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If you're listening to this podcast right now, you're one of the luckiest people on
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No, that's not because this is an awesome podcast, which of course it is, but because
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you have both access to technology and the leisure time to listen, which so many people
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We often take our good fortune for granted, which we should not, especially in India.
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The truth is that most people here live precarious lives, one medical emergency or natural calamity
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from being broke, and COVID-19 was one such calamity.
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Millions of Indians living lives on the edge were pushed into joblessness or poverty when
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the lockdown hit and their work dried up.
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Our immediate priority then was the virus.
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The virus could kill you, but you also had to eat to stay alive.
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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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Chances are that most of you listening to this, like me, don't worry about hunger.
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We know where our next meal is going to come from, and it should cause a jolt of recognition
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that it's not like this for much of India.
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The lockdown made this clear.
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As our cities and public services shut down, the problem of hunger exploded.
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People in our slums no longer had easy access to work, no longer got paid, and they often
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lived from meal to meal.
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Our migrant workers were in an even more precarious position, finding it important to get away
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from the city that had abandoned them, and also finding it hard to get food.
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My guest today, Ruben Mascarenas, has been an activist from his early teens, throwing
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himself into local causes to make the world a better place.
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When he heard about the problem of hunger in March last year, he got together with some
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fellow activists and started a campaign called Khana Chahiye.
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They began by distributing more than a thousand meals on March 29th and had ramped it up to
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deliver 47 lakh meals, that's 4.7 million meals, by August.
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They fed the homeless on the streets of Mumbai.
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They fed slum dwellers who were suddenly jobless.
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They set up positions in the arterial roads out of Mumbai and in its railway stations
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to feed migrant workers on their way out.
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Poor Ruben also ended up catching COVID during this time and is still feeling the after effects.
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I thought Khana Chahiye was a remarkable initiative, an example of how the voluntary actions of
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private citizens can help society when the dysfunctional and parasitic state seems invisible.
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I invited Ruben to share his insights from this great campaign to feed the hungry and
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also from his many years in politics.
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Ruben is one of those activists who believes that clean politics can turbocharge activism.
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He worked for the India Against Corruption movement a decade ago and is today a National
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Joint Secretary of the Aam Aadmi Party.
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Now, I am not a fan of this party and I discussed some of my criticisms in an earlier episode
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with Ashwit Mahesh, one of India's finest public intellectuals and also a member of
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I will bring that from the show notes.
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After talking about Khana Chahiye and local activism in the first half of this conversation,
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I brought up my criticism of AAP in the second half, in the context of how the will to power
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can corrode any principles that a politician may have within this Indian system.
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To me, the Aam Aadmi Party is an illustration of this and when I raised this matter, things
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got somewhat combative.
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Ruben, after all, is a loyal party worker.
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I am sure you will find that part of the discussion thought provoking regardless of which of us
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you agree more with, which doesn't really matter.
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What's important is that two people with different views can have a fierce disagreement like
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this while being polite and respectful.
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If we had had that conversation on Twitter, 100 other people would have jumped in and
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it would have been a dogfight.
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Before we started chatting about power though, we spoke about hunger and empathy.
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And before you start listening to this conversation, take a quick commercial break.
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When I first started podcasting, I had no idea of what a powerful medium this is.
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Over time, I realized that podcasting allows you to go both deeper and broader than any
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And the insane level of engagement that listeners have with good podcasts is also unique to
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What's more, anyone can start a podcast.
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You don't need a license from anyone, you don't need a radio voice, you don't even
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So if this is something you'd like to learn, I'd be glad to teach you.
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Registration is now open for the February cohort of my online course, The Art of Podcasting.
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Over three webinars on three Sundays, I share my high level conceptual learnings, as well
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as the nitty gritties of recording, hosting, distribution and building your brand.
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The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST or about $150.
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Head on over to sceneunseen.in slash learn for more details and to sign up.
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This might be the last month I teach this specific course.
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So hey, don't procrastinate.
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Classes start on February 7.
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So sign up now at sceneunseen.in slash learn.
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Ruben, welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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An absolute honor to be here after following your show religiously all these years.
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That's so kind of you to say that.
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And I just want to begin the show by expressing my admiration for all the incredible work
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you've done in the last few months.
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Not to say you haven't done incredible work before that, but I want to start over.
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You know, you've just recovered from COVID and you got COVID not being lazy, but being
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helpful by actually being out there on the streets and organizing food for people who
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didn't otherwise have food, which is fairly incredible.
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But before we get onto that, how are you doing now?
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Much better, but there is post-COVID fatigue and there is, you know, there are shortness
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Even if I walk for about 200 meters, I end up panting.
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I did see the doctor and that's one of the post-COVID phenomena, which most people seem
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And how long back did you get COVID?
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So this was in the end of October and by the second week of November, I was, I was out.
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I mean, good to see that you're fine.
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Now, you know, what I want to do during this episode is sort of talk about your entire
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Right from when you started, you once mentioned to me in a WhatsApp message that two people
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who've been an influence on you have been JP Narayan and Ashwin Mahesh, both of whom
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are sort of heroes of mine for their, you know, their intellectual prowess and who've
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been guests on the show multiple times, both of them.
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So I kind of want to follow that entire journey of yours, but before we do, I want to sort
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of talk about the last few months and khaana chahiye.
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So COVID happens, the lockdown begins.
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At what point did it strike you that there is a problem and it needs to be solved?
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So I think as the lockdown was announced, we were inundated with a lot of calls from
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As the guy said, there are people who are going hungry and you know, if, if demonetization
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was demonetization, this was demobilization.
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So you had your working class, your informal sector, daily wage laborers, all of their
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livelihood that suddenly got paused.
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I mean, all of their wages suddenly got paused.
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They were struggling to make their ends meet.
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And of course, this was also the time that the lockdown was being implemented very, very
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strictly by, by the police.
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So you know, you wouldn't even have people in the road.
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So we had a bunch of people, so we call ourselves the Litmus Test Project and you know, I reached
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out to a few of my friends and again, Karachi, thank you for the compliments earlier, but
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So I have six co-founders.
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There is Shishir Joshi, there is Rakey Singh, there is Swaraj, there is Anik, there's restauranteur
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So it's them and of course, over 400 plus volunteers, most of whom responded to our
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And that's again, thanks to Swaraj, who's, who I believe is one of the best mobilizers
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we have in India right now.
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But that apart, we started receiving these frantic SOS calls.
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So we said, okay, let's do this.
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Let's try and quantify the demand.
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Let's see where are these calls coming from and why are they not getting food?
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Is it that they don't have the apparatus to cook?
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Is it because they're stuck in distress and they're not being paid their wages?
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Let's try and understand this better, let's try and deep dive.
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So in a few days, we saw that, okay, this seems to be more or less around arterial roads
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So we picked the Western Express Highway and said, okay, let's just make 1200 meals and
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let's start from Bandra and go towards Borivali.
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That's about 25 kilometers of highway and below every flyover and on every footpath,
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we would stop there and we would talk to people.
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And I think it was heartbreaking.
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It was gut wrenching because you had people who hadn't eaten food in days, but of course
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the silver lining in all of this was, and I think that's for me, the story of the pandemic
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that even though they needed food more than the people with them, they would make sure
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that everybody has something.
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And that's when we realized that the problem is much bigger than any of us who live in
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our privileged bubbles or gated communities can even begin to comprehend.
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And we said, okay, we need to do something.
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And obviously I don't understand food production and food manufacturing.
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So we had a Neeti, we had a Munaf and you know, I told them you are restaurateurs, you
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run catering businesses, how does the food bit work?
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And then we realized on the supply side, there are a lot of restaurants which are lying shut.
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So you actually had a network of unused kitchen capacity, which we said, okay, so we now have
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a kitchen capacity on this side, we've quantified demand on the other side.
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Can we marry the two and raise resources for that?
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And that's when we started a crowdfunding campaign, which was with Effort for Good,
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which was a partner, Andhraq Mazumdar has been kind enough to support us there.
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And yeah, I think the response was fantastic.
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So a lot of people started donating.
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And we realized that we as a team need to expand and grow.
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I remember I just put up a post on Facebook saying, look, I'm going to do something like
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Of course, Shishir has been like backbone, because we obviously needed to take all the
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Because all of us are essentially working professionals and all our organizations are
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not charitable organizations per se.
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So Shishir just took two minutes when I called him and said, look, I'm doing something like
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this and I'd like to collaborate and you know, he came on board.
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We then got all of my friends.
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So we're the same group of people who worked with the election commission for this in the
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last elections in 2017 and increased Mumbai's voting percentage for the first time ever
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So this is a very interesting bunch of people, which does things from time to time.
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And I was honestly really frustrated being cooped up at home.
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I mean, I really, now that I look back, I don't know how else would I spend the lockdown
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if I hadn't been doing Khana Sege.
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So yeah, we went to the Western Express Highway on the 29th of March and we saw that the problem
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Then we raised some funds.
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We started supplying about 20,000 meals a day across the arterial roads of Mumbai.
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So you had the Eastern Express Highway, you had the LBS Road, you have the SV Road, you
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have the Link Road, so on and so forth.
