendyal Upadhyay who runs the party at
#
that time wants a good articulate replacement for Shyamaprasad Mukherjee. And he's in parliament
#
from the age from 1957 basically unbroken to 2007-2008. That's enormous, right. Whether I'm
#
in the Lok Sabha or the Rajas Sabha and Vajpayee does not care who represents the party. He wants
#
to make sure that he has the best seat to speak in parliament. That's his self-image, right. And
#
parliament in that period, right, is a Nehruvian consensus. Even if you're not part of the Congress,
#
you broadly believe in a Nehruvian consensus to be respectable in parliament. You have to accommodate
#
the Nehruvian consensus and Vajpayee does that. And he does that not because he's half a congressman
#
as his right-wing critics allege, but that is what you have to behave to get respectability in
#
Congress of that period. So that is the first liberalizing influence of Vajpayee given his
#
social background. The other which is the, you know, has led to some controversy in the book is
#
his longtime companion Rajkumari Kaul. They are in love when Vajpayee is 17, she is 16 in Gwalior.
#
They study in the same college together, but it doesn't happen I think because the families oppose.
#
But they meet a couple of decades later and at that time Rajkumari Kaul is married and Vajpayee
#
then has a long-standing relationship with her. Her husband Mr. Kaul, Rajkumari Kaul and Vajpayee
#
live together, right. And she is Indira Gandhi's second cousin. She's a remarkable woman. I think
#
one of the most under studied political women of the 20th century in that she plays a role
#
in liberalizing one of the greatest politicians of 20th century India namely Vajpayee. She has
#
long discussions on him say on the Ayodhya movement. She's approached through the demolition
#
of Babri Masjid. And she's a key part of the puzzle in trying to understand why someone like
#
Vajpayee with Vajpayee's background began to be seen as a moderate. No, no. And you know, I found
#
it fascinating how you've quoted Vajpayee at one point as saying, quote, I am unmarried, but not.
#
So that was fascinating. I wanted to explore sort of a couple of interesting facets of Vajpayee's
#
personality here. And one is even though Advani who we'll speak about later had an actual
#
cosmopolitan background and all of that, Vajpayee in many ways is also fairly cosmopolitan in the
#
sense that, you know, in that 95 meeting that you write about where Advani says that he'll be
#
the prime ministerial face of the BJP, Vajpayee cautions him by quoting Hazrat Nizamuddin. And he
#
says, Delhi to Bahudur hai. And you know, he's a man who likes Bhang pakoras. He makes prawn curry.
#
He likes his whiskey. You describe him as an epicurean. So it seems very interesting that,
#
and this is something that is also say common with Advani whose background would make you expect this
#
much more, but he's also, you know, Advani is also into English literature and all that.
#
And the interesting thing is that where their political vision or perhaps a political vision
#
that they are sort of driven to by circumstances can be exclusionary and can have a narrow vision
#
of what a person in India is or what a Hindu is in their lived reality, in the concrete outside
#
the abstract, in the world of the concrete, they are actually quite cosmopolitan and syncretic
#
and absorbing all of these different cultures and all of that. And this about Vajpayee seemed
#
very interesting to me. What was also fascinating though, which is sort of a counterpoint to that
#
is you quote a family friend of his saying quote, from an early age, Vajpayee resented
#
English speaking Indians, but he was also fascinated by them. That's the story of his life.
#
Stop quote. And this has multiple resonances. You know, first of all, to what extent do you
#
feel that this was true and not just something that this person was saying. Did it change with
#
Rajkumari call who was earlier Rajkumari Huxer. And as you pointed out, second cousin of Indira
#
Gandhi, to what extent did she change that? Because, you know, she was fluent in English
#
and obviously brought a lot more of these influences. And to what extent does that sort
#
of resentment towards English speaking elites linger on and shape the politics today? Because
#
it is true that a lot of Indian politics has been shaped in a top down way from English speaking
#
elites who are disconnected with the rest of the country. And it is natural and rational,
#
you know, to imagine resentment towards that. Yeah, I think that that's a key way to understand
#
the RSS, this insecurity and this anger at English speaking elites like me, Amit, like,
#
and this made my life very hard when I started doing interviews, you know, but I, and the thing
#
is, I didn't pretend to be otherwise, right? I didn't pretend that, you know, I was pretty clear,
#
look, I grew up in Bandra, that I've gone to, you know, Harvard and Princeton, like, why? And,
#
but at the same time, they want you to know their story. So it's a complicated, you know,
#
it's a complicated relationship. You talk about Vajpayee, but you know, Advani is even more
#
syncretic. Yes, he came from an English speaking background, he knew, which is defined as, you know,
#
English before you know any other Indian language, right? He did. I mean, he knew English before he
#
knew Hindi. But at the same time, he, the kind of Hinduism that is practiced amongst Indies of that
#
period in Karachi is a very syncretic one. He is in his house, you have Sikh rituals, you know,
#
that are practiced. His mother used to go to a Sufi shrine, precisely the kind of shrine that
#
the RSS, the Hegdevar oppose, which we discussed earlier. So it's a syncretic background and he's
#
English speaking, he's playing tennis. As I mentioned, you have to understand, Advani is to
#
understand him through the catastrophe of partition and his desire to make his family and India whole
#
again. That sense he comes across as a much more sympathetic character in this book than the
#
cartoonish versions of him, you know, wearing that hat in the Rat Yatra, right? Saying that here's a
#
man who is really shaped by these grand forces of history that he's trying to, you know, come to
#
terms with after so many years. And ironically, Amit, the quality that pole vaults Advani into
#
the heart of Hindu nationalism is the fact that he speaks English. So Atan Bihari Vajpayee becomes
#
an MP in 1957 and also leader of the party, the Jansan in parliament, even though they had, I think,
#
only three MPs. And Deendya Lupadhyay, himself a dhoti wearing, Hindi speaking type, realizes very
#
quickly that Lutyens Delhi is English speaking. So if you want to speak to journalists, you want to
#
speak to diplomats. I mean, you know, he has the same insight that Arnab Goswami has had like 50
#
years later. But the difference is that Deendya Lupadhyay says, look, I need somebody to help
#
Vajpayee navigate this English speaking world. And who's the English speaking person we have in our
#
midst? It's Lal Krishna Advani who happens to be in Rajasthan. That's the immediate reason that he
#
is moved as secretly to Vajpayee in 1957. So it's this very complicated relationship between the
#
English speaking world and Hindu nationalism, given that that was a reason for the rise of
#
Advani himself. Right. And of course, once Vajpayee gets much bigger, his political constituency
#
becomes the English speaking liberals compared to Advani. Right. Even though the English speaking
#
types who get into the BJP, Chandan Mitra, Swapam Das Gupta, Vajpayee can't relate to any of them.
#
They are all Advani's men. So, you know, this is a, it's a, it's a fascinating thread that runs
#
through this book without, and I like it also because it's a contradictory thread. There's no
#
clear, you know, it's like a river that is kind of meandering up and down there, the relationship
#
between English speaking resentment and Hindu nationalism. In fact, there's a very telling
#
quote in your book about the time where, you know, Advani was sent to Delhi to help out Vajpayee
#
and you quote an RSS man active during that period as saying, quote, there are two types of Indians,
#
those who use Western toilets and those who use Indian toilets. We use Indian toilets,
#
but we need some people who use Western toilets, stop quote, which is why, you know, Advani is
#
sort of send them. Another sort of very interesting thing about Advani is that this sort of impression
#
of Advani as a hardliner and Vajpayee as a moderate, and I think there is perhaps much
#
more truth to Vajpayee's moderation, but Advani was sort of, you know, circumstances almost forced
#
him to take this hardline stand because first of all, in 1985, he's kind of, you know, pitchforked
#
into the leadership of the party when Vajpayee has to go because, you know, all the Hindu vote has
#
gone to Rajiv Gandhi and all of that. And then over a period of time, he, you know, becomes hardline
#
out of circumstance. Now I'm struck by a bunch of quotes about him. In fact, and one is of course,
#
from Balraj Madhok, who was opposed to both Advani and Vajpayee and Balraj Madhok called Advani a
#
quote, boneless wonder who does not have his own character or opinion, stop quote. And much later,
#
you know, you quote Arun Shuri is saying of the time in the cabinet together in the Vajpayee
#
government that Advani was the second most powerful man in the country. The most powerful was a man
#
who last met him, you know, indicating that he is so impressionable, as it were. Tell me a bit about
#
Advani's beliefs. Like we've already sort of spoken about, you know, Vajpayee the orator and,
#
you know, Advani the organizer coming together and that's how they start. But Advani also becomes
#
not bad at orating at a later period in time. But so he's an organizer. He's looking after the party.
#
The party has an ethic. It is a team ethic. He has a cosmopolitan background. You know,
#
he went to St. Patrick's and, you know, you describe an incident about I think in the early
#
2000s, he goes to Pakistan and he goes to that school and they sing for he's a jolly good fellow
#
for him. And, you know, his eyes missed over, as you point out. So he is that kind of man. He's also
#
what is the sense that you get about, you know, what his views are like? What does he really
#
believe? What is he driven by? Like Swapan Dasgupta at one point said, as you've quoted in your book,
#
that Advani was a different man before and after the Rath Yatra, which is interesting. But I think
#
that is, you know, he would have reached a bit of an age there where your basic character doesn't
#
change. So are these people political animals who are responding to incentives in the political
#
marketplace, which later determines the way that they are looked at? Or at their core,
#
is there something else which you can point to? Like with Vajpayee, certainly you can say that he
#
had things that he stood up for and strong beliefs. For example, when, you know, the
#
Golwalkar asked him to break up his relationship with the Rajkumari, he just flat out refused.
#
And, you know what, give me a sense of Advani in that sense. You know, the narrative spine of this
#
book, Amit, is Vajpayee and Advani. So it was very important for me to get their personalities right.
#
Very important, right? And to have that, look, people change, as you said, people change over
#
80 years, but they also have to have some part of their personalities that are constant.
#
And after thinking about this for three years, I realized that the two core personality traits of
#
Advani, right? One is loyalty. You know, he's defined by loyalty, you know, and it's a trait
#
that, you know, is very welcome in the RSS. And the second trait is underconfidence. He's constantly
#
unsure. He has this hamlet-like quality where, you know, he's constantly unsure to do or not to
#
do, to be or not to be, you know, in a sense Vajpayee doesn't have that at all. So right from
#
the beginning, when he meets Vajpayee, he's in awe of Vajpayee's speaking talent. And Advani
#
himself is very underconfident about his speaking talent, right? He's an unnatural politician in that
#
sense. But, you know, he's loyal. He spends a lot of time with the party carder, the party carder
#
like that. Vajpayee has no time for them. Vajpayee only has time for parliament. So over time, he
#
develops this hardline image, Amit, for three reasons. One is that, look, he listens to the
#
party. He listens to the RSS. He spends morning to evening, like going to party headquarters,
#
listening to what people are saying. Vajpayee doesn't do that at all. And the party is far more
#
hardline than parliament. So Advani becomes the face of the party. That's the first reason why he
#
gets a hardline image. The second reason he gets a hardline image is that Vajpayee liked that,
#
because Vajpayee understood the fact that you need an orator and an organizer. And at the times in
#
which the RSS was tiring of him, he would say, look, if you're tiring of me, I'll put a different
#
party president that you like who will also be loyal to me. And that was Advani. So they needed
#
the jugalbandi. Vajpayee understood it. Advani understood it also. The third reason he's given
#
the impression of being hardline today is the ratyatra, right? And the Babri Marjid demolition.
#
No question. That's the defining feature of Advani. I point out in the book, though, that
#
ratyatra, which I'm critical if you've read that, was not because he was a religious zealot at all.
#
It was sheer naked political opportunism. That in August 1990, the V.P. Singh government announces
#
the Mandal Commission report, where you have reservations in central government jobs for
#
OBCs or backward castes. This immediately sets off panic among the upper caste base of the BJP.
#
And Advani is able to see that if this continues like this, there will be a split between the
#
upper caste and the backward caste. And if it's just upper caste, the BJP cannot come to power.
#
So literally a month later, he announces the ratyatra, where he travels from Somnath to
#
Ayodhya, or he plans to travel to Ayodhya. The Ayodhya movement is by that time already seven
#
years old. So nothing explains the timing of the ratyatra, except that literally a month earlier,
#
you had the V.P. Singh government. And I would say that that is the sheer political opportunism,
#
rather than deeply held Islamophobia. And a sign of that is that in all his speeches that you see
#
there, I don't want to defend him, he's very careful not to criticize Muslims directly,
#
which is something you hear every day in this government. He's very, very careful. And even
#
when the crowd starts saying something against Prophet Muhammad or something, Advani is the first
#
to shush them up, saying that's not what this is about. That's what gives him this hamlet-like
#
quality, that his own social instincts and the political persona that frankly is good for him.
#
Like it's good to be called a hardliner because the parliament and English-speaking liberals will
#
hate you, but the RSS and the carder will say, okay, he's one of us. But that's what gives
#
Advani this complexity. And I don't want to defend him or anything like that. But certainly as the
#
beginning of the book shows, Amit, he could have become prime minister in 96, but he understands,
#
or you can say underconfident, or he understands his own limitations that if he is prime minister,
#
the BJP will never get allies. And so you need someone like Vajpayee. So he gets Vajpayee out of
#
cold storage and Vajpayee is then the PM candidate and then Vajpayee becomes PM again, 96, 98 and
#
99 and Advani serves under him. And I just think that's remarkable because how many politicians you
#
know are aware of their own limitations. Certainly today's Congress and Rahul Gandhi are not aware
#
of their limitations. And in that sense, certainly when you read this book, the 100% negative image
#
of Advani some of you may have will be diluted just a little bit. And the 100% positive image of
#
Vajpayee that some of you have will be diluted just a little bit. They were a jugalbandi. They
#
were at some level playacting. And in a sense responding to incentives, before I get to my next
#
question, a couple of asides and the first is an aside to an aside. So it may seem completely
#
irrelevant. But I remember, you know, there used to be this news magazine in the early 90s called
#
News Track, which would go around in video tapes. And I remember, you know, watching an episode of
#
News Track where there was an interview of Devi Lal. And it was fabulous if someone can find the
#
clip, I don't know if it exists, where he is basically sitting in I think a banyan and a dhoti
#
in the garden on a chair with his feet up. And the camera angle is, you know, at his shoes. So his
#
shoes are really big and he is kind of in the background. And the interviewer asked him,
#
ki Devi Lal ji apne apne bete ko chief minister kyu banaya? And Devi Lal says, toh kya Bhajan Lal ke
#
chore ko bana? Which is a masterful answer. But the reason this aside came to me was because of the
#
next aside, which is again about how circumstances seems to shape politics in the sense that
#
VP Singh went in for all the Mandal stuff he did partly because Devi Lal was agitating and he
#
felt politically insecure. And then Advani responds to that with, you know, the rat yatra.
#
And then whatever happens happens and it, you know, it's like a domino effect of one thing after
#
another. And you wonder what would have happened if the chain was broken. Now, tell me a little bit
#
about sort of the relationship between Advani and Vajpayee. Like at one level, their backgrounds are
#
pretty different. You know, you point out how Vajpayee is from Gwalior, the orthodox strand of
#
colonial era Hinduism, as it were. Advani is from the reformist strand. He is, you know, in Karachi,
#
where he's going to St. Patrick's and he's playing tennis and the Guru Granth Sahib is at home. In
#
one sense, he's almost like his family is partly Nanakpanthi, it would seem. And then they both
#
join the RSS and they come together and you describe their first meeting where, you know,
#
Shyamaprasad Mukherjee goes to Kota to campaign before the 51-52 elections. And because he's not
#
great at Hindi, the RSS sends Vajpayee, who was earlier the editor of their magazine, to help him
#
out. And Advani is just smitten. And he says about Vajpayee, he describes him later as, quote,
#
a poet who had drifted into politics. Something was smoldering within him and the fire in his belly
#
produced an unmistakable glow on his face. Stop quote. And at a sense, it almost, you know,
#
it seems like, and they're both deeply emotional people, as Vasundhara Rajesh India tells you,
#
I think, at another point of the story. And it seems to me like a beautiful sort of bromance
#
that is developing through the book that these are such different people watched by much more
#
flamboyant, given to expression, slightly more colorful life. While Advani, despite the
#
cosmopolitan background, is a very stable personality, very uxorius, if I might use that
#
word. I shouldn't use jargon, but uxorius, however you pronounce it means someone absolutely devoted
#
to his wife, which is, of course, a very formidable Kamla Jagdiani, who also kind of stays in the
#
background, just like Rajkumari Kaul. What was the relation? Like you've also spoken about how,
#
you know, in later in the 60s and the 70s, they'd go and watch movies together, and they just loved
#
each other's company. And yet there is a sort of drift when, you know, the first watch by government
#
actually spends his time because watch by realizes that there isn't enough talent in the RSS. And so
#
he brings in all these other people and centralizes a lot of things in the PMO. And Advani is a bit
#
resentful. What's the personal relationship been growing through the years? Like, Advani makes in
#
a sense, a supreme sacrifice in 95, where he says that, you know, watch by should be the PM candidate,
#
when the whole party is just aghast at that and, you know, he is your best choice. Tell me a bit
#
about that relationship and your sense of it. And was it moving in parts to sort of, you know, look
#
at how that unfolds through the years? So, I mean, I look at this relationship, this jugalbandi is
#
having three different strands. The first strand, which is, I think the, you know, the one that is
#
essential is that they like each other, they like hanging out. So think about your listeners,
#
to think about friends you like to hang out with, there's no formula for it. Like, you know, you may
#
like somebody else, but you may not like like shooting the breeze for an evening with somebody,
#
you know, somebody else you may disagree and argue with, but hang out with, they were like that. So
#
they, you know, they, and it's hard to reduce that chemistry into three or four equations. So they
#
like Bollywood films, right? That was an aspect of the personal relationship. They like to eat,
#
right? They used to go out, though Advani was vegetarian, watch by was anything, but, you know,
#
they would discuss, you know, each other's family. So they would do that kind of thing. They had a
#
similar emotional question that they could, you know, cry and laugh at the same time. There was
#
definitely a fanboy element. Advani, when he met as the quote that you read out, now Advani was,
#
you know, startled by watch by, and look, I think one of the big strengths of the book is I never
#
met Vajpayee. And I mean this because anyone I know who met Vajpayee was bedazzled by, you know,
#
he's any journalist, anyone who sees it in parliament, he could make time stop. And I
#
would encourage your listeners to go at least on YouTube and see some of his speeches, you know,
#
even when, you know, he's being calculated this, that he, you know, unlike many politicians who
#
try to convince you, Vajpayee could make you laugh. He could make you smile. You know, his sentences
#
had an angularity to it. He, in his best sense, he had the ability to uplift you. Now the problem
#
with that is that may not be the person he is. Many cases, many times it is, sometimes it's not,
#
but you can get totally, you know, emotional and irrational if you met him. So many of the people
#
who are a little critical of my book for being, you know, because of sort of puncturing this grand
#
Vajpayee image, which I do, while at the same time saying he was one of India's greatest prime
#
ministers, but look, he was a human being and he was a politician are people who met him and
#
who people who've been blinded by that, right? I have not, and I'm thankful for that because
#
had I met Vajpayee, this book would definitely have come across as a fanboy book, right? I don't
#
think India has had a greater political orator. And I think part of the personal equation between
#
Vajpayee and Advani was Advani was a fanboy. He was a fanboy of Vajpayee. The second strand of that
#
relationship was professional, something that we discussed earlier, that Hindu nationalism needs a
#
moderate, needs a hardliner, needs an orator, needs an organizer. And both of them fitted that
#
part. And, you know, when the mood of the nation was for moderation, Vajpayee was in front. When
#
the mood of the nation was for radicalism, Advani was propped in front. And by the way, as an aside,
#
I think that is the most remarkable part of the relationship that in a country as hierarchical as
#
India, you have a relationship that is able to switch spots, not once, but twice. So it's like,
#
you know, Obama now serving under Biden, Biden had served under Obama, Obama now serving under
#
Biden. And then a few years later, Biden once again serving under Obama. It's unthinkable,
#
but that's literally what Vajpayee and Advani did. And that was also because they were professionally
#
compatible, right? In a way in which Advani and Murali Mano Joshi were competing with the same
#
spot. There was no jugalbandhi there. That's why they didn't like each other. Or Subramanian Swami
#
and Madho were competing with the same spot as the face and voice of Hindu nationalism as Vajpayee
#
did. Whereas Vajpayee and Advani were perfectly compatible in a jugalbandhi that is at least in
#
part a requirement of Hindu nationalism, which is both a party seeking political power, as well as
#
a social movement seeking to transform society. So it's like the communists in that respect.
#
And that's the second strand, professional compatibility. The third strand, however,
#
and that's like, literally, that's the taste that I want to leave you with in the book is ideology.
#
That it's an ideology that focuses on teamwork. And even when the things went so bad between
#
Vajpayee and Advani, for Advani it was between 1998 and 2004 when they were in power. And for
#
Vajpayee it was between 1986 and 1993 or 1994. They never divorced. So it was like one of these
#
odd couples squabbling in the park that you see and you're like, they're going to call the police,
#
but they go home and cook for each other. It's like that. And what keeps that couple united is
#
a deep ideological belief in the sanctity of marriage. That's what these people had. And
#
a good sign of that is the end of the book, which, you know, I'm sorry, please read the book. Don't
#
just see, hear the podcast, but at the end at Vajpayee's, you know, just after his funeral,
#
Advani has to speak and Advani could have referred to Vajpayee's 60 year relationship with Vajpayee
#
in terms of personality or in terms of personal chemistry or in terms of professional compatibility.
#
But he focuses on ideology. He says that thinking about Vajpayee will help us live according to the
#
not to the ideology and principles that the RSS has laid for us or words to that effect. That's
#
very telling because even after all these decades, even after all the love, the warmth,
#
the professional compatibility, the marriage was kept together by an ideology.
#
You know, that's fascinating. And I'll go off on another sort of brief digression by something
#
that you said and something that you wrote. What you said was that you're glad you didn't meet
#
Vajpayee because then you might have been biased by it. And this could have been a fanboy story.