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And then the good part about working with the team is that now the entire operation
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There were a lot of learnings.
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So we actually went out to the BMC and said, okay, we know you're also doing your best.
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How can we do this better?
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So you tell us what your weak places are and maybe we can adopt them and things like that.
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And yeah, I think there was no looking back from that.
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So I think from 20,000 in the first few days, we quickly reached at our peak, we were one
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And I think on an average, we were about 70,000 meals a day.
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So that's that's insane bunch of follow up questions.
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One is when you say at the start, people reached out to you.
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Now one who reached out to you and two why you and I'm guessing it's partly because all
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the organizations that you've been part of and so on you've, you know, built a repetition
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over time of being people who are actually out there and do things and all of that.
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So kind of take me through the process.
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Was it other activists reaching out to you?
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So it was other activists reaching out to me.
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It was friends reaching out to me because I've always been, you know, that guy who does
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something about the situation.
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No matter what the situation is, at least that's the most that's the image that they
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And well, initially, the activists were like, there are a lot of people going hungry.
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And we know for a fact that they're going hungry.
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We can't go there because, you know, we were hearing reports of the police was cracking
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down really badly on anyone who is outside.
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So even they were concerned as to how should they go about and help people even if they
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Second is outside gated communities.
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I think for the first time in, I think, recent memory, we would have seen a lot of people
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just outside their slums, just staying there because they didn't have anything to eat.
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And it was really, really, really, really sad.
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So while on one level, we could see the dolphins in the Arabian Sea and we could see all sorts
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of flora and fauna return outside our balconies and our gated communities.
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You also had, so while you had empty roads on one side, you actually had these slum clusters
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where people were really facing acute food shortages.
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Let me give you one case in point.
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The slum right next to my building, which is Premnagar in Juhu.
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I went there and I was interacting with a bunch of workers.
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These are young people, young boys.
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I do play football, so that's how I know them.
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And I just wanted to check on them as to what's going on.
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And they were all laborers.
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So some of them were auto rickshaw drivers.
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All of them were basically staying on rent.
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And they would just pool in the rent and they would just go out to a mess service.
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And they were a bunch of bachelors.
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And I asked them, how are you doing?
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And they mentioned that in some cases where they were working for a contractor, the contractor
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Some of them were construction site laborers and they just have a few hundred rupees.
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They don't know how are they going to go back.
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And this was also the time that COVID hadn't been as normalized as it is right now.
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So there was many unknowns about it back then.
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And yeah, so all of them were just really, really scared as to the disease is going to
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They're not with family because they had really experienced a facet of the city that
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nobody else had experienced or rather, you know, they had experienced the most ugliest
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side of the city actually had, because look at it from their lens, their landlord was
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demanding rent, irrespective.
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Their mess service was demanding their fees, irrespective.
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Their wages were paused.
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They were not being able to do anything whatsoever.
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And they're like, hey, we just have like a few hundred rupees and you know, that's all
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How are we to feed ourselves?
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How are we to, you know, help our family, some of whom are here, some of whom are not
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here and how are we to get back?
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And that's when I realized that the problem is really, really big.
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So it's not the homeless.
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That's just one part of the story.
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The bigger part of the story are slum clusters, which are entire slum populations, which have
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suddenly are now living in abject conditions.
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And this was, again, initial days after which then we saw the migrant worker exodus and
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that's another epic saga in itself.
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So when I cross checked what I was hearing and what I actually saw in the slum, I was
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convinced that this problem is much bigger than I think anyone can wrap their head around.
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And at some level, isn't this much more than a COVID problem?
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Like I remember I wrote a column a few months back about how, I think I wrote it in April
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about how we are dealing with two disasters.
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One is of course COVID, but the other is a flailing state, which has been with us for
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more than 70 years in the sense that like when I was looking up statistics for that,
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I found that 3000 children die of hunger every day in India.
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One in four Indian children below a certain age is malnourished.
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So it seems like an ongoing disaster and yet we normalize all of that and we completely
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Especially those of us who are in our elite bubbles, we simply don't notice.
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And then a disaster like this happens and we say, oh shit, people are going hungry as
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if they weren't anyway, you know, and what also strikes me is that whereas, you know,
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people like you and me who have some kind of a safety net, we don't have to earn money
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But most people in this country, you know, the vast majority, definitely more than 99%,
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I would go so far as to say, live very precarious lives.
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The slightest disruption can just be a personal disaster.
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Is that something you had a sense of from before or during this time?
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Did you, you know, were things worse than you had imagined?
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I think because we're essentially activists at the end of the day and we work on the ground.
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So we know the precarious lives that, you know, people live, especially when it comes
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to the informal sector, which makes up a bulk of our workforce.
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So we were mindful of that, but the situation would be so bad that people would demand rent
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The situation would be so bad that their contractors would suddenly stop responding to their calls.
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I mean, at one site, we actually had an entire team of construction workers just there and
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they didn't know what to do because the contractor is missing in action.
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They've not been paid their wages, so they don't know where to go.
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I mean, it was ridiculous, ridiculous to another level.
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So that's when we realized that we have to do something.
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And I think coming back to the point that you were making about, you know, poverty and
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hunger being normalized.
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I think COVID just amplified inequality like never before.
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So while you can argue that state capacity was overwhelmed by the sheer pressure due
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to a pandemic, and that's true in many ways, but the opposite argument is also equally
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true that we had a broken system in a very long time, that we didn't really have functional
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We didn't have our primary health care centers.
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I mean, all said and done, why did we have to go around setting up these fever clinics
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and why are we sending people to tertiary hospitals?
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What happened to our primary health care system?
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What happened to our PDS, which was essentially supposed to distribute food for people in
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And then it's only now that Prime Minister Modi has now spoken about one-ration, one-nation
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But you would hear horror stories that we have our ration card back in the village,
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but we can't essentially get ration here.
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So the system has always been broken, but I think COVID just amplified that to an extent
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that I think any individual with an iota of conscience can't ignore.
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I mean, if you're just going to look out of the window and you're going to just see hungry
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people, how can food rest in your stomach?
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So something had to be done.
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So let's get to some of the fascinating nitty gritties of this.
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So for example, you said that, you know, at the supply end, we had unused kitchen capacity,
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which is of course true because everyone's shut.
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But you know, are they still manned?
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Who actually goes there and cooks?
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And some of the restaurants who were involved were like people like Nom Nom, who are not
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cooking that kind of food, for example.
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What's the thinking process when you say, okay, what is the food we want to give them?
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How do we handle the logistics?
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Where do we get the grain from?
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Yeah, so all of this was, so I mean, 70,000 meals, even in non-COVID context is a lot
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of food and is a lot of effort.
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So certainly during COVID times and during lockdown, logistics were certainly an issue.
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The good thing is thanks to somebody like Neeti, thanks to somebody like Prana who are,
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you know, seasoned restaurateurs, we could speak to APMC directly, we could speak to
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farmers directly to source raw materials and agricultural produce.
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So that was taken care of.
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On the other side, staff, right, because many of these staff didn't really have passes.
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And that's when we approached the BMC and said, listen, we're trying to do good and
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you need to sort of help us with these passes because these guys are getting backed when
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they're going to the hotel to cook food and stuff like that.
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So if my staff doesn't reach the hotel or the restaurant, how do they cook?
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So the good thing about working with the restaurant is that they already had a functional kitchen
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with FSSAI licenses and they had a clean, hygienic environment to cook in, which was
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again a challenge if you would start something on the scratch.
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So you'd rather put to use a utility which exists.
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And thanks to a person like Munaf who understands how food is cooked, we actually approached
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a nutritionist, Monal Shah, as to what is it that we feed these people?
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I mean, we don't want to give something which A, is not nutritious, B, given the fact that
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they may have long intervals of not having access food, you know, it should not have
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an adverse reaction on their body.
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And that's when we realized and that's what they suggested that it should be a rice based
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So we had khichdi, we had sabzi and we started off with that.
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But then because our volunteers, so they're called food ninjas, because a lot of them
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at the end of the day decided to volunteer at great personal risk, they would go to these
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communities and distribute food day after day.
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And then again, there is a ditty gritty there too, because rather than giving two food twice
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a day, we said let's give it once because when it comes to when it comes to the lockdown
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and the curfew at night, we don't really know what the security connotations of the whole
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So just to play it safe, we would give a large 400-450 gram packet, which was good enough
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for a person who could eat that meal twice a day.
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But while we were giving them this food after a few days, we got a feedback that, hey, we
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know now this is going to be, you know, going to continue for some time now, we'd like some
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And we then went back to the restaurant and say, okay, these guys are like family now.
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So we call them our community mobilizers.
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And you know, this is the feedback that we're hearing.
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So we started an experiment with roti and sabzi.
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We've done pav bhaji, we've on special occasions given them some sweet dish, we've added Ramzan
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food packets in Muslim areas so that, you know, we changed the rotation of the distribution
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timing so that they could have something early in the morning and have something late in
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And we would put fruits, we would put khajoor, that is dates and all of that.
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So yeah, I mean, it was fairly exciting.
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It was certainly not the same operation that the same food is going to the same person
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for all these five, six months.
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We managed to get in some variety and yeah, it was fun.