#
In your book, at one point, you also write about how Advani, realizing consciously that he needs
#
to woo English speaking journalists. And so he gets Swapandas Gupta and Chandan Mitra and so on
#
into the fold. And since then, they've been complete fanboys. And equally, I know, sort of,
#
quote unquote, liberal acquaintances of mine, who have been granted a meeting with Rahul Gandhi,
#
and suddenly their view just flipped and they are just in complete awe of the guy and no, no,
#
he's not as dumb as you think he is and blah, blah, blah. So what happens like, you know,
#
and I'm referring to sort of, if you have any observations about this human trait,
#
that you meet this person in power, who's a public figure, who is nice to you.
#
And suddenly you just flip your independent thinking vanishes. I have seen this so often
#
and it's just so bizarre. It's the power of raw charisma. This is what Max Weber said is a very
#
key component of why politics works and boy did Vajpayee have it, you know, like Advani,
#
I don't think you meet Advani, you say sincere man, you know, if you like him,
#
you know, like whatever educated man, but you know, you won't like with Vajpayee like,
#
you know, journalists will go to talk to him. Journalists have told me to talk to him about
#
some political story and he kind of turned to the window and see, you know,
#
Bajesh Sulo and they go and for five minutes listen to the sound of the rain. I mean,
#
it's mesmerizing, absolutely mesmerizing, which is, and that's of course at a personal level,
#
at a political level, Vajpayee's command over what to say, what not to say was an enormous
#
political tool. Like to give you one example, again, this charisma, he goes to Pakistan in
#
the late nineties on the bus, Namor bus yatra, and he gives a speech in Pakistan to all the elites
#
of Pakistan. And he just totally floors there, both in the way he quotes Urdu and the way he
#
speaks, but also in like the sentences he uses. So he gives the sentence and I put it in the book,
#
I'm saying it in English, which is he says that, you know, some people feel that by coming to
#
Pakistan, I have put a mohar or I put a stamp on their existence, right? So that's the beautiful
#
sentence because what he's saying is, and the Pakistan audience understands is that people
#
in the RSS who believe in Aakhan Bharat, who believe that Pakistan should not exist in the
#
first place, feel that by Vajpayee going there, that he has put a seal on Pakistan, right? But
#
he never has to say it in that complicated way. He actually, George Orwell, you know, should use
#
Vajpayee as an example, because he, you know, he shows without telling. And then the next sentence
#
is remarkable. He says, I'm here to tell you that Pakistan's existence doesn't need a stamp from
#
anybody. And the crowd there goes bananas because they get exactly what he's trying to say. At the
#
same time, nobody in India makes a complaint. The RSS doesn't say anything because at least formally
#
the sentence seems okay. You know, so this charisma that you're talking about is able to
#
floor people, charm parliament, but it's also able to say things and not say things that is able to
#
paper who are the very different and sometimes conflicting constituencies of Hindu nationalism.
#
And how much of Vajpayee is Mukhota? Like how much of this is, do you think is your field,
#
is performative and how much is sort of the real Vajpayee? Because it seems to me at different
#
points in your narrative, you get a sense of a man who does believe in certain things and is willing
#
to stand up. Like for example, his relationship with Rajkumari when Golwalkar asked him to break
#
that down or even his sort of stubbornness towards like when he forms the BJP in 1980,
#
and he's saying Gandhian socialism and we won't talk about the other. And he kind of abandons
#
the Hindu vote. So to say what you would imagine, all of which, you know, then goes to the Congress
#
and the RSS stops working for them, but he kind of sticks to his gun till the election of 84,
#
which is so disastrous. So I did get the sense through the book that there are certain core
#
beliefs that he will not compromise on no matter what the politics. So tell me a little bit more
#
about your sense of the man in those terms that between Mukhota and man, you know, what's happening
#
there? Are there lines he will not cross? So good question. I mean, you know, despite having spent
#
three years and reading everything he's written, I don't have an answer. And that's something I
#
learned even when I worked with Naseema Rao that you think you know, Naseema Rao, I was focusing
#
only on Naseema Rao and it was only a biography. And even so, there were parts of him I didn't
#
understand, you know, and I then began to realize that, you know, if I think about my parents or
#
if I think about my wife or I think about my daughter, you know, I know them so well, sometimes
#
they surprise you. And I'm sure that your listeners and you also Amit, you think you know somebody
#
very well. And then sometimes you realize you don't know there's parts to them that you can
#
never quite make out. And even while writing it, I wanted to leave that like human beings are not
#
mathematical equations where you figure them out because they sometimes surprise you. And at least
#
I hope that with Advani and Vajpayee, I make them living and breathing and you come away knowing
#
something about them, but they also seem to have this ability to sometimes surprise you, right?
#
So that's how I sort of told the story of Vajpayee, especially this sort of core conflict
#
that you talk about saying that, you know, is he really a moderate or is he putting on a mask?
#
Right. And at times it seemed he was wearing a mask. At times he seemed that, you know,
#
his instincts were liberal. And I didn't fight that. I didn't try to paper that over. And I
#
didn't try to kind of explain it at the end, except to say that, you know, large and great
#
personalities are complex figures. So they are like Narsimha Rao, for example, had this deep
#
vision for India, but was also a corrupt man, right? Corrupt man in the sense he definitely
#
bribed the GMM MPs. I provide evidence for that. At the same time, he was a frugal man. The money
#
wasn't for himself. So, you know, it's a complex, it could be very petty to his family, Narsimha Rao.
#
Gandhi, you know, he's not a good family man, didn't treat his sons very well. At the same time,
#
you know, this remarkable human being, you know, outside of his family. And I think this desire
#
to have just the one answer I push against and I push against because I don't know, you know,
#
and maybe if I spend even five years more years on this book and only focused on Vajpayee, I may
#
not have been able to get to the core of your answer, except to say that I think in a lot of
#
cases Vajpayee's first instinct was quote unquote liberal, but that was accompanied by this worry
#
or this anxiety that he was always a guest artist to the party, right? So there is an element to that,
#
but there is a magic to human beings and there is a magical inconsistency to human beings
#
that sometimes precludes me from answering a question like the one you asked.
#
No, and in fact, it's quite possible that Vajpayee himself wouldn't be able to answer it because
#
sometimes we are a mystery even to ourselves. And, you know, one of the other tropes of my show,
#
which keeps coming up is about how everyone contains multitudes and the sort of the three
#
Indian figures I always cite when I'm talking about, you know, how true that statement is,
#
Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and Vajpayee. You know, it was very sad when Vajpayee died recently that
#
the response on social media especially was so polarized that either he was, you know,
#
the best prime minister we ever had and there is some truth to that or he was, you know, a Hindu
#
nationalist demagogue who was just othering Muslims and there is a little bit of truth to that as
#
well. Let's, you know, before we move on to talking about the Bharatiya Jansang, you know,
#
that that first leg of the political movement where Vajpayee and Advani are really together,
#
one final question on Advani, per se, because one of the interesting bits of trivia that struck me
#
from your book is that he was also a sort of a part-time film critic and that he wrote film
#
reviews for the magazine The Organizer. And in fact, at one point when, you know, he criticized
#
Richard Attenberg's Gandhi because he said that why are foreigners making a film on Gandhi aren't
#
Indians good enough to do it? And that led to a tangential question which is neither about Advani
#
nor about cinema, but more about sort of protectionism and the Swadeshi Jagran Manj kind
#
of sentiment that foreign things are bad, Indian things are good. And obviously the economic logic
#
behind that is complete rubbish. But I've come to realize that the point of that sentiment is
#
that insular protectionist sentiment is not even so much sort of economic, though there is of course
#
a political logic of it that your base of small traders will want to be protected from imports
#
and all that, but is also in a sense psychological and it's this distrust and resentment and hatred
#
of the other who comes from outside because of, you know, these centuries of colonization and
#
invasion and all of that. To what extent do you think that what is otherwise a sort of an economic
#
position in the modern world comes from this deep-rooted psychological insecurity?
#
Just two points on that. Before we talk about Janasthan and BJP and the economic question,
#
right? You know, you mentioned that Advani was a film critic, he was a full-time film critic.
#
And just as an interesting anecdote to those of you who want to do research after this, that
#
in Advani's own memoir, I think I had read, if my memory serves right, that, you know, he had spent
#
some time with the organizer and he had a pen name Netra, N-E-T-R-A. So then of course, my researcher
#
mindset, let me go and find these articles, which was a huge pain because they're looking at articles
#
written in the 1960s. So I went to this archive, that archive and in the 1960s and all is not
#
digitized. It's, you know, it's a physical thing and you have to kind of open it. Some of it is
#
in microfilm. So it's a lot of effort, but then I was able to pick out that some of, you know,
#
Netra's criticisms, including like saying that, you know, when you want to make a film on Gandhi,
#
why are we going to Richard Attenborough? It would eventually a decade later come out as a film,
#
but even then he was criticizing this. So, you know, this, this is a part about this process
#
that I quite like. You get a clue somewhere, you know, I actually, Shalapoon as a kid. So maybe I
#
just, you know, if I can't do the real thing, I do like the fake thing, which is a researcher,
#
Shalapoon, which is you get a tip like this, then you go to one library, go to another library,
#
go to a microfilm. You know, this just doing that one sentence, finding out a couple of his reviews
#
took me a lot of time, but it was worth it, you know, because someone like you will read it and
#
you will immediately notice it and use, and it's a show. Don't tell like, don't tell me that
#
Advani was a reviewer, you know, write some of that, you know, put him giving some of those reviews
#
that itself gives you something about the man. Right. So the thank you for noticing that because
#
otherwise we could have been wasted. Right. But the larger question you ask is about this instinct of
#
protectionism that Hindu nationalism have. Let me push back a little bit against that Amit because
#
I spent a lot of time in the book, arguing that Hindu nationalism doesn't really have a theory
#
of what to do once you have state power. So it has this theory on how you get state power
#
in a democracy by uniting Hindus, othering Muslims, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
#
But if you say, what is the Hindu nationalist view on foreign policy, on economics, on welfare
#
scheme? It doesn't have it. You have Hindu nationalists over time who have expressed views
#
on it. So just like you have Arun Shourie, who is a strong pro marketer who I would call a Hindu
#
nationalist, you know, broadly, even though he's currently fighting with the institution,
#
his cultural critiques, et cetera, et cetera, on Marxism or against reservation, all of that
#
have Hindu nationalist elements to it. At the same time, you have his former close friend,
#
Guru Murthy, who was with the Swadeshi Jagran Manj. Much earlier, as I point out in the book itself,
#
you had Subrahmanyam Swami and Balraj Madho, who wanted a frontal assault on Indira Gandhi's
#
socialism. But you have Deendayal Upadhyaya and Vajpayee who push against it. And they push against
#
it not for ideological reasons, but they feel that the Indian voter was actually not free market at
#
that time. So even if they were rejecting Indira Gandhi, they were not rejecting the Nehruvian
#
consensus. And that tells you in the book itself that on this, there's plenty of diversity within
#
Hindu nationalism. So even this protectionist instinct that you talk about is not in evidence
#
when they come to power. I mean, I would argue, and the book does argue that Yashwant Sinha and
#
Jeswant Singh, who are the finance ministers of the Vajpayee government between 1998 and 2004,
#
were the most kind of anti-status pro market finance ministers India has had. And I would say that,
#
you know, and maybe this is betraying my own ideological impulses, so feel free to disagree
#
with you. That did India a lot of good in those years, you know, between 1998 and 2000. Once again,
#
you know, even when I teach, I say the few times I show you my cards, I wanted to be clear to the
#
listener that there are other cards that one can play, you know. So that's a complex answer to this
#
question that the protectionist instinct is not embedded in Hindu nationalism. It's just not. If
#
you look at the thinkers, if you look at the actions, and therefore to answer the question,
#
why is Narendra Modi's economic policy the way it is, don't look at Hindu nationalism. Don't look
#
at Savarkar. Look at Narendra Modi. Look at the circumstances. If you want to understand demonetization,
#
don't read like Dindyal Upadhyay. Right? So the ideology does some things for you. And that's
#
very important. For example, you can't understand what Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have done on
#
Article 370 without knowing that the Jansan right from the 50s itself has said in the constitution,
#
in their manifesto, if we come to power, this is what we'll do. The citizenship amendment act
#
and the NRC again is based on this ideological obsession with demographics. So to understand
#
those actions of the Modi government or the Vajpayee government, definitely look to ideology.