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That's fascinating because you know, initially when I heard about this, I thought, okay,
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migrant laborers, construction workers and so on, you're giving them food and all of
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But you know, you were actually at a lot of places.
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One you've pointed out, you were at all the arterial roads, you're on the Thane Nasik road
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and you're on all those places which people are passing through.
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But you're also at slum pockets and people who are actually staying here, you're giving
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them sort of their regular meals and all of that.
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So we started with the homeless on Mumbai streets.
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And you know, as soon as we started, word quickly got around that, hey, these guys,
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you know, we don't know who they are, but they show up and they distribute food.
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So we started getting requests from the slum clusters.
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So we would send our volunteers there, do a basic housekeeping check, you know, is the
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Are the people for real?
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What is the size of the community?
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And then depending upon the resources we could mobilize, we would start distributing food.
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But then the first were the arterial roads, then were the slum clusters.
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After the slum clusters was as close to apocalypse that I think I've seen, which is the migrant
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workers literally trudging on the road.
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And I remember Neeti Goyal, my colleague reached out to me and she said that, she says in Chimbur
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But she was like, you know, I'm just coming from the highway and there are hundreds of
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And I couldn't believe her as to, you know, why are the hundreds of people on the road?
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And I actually went there.
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And it was really, really, really earth shattering the scene.
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You had people just walking on the roads and you know, I stopped a few people and I said,
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And they're like, what are we going to do here?
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Because we don't have anything to eat.
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Some of them were actually from containment zones.
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So they were not even getting the regular supply of food, which they otherwise would
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So people like us could have maybe gone to the nearest vegetable vendor and got what
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But because they were in a containment zone, they weren't even being able to access that.
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And we said, okay, something needs to be done, just as we were distributing food.
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But then we realized it's not food, food that they need because they're walking.
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And we set up our first relief operations at Majiwada Junction, which is on the Mumbai-Agra
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Highway, just outside of Mumbai in Thane.
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And we were distributing fruits, we were distributing water, we were distributing biscuits, we were
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distributing teplas, dry snacks, savories, at least something, you know, which would
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help them while on their journey.
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Because look at the context of the whole thing.
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This was still the time that railways were shut.
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So there were no trains functioning.
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There was no public transport.
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The only public transport which had been announced was extremely haphazard because the state
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said that, okay, we're going to ferry you from a particular point to the border and
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you're supposed to cross the border and you're supposed to find something in the next state
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and you have to continue to hitchhike like this till you reach your destination.
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Now you have families, you have women, you have children, you have senior citizens.
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I mean, just imagine the extent of the calamity.
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And I still remember on day one, I remember the police were just cracking down on them
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and they were running into the mangroves parallel to the highway.
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And I remember stopping the car and confronting a policeman saying, why are you beating these
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And if you've announced buses from a particular spot, they're obviously trying to get there.
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So they showed me, you know, they took out a small folded piece of paper from their pocket
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and one of them was like, this is a doctor certificate that I paid money for.
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Because I don't know which doctors were they and what ethics they had, but a large number
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of them had actually paid for that certificate, which for them would enable them to get onto
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And that was the last money that they had.
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And they just with with backpacks, they don't have food, they don't have access to water.
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They're worried that the police will crack down and beat them away.
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I mean, it was it was just something which really, really moved us.
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And we said, OK, if this is the situation on Thane, then it's also true for Vashi on
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the Mumbai-Bangalore Highway.
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And it is also true for Dahisar on the Mumbai-Surat Highway, the Mumbai-Gujarat Highway.
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So we set up these three relief sites.
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And I remember going there myself the first two days.
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And I think I was I was heartbroken.
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I remember I think three, four images with me.
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I remember a family, nearly seven people, somehow, you know, who were somehow accommodated
#
themselves in the in a small rickshaw.
#
And they had stopped by saying, we're going all the way to Uttar Pradesh because we don't
#
have anything any any transport.
#
This is the only transport that we have.
#
We've carried some additional fuel and we'll somehow, you know, drive past there.
#
And we want some food because we don't really have food.
#
We spent our money with all of these arrangements.
#
I mean, we we gave them food.
#
And the second scene was even worse.
#
They were riding what seemed like new cycles.
#
So I stopped them and I asked them that, hey, where are you going?
#
And they're saying we're going all the way to Koraput and Orissa.
#
And I asked them, are you serious?
#
You know, that's that's in the other end of the country.
#
And they're like, what do we do, sir?
#
We were here as salesboys and this was the last money that we have.
#
And we we've invested in this bicycle.
#
This is something that we've paid four thousand rupees for.
#
And we're going to cycle all the way there.
#
And they didn't have water.
#
They didn't have access to washrooms.
#
And yeah, if you ask me, I think it was a collapse of of governance at so many levels.
#
I mean, how difficult is it to put for the administration or for the collector to just
#
make some arrangements on the highway?
#
Or how difficult is it to ensure that people at least have water and biscuits or something?
#
You know, the children, they're just they're just crying, I still remember.
#
And then the absolute chaos at these junctions, I still remember Majiwada Junction.
#
Sorry, I'm going into the depth of it, but I think it will help your listeners understand
#
the extent of the problem.
#
And you had these people just squat on the road.
#
And I would ask them as to what they were doing.
#
And they're like, all the buses are done for today.
#
We can't possibly go back and come back tomorrow.
#
So we're going to wait here.
#
And the police didn't really have information.
#
Buses were very difficult to come by.
#
And this was still the early days that the administration was trying to get its act together.
#
And as evening, so the deadline for the buses would be approximately six o'clock.
#
So all the people who could get themselves into a bus would would basically get onto
#
And after that, I would see there would be trucks lined up right ahead of Majiwada Street
#
going on that road which goes towards Kalyan.
#
And I remember, okay, I remember going to one of these trucks and each of them is stuck
#
had like dozens of people and all of them just waiting for the police barricades to
#
be relaxed a little and they would just basically get out.
#
And that's how most people have actually traveled in trucks, hitchhiked through buses in the
#
total absence of support for migrants.
#
That's when we were working with the BMC administration.
#
So by this time, we were really distributing food in those areas that the BMC couldn't
#
Sometimes the BMC had sponsors who maybe had the money but didn't really know how to go
#
So we set up the operation for them at the most optimally low price and, you know, help
#
So this is when Mr. Jaiswal, who happens to be the additional municipal commissioner reached
#
out to us and said, we're starting the stomach trains.
#
Can you be kind enough to supply food?
#
And we went to I still remember the first stomach train was leaving Kurla terminus at
#
And I was told that because these trains have no pantries, there is no avenue for them to
#
basically get their food and some of them have carried whatever.
#
But let's remember that these are people who already sort of sold their belongings because
#
they were in a rental place.
#
They really were leaving the city for good because they thought that the village would
#
be at least better in the city.
#
The city had, I think all of us, all of us in urban India should hang our heads in shame
#
that for whatever reason, our workforce felt insecure and for some reason didn't really
#
And maybe it's because of the way we behaved with them.
#
And we said, okay, we'll start with distributing food.
#
And I remember going to the railway station at about 12.30 at night, and it was just in
#
time for the first train to leave.
#
And I talked to a few of these people and they had come in BST buses from slums.
#
And all of them had, you know, signed up at the local police station giving applications
#
as to where they wanted to go.
#
So they were grouped and the police would then call them and there was a systematic
#
operation which was in place there.
#
So yeah, so I immediately got back to Mr. Jaiswal and said that no, we are going to
#
adopt three of Mumbai's four terminuses.
#
So we adopted VT, which is also known as CST, the Bandra Terminus and the Lokmaina Dilak
#
And yeah, till date, we have serviced over 284 Shramik trains.
#
Each train has on an average anywhere between 2,000 and 2,500 people.
#
That depends upon how many bogies that a train has and so on and so forth.
#
But yeah, I think in all, between the relief operations at the transit points and the Shramik
#
train operations, the railway operations, we've supported over six and a half lakh migrant
#
workers with food while they were going back to their villages.
#
And a lot of this is so heartbreaking.
#
And there are a number of kind of thoughts that come.
#
One is what you just said about how this should be a wake up call for all those of us urban
#
professionals who don't kind of notice this.
#
And I think in many ways, we live in cities full of invisible people, right?
#
We are in our own cocoon, whether it's, you know, we are at a car and we don't notice
#
who's what's happening on the signal around us or people on the streets, whether they're
#
homeless people or beggars or whatever, you know, we live in our own little cocoons, everybody
#
And we also sort of take a lot for granted, like, you know, one of the most sort of heartbreaking
#
images from the stories I hear about partition, for example, had to do with trains.
#
So you'd have a train going from one country to the other.
#
And when it arrives, it's full of dead bodies, because everybody's been killed.
#
And similarly, we heard stories during this time, that migrant workers get on a train
#
And three days later, because they've had no food, they're not there.
#
The government initially in parliament said that they don't have data.
#
It was only after a consistent follow up by a few MPs, and I remember Sanjay Singh, our
#
MP had taken up the issue in a very big way, that the government then came up with a figure.
#
But I'm confident that even if they wouldn't have died in the train, you're talking about
#
people in some cases, like, I don't know, we did this in Mumbai, I'm sure this was true
#
for every major city in India, and there were a lot of trains leaving out of the city.