#
But the Hindu nationalist ideology is silent on 90% of things we, you and me would call governance.
#
Right? So that's, and so there may be individual RSS heads who have a view on it, like Sudarshan
#
did, who was kind of left-wing on economics. And Dattopan Thengri, again, RSS man who founded,
#
you know, India's largest trade union. But there are plenty of others within Hindu nationalism who
#
don't agree with that. That's what makes it remarkable to Amit that on a lot of intellectual
#
areas, it's actually a broad theme that as long as you don't, you know, defeat the party, split
#
the party, you're actually allowed to have various kinds of views within it. No, that's a fair point.
#
And you've revealed your cards, but I'll also, at this point, reveal my cards and point out that
#
the two central figures of your two biographies, Narsimha Rao and Vajpayee, are in my mind, the
#
best prime ministers we've had by far. But here I would again, sort of not exactly push back,
#
but just state a thought that comes to my mind, that if you, you know, Jaswant and Yashwant were
#
good finance ministers, but they were not from the RSS, they were sort of outsiders. Jaswant really,
#
you know, came from the Swatantra party and Yashwant Sinha was an earlier finance minister
#
for another government. And the RSS, like you pointed out about how in the 80s, because the
#
RSS felt that the BJP was ignoring the Hindu world, you know, they reset up the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
#
in a sense. And similarly in 91, when liberalization happened, because they felt that the BJP wasn't
#
strong enough in voicing their opposition to it, they set up the Swadeshi Jagran Manch. So at least
#
from the RSS point of view, you know, there seems to be some continuity and it struck me that this
#
might come not from economic ideology, being pro-free markets or against them or whatever,
#
but just a distrust of foreigners in general. But yeah, but I mean, that's just kind of me thinking
#
aloud. Do you want to respond to that? I mean, I don't know, because, you know, look, there's
#
definitely a nativist instinct in the RSS. The question is to what extent is it articulated in
#
policy? That's what we really care about, right? And I'm like, don't look there, but look, during
#
the Vajpayee government, Amit, there are many other areas where you can see the imprint on the
#
RSS, for example, on teaching of history, right? Actually, RSS didn't care really about that the
#
foreign minister wasn't from the RSS, but they wanted Gudli Malhotra Joshi to be the education
#
or HRD minister. They care about it, right? Equally, when it came to telecom and roads,
#
I point out the RSS supported it because just like the RSS support for GST, it supports their
#
vision of a united India unity. Remember, that's the poor idea, territorial and cultural unity.
#
So you have to think of it in those terms, right? Because when you spend a lot of time thinking
#
about the RSS as the anti-Diluvian protectionist, and then you end up with two prime ministers who,
#
whatever else you say, that's not the frame in which you think about them. So when they have
#
come to power, that's not the frame in which they have operated, right? And even today, you know,
#
on the disputes that the RSS, the say the Swadeshi Jagran March or the RSS trade unions are having
#
with the Modi government, you know, on, let's say on some of the economic reforms that they're
#
afraid to do. It's not that Mohan Bhagwat is taking a side of the Swadeshi Jagran March against
#
Modi. He's like, look, this is a family, figure it out, you know, which is a healthy attitude,
#
frankly. Yeah, absolutely. And to sort of buttress your point about Modi, there's clearly no ideology
#
there. Like I did this episode with Pooja Mehra, who's written the book called The Lost Decade,
#
which, you know, describes in very fine detail how everything that Modi did in government was
#
shaped by political imperatives when, you know, he was with a jibe of suit boot,
#
ki sarkar was thrown at him and all of that. And he figured that economic reforms would not sell
#
with the public. He instantly kind of moved away from it and went into status populist
#
directions as it were. Now, you know, we'll take a quick commercial break now. And when we come back,
#
I want to talk a lot more about sort of those two legs of the political journey of this great
#
jugalbanti, first the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, and then finally, the Bharatiya Janata Party. So
#
see you after a quick commercial break. On the scene and the unseen, I often speak
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and make art a part of your life. And hey, for a 15% discount, use the code unseen. That's right,
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unseen for 15% off at indiancolours.com. Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen. I'm chatting with
#
Vinay Sitapati on his marvellous book Jugalbandi, the BJP before Modi. And now, you know, we've spoken
#
about sort of the background of Hindu nationalism and, you know, all the different conditions which
#
lead to it sort of coming to being. We've spoken about the different personalities of Advani and
#
Vajpayee and the relationship between them. I want to speak now a little bit about the Bharatiya
#
Jainsang. You know, we spoke about how it originated because after the assassination of
#
Mahatma Gandhi, when the RSS was sort of thrust into the wilderness and demonized and banned for
#
a few months, they realized that we need to have a political voice. And, you know, Golwalkar,
#
despite being initially hesitant, said, okay, let's go for it and supplied his RSS, Pracharaks and his
#
RSS people to this new party led by Shyamaprasad Mukherjee. And then, you know, who dies young,
#
so at 51. So, and there's an interesting counterfactual there. And if we have time,
#
I'll ask you about those. But then Vajpayee and Advani take over the party. Now, this,
#
the next phase that happens is very interesting to me because what you point out is that for about
#
15 to 18 years, they have to function within what you call the Nehruvian consensus. So,
#
what do you mean by that? And tell me a little bit about what it implies and which are the areas
#
where Vajpayee and Advani feel that they can compromise because they have to go with the
#
temper of the times and which are the areas that are so core to them that they never compromise on
#
those? Amit, I think the Nehruvian consensus, the way I use it in the book, has three pillars.
#
Pillar one, which is the most controversial pillar is the relationship between the state and
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Hinduism. Now, I don't want to say the sentence Nehru was anti-Hindu. I mean, the BJP says that
#
all the time. I don't think that's right. But Nehru certainly was worried that a Hindu majority
#
country where the majority of Hindus were religious Hindus, it wasn't just they were
#
Hindus by name only, there was a threat that the religion would enter the state. So, just speaking
#
descriptively, objectively, without any value judgment, Nehru definitely intervened in Hinduism,
#
much more than he intervened in other religions. This is the codification of Hindu law, for example.
#
I mean, you know, the other thing that the BJP talks about all the time, which is that, you know,
#
why is Tirupati temple run by three IAS officers? You know, this, of course, is long standing,
#
but it is a grouse that they have that, you know, why has nationalization of temples taken place and
#
not other religions? I think part of the reason was that Nehru felt that this force had to be
#
controlled. Otherwise, it would go against his modernizing experiment. And part of it was
#
that he felt that he was a Hindu. So, as a Hindu, he had the right and the legitimacy to intervene
#
in Hindu affairs, especially because Hinduism doesn't have an authoritative church or an
#
authoritative text. So, the modern Nehruvian state became the vehicle for speaking and reforming
#
Hinduism, right? Which is the BJP and the Jansang's counter to that has always been, but Nehru is not
#
really a Hindu. But Nehru believed that. On the other hand, he did not think, especially when it
#
came to dealing with post-partition Muslims, that he had the same legitimacy or the Congress party
#
had the same legitimacy to deal with Muslim affairs. On hindsight, you can say that he was
#
being a little short sighted because even though he had, you know, I wouldn't say noble, but he had
#
a pretty idealistic aim here. It has been, you know, it does expose that the state has not been
#
even handed when it comes to religion. And it has definitely given the BJP an issue from an issue
#
from an issue where there was none. And I think those of your listeners who don't like the BJP,
#
I think the first thing you should do is to admit this and then to say, but so what, you know,
#
and this was his particular logic. So I think that's the first pillar of the Nehruvian consensus,
#
which is that a particular worry that Hinduism and traditional Hinduism should stay out of the
#
state. Nehru of course didn't have a worry that Islam would enter the Indian state because Muslims
#
were a minority, but he did have this special body when it came to Hinduism. Second, Amit, and
#
you know, I'm a fan of your podcast enough to know that the second pillar, something you don't like,
#
which is the role of the state in the economy, in society, the, you know, big brother, you know,
#
can see all, knows all. That was a modernizing impulse that, you know, the Madhav Khosla who's
#
been on your podcast before, you know, made it quite clear to your listeners that Nehru's
#
and Amitka's idea of the constitution was premised on the fact that they thought traditional Indian
#
society was incapable of liberal democracy. And so the constitution would be this transformative,
#
you know, and a teaching tool to teach Indians to understand liberal secular democracy. Right.
#
So that I think was the second pillar of the Nehruvian state, which is that a belief that
#
the modern state will be the vehicle for transformation of the Indian economy and society.
#
A third pillar, which had to do more with temperament than policy was this belief that
#
you must respect the protocols of democracy. You must, you know, respect constitutional
#
functionaries. You must respect those, you know, who you actually have power over.
#
To give you just one example, Nehru was remarkably courteous to his chief ministers,
#
the chief ministers during that time, even though, especially after 1950, Nehru completely
#
controlled the Congress party and the chief ministers were totally beholden to him. Yet,
#
as you can see from his letters to chief ministers, he was very respectful of that.
#
So these were the three pillars of the Nehruvian consensus, a particular worry that Hinduism would
#
take over the state. Let me put that in the most neutral way possible. A belief that the state,
#
the heavy handed state would, from the commanding heights, not just transform the economy, but
#
transform Indian society. And third is a temperament in which you respected constitutional
#
functionaries, you know, even when Nehru disagreed with the Supreme Court, as I think Tripu Daman
#
Singh was already come on your podcast, I just feel that when I answer your questions, I also
#
answer that, you know, half your podcast listeners come through. But I think that was the third
#
aspect of it, which is that he was, you know, he treated even the Supreme Court with some respect.
#
He was careful about what he said. So he exemplified this larger democratic temperament. Now,
#
Vajpayee and Advani sort of come onto the national stage at a time when two things are happening,
#
which is putting them on the defensive, which is forcing them to play back foot. One is that
#
the Nehruvian consensus is completely dominant in parliament. And I don't just mean with the
#
Congress party, you know, I think that's a mistake, you know, for people to see that even the
#
non-Congress opposition bought many of the principles of the Nehruvian consensus. So you
#
can say that Rajaji and the Swatantra party, you know, had a slight departure when it came to the
#
role of the state in the economy, but many of the other precepts he agreed. So I would say that most
#
of the parliamentary opposition to the Congress party agreed with about 70 to 80% of the Nehruvian
#
consensus. It was that powerful. And today, when you see a Modi consensus or a Narasimha consensus
#
in India, I think people will find it very hard to remember how much of a colossus Nehru was both
#
in parliament and in India. You know, today they all say, oh, he's a, you know, UP Brahmin or a
#
Kashmiri Brahmin who sort of moved to UP. What's his social base? Is he like Lalu Yadav? I mean,
#
he had a national base and he really stood out as the hope of post-independent India. Now I am
#
critical of him in the book saying that, you know, his self-conscious elitism has brought the Congress
#
party where it is today. So there's something conceptual in that idea, but nonetheless, he was
#
a colossus. So Vajpayee and Advani had to deal with that and Vajpayee in particular, and Vajpayee
#
therefore adopted the Nehruvian consensus because that's what it meant to be respectable in
#
parliament. And as we've discussed before, Vajpayee, the thing he cared about the most was
#
speaking in parliament, charming the opposition. He didn't really care who ran the party and he
#
was very happy for Advani to do that. So that was the first impact on Vajpayee, the Nehruvian
#
consensus. The second reason why the Jansang of that period, now which is the Prakasa party to the
#
BJP, had to fall within the Nehruvian consensus was the murder of Mahatma Gandhi. As we discussed
#
earlier, the Jansang or Hindu nationalism more generally was on the ascendant after partition
#
because what the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS had been complaining about Gandhi and the Congress
#
all this while, namely that the appeasement of the Muslim League would result in the breakage of
#
India actually happened. And we don't have evidence for this in terms of elections, but if you just
#
look at the increase in enrollment of Hindu Mahasabha, increase in enrollment of RSS between
#
August 1947 and February 1948, which is when Gandhi is assassinated, it's definitely on the ascendant.
#
And people I speak to within the RSS and the Jansang of that period really felt that this was
#
their chance, that we had an 80% Hindu majority, half the Muslim population, no Britishers, this
#
was their chance. The murder of the Mahatma, who was the leader of Hindus, ironically made the RSS
#
and Hindu Mahasabha seem like a party that was opposed to the interest of the vast majority of
#
moderate Hindus. And so, the RSS was banned, Hindu Mahasabha wasn't banned, but every time
#
there was an election, whoever was opposing the Jansang candidate would bring up saying that they
#
have the blood of Gandhi on their hands. And as I point out, the evidence is not there. So they
#
always had this sense that they had to mainstream themselves and it took them a very long time.
#
And the way to mainstream themselves, Amit, was to basically fall within the Nehruvian consensus
#
on which 80 to 90% didn't disagree. They did disagree on the role of Hinduism in the state,
#
but that was something they downplayed in the initial years. The third thing, Amit, that aided
#
them in falling into the Nehruvian consensus is something that we discussed earlier, which is that
#
on 80% of issues we call governance, Hindu nationalism doesn't really have a view. So when
#
it came to foreign policy of Nehru, non-aligned movement, when it came to his economics, sure,
#
individual Jansang members like Balraj Madhok had problems, Subramaniam Swami had a problem,
#
but they couldn't rely on ideology to make that case. And that made it much easier for Atal Bihari
#
Vajpayee to go with that. And as evidence of that point that I give you is that once the central
#
hall of parliament, which is sort of the heart of where the gossip and the chai is drunk in
#
parliament, when that consensus changes after Narsimha Rao, especially with regard to the
#
relationship between the state and the economy, Vajpayee changes too. And that is something
#
changes too. And that tells you that he doesn't have deep views on this. He just wants to go
#
with whatever makes common sense in parliament. So that's the relationship between Vajpayee and
#
the Nehruvian consensus. The reason I'm giving you a long answer to this, Amit, is too many,
#
both admirers of Vajpayee as well as his right-wing detractors used to say, look,
#
he's half a congressman. He was bedazzled by the charm of Nehru. That's not the case at all.
#
He was a wily politician. He understood very clearly that Nehru was the consensus and he
#
didn't want to break from the consensus. And that's also why the RSS supported Vajpayee when it came
#
to these quote unquote left-wing views. Yeah. And you know, one, like there is something in
#
this journey of Vajpayee and his strategy towards sort of dealing with politics that comes down all
#
the way to the present day to the, you know, even the way Modi and Amit Shah approach politics,
#
which is, you know, when, as you pointed out in your book, you know, in the first elections,
#
the Jansangh perhaps because partly because of Shyama Prasad Mukherjee's charisma and all that
#
get 3.06% of the vote, but that's more than Hindu Mahasabha and Ram Rajya Party. And therefore
#
the Bharatiya Jansangh automatically becomes the primary Hindu party, so to say. Now one,
#
you've pointed out how because of the political imperative of fitting within the Nehruvian
#
consensus, you know, they sort of moderate themselves. But even later at different points
#
in time, like one of the really fascinating parts of the book is how the political wind
#
is influencing Vajpayee. And for example, you know, after the VHP comes up in 1964 and you have anti
#
cow slaughter becoming an issue, they use that in the 1967 elections, a pivot towards that,
#
you know, with Vijay Rajeshwari being a major patron of the party. And in that elections,
#
they have the second largest vote share after the Congress, but third in terms of seats.
#
And, you know, then you point out about how Vajpayee, which, you know, fans of his
#
prime ministership may recoil a bit to see this, but he supported the bank nationalizations of
#
Indira Gandhi and many of the economic policies because that's the way the political wind was
#
blowing. And I'm struck by this very interesting article you cite, which was written in 1971,
#
which Vajpayee wrote, but under the sort of pen name of Ur Swayamsevak, where he spoke about
#
the need to balance ideology and power and to realize that if you wanted to go with power,
#
you had to at some levels in the political sphere compromise on ideology. And you speak about how,
#
you know, when Goldwalke reads this, he realizes pen name or no pen name, only Vajpayee can write
#
like this. And he calls Vajpayee over to chat with him. And he realizes that Vajpayee in a sense is
#
right, that the RSS needs to take a step back and, you know, let Vajpayee kind of go down this route.
#
Now, this sort of leads me to this larger question that even in modern times, and this is a question
#
I've had, that on the one hand, we see with the BJP today taking Hindutva almost to its logical
#
sort of conclusion where many of the things that they aimed for in that period of time,
#
like the building of temple and the abolition of 370 and all that is gradually being achieved. But
#
at the same time, there is again a trade off to be made between pure ideology and the will to power,
#
so to say, which Amit Shah exemplifies. So on the one hand, you see this ideological purity,
#
which is finding more expression. But on the other hand, you also have a will to power where,
#
for example, under Amit Shah, they'll do what I would call in the political sphere mergers and
#
acquisitions, where they'll buy 50 MPs from this party or, you know, co-op leaders from some other
#
party and all of that. So, you know, in this balance, in this trade off between politics and
#
ideology, where, you know, Vajpayee realized that you have to, you know, you can't go too far
#
towards ideology, politics has to reign supreme, you have to respond to the incentives and the
#
atmosphere of the time, which is why relative liberalizers of the 70s like Balraj Madhok and
#
Subrahmanyam Swami were eventually sidelined. But, you know, if we look at the party today,
#
for example, how do you view this trade off? Does a party risk losing its soul, so to say,
#
if it compromises too much for political purposes? Like, we can look at parties like
#
the Congress and all and say they have no soul at all, so it doesn't really matter. But the BJP
#
is a firmly ideological party and yet it is as will to power in the accumulated organizational
#
wisdom of a century that has got them to where they are today. Well, Amit, that's a deep question,
#
right? And first up, I want to remind your listeners that, you know, I don't think anyone
#
has read the book as carefully as Amit, but that doesn't mean you only hear this podcast and not
#
buy the book. That's what I'm worried about, Amit, because you've read it so carefully that,
#
you know, the reader may feel, you know, why should we buy the book? Please buy the book,
#
it's available on Amazon. No matter how closely and in detail Amit has read the book is not a
#
substitute to buying the book. So I must put an advertisement, Amit, because, you know,
#
you know everything about the book. So I have to... No, I second that. And I mean, in the sense,
#
I second your recommendation. And I have to point out that my listeners, you know, there is a meme
#
on Twitter where people have seen in the unseen bookshelves with all the books they've bought
#
because of my episodes. So don't worry about that. Everybody's going to go out and buy the
#
beautiful book. But let's... Thanks, Amit. Well, so look, here's why your question you ask is deep,
#
right? Which is that at the heart of Hindu nationalism is, you know, you call it will to
#
power and ideology, right? Let me call it, it's a conventional party seating power, which is your
#
will to power argument. And two is it's a, you know, it's an ideological movement radically
#
seeking to reshape society. And there is this tension. And this tension is always on yin and
#
yang. So I wouldn't say that there's a, you know, we discussed this earlier, there's no,
#
you know, movement towards radicalism necessarily that, you know, the nature of India is always,
#
you have moderate Hindus, you have radical Hindus, you know, you have plenty of people who
#
don't think of themselves as Hindus, that a political party that, you know, wins enormously,
#
the word enormous only means less than 50%. So I think the highest vote share any Prime Minister
#
has got is Rajiv Gandhi in 1984 on the back of his mother's murder. And even he got less than one
#
and two voters, right? So you always have some other party, you know, if opposition, you have
#
adequate unity, then that puts the, you know, BJP or the Congress on the back burner and then forces
#
you to be moderate to try to get allies. So the dynamic that you talk about, right, is a yin and
#
yang is an up and down, right? It's never moving towards one particular direction. To give you one,
#
just one example, when it came to the Citizenship Amendment Act, there's a reason I think that it
#
was Amit Shah who presented it. And if my memory serves, and I think your listeners can check that
#
Narendra Modi made sure that he wasn't in parliament, you know, because he wanted to, you know,
#
it was so radical, right? And he was afraid what the press, what the foreign press would say,
#
that Modi wanted to appear moderate, right? Now, Modi is not more moderate than Amit Shah,
#
they both are cut off the same cloth. But that the point being that the ideology of Hindu nationalism
#
itself needs this jugalbandi, right? Which is why right in the beginning, you see the jugalbandi of
#
Shamprasad Mukherjee and Deendayal Upadhyay. You can call it moderate and hardline, but the other way
#
you can see it is one cares about the ideology, the other cares about what you call will to power,
#
right? It's true that the BJP under Modi is able to kind of break political parties, but the ability
#
of Vajpayee to reach out to parties in return like AIDNK wanted very opportunistic things that
#
predates Amit Shah and Modi. So this is a, I mean, it's a good question that you asked, because the
#
answer to this puzzle is jugalbandi, right? That jugalbandi provides a team ethic of teamwork,
#
where given that you have this inevitable yin and yang, this radical, this moderate, this hardline,
#
you know, softline, you need to stick it together because in many other parties, when this happens,
#
Amit, you end up with a split. So the other party, for example, where this happens very often is the
#
communist party, which is both a movement seeking to reshape society as well as, you know, at least
#
after the 1950s, tactically a believer in bourgeois democracy. But, and you did like have some kind of
#
this dynamic. I think you had when Jyoti Basu was in his height of his power in Bengal, you had Jyoti
#
Basu running the government. And I think you had Pramod Das Gupta running the party. Again, the same
#
dynamic, but you know, while that jugalbandi state, the communists in general have been plagued by a
#
lot of splits. The biggest split Amit is between overground and underground. So if you look at the
#
communist party in India in Bihar at the moment, a lot of people were surprised that the communist
#
party did unusually well in the, in the results last month. But you know, it has a very old history
#
in Bihar. In fact, I think it's produced communist party CPI MLAs from Patna itself, I think Dr. Sen.