#
So there were a lot of trains leaving from the Vasais and the Kalyans, the world, we
#
couldn't even reach there.
#
So we could do what we did in Mumbai.
#
And clearly, you're talking about people who've been eating once a day for the last few days.
#
This was the last money that they actually had, sold all their belongings, and, you know,
#
they're just moving to the next city, and now that they don't have food for like the
#
next three days, while they're going to their native place, I mean, just think about it.
#
How more gut-wrenching can it basically get?
#
So I think, irrespective of what the government may say on paper, I am confident that a number
#
of people would have passed away just because, A, of sheer exhaustion, both mental and physical,
#
and of course, the fact that they didn't get food.
#
In fact, I saw a panel discussion of yours on YouTube, where a gentleman asked you a
#
question, and he spoke about how one of his workers actually boarded one of these trains,
#
got fed by you guys, but then died three days later because three days there was no food.
#
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
#
And the other thing that also strikes me here, like when you were telling me stories of these
#
people on the highway who are, like one of course is, even at a time like this, there
#
is this incredible scamminess where you have doctors taking money to give out these freaking
#
certificates or selling cycles or whatever, and I assume making a fast buck there.
#
But what also strikes me is a kind of poverty that we don't notice when we talk about poverty.
#
Like when we talk about poverty, typically we'll think about not having money, not having
#
a roof over your head or having enough to eat.
#
There's also a poverty of information.
#
Throughout this period, people like you and me, we've got our mobile phones, we've got
#
the internet, we are informed about what's happening, right?
#
We kind of know what's happening, despite the fact that there is a sort of a fog of
#
You know, we are not falling for a lot of fake news out there unless it's on WhatsApp
#
and it's about politics.
#
But for a lot of these people, they don't even have that basic information.
#
If they are told that you need a certificate and blah, blah, blah, and they have no way
#
Like these kids who you mentioned were trying to cycle to Orissa, like they didn't know,
#
you know, how far away Orissa is to begin with and the fact that it's virtually not
#
Did you get any chance to take anybody's number or something?
#
We in touch with a few people and we're going to now come up with a report as to what happened
#
to their lives when they went back to their villages in the rural areas and it turned
#
out to be much worse than what it is here.
#
Because at least here, there was some avenue of some employment and something, they had
#
something going for them in the villages, they had nothing going for them, especially
#
in places like Bihar, we've been hearing a lot of feedback about the families over a
#
period of time, tell people as to why you come here, like, you know, you went there
#
to feed us, now how we expected to feed you.
#
I mean, you're seeing systematic breakdown of society.
#
But before we get into, you know, the poverty of information and all that, let's look at
#
Okay, average middle class people.
#
We have our domestic workers come to us.
#
My last startup, by the way, was served, where we were working to make domestic workers financially
#
independent and debt free and maybe I'll speak about it later.
#
But I know of people living in the prosperous and the plus Juhus and the Lokhanwala's and
#
the Bandra's and the Pawais of the world, who actually didn't pay their domestic worker.
#
Kis baat ka paisa aapko dena chahiye, oh, you've not come to work, so you know, we don't
#
And obviously, you live in a slum, so you would have already contacted COVID.
#
And we basically live in our two bedroom hall kitchen flat, so we are obviously safer than
#
So hey, you can't come here.
#
It's a poverty of empathy.
#
I mean, on my society WhatsApp group, there was a lady complaining that why are you people
#
paying your domestic help?
#
My maid expects the same from me and what do you even kind of say to that?
#
The other absence besides the absence of information seems to me in some ways to be the absence
#
Like, I've always held that in India, we don't really have a rule of law except for the rich.
#
That the state exists, but the way people get by is through a kind of Jugaar.
#
That they figure out a way to get shit done.
#
And it seems to me to a large extent, that's kind of what happened here, that the state
#
was just absent or clueless.
#
And a civil society people like you guys stepping into the breach.
#
What was the experience like though of dealing with the state?
#
Like you've pointed out that there were people who were helpful, who cooperated with you
#
guys, wanted to work together with you guys.
#
What was that experience like?
#
Because the interface that the common person will often see is the officious policeman
#
who is just rent seeking, who's taking a bribe because you're not wearing your mask in your
#
What was your experience like?
#
So I think it would be wrong to state that the state was completely bereft of political
#
I think that's not the case.
#
People were really concerned.
#
But what had happened is over a period of time with corruption and the lack of reforms
#
had just robbed the state of its capacity.
#
So while you had like Sangeetha Hasnally of the BMC is an amazing woman.
#
We've been working with her and I've seen her in action.
#
Jaiswal Saab is an amazing guy who is again solution oriented, focused, all of that.
#
But what happens when it comes to the lower staff?
#
There is a clear lack of capacity.
#
So A, do you have the will to do it?
#
Okay, if you have the will to do it, you don't have the capacity to do it and hence you're
#
not being able to do it.
#
Fact of the matter is at the end of the day, these people, the poor people are left high
#
And that was the saddest lesson in all of this.
#
Like let's take even a ration card, which is functional.
#
People have a ration card.
#
People know where to go to.
#
Let me give you a case in point.
#
We got a SOS distress call from Cassandra who works with the Adivasi Padas in RA and
#
Sanjay Gandhi National Park.
#
Now their ration shop is on the other side of the road of the Western Express Highway.
#
Now how are they supposed to come there and they're living in, you know, in some place
#
Now I went with these people and I went to the ration shop only for the ration guy to
#
tell me, first of all, why are you poking your nose in it?
#
And second is that, oh, we don't really have supplies.
#
So we've seen this in shop after shop that you have people go to the shop and the guy
#
is just responding that, hey, we just have rice and even the rice is over.
#
So we don't have dal or we don't have anything else.
#
How do you really expect people to respond to this?
#
And yes, I would still hold the state accountable because I've seen what happened in Delhi.
#
I was extremely closely involved in how the entire food operation happened.
#
I spoke with my colleagues there and et cetera and you know, they gave people temporary ration
#
The distribution point there was a school that anyone could go to a school and the principal
#
had been given powers, discretionary powers to, in case there's somebody without any
#
documentation, you do a panchnama and you give them the ration that they need.
#
We didn't see any of that here.
#
So yes, while there are good people in the system as they are anywhere around, I think
#
this is a problem which is compounded many levels.
#
So I think you're correct in saying that what we see are the symptoms of this larger disease
#
So yeah, we see a police guy taking a bribe and you know, it angers us and we see poverty
#
But yeah, I think what we now need to see and this is why I come back to JP, you know,
#
those mantra which I use in my life is just as Gandhiji had spoken to Jagjivan Ram and
#
spoken about Dharidra Narayan, the most destitute, the most helpless person that you've ever
#
met and if your decision is going to change his life for the better, your doubts will
#
And I think if I would use the same example in the 21st century in a slightly more varied
#
context is where JP comes in, where he says, I don't believe in a God, but I certainly
#
believe in a sin which is unacceptable.
#
And that sin is twofold of avoidable suffering and of unutilized potential.
#
So that prism that all of this what you're seeing is actually avoidable suffering.
#
People don't need to go through this.
#
If the state would have been a little more vigilant, if people really walk the extra
#
mile, all of this could have been avoided.
#
And I think the sooner that people actually look at it as a core problem of governance
#
rather than all this band-aid approach that we go about doing, it's not really going
#
Because what do NGOs do?
#
NGOs do something that the government has failed to do.
#
And I think I tell this to everybody that A, an NGO can never substitute the government.
#
B, no matter how many NGOs come together, you cannot ever substitute the government.
#
And C, if the government doesn't do something, that doesn't mean that I stop doing what
#
I do productively and start working with the government which is not basically doing much.
#
So I mean, I do go and clean the beach whenever I have the time, but I'm not a huge proponent
#
Because I think the BMC has gotten contracts.
#
It is our citizens that should hold them accountable and they should basically go about fixing
#
You know, as citizens, we again confuse action with activity.
#
And we are very happy with activity, which, okay, there's something going on and we put
#
something on Facebook and we get some gratification with a few hundred likes and we feel good
#
And I think that's good.
#
But unless and until we look at this as a problem of governance, which is why we are
#
now working on the hunger map where we are actually trying to work on a set of interventions.
#
So we've actually identified about 10,000 of some of the most vulnerable populations
#
So each of them is called a micro cluster.
#
We've used Ashwin Mahesh's MapUnity tool, M-Group, to actually map these clusters.
#
And of course, it's heartbreaking to go to them and essentially take their data and not
#
give something to them.
#
Parle has been kind enough where they supported us with biscuits.
#
Again, I think till date, we've distributed about 12,00,000 odd biscuit packets to people
#
And we are now working with the BMC to say, okay, now this is a real problem.
#
Where are these night shelters?
#
Because the BMC has 28 night shelters, 18 of which are functional.
#
I think Mumbai is best kept secret.
#
And we're trying to map out these sections to these slum clusters.
#
We're trying to understand how the Rayan Basera model worked in Delhi, how do soup kitchens
#
Because the problem is the same.
#
It's not a uniquely Mumbai problem.