#
So it has a old history, but it would have done even better if it had been able to solve this very
#
dynamic that you identify in Hindu nationalism. When the underground and overground get together,
#
why did the CPI split into CPM and the CPM has split into the Maoists? Because they simply,
#
you know, they could not accommodate the radicals. They just couldn't, right? And there the definition
#
of radical is that you believe in taking up arms against the state. And I think it has hurt the
#
communist movement hugely, you know, the splits and this constant anxiety about whether you should
#
be underground or overground. I think the underground movement has given a bad name to the
#
overground communists. So the dynamic that you talk about is not peculiar to the BJP because
#
it happens in many parties that are also movements. The solution to that problem is peculiar to the
#
US, to the BJP. So let's kind of move on to, you know, what is the big rupture, you know,
#
in the politics of the Hindu nationalist movement and a big rupture in Indian politics as well,
#
which is the emergency where, you know, so many opposition leaders get jailed. And what you see
#
during that time is that all of these parties, you know, from Jayaprakash Narayan on where he
#
stands in the spectrum and Vajpayee and so on are like, let's leave everything aside. Let's just
#
unite. And it's pure will to power their modern ideology. And they all come together. And you
#
point out about how after the emergency, when the coalition wins power, you know, the Bhartiya Jansang
#
realizes that we have the most seats of all the parties, but we won't make a bid for PM.
#
And there are, of course, three candidates, Morarji Desai, Charan Singh and Jagjivan Ram.
#
And again, it's sort of the strategic astuteness of Vajpayee that, you know, he supports Jagjivan
#
Ram because his thinking is Jagjivan Ram is a harijan. And therefore, this whole project of
#
expanding the Hindu vote to include, you know, all castes and so on will be helped if Jagjivan
#
Ram comes to power. But the Janata experiment, as we know, kind of fails. And after that, you know,
#
Vajpayee and Advani form the Bhartiya Janata Party, which is suddenly committed to
#
Gandhian socialism. And their vision seems entirely different from whatever it was before,
#
to the extent that, you know, they disassociate themselves from, you know, religious imagery and
#
language and rhetoric and all of that, to the point where the RSS stopped supporting them,
#
you know, and in a sense, you could say Vajpayee makes that shift at exactly the wrong time when
#
the political winds are shifting. So tell me a little bit about that period and why are Vajpayee
#
and Advani going into this interesting direction? And, you know, what do the changing political
#
winds then mean for them? Amit, the direction that Vajpayee chooses is driven by one thing,
#
which is that where he thinks the voter is headed. Vajpayee's analysis of the 1970s in India is even
#
though the Congress is in decline, Congressism or the Nehruvian consensus has not been rejected
#
by the voter. So while the voter in 1977 rejects Indira Gandhi, they don't reject the larger
#
principles on which the Nehruvian consensus is built. More importantly, even the anti-Indra
#
political parties, the BLD, Jaiprakash Narayan, they don't fundamentally reject the Nehruvian
#
consensus. What they don't like is the authoritarian figure of Indira Gandhi. And Vajpayee realizes
#
that for the Jansang to become mainstream, there is no other, this is the only opposition in town.
#
So if you want to take down the Congress, which is the 100 pound gorilla in the room,
#
you have to merge yourself into a non-Congress opposition, which actually shares many of the
#
precepts of the Nehruvian consensus, which is what he's able to do. And as you pointed out,
#
the Jansang is the largest constituent of the Janata Party in the 77 elections. So logically,
#
Vajpayee should have been prime minister, but they don't even begin to ask that question because
#
they're like, look, we're grateful that we're part of you. Let's not ask for more than we can get.
#
And that again shows a certain sagacity and a certain ability to avoid the immediate greed
#
of power. They're interested in the long game. They are marathon runners. They are not 100 meter
#
runners. And I think that's something quite remarkable. And the other aspect that you pointed
#
out, which is that not just Vajpayee, but even the RSS wanted Jagjivan Ram. Jagjivan Ram, by the way,
#
is a complex figure. I mean, his father was a priest. He knew Sanskrit. So he was scheduled
#
caste, but he was highly Sanskritized. But they wanted the symbolism of a Dalit prime minister,
#
India's first and I think only Dalit prime minister would have come through because the
#
Jansang wanted him. And that was stymied by other parties, namely Charan Singh. But again,
#
it tells you something about the party. While they are in power between 1977 and 80, they don't go
#
outside the Nehruvian consensus. This is more classically the case when it comes to foreign
#
policy that Vajpayee continues to follow the non-aligned movement in some sense. So they are
#
very, very careful. And I think that again, that shows a certain ability to sort of run the long
#
distance rather than short distance. The problem again, not for India, which I leave your listeners
#
to decide what is in India's interest, but the problem for Hindu nationalism is that this
#
analysis that Vajpayee has of the Indian voter in the seventies, he carries over to the eighties.
#
But a lot of changes are happening in the eighties. There's the breakdown of the Congress system.
#
There's Hindu anxiety because of the Khalistan movement, which is targeting Hindus of all castes.
#
There's an anxiety among upper caste Hindus in North India, for example, Gujarat,
#
where there is an increase in OBC reservations. And there's a sense that Saudi petrodollars
#
is expanding conversions of lower caste Hindus into Muslims. So there's a sense of anxiety.
#
And again, not my job to judge whether it's a valid anxiety or not, but there is an anxiety
#
and it's demand drawn. Now at precisely this time, Vajpayee, who one of the core arguments I make in
#
this book is he's not a mass politician. He has his ear to parliament. He doesn't have his ear to
#
the ground. And there's a difference between the two because changes in the ground may take a
#
little while to percolate to parliament. It's not immediate. Whereas I think someone like Indira
#
Gandhi and Narendra Modi have a direct connect with the voters. So Vajpayee doesn't get it.
#
So even in the early eighties, when the Bharatiya Janata party is created in 1980,
#
he actually wants it to be a continuation of Jayaprakash Narayan's vision. Hence even the name,
#
I think the most important relic of the Janata experiment that remains today is the name Bharatiya
#
Janata party, right? It's the same name. He just put Bharatiya in front of it. He was, you know,
#
he made sure that there was a prominent Muslim leader, Sikandar Bhakt. Now he said very clearly
#
that we don't follow, we won't follow Hindu nationalist ideology. We will follow Jayaprakash
#
Narayan's ideology. What we will do is we'll follow Hindu nationalist discipline because what
#
he felt the Janata experiment lacked was just discipline and teamwork. So he wanted to take
#
Hindu nationalist teamwork with Jayaprakash's ideology. And as I point out, you know, in the
#
early 1980s, he's exactly wrong. Again, it's not anxiety that is created by the RSS or VHP, but
#
the RSS and VHP see this and they see that the party of the Hindus, the BJP is actually turning
#
left. It's turning secular. So they then activate this Hindu anxiety even more. And Indira Gandhi,
#
who's a far better politician in that sense than Vajpayee as a mass level sees this Hindu anxiety.
#
She plays to it. She goes to temples, she wears saffron sarees. I think 1982 or 83, there are
#
elections in Jammu and Kashmir. And as your listeners know, Jammu has a lot of Hindus and
#
the valley is exclusively Muslim. So she campaigns for the Hindu votes, and I mean Indira Gandhi
#
campaigns for the Hindu vote in Jammu in that election using the bogey of National Conference,
#
Farooq Abdullah and the valley's Muslims. And she portrays herself as goddess Durga committed
#
to keeping India united against the Khalistan movement and even gives her life for the movement.
#
The RSS notices. And so in the 1984 elections held immediately after Indira Gandhi's murder,
#
the RSS actually campaigns and votes for Rajiv Gandhi. Because I quote an RSS essay in their
#
mouthpiece organizer just after the election saying that look, Rajiv won because he was the
#
Hindu party and Vajpayee lost because he was not the Hindu party. And that begins Vajpayee's long
#
exile from the BJP beginning in 1986 all the way to 1995. So to answer your question, I think
#
Vajpayee's analysis of where India was heading in the 1970s was right. Someone like Balraj
#
Madhok was wrong in this regard. I don't think the Jansang would have survived in the 70s by being
#
the party of capitalism, much as many of your listeners would have preferred that. I just
#
don't think the political mood was for that. On the 80s on the other hand, Vajpayee read it
#
completely wrong and Advani read it better because he had his year closer to the card.
#
So Advani, I show him, you know, facing the biggest test of loyalty in his life because
#
he doesn't want to reject Vajpayee the person, but he has to reject Vajpayee the ideology.
#
And he does it. And what is remarkable about the BJP is that this happens without a split to the
#
party in any other party, Amit. This would have resulted in a split. No, and I was struck by,
#
you know, the words of the RSS where they call the 1984 elections as a court massive Hindu mandate,
#
end quote, for Rajiv Gandhi, which is very telling. And you talk about how that big growing
#
Hindu vote bank between 1980 and 1984 just goes for the Congress. And you sort of point out another
#
very sort of interesting meeting after that, where, you know, the RSS is trying to figure out what do
#
we do. And obviously, the BJP needs a new leader and all of that. And they have, of course, revived
#
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad as a sort of a, you know, a counterpoint to take the, you know, the hardline
#
view forward. But then they decide that Vajpayee has to go and he described this fascinating
#
meeting. I think it's in Gandhi Nagar, where the young Amit Shah has to, I think, grind paan.
#
Beetle nut. Beetle nut. He has to grind beetle nut for Vijay Rajesh India, who's sitting in a room
#
with Atal. And at one point where he's handing over the beetle nut, you know, this message comes
#
from the RSS that Vajpayee has to step down and Vijay Rajesh has to take over. And Vijay Rajesh,
#
again, a very interesting figure. I wish you'd written more about her, where she just doesn't
#
want power. She's an incredible patron, practically funds a party single-handedly for a long time,
#
but just doesn't want the spoils of power. And she doesn't want to hurt Vajpayee. So eventually
#
she doesn't take it and it goes to Advani. Now, tell me a little bit about how that shift happens.
#
Does it affect the personal relationship between the two men? Does Vajpayee completely withdraw or
#
is he a humble party servant? And what's happening in the next few years as far as the Hindu vote is
#
concerned? Because those are two multiverse years for Indian politics, say, you know, leading to
#
V P Singh coming to power. And of course, we'll, you know, discuss that phase and Ayodhya right
#
after this. But in that period, the second half of the eighties, what's the dynamic there? What
#
is going on? Ramayan and Mahabharat also become really popular at that time. Give me a sort of a
#
picture of what the party is going through in that period. Well, I mean, for those of your listeners
#
who are strong critics of the BJP and who are supporters of the Congress or rather who see the
#
Congress party as the only quote unquote secular possible opposition to the BJP. If you are that
#
kind of person, I think you would agree with me that Rajiv Gandhi was absolutely the worst thing
#
that should have happened during that period because and here's a tragedy. I think he came
#
across as Mr. Clean, the kind of euphoria that greets Rajiv Gandhi when he becomes prime minister
#
in late 1984. You know, he's seen as it's very similar to, you know, the John F. Kennedy mania
#
in the United States of the 1960s. He could do no wrong. He, you know, he's a modernizer,
#
unlike his brother, younger brother Sanjay, he kept away from politics. So he was seen as clean.
#
He was seen as a reluctant man. A lot of the people who surrounded him were, you know,
#
people from Dune school who had private sector education. So there was a thrill that went in
#
India, especially the middle class, that he was the right man at the right time. He actually turned
#
out to be the wrong man in the wrong time because his extraordinary inexperience meant that his
#
counter to this Hindu anxiety was to pander it. It wasn't to tamp it down the way Mahatma Gandhi had
#
done, which is you see Hindu anxiety in the twenties and the forties, but you actually,
#
that's the leader, right? You see anxiety and you calm your people down. He exaggerates it.
#
So he opens the locks for Babri Masjid for prayer in 1986, I think. And then in 1989,
#
he, I think 1985 or 1986 for prayer. And in 1989, he opens, he allows Shilanyas or bricklaying
#
ceremony in Ayodhya. And it's not a coincidence, Amit, that recently after the new temple was
#
inaugurated in Ayodhya, I think it was the Madhya Pradesh Congress, which ran an advertisement
#
saying that actually it was Rajiv Gandhi who did it. So if you buy the rhetoric that the BJP is
#
a communal party, Rajiv Gandhi got there first. And then he sort of, he did a jugalbandi of this
#
Hindu communism with Muslim communism. He was India, I think was the first country under Rajiv
#
Gandhi to ban the satanic verses. He annuls the Supreme court judgment when it comes to Shah Bano
#
by passing a law and which did the exact opposite of protecting Muslim women. So here was a man who
#
when sees these various Hindu and Muslim anxieties, not of his making, responds not
#
with high-minded liberalism, but pandering of the worst kind, absolutely worst kind.
#
And that is the box or the hole that the new party president Lal Krishna Advani finds himself in in
#
1986, that you have Hindu anxiety, but actually that Hindu anxiety is being sought to be monopolized
#
by the Congress party. And if he doesn't move to the right of the Congress party, he risks a
#
repetition of the 1984 results, whether the Congress gets all the Hindu votes. And it is
#
this kind of context, Amit, in which the Lal Krishna Advani finally accepts the Ayodhya movement.
#
The Ayodhya movement began by the RSS, VHP. And I hope your listeners are listening to this two
#
congressmen on stage in 1983 for the Ayodhya movement. And very soon Rajiv Gandhi adopts it.
#
It takes to 1989 for the BJP to adopt it under Lal Krishna Advani. And as I point out, he
#
gets on the Rath Yatra. It's an opportunistic reaction to the Mandal Commission recommendations
#
being implemented. And in many ways, the book argues that Advani's about right turn was actually
#
a signal to his own cadre and his own movement that the BJP doesn't want to get left behind.
#
And all through this period, Vajpayee feels that what Advani is doing is wrong. He feels that
#
religion and politics shouldn't mix. And Amit, you had asked me this question earlier that, you know,
#
which is the real Vajpayee? Is he, you know, is he the liberal or is he really wearing a mask?
#
It's hard to say because at that time, his anger is quite genuine. He feels this is absolutely the
#
wrong way to go. And in fact, he tells Advani that the problem with riding a tiger is that you can
#
never get off. And I think he genuinely believes that. At the same time, I think Vajpayee is being
#
ignored by the party. He travels on his own quite a bit in India, but most of the time he's spending
#
time in the US with his, you know, or he's in his house in Delhi and he has a little bit of
#
coterie and they're eating, as I pointed out in the book, prawn curry, a little bit of whiskey.
#
Vajpayee loved opium or bhang pakodas. And, you know, so this is the loser's coat. So Vajpayee is
#
being sidelined. And these are the people around him, people like Rajesh Mishra, Jaswant Singh.
#
And the thing is that once Vajpayee comes to power in 96 and then 98, he doesn't forget these people
#
because they stood with him when nobody else was standing. Now, Advani is not invited to these
#
sorries because he doesn't drink. He doesn't eat meat and he doesn't, you know, he doesn't
#
gossip. He doesn't do that kind of thing. On the other hand, relations between the two, I think
#
both make a huge effort to keep it going. From Advani's side, I think it's loyalty. From Vajpayee's
#
side, it's a recognition that his sidelining in the party is not because of Advani. It's because
#
the party itself is going in a different direction. And Advani is his one insurance. Then when things
#
change, then Vajpayee is back in business. I also think, you know, I don't want to portray Vajpayee
#
as too cynical. I also think he liked Advani. So while the professional relationship between them
#
is ruptured, the personal relationship somehow manages during this period. No, and I can't
#
underscore the point you made earlier about the Congress's alleged secularism, which, you know,
#
the BJP themselves used to use the term pseudo secularism, which was very interesting because
#
if you're against pseudo secularism, one would assume you're against a pseudo part of it. And
#
therefore you don't mind secularism, but they were against both pseudo secularism and secularism.
#
But, you know, the point to underscore and what I feel strongly about is that the Congress today
#
on the ground is the party of Kamal Nath. To call it a non-communal party is just a joke. They've
#
always been quoting the Hindu vote, which they continue to do today. And for all of Rahul Gandhi's
#
vogue posturing on Twitter, the bottom line is that he has never actually come to, you know,
#
spoken about the horrors of the past or, you know, tried to come to terms with them, not just what
#
his father did, but also what his grandmother Indira Gandhi did. And I think for everything
#
wrong that Modi has done, and he's a horrendous, horrendous Prime Minister, and this is just my
#
opinion, of course, I think Indira was worse. Indira was just a moral monster for the kind of
#
things that she did, which is why it's difficult to take the Congress party seriously as long as
#
they have portraits of Indira Gandhi on the wall. But that sort of... Can I interrupt you, if you
#
don't mind? Sure, sure. Look, I'm less, I'm just being descriptive, right? I know, I know. So
#
because I, you know, I have views, I have pretty strong views, and, you know, if you read my book,
#
I mean, you know, I think you know that we agree on many things more than we disagree, but that's
#
not the point here. I'm much more sympathetic about Indira Gandhi as a stunningly good politician.
#
Whatever else you can say about her moral feelings, she was a very good politician.
#
Her son was a bumbling politician. His sin is incompetence. It was, you know, he was a pilot
#
who didn't have a heart in this, and, you know, and he was confronting India, these massive
#
crises in India, and he was just clueless despite having this mandate. I think that's a much worse
#
sin, right? Or whatever, I leave your listeners to ask that question. And in that, I think Rahul
#
Gandhi, you know, reminds me a lot more of his father rather than his grandmother, because,
#
you know, from all accounts, he's a, you know, personally polite person, he's personally charming,
#
you know, he's well brought up, but he's just, you know, for the kind of changes that is going
#
on in India, he could not be, you know, worse, worse place to deal with. And that definitely
#
reminds me of Rajiv Gandhi during that period. No, the reason I partly called Indira Gandhi,
#
a moral monster is includes what you just said about her incredible politics, because she was
#
such an incredible politician. She took decisions and took the country in directions, which were
#
going to be disastrous for the people and were horrible in terms of governance. And she didn't
#
give a damn about that. That wasn't even a factor. Her only factor, much as in fact, it is for the
#
current dispensation, is that how do I craft the narrative to win elections, governance jai bhar me,
#
you know, and in that sense, when, you know, Narendra Modi did demonetization, which I call
#
the largest assault on property rights in human history, the moment I heard about that measure,
#
I thought, oh, this is, you know, just the kind of thing Indira Gandhi would do, you know,
#
just thinking of narrative and not giving a damn about what actually happens on the ground.
#
But that aside, and I must point out to my listeners that this is me giving my opinion.
#
And none of this is in the book. None of this is in the book. This is just me giving my opinion.
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When his book is only about facts, and in that sense is incredibly rigorous. Now, now let's
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talk about that period after Rajiv Gandhi comes out of power. Now, we already spoke earlier in
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the episode about what is happening when, you know, VP Singh is in power. Devi Lal is doing
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his little thing there. VP Singh feels insecure about that. So he does mandal. Now, LK Advani,
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who is, you know, in charge of BJP is now in a spot. How do I react to mandal? There are all
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these pressures and this could divide sort of the Hindu vote, but I need to bring it together for
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me. What do I do? Oh, there's Ayodhya. Let's do a rat yatra. And you speak about, you know,
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Atal Bihari Vajpayee. In fact, you quote him as saying, quote, the difficulty of the rat,
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once you ride it, you do not feel like getting down from it. Stop quote. And at another point,
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he asked LK Advani, don't do this. He says, you know, quote, you're riding a tiger. Stop quote,
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which is really interesting to me. And you, and you also sort of point out that this changes
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Advani in a kind of fundamental ways, as I think Swapandas Gupta remarked, that the rat yatra
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changes him in fundamental ways, almost as if he has taken this direction and the Mukota becomes
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a person, so to say, the mass becomes a person. So tell me a little bit about this phase of time
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leading up to Ayodhya. And one of the sort of, you know, when you go deep into that, when you go deep
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into the nuances of what actually happened, what strikes me there is that just as in the 1980s,
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the whole resurgence of the Hindu vote was a bottom up thing, which, you know, Vajpayee and
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Advani were first completely taken aback by. What is happening now also is that the movement is a
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bottom up thing. And that Vajpayee and even Advani from what seems to from the narrative have much
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less control than most people, including Narasimha Rao, appear to think they do. Tell me a little
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bit about that phase, especially as this episode releases on the 6th of December, which is, of
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course, a, you know, a sort of a historic day. So tell me about the lead up to that, because what
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is really interesting is that you have political Hindutva, the supply end of political Hindutva
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gathering force at a time when, you know, the people at the top aren't really in control of
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events anymore. And there are things happening which have a momentum of their own. Tell me a
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bit about that. I think that's exactly right. Because, you know, and it's not like, let's just
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take a step back, Amit, to focus a little bit on the period 1990 to 91. There are three different
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momentums or three different forces in India, which have a momentum of their own. One is,
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of course, the OBC reservations in North India, which then culminates in Mandal Commission report.
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But Mandal Commission report didn't begin OBC reservations in India, it actually ended it.
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Because in the 60s itself, in the states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, etc., you had OBC
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reservation. And by the 80s, this had entered North India. So the OBC reservations in the central
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level in central government job was a culmination of this force. The other, of course, is the Rathyatra
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or Mandir. As I pointed out, there was a bottom up force that was activated by the RSS and VHP.
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And the movement began in 1983 itself, seven years before the Rathyatra. And the third,
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let's not forget, Amit, was the failure, the catastrophic failure of the Indian economy.