#
And if there are funds which are allocated for this purpose, I think we can do a much
#
better job of it right now.
#
And our first focus now is on ensuring that these people actually get ration cards so
#
that they can actually get some support from the state.
#
Because right now, they're not getting anything.
#
So tell me a little bit about this hunger map.
#
Like, does it come out of the thinking that, okay, we've dealt with the immediate crisis,
#
but we haven't obviously solved the problem of hunger, which is widespread?
#
So Khan Chahin was a relief operation.
#
So we understood the distress and we're not people who would do this permanently.
#
We're not going to just cook food and just distribute that.
#
We'll do it as the circumstances demand out of us because this was truly, you know, something
#
in the middle of the pandemic where a large number of people are going hungry and we did
#
So we said that, okay, now that we have the data of these communities for the last six
#
months, can we put all of this on a map?
#
And can we geographically say, okay, these people are here.
#
We have their community contact points and we reach out to them and we now see what is
#
Are they really that abject?
#
Can we take some data as to where did they come from?
#
What is the kind of work that they would do prior to bad days fell upon them?
#
So all of this, we were to put on a map.
#
So that's the first layer.
#
The second layer is then see what are the government schemes which are actually meant
#
for them and why is it that they don't reach them?
#
So the last mile delivery of all these public services, both at the BMC level, at the state
#
government level, I'm sure at the central government level, you have a Atal Bihari
#
Vajpayee this, you have a Deendayal Upadhyay that.
#
So can we at least ensure in a controlled manner that this lot basically gets whatever
#
the state has at least in principle set out to do so that they are a better lot over a
#
There is something called the National Urban Livelihood Mission, which is again something
#
very interesting where they're supposed to train a lot of people and skill them so on
#
But again, it's just lying in disarray.
#
Nobody really pays too much attention on that.
#
So we've identified a few of these schemes and now for the better part of next year is
#
to focus on these communities to actually ensure that they get all the possible state
#
help that at least the state at least in principle has promised to provide them.
#
Tell me about the role that corporates have played in this.
#
Like you pointed out Padle gave all these lakhs of biscuits and all of that.
#
You've spoken about Wipro stepping in.
#
Tell me a bit about that.
#
Like did they come on their own?
#
So I am part of Jagruti Yatra, which is the largest train led enterprise journey of its
#
kind, which takes 500 young people across the country and the idea is to inspire them
#
to become entrepreneurs.
#
And because of that network, I had somebody working in Wipro and you know, they reached
#
out to me saying, listen, you're doing some good work.
#
And we actually gave a proposal to them and they were kind enough to support us and Wipro
#
was one of our biggest supports.
#
I must say that the turnaround time between when they approached us, when we gave them
#
a proposal and when they approved of it was less than 24 hours.
#
And because I think they came from a place with a lot of heart and they of course did
#
their inquiries and they would obviously see that the money that they're giving us is well
#
spent and judiciously used.
#
But yeah, I think they threw their weight behind us and I think thanks to Wipro, a lot
#
of the other corporates came on board.
#
So we had Paytm which contributed something, we had Godrej which contributed something,
#
we had Reddington which contributed something and all these companies essentially happened
#
because Wipro basically came on board.
#
So that was a big validation of sorts.
#
And then I think what happened was a large number of our volunteers were with corporates.
#
So they would get us in touch with their CSR team saying, hey, you know, I'm volunteering.
#
I remember the vice president of Tata Trust was a volunteer.
#
I didn't even know this until later on I was told about it.
#
So I think a lot of the good news spread with word of mouth and that really got a lot of
#
But while that is where we got the large donation sums, also a large number of people who donated
#
were basically simple millennials.
#
It's very interesting to see.
#
A majority of the people who donated to us are millennials, not the 40 plus generation
#
which we would have expected because they have a larger pile of savings would basically
#
No, I think our millennials have much more heart than I think the previous generations
#
I think nearly given up on that generation.
#
And yeah, I think that's how we were able to do a good job of it.
#
But interestingly, there is again, Anik Gardia is our residential Marwadi.
#
And as with all of our previous projects, he was in charge of the finances and the accounting,
#
which again was done very nicely because if you need your sponsors coming back, so Disney
#
Hostel supported us again in a big way.
#
If you want your sponsors coming back to you, you need to give them reports, you need to
#
make sure that this is run as a professional organization, that this operation is as world
#
And that's when I think the focus was on the team because I think the learning for me in
#
all of this is whatever you do, it has to be collaborative.
#
Like I think early on, we said forget about the branding.
#
I mean, who's going to go about branding something in the middle of a pandemic?
#
If there are people on the ground, let them call it whatever they want to let them donate
#
it as long as it's reaching people.
#
So yeah, so that's that.
#
And you also mentioned that there were corporates who you know, you went to for the CSR funds
#
and they said, no, we have to give it somewhere else.
#
Yeah, I think the PM cares fund is the closest that any of us humans can experience when
#
it comes to an astronomical black hole.
#
Everything just go there and just disappear.
#
Because corporate after corporate would tell us that oh, we've already given it to PM cares
#
and we've already given to PM cares.
#
And I saw the entire NGO ecosystem collapse.
#
So many community kitchens which were started by just some do-gooders in their localities
#
didn't really have the wherewithal to actually keep the operations going.
#
And I think when all of this started becoming apparent after the initial bit of support
#
started evaporating because see the pandemic also got extended, I mean, the lockdown was
#
extended month after month, we would see the Prime Minister extend the lockdown and then
#
the government would extend the lockdown basis the announcement that they would hear from
#
So because of all of that, that had also led to a lot of donor fatigue.
#
So on one side, we told that all of this money is going to PM care, we don't know how is
#
it used and I think it's not even under the RTI.
#
So it's as opaque as it can get.
#
So a complete lack of transparency.
#
And on the other side, you have donor fatigue because while people have contributed, people
#
feel that okay, we've done whatever we could and now basically the problem should somehow
#
No matter however illogical that is or sounds, that was the excuse that a large number of
#
So that's actually the sad part.
#
Let's get a little meta now, right?
#
So you know, we've discussed that the system is broken has a crisis, there's an ongoing
#
crisis but that's a different matter here's an immediate crisis, you're going out and
#
feeding all these people, there are well meaning people within the system, but the system itself
#
When I try to get a little meta and think about the fundamental flaws that it reveals
#
and I'll ask you for more of them but the first one which stands out to me and tell
#
me if you agree is that government isn't local enough.
#
If it was much more local, there would be much more accountability, you would have better
#
information going through to people in the state, they'd be able to utilize whatever
#
little capacity they have better and everything would kind of work and that seems to me to
#
be a systemic flaw which would solve so many things, not just this and yet it's kind of
#
impossible because the only people who can now make it happen in the existing system
#
are the people who are you know enjoying that accumulated power at the center, whether a
#
center or state or whatever, why make it more local?
#
No, I think the 74th amendment which is about urban decentralization of power has been in
#
abeyance for the longest period of time, I mean let's look at Mumbai for example.
#
We have what is called award committees which was supposed to be the corporate awards, so
#
in Mumbai there are two kinds of awards, there are the corporate awards which are numbered
#
so we have 1 to 227, one being in Dahisar and 227 being in Kolaba and then you have
#
these A to T which are your administrator awards which are basically one or more corporate
#
Now the idea behind the award committee was you were supposed to get more people to participate
#
but while they claim to be implementing the 74th amendment they said okay the award committee
#
is now comprised of all these corporators and maybe some members of some NGOs and so
#
on and so forth and the police and etc etc.
#
Now that is a complete repudiation of what the community participation law actually was.
#
Let's again come back to 2005, 2005 was when the Nagarraj bill under the Jawaharlal Nehru
#
urban renewal mission was presented as the model community participation law and you
#
know the JNNURM funds were like a carrot dangled to them saying oh you know if you pass the
#
community participation law we will basically give you these funds and so on and so forth.
#
Maharashtra passed a ridiculous watered down version of the act which still has not implemented.
#
I mean they've passed it but they've not notified it.
#
I mean that's the level of treachery sadly by our politicians but that apart I think
#
the problem is that in a city like Mumbai your average ward has about 40 to 50,000 voters
#
You add another 20,000 people who are below the age of 18 so that's your population in
#
How do you expect one person to liars with these people and solve their problems?
#
All of them just operate out of one small encroached footpath which has turned into
#
some sort of a political office and they just put two benches and they're somehow supposed
#
So there is no grassroots democracy.
#
I think at one level when we think about ourselves being a democracy we think about elections
#
but again if you see voter participation you have more people voting at the Lok Sabha level
#
because they know that a prime minister gets elected and it's a bada election.
#
You have a lot of people voting at the Vidhan Sabha level and you know the chief minister
#
gets elected and it's a bada election but when it comes to municipal elections seen
#
as a sota election oh it's a councillor and etc etc what is it possibly going to do to
#
If we look at the things that actually matter the roads that we walk on our footpaths, primary
#
health care, primary education, garbage, water, sanitation, sewage all of this is BMC.
#
So I mean it is really far-fetched for a person to you know participate in elections and then
#
not really have a say in the things that actually matter right in his or her immediate vicinity
#
and that is exactly what the Nagaraj Bill was supposed to remedy.
#
It spoke about area sabhas which are like Mahalla sabhas so you have one or two contiguous
#
polling booths one locality which had an area sabha and they would elect an area sabha representative
#
and so if there are 35 polling booths you would have 35 area sabha representatives who would
#
be mini corporators so to say.
#
They would have a ward committee, the corporator would be answerable to the ward committee,
#
the ward committee would set the agenda.
#
Right now just think about it how do your corporators go about proposing works there
#
is absolutely no study nothing.
#
The contractors come with a list of things and they tell you that okay this is what we
#
did last year, this is what we will do this year, this is this is what we will continue
#
So there is absolutely no involvement when it comes to the electorate, when it comes
#
to understanding what the issues are, when it comes to correcting something gone wrong
#
like let's take the brimstone wide project right which came after the 26-7 Mumbai-Delhi
#
which is still not implemented.
#
Look at the kind of money that is being spent by the BMC, let's take our roads it's almost
#
in Mumbai if you divide the budget by there are approximately 2000 kilometers of road
#
so it works out to 50 lakh rupees per kilometer right that is the kind of money that is going
#
there the entire process somehow leaves the citizenry out of the decision making and I
#
think yeah this is all the result of that because had you had these functional urban
#
panchayats, mahalda sabhas as I would call it then all of this would be weeded out because
#
meeting after meeting if you're going to have a public meeting where you're going to discuss
#
these problems if there is a problem with the BMC, if there's a problem with the ration
#
shop, if there's a problem with the police, if there's a problem with the traffic police
#
all of this would have got weeded out if by nothing else then by at least benign collective
#
informed assertion because all said and done no matter what the systemic problems that
#
we have I think if you are at it over a period of time and you have evidence then things
#
do change but we don't even have that so yeah so to answer your question I think our urban
#
governance is a big disaster in all our Indian cities and I think that will require another
#
podcast by itself because Mumbai is an absolute mess so while we elect our councillors and
#
the councillors elect a mayor the mayor and the councillors can make laws but they can't
#
implement laws the implementation is with the municipal commissioner who is directly
#
answerable to the chief minister and it's a mess and as if this is not enough you have
#
so let's just take where we are right now let's go to the highway on the western express
#
highway the western express highway is managed by the MMRDA you then go to that Kherwadi
#
flyover which will be managed by the PWD because it's a flyover at the end of the day then
#
you go a little further that bridge is managed by the MSRDC then you reach Verli C-link and
#
that's managed by another organization so can you see that just within a small set of
#
just a few kilometers you have like five different organizations
#
and they'll operate in silos they'll have their own incentives
#
yeah I mean railways why should you have okay now it's Piyush Goyal who coincidentally
#
lives in South Bombay but I mean just think about it you have somebody else elected from
#
somewhere else whose only idea about emancipation is to go ahead and set up a coach factory
#
I mean can you imagine why is a coach factory in Raibar really because the great leader
#
who gets elected there couldn't do anything to solve local people's problems so you basically
#
get the railway minister to basically put something there and that's supposed to solve
#
problems but coming back to the point how would you have such indirect accountability
#
for somebody in the country looking at railways in Mumbai it just doesn't make sense why do
#
you have a shipping minister suddenly look at our portlands our port trust you have the
#
shipping ministry in what we don't have I think one of the only large cities in the
#
world which doesn't have an integrated transport system and you have so many parasitical agencies
#
and you have the MMRDA and then you have the collector and then you have the state government
#
and then you have the BMC and then you have MADA and if you actually put all these jurisdictions
#
over a map you know none of them will actually overlap you know none of their borders will
#
actually overlap it's it's just is this such a such a big mess sorry sir that's no that's
#
that's that's the image of urban governance as citizens see it no no that's very eloquent
#
and also very scary and we will not leave that discussion for a separate podcast this
#
is a long podcast it contains multitudes and we'll talk more about it in the second half
#
but for the moment let's take a quick commercial break okay have you always wanted to be a
#
writer but never quite gotten down to it well I'd love to help you one of the great joys
#
of the last few months for me was discovering how much I enjoy teaching what I've learned
#
over the years and my online course the art of clear writing is now open for registration
#
in this course through four webinars spread over four weekends I share all I know about
#
the craft and practice of clear writing there are many exercises much interaction and over
#
the nine months that I've taught this course a lively writing community has formed itself
#
the course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST or about a hundred and fifty dollars and the
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February classes begin on Feb 6 so if you're interested head on over to register at India
#
uncut dot com slash clear writing being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent
#
just a willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your
#
skills I can help you India uncut dot com slash clear writing welcome back to the scene
#
in the unseen I'm chatting with the Ruben Mascarenas a man who wears many hats but fundamentally
#
someone who is deeply involved in making our world a better place and you know we've spoken
#
about which I wanted to spend the first half of the show doing because it's so kind of
#
urgent to our times and so eye-opening in many ways and I normally start of my episodes
#
by talking about the personal journeys of whoever I'm talking to and your personal journey
#
is also pretty fascinating because I think the default mode for a citizen in India is
#
one of apathy you know that I can't change anything let me just you know make a good
#
life for myself and blah blah blah and that's kind of the default mode of citizenship we
#
are apathetic and also as public choice service would tell you there is something called the
#
free rider effect there might be some social good that we would like but we will let others
#
fight for it why should we do the hard work you are the complete converse of all of this
#
in the sense that you dive into causes that you know there was this urban governance activist
#
from Bangalore V. Ravi Chander who once described himself as a patron saint of lost causes and
#
I think a lot of these causes that to my cynical mind from a distance where we have such a
#
overwhelming dysfunctional state seem to be you know if not lost causes very difficult
#
causes which you know there's no sort of immediate fruit at the end of the line but I'm rambling
#
so let's talk about your journey what made you interested in politics and social work
#
to begin with I think two three things I think I come from a orthodox Catholic family charity
#
came to us naturally you know we would go to the church and we would do some social
#
work and you know I would always ask this question as to okay how much are we going
#
to do because it's just a drop in the ocean so while I still did it I would I would always
#
have this question in mind and then I went to St. Xavier's and I think that just opened
#
up a lot of I mean there was really grounding because that was an eye opener to a larger
#
world around our immediate surroundings that we would know and that which was it really
#
took me out of my comfort zone and challenged me and then of course engineering happened
#
I studied at St. Francis and while growing up I remember something very interesting had
#
happened there was a banker who had contested a local corporator election and I had thought
#
that she would win you know and I was interested in politics very early on my the earliest
#
memory that my mother has of me about the television is me watching Lok Sabha so but
#
that apart I was you know because I would play and I would know these local boys because
#
they would live in the locality and some of them were affiliated to a political party
#
and you know when the elections came I thought the banker would win because she was an independent
#
candidate and she was well educated and had the right resources but when the results came
#
these guys won and so I was really surprised as to how does this happen like you know we
#
expect the best talent and the best resourced person to actually end up winning so I would
#
go to them and I would tell them that listen I want to hang out with you but I don't want
#
to join you so you know they said that listen we need somebody to write letters in English
#
so I would go to their shaka quote unquote and I would write letters in English but I
#
would get to see you know how the entire system really operates how do they go about organizing
#
themselves for elections on and so forth so all this was happening and the RTI movement
#
had just kicked in Maharaj had an RTI Act in 2003 which then became the National RTI
#
Act in 2005 and we had sort of filed RTI queries I still remember my first query was about
#
shifting a garbage dump which wasn't there when we were growing up and then suddenly
#
the garbage dump really became the entrance to the Irla road so to say and I remember
#
after writing letters of complaint that we actually put some of the formal letters that
#
we learnt in school and college to use and nothing really happened and when I filed an
#
RTI I realized that that wasn't there that was outside the MLA's house the MLA didn't
#
want the so called Gandhagi so he got us shifted to the Irla market and you know we had a signature
#
campaign and etc and we actually ended up shifting the garbage dump to where it was
#
supposed to be and not in a crowded area and so on and so forth so that was my first win
#
of sorts and this was again early days I didn't know activists or activism or anything of
#
And then I remember I joined engineering college it used to be very hectic because college
#
would be between eight and five so I would come home really tired I was not used to working
#
that long and I remember one day I was asleep and I heard some people screaming and I called
#
my watchman to ask them what the hell are these people doing and why are they yelling
#
at me so I went down and I ended up meeting a few activists who are prominent names today
#
and they said that we are trying to win an election and we are trying to change the way
#
politics is and we are going to only spend 75,000 rupees and winning this election so
#
I told them you are clearly out of your mind and I happen to know something about this
#
and what you are saying is impossible and that was the beginning of the Vote Mumbai
#
Vote Juhu campaign where 49 NGOs came together and put up what is called a citizens consensus
#
candidate and Adolf D'Souza and I remember I went there and I was really excited because
#
I always was interested in politics these seem to be decent people that was the only
#
reason why I didn't join the previous cohort so I said okay let's let's do something so
#
I went there and they said okay the elections are about four months from now and we are
#
already doing some prachar and you should do some prachar in your local area so I said
#
okay so I went to Premnagar the slum right next door and you know we had helped these
#
people the deluge was recent we had you know again given them food and all that and these
#
were all boys that I played football with so I remember it was in the middle of the
#
election I went to the slum and the slum looked like a war ravaged zone I couldn't see any
#
able-bodied young man or woman I could only see the extremely old or the extremely young
#
the toddlers so I asked people where are these people where are these people gone I just