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And again, it was not fated that you would end up with liberalization, but something had to give.
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So Indira Gandhi herself tried with the LKJAR commission report, the Alexander commission
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report on economic changes, Rajiv Gandhi tried a little bit. But it was really left to Narsimha
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Rao to open up. Now, the point I make in my book is that all of these three events, which is Mandal,
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Mandir and market, were not inevitable. When V.P. Singh comes to power, yes, there is an OBC
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reservation. They talk about it in the manifesto itself. But had it not been for Devi Lal's attempt
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to upstage V.P. Singh, he may never have implemented the Mandal commission report.
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If the government had changed and the Congress come back, they would have never implemented it.
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Because the commission report was submitted in 1980 itself. And for 10 years, the Congress
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government didn't want to touch it. Ditto with Mandir. If it hadn't been for Mandal commission
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report, Advani was still in his hamlet-like ability of should I, should I not. He wouldn't
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have decisively got on to the rut. And as I argued in my previous book Half Line, if it wasn't for
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Narsimha Rao, you may not have been so decisive when it came to liberalization. And I just want
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to take your listeners back to a question we had right in the beginning of this podcast,
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which is the role that, you know, events and people play alongside structures and larger
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changes. And I think Mandal, Mandir and market are good examples of that. But yes, there were
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larger forces, but it was not fated. And all those three decisions which L.K. Advani makes
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on Mandal, Mandir and market, which is to support OBC reservations, support Mandal,
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to support Mandir and to support market was not inevitable. And I point out in the book,
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many pulls and pressures he had. And for good or for worse, those three decisions define the
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party today, which is that BJP is known as the pro-Mandir party. It is known also as an OBC party.
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And, you know, I know many of your listeners would disagree, but at least, you know, it plays
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superficial mouth value to the benefits of liberalization. So, you know, and that's very
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important, you know, because that 1991 period is a real pivot in Indian history. It could have
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turned out very differently. Yes, there were the larger forces, you know, but only looking at a
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larger forces and saying that these were inevitable in India, or to put it differently, looking just
#
as demand side explanations to say that supply will soon follow. It need not have turned out that
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way. So in that sense, it's an enormous pivot. And I want to end with the question you asked,
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because, you know, today, your listeners are hearing it on December 6th, 2020. And on December
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6, 1992, you know, there was a very different event in India, which is the demolition of the Babri
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Masjid. And Amit, I got to tell you that the Babri Masjid haunts me in many ways. So as I told you
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right in the beginning of the podcast, I remember the Bombay riots. I remember seeing the timber
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yards on the other side of Mahim Bay burning from the, from the terrace of my building. But also in
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my Narsimha Rao book, I devoted a whole chapter to it. And once again, in this book, I devote an
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entire chapter to Babri Masjid. And broadly, you know, so I think I've done more research on the
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subject and talked to more people than most, I would say with some confidence. And, you know,
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I don't want to reveal more to your listener, because, you know, she and he should read it.
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But in short, I'm more convinced that things went out of control, rather than a well-planned
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conspiracy from the top. There was a conspiracy. The question is, was the top leadership of the
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BJP involved? You would never know, because there's a lot of smokes and mirrors happening here.
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The trial court has actually exorbitated everybody saying there's no conspiracy. I don't agree with
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that. But I certainly buy or I certainly, it seems certainly plausible that someone like Advani and
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Vajpayee were blindsided by things getting out of hand, rather than, you know, well-planned
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conspiracy from the top. In fact, one of the sort of memorable sentences from your book and earlier,
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you claim that you are not into good sentences and all of that. And that's completely untrue.
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And one of my favorite sentences from the book is when you're describing Advani and Joshi at the
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site where, you know, things are going out of their hand and you write, quote, they look like
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prisoners rather than wardens, stop quote, which to me, like sums up so much, not just about that
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event, but possibly a lot more than that. And then you also write about how, you know, Atal Bihari
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Vajpayee, of course, chose not to go to Ayodhya and was apprehensive about what would happen there.
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And he's in Delhi. And, you know, when the demolition starts, N. M. Khatate, his old friend
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goes to meet him. And you quote Khatate as saying, quote, he was all alone watching TV. He was very,
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very angry. He could not believe what had happened. Stop quote. And there's sort of, and that's just a
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very interesting dynamic. You know, we don't have much time. So I want to get to sort of closing
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question in a sense. But again, I would say that I have barely touched upon sort of the depth and
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nuance that is in your book. So, you know, even the period after this through the 90s, Vajpayee
#
becoming prime minister, the sort of the two short terms, and then that one longish term, and then
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Modi and Shah coming back, all of it is fascinating. And it's like a thriller unfolding in front of
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you and an ongoing thriller as it were. So it's impossible to kind of put it down. I want to sort
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of end with something that you said in a recent interview for Scroll with Rohan Venkat, where
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in response to something that he said, you spoke about how, quote, a Hindu group consciousness
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that you are Hindu, I am Hindu, let's vote for the same party, that has to be constructed.
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That's a hundred year project of Hindu nationalism, which is why when you look at the
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wording of Hindu nationalism is politically liberal in that it is premised on the idea of
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one person, one vote, stop quote. Now, you've spoken about the Hindu group consciousness,
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you are Hindu, I am Hindu, let's vote for the same party. Now, obviously, people contain multitudes,
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which has become a cliche on my show. And, you know, and it might be the case that let us say
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that I am a Hindu, and you can appeal to that part of me, when you're trying to build this Hindu
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group consciousness. But, you know, what canny politicians would always look out for is that
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are there other parts of people's personality, which we can appeal to, which they can care about
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enough to vote for it, that don't go down this axis. So, for example, a lot of the ideas of
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Congress are just abstract ideas and often insincerely expressed by them to begin with,
#
like concepts of secularism or all the abstract ideas of India that come about. And I would argue
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that in our lived reality as well, besides the Hindu consciousness, there is also a sort of,
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there is something syncretic to it. There is something, you know, while our society in many
#
ways is deeply liberal, there are many ways in which it is deeply liberal in the way that we
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embrace influences from everywhere and make this delightful khichri, like Vajpayee himself in his
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own personality, if not in his politics. So, my sort of rambling question to you right at the end
#
is that, you know, in all your studies of sort of political theory, not just in India and elsewhere,
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is there something that would give you the sense that assuming that this Hindu consciousness has
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been captured by this one party at the center and it's done for and it would appear that even
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other parties like the Aam Aadmi Party and the Congress are very cognizant of it and they work
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within the bounds of, you know, they don't want to displease this Hindu consciousness, so to say,
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you know, are there other aspects to our nature that also unite us, other things that we care
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about that can in future become a locus of political movements? So, that's a deep question,
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I mean, like your other question, but that this is a deep question and let me just rephrase it in
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my language, which is the following, which is that if you just buy this idea that India is a
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Hindu majority country and you had this one party that has been able to activate Hindu group
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consciousness, is politics, as we know, over? Because there's no other way in which you can
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localize, you can kind of find another loci of identity. So, one is that it's true that
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India is a Hindu majority country, but India is also a peasant majority country, it's a majority
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peasant country, it's a majority of workers and peasants, why doesn't the communist party come to
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power? India is a majority Bahujan country, you know, non-Apakas are 80%, why didn't Kanshiram
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come to power? So, the first answer to your question is that rather than look for other
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identity access, maybe the real answer lies in better organization, you know, rather than
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trying to find a magic that, you know, to counter Hindu group consciousness by something else,
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how about like picking parties which just focus on better organization and in that learn something
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from the BJP, don't split, right? Believe in teamwork, right? Even when there's disagreement,
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kind of stick around because things may come your part. That's the purpose of this book that look,
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the inevitability of the BJP's rise is not true. There's hard work there, there's teamwork there.
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Yes, it's a majoritarian ideology, but there's no shortage of majoritarian ideologies in India.
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Why did this particular one win? So, that's the first sort of answer to the question that you asked.
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The second answer, Amit, is to ask the question that is the only way to defeat the BJP through
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another group identity or is there another way to conceptualize the individual? Unfortunately,
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on this question, I'm a pessimist, which is that the beginning of, you know, of Hindu nationalism is
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the introduction of one person, one vote to a group-based society where Indians think in,
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you know, their social and economic lives are entirely in terms of groups. What makes Indian
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politics flexible is that the group definition keeps changing. Sometimes you vote on the basis
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of your region, sometimes your caste, sometimes your religion, but you're still voting on the
#
basis of groups. Now, the question is, will Indians ever start voting on the basis of individual
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freedom? That's really the question. And if that happens, that's a genuine counter to the BJP,
#
like stop telling me how to, you know, celebrate Valentine's Day, you know, stop telling me what
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to eat in my house. These are all based on the idea of individual freedom. The reason, Amit,
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that those critics of the BJP don't have popular purchase, right? They just don't have popular
#
purchases. In India, we yet don't have a constituency which is liberal. And I define liberal in the very
#
limited sense of putting individual freedom at the center of your politics. So that's a pretty
#
pessimistic answer because that is a fundamental counter to the BJP. But none of the BJP opposition
#
parties want to go that path, especially the Congress party. That's not what they're into.
#
And maybe they're not going down that path because Indians aren't ready for that kind of argument.
#
So that's, you know, I'm sorry to end this long, long podcast on a slightly pessimistic note.
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But, you know, I want to end this by asking what you think, because I think, you know,
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hearing your podcast, this is a question you obsess over again and again and again.
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No, I agree with you entirely. I mean, my hope would be that a great locus would be individual
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freedom because we are all individuals first. And then after that, we construct all these other
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group identities and whatever around us. But I simply do not see it happening. And I'm as
#
pessimistic about it. I mean, you know, one thing that gives me hope is that, look, the future is
#
full of unknown unknowns. So, you know, one can just hope for things that are currently beyond
#
our conception and maybe good things will come out of that. And one of the things that I do hope for
#
is that the next time we, you know, do an episode together, perhaps on your first book on Narasimha
#
Rao, which is as fascinating a subject, that you'll give me five or six hours because today
#
I really, I really felt like we could have gone on and on and on. But unfortunately,
#
you know, we are both human and there is only so much time for this. But thank you so much for
#
your generosity in sharing your time and your insights. I, you know, I'm going to read your
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book again carefully because there is so much to process. And I recommend that all my listeners
#
do the same. So thanks so much for coming on the show, Ganesh. Thanks, Amit. And I'm totally sold
#
onto this, on what you're doing, because I haven't had this discussion with anyone with this kind of
#
depth. And I think that, you know, it's the medium and it's you who makes it possible, which is,
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if you go back to our original debate about, you know, structure or technology and individuals,
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I think in the case of seen and unseen, it's both here. So thank you very much.
#
You are the first historian to tell me that the great man of history is true by pointing
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out that the great man is me. Thank you so much. Thanks. Thanks a lot, Amit. Thank you.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to your nearest bookstore,
#
online or offline and pick up Jugal Bandi, the BJP before Modi by Vinay Sitapati. You can follow
#
Vinay on Twitter at Vinay underscore Sitapati. You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of the seen and the unseen at seenunseen.in. Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of the seen and the unseen? If so, would you like to support the
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production of the show? You can go over to seenunseen.in slash support and contribute
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any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking. Thank you.