#
said no they've gone for they're actually on hire so so the term that they use was they're
#
basically paid political volunteers and they're gone for prachar this is season time for them
#
I mean you're you're essentially come at a wrong time so I went there and you know I
#
gathered all these guys and I said hey you know what this is what we're doing and we
#
have a candidate and it's about clean politics and you know if we we've actually voted for
#
everyone our lives won't change this is the guy and you should vote for me so they all
#
laughed at me and they said I think you're out of your head I mean you're a friend and
#
you're a great guy but you shouldn't get into this it doesn't work that way so I said no
#
no no I please do this for me so I encouraged them to call for a sabha and they said okay
#
you come we normally charge people but we'll gather people for you and I remember I climbed
#
onto a taxi and gave a very rousing speech and then we were good two three hundred people
#
there and everybody was clapping clapping and now I asked them to vote for me and etc and
#
you know they after the whole thing they they again asked me okay so now what are you still
#
as crazy as you were I said no I'm I'm crazy and I want your help to go door to door and
#
etc and they said but what are we I mean okay now this all this was okay you were a friend
#
so we let this happen but what are you gonna give us so I said what do you I am not that
#
rich guy okay yeah I live in the building there but that's about it and they showed
#
me three pipes one was a shining stainless steel pipe one was slightly aluminumish and
#
they said the first pipe is being given by party X the second pipe is being given by
#
party Y and they are building this toilet block for us and they're doing this and they
#
have promised us this and that what are you giving and I said do you think that these
#
people will basically basically do something and they said maybe but this is how it is
#
and you have to pay us if you basically want our services so I said okay I don't want
#
your services but let me campaign and you do what you have to do but you at least vote
#
for me so we did that and I still remember on the day of the elections we actually end
#
up winning that seat so we won by 4582 votes and we I never expected that we would win
#
but we did and I still remember that night I was home I was truly ecstatic I remember
#
partying and I remember my father came up and woke me up startled and he said what
#
happened and I said what happened why are you waking me up I'm I was I mean I'm asleep
#
so he's like there are there are another there are about 30 40 people outside of our door
#
and I go there and I see these boys and etc and I said what happened and he said no we
#
voted for you the results came as per the polling booth they realized that we've not
#
voted for you now they've cut our water oh Jesus and I went there so I saw something
#
I saw that of course we worked the whole thing out we got the BMC to repair the water and
#
all that and they got that water connection but that for me was the moment of truth because
#
if you had to really change the world for the better in the most effective way you had
#
to engage with the state you couldn't have worked in silos you couldn't have done it
#
without the state and then thanks to Adolf who basically became the corporator and he
#
was a member of the Prabhak committee the ward committee I was talking to you earlier
#
about he was part of the standing committee I was his head of staff in many ways I would
#
draft his letters and that really gave me a bird's eye view of things and I and I again
#
remember six months into his tenure Shailesh Gandhi who this is before he became the central
#
information commissioner and so on and so forth he was an RTI activist I remember he
#
had written to all of us over email saying that there's a Crawford market redevelopment
#
and the redevelopment is supposed to get us X but it is being given for Y which is much
#
less than X so it's clearly there's something amiss and we had to stop it so I remember
#
I volunteered and me and a few friends actually went to all these 227 corporators and I remember
#
till then we had this theory of the good Congress of the bad Congress of the good BJP and the
#
bad BJP and depending upon convenience you know you would say that okay some leaders
#
are the good Congress and some some leaders the bad Congress and bad party and good party
#
or whatever but I remember all of them on the face of it said yeah this is wrong and
#
something needs to be done I remember when the issue came up for discussion I was in
#
the viewer's gallery by the way the BMC has a viewer's gallery which is not being used
#
right now but you should go there someday it's a good view and I remember we were all
#
escorns there we were looking at what's happening and the proceedings were going on in Marathi
#
and this issue suddenly comes up and not one person stood up to oppose it the only person
#
who stood up was that Adolf de Souza who stood up and he said that this is wrong and I about
#
to object to it and because he objected to it it was recorded and there was some probe
#
and the whole thing got scuttled and yeah the thing didn't take place at the end of
#
the day but that day I was convinced that boss it has to be politics and it has to be
#
long term and this was around the same time that I was introduced to a Jayaprakash Narayan
#
and then the entire idea of looking at systemic problems and political reform as the as the
#
core issue and also JP is this phenomenal figure I still call him my mentor I joined
#
Lok Sattar I left Lok Sattar when he decided to support Modi but that's a discussion for
#
another day but yeah so Lok Sattar was the first party that I joined before Ahmadmi Party
#
so that happened and I think I thought that this is a great party here is a great thinker
#
and we already had one ward in Juhu so we were like the beacon of sorts when it came
#
to the so-called clean politics but I saw that while we were doing some good things
#
we were still a flash in the pan and we weren't really being able to create impact at scale
#
and that's when the Anna Hazare India Against Corruption movement happened and I was one
#
of the few people who I remember and Arvind Kejriwal who I didn't know then reached out
#
to and say and said that look we are trying to do something against corruption and why
#
don't you join us in Mumbai and yeah we organized Mumbai and we saw that widespread massive
#
support which again turned into the Ahmadmi Party and you know I've been there since and
#
also the Ahmadmi Party actually gave me such an amazing opportunity at my age to end up
#
becoming spokesperson I am the National Joint Secretary there I am able to work very closely
#
with the Delhi government on a few of its programs I am able to influence policy I am
#
able to formulate the party stance so yeah so that's basically been my energy in the
#
political space and yeah I think ever since that day in the BMC there was really no looking
#
So let's take a step back like I do want to ask you lots of questions about your sort
#
of intellectual evolution at this time through people like JP and all of that and how your
#
understanding of politics deepened but before that I am very fascinated by the BMC elections
#
for which you know you were chief of staff as you say for Adolf D'Souza you got 4700
#
votes or something in 2006 I think 2007 and you guys won so here's my question help me
#
understand the mechanics of this that when there is a local election like this at the
#
BMC level number one the people who are voting why are they voting the way they are and number
#
two the people who are standing for these elections why are they standing?
#
So in most cases while the corporators may argue that they can only make laws but they
#
can't implement them so while they may be true on paper the fact of the matter is if
#
a corporator wants to do something he can get something done irrespective of whether
#
he has powers on paper or not we have seen that on multiple locations that's point one
#
point two the way people vote is that they are really disinterested in the BMC election
#
you know it's seen as okay it's just the least important election the councillor is
#
seen extremely low in the hierarchy of elected representatives and you know people don't
#
think highly of them consequentially and hence that disinterest the third the people who
#
contest typically are again from established parties because what happens is you have to
#
give your carder an opportunity to contest you have a lot of competition when it comes
#
to MLAs and MPs because those are bigger elections you need more funds but councillor election
#
is a small election and if you are not going to accommodate your party carder in the councillor
#
election then where are you going to basically accommodate them so most of these people are
#
people who want to make a career out of politics if you typically see most of the Shivsana
#
MLAs today that evolution started by them being corporators at some point in time and
#
then they became successful after going to their villages starting the party there and
#
then expanding the party's footprint so on and so forth so these are people who want
#
to contest but again in typical parties if you have a corporator who becomes an MLA then
#
he will ensure that there is no corporator winning twice because then he suddenly gets
#
threatened because of it so because of this churn and because of the manner in which reservations
#
play out for example you have 50% of all local body seats reserved for women which is a good
#
thing you have 27% reserved for OBC you have 18% reserved for SCST so on now the problem
#
is that because these reservations come only six months prior to elections okay it's a
#
good thing that you have diverse groups of people participating in it but the open so-called
#
constituencies become so-called competitive because all the men folk who get displaced
#
from their erstwhile constituencies basically come there and that's why you have so much
#
of a khichdi so if you typically see most parties actually struggle to get candidates
#
of the particular combination that the reservation is there for and that speaks volumes about
#
the political discourse itself in terms of participation of people in these parties so
#
yeah so that's broadly how the entire election goes it's a khichdi but this time around we
#
expect that there will be more clarity much earlier on so that you can have a long protracted
#
campaign towards elections because also see prior to this if you see the citizens movement
#
right they were independents so you had to go to people tell them who you are what do
#
you do what do you stand for and if you get elected what would you do for them so the
#
what's in it for me part now all of this had to be done just within 15 days or 21 days
#
at max from the time that you got allotted a symbol which would be the random it should
#
be anything random so politics is about consistency it is about perseverance it's about that
#
repeated attempt to communicate and all said and done 10 years ago we were still somebody
#
who was just an independent looking at one particular locality now all said and done
#
we have a political party doing looks at that yeah we had a political party which had a
#
reserved symbol which nobody know about it's a good party but now we have the arm of the
#
party all said and done we have a model in place in in Delhi you may argue whichever
#
way but the fact of the matter is that it has actually worked and there is the broom
#
which is our symbol there is Arvind Kejriwal that who's our leader and all of those things
#
put together now I believe that these forces of new politics have never been better positioned
#
than they are now so hoping for a much better election because I think also what has happened
#
in the pandemic is people for the first time have been forced to think about is our health
#
care really that bad that all of us have to just be cooped up at our in our houses why
#
is it that the government apparatus has collapsed and how why are these people on the streets
#
why do these people have to go out there and go back to their villages all of these things
#
have really I believe have forced people across the board to ask some serious questions about
#
their government and things like that and I think this BMC elections would be a very
#
very very interesting election assuming it goes the way we hope it to.
#
I'm wondering if there is you know before we come back to larger questions I'm wondering
#
if there's a little bit of the availability heuristic here because the people who interact
#
you interact with who would obviously care more about all of this and you know would
#
be more aware and even people who are not activists like you would want to come across
#
that way but my general sense just sort of looking around is that people have gone back
#
to being apathetic because everything that changed you know we've got a new normal now
#
and people are going on with their lives and so I'm not sure that that like for me the
#
fundamental insight which I would like all Indians to have is that our state is a dysfunctional
#
and parasitic state and that we have been treated as subjects not as citizens and I
#
don't and and this is another opportunity where you'd imagine that more of us would
#
see that and I don't think enough of us see that I think we are just back into the normal
#
kind of groove of the way things used to be but maybe I'm just being pessimistic.
#
No I think at the core lies commonality of faith you know I always give this example
#
that a mosquito is more socialist than Karl Marx it makes no distinction while it bites
#
between rich or poor you know I've got to express a pet peeve here which is that a lot
#
of people use the word socialist as if it is caring about society and actually socialism
#
is extreme coercion as we've seen in and that sentence is still right because a mosquito
#
is of course being coercive you will never consent to a mosquito taking your blood so
#
in that sense it's absolutely kind of true let's you know there are two strands I'm
#
But I'll just complete the thought so the point is unless and until you have that realization
#
of the commonality of faith that if today somebody is suffering and we aren't working
#
towards solving the person's problem sooner or later it's going to really come back and
#
impact us and what better time than a pandemic to realize that yeah right so the mosquito
#
can be substituted with the COVID virus and I think slowly and steadily people are really
#
reaching that conclusion so no matter what jingoism we see on social media and our Twitter
#
timelines and our Instagram timelines the fact of the matter is that there is an increasing
#
realization that all so-called existing traditional parties have failed status quo is unsustainable
#
we are slowly getting there is just about when you reach the tipping point because also
#
see the way change takes place just think about a weighing scale and you have let's
#
say 100 grams in one on the other side you're just putting one one gram each and it won't
#
tip till 101 so even though there is a lot of work that is happening even though there
#
is a lot of manthan so to say it still will tip only with that 101 so that tipping point
#
is near and I am a little more optimistic than you are that people will vote see because
#
coming back to our experience in the 2017 election when we went to the election commission
#
and we told them that look you guys aren't doing a good job of increasing voting percentage
#
and I think we can do this better than you and you should basically trust us and we did
#
a number of things with them to engage young people and there was an increased voting
#
percentage this was the same time that I'm not going to take names but some prominent
#
advertising firms and some so-called creative agencies came back to me and told me arey
#
but Mumbai is an apolitical city and you know all of what you're saying is true for a Delhi
#
which is a very political you know we are really stuck into just going to a work and
#
coming back and not being able to do anything but that's wrong so if you actually engage
#
with people I think you know as JP says again that we are as good or as bad as any other
#
people anywhere in the world so we are all people who respond to incentives if bad behavior
#
goes unfinished and good behavior goes unrewarded there is there is nothing there's no incentive
#
for really doing good so over a period of time I think people are slowly realizing that
#
good governance is an incentive is a major incentive and we are really going to see that
#
tipping point come sooner or later I hope you're right you're of course much closer
#
to the ground so maybe you have more reason to be optimistic but perhaps you're much closer
#
to the ground because you're optimistic to begin with so we'll never know but you speak
#
about people responding to incentives and and there I sort of like one of the strands
#
I want to unpack is that that strand of local governance like I remember episode 31 of my
#
show was with Shruti Raj Gopalan where we spoke about urban governance and one of the
#
big sort of TIL moments there for me was learning that how at the level of local politics there
#
is a mismatch between power and accountability in the sense that your MLA is relying on vote
#
banks from elsewhere not necessarily your little urban vote banks so he doesn't really
#
have the incentive to serve you whereas the people that you do elect and that you have
#
power over your local corporator their powers are very restricted their budgets are restricted
#
you know most of your taxes go to the center not enough of it devolves down at the local
#
level so you might have some local concerns but you have you know no way to the people
#
who are accountable to you don't have the power or the money to do anything about that
#
and there is therefore this fundamental mismatch which would also explain what you mentioned
#
earlier that you know people are excited about voting in Lok Sabha elections a little less
#
with An Sabha but at the BMC level not at all because you know what difference is it
#
going to make to my life how much is that an accurate impression in the sense specifically
#
at the level of the BMC or the municipality or whichever city what can the local government
#
do and what can it not do so I think a lot of things so when we speak about decentralization
#
of power we can hear a lot of noise but we should focus on three things funds functions
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and functionaries and I think if you look at urban governance from that lens you what
#
you've realized is that you've seen the legislature metamorphosing into the executive you can't
#
make out the difference so the net result is that the MLA that you elect you expect
#
him to be the face of the government he's basically a lawmaker and maybe because he's
#
an elected representative he can hold the government accountable but he is not the government
#
so in a situation where you a have reduced avenues of participation b you have these
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indirect accountability and you have the not so steel framework of India the rusted framework
#
of India operating and even more rusted framework of the lower bureaucracy operating the whole
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thing is one big mess and all enough you can have a good IS officer who is a genuine guy
#
a nice guy who is well-meaning but all said and done unless and until you do not have
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that local participation the grassroots to ensure last mile delivery nothing really happens
#
so let's look at BMC for that matter there is no new project which is a capital expense
#
project taken up for a long time the coastal road was the first such thing done in a long
#
period of time all the bulk of the thing is maintaining old projects and I mean you have
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the same road you would have experienced this right the same road is dug on multiple locations
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how difficult it is to set up your what is called ducting to ensure that each time there
#
is a new line that the road is not dug open and stuff like that so the reason why you
#
have this mess is because status quo benefits the existing economy here you look at the
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contracts the way it is operated blacklisted contractors get awarded the contract if they
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are blacklisted in one ward they apply in another ward it's one contiguous set of people
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who are actually beneficiaries at all levels so whether it is tenders whether it's contracts
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whether it is its poor execution whether it is its repeated execution of the same set
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of things without giving much thought I mean it just lies in lint tatters let's take the
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DP for that matter the so-called DP 2034 which took like which got cancelled twice and you
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know everybody spoke about oh we should speak about zoning and we should speak about sharing
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our I mean conserving our open spaces you know how much of that gets implemented 17%
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so why go with this entire exercise of only 17% of it basically gets implemented but the
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point that I'm trying to make is much larger that in all your cities you basically do not
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a have direct accountability b people do not have a say in the agenda that the council
#
basically takes so basically people aren't able to hold people accountable from the time
#
that they have elected them till the next election and also then we get into the kind
#
of democratic systems that we have so we have the first pass the post system which clearly
#
incentivizes vote bank politics so you just need a combination of whatever lens you look
#
at it cast or maybe linguistic groups or maybe socioeconomic groups which basically give
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you the threshold of 30 31% depending upon the number of people in a particular constituency
#
and that's why you have the results that you do but that said I think when you have a directly
#
elected mayor when you have a directly elected chief minister which is a model that we should
#
slowly go towards so there is at least a distinction between the executive and the legislature
#
than what we have right now but the answer to your question is that unless you don't
#
have these avenues of participation no matter what you do it's still going to remain the
#
same but if you have these ward committees made I have so for five years in juhu we had
#
this ward committee we had this group of 35 people plus people from the local commercial
#
establishments and shopkeepers associations we would meet month after month and discuss
#
issue after issue so over a period of time things do sort themselves out I mean they
#
will certainly not be as great as we expect them to be but they would be much better than
#
the situation that we're in right does it really make that much of a difference because
#
I came across a 2011 article where you are expressing disillusionment with Adolf and
#
saying that hey he didn't really do anything at the end of the day no so so there is nuance
#
there so in 2011 I so I think Adolf was a great corporator when it came to him working
#
on the ground but when it came to his utilization of his funds when it came to getting us projects
#
but when it came to him raising questions in the house I saw that that was really sad
#
he just raised one question so now of course we've realized that there is I mean he had
#
an issue with public speaking and so on and so forth which were learnings afterwards but
#
the reason why that happened was because there was no institution to support him so while
#
people like us supported him with the goodness of our hearts he was still not part of a political
#
party there was no formal process to basically support him he was clearly overwhelmed with
#
the kind of queries that he would get and I still would say I would still give him a
#
10 on 10 on all of all of those things but I would certainly call him a failure when
#
it came to him being our batsman in the house so we had this expectation that here would
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be Adolf so the only question that he asked was that Crawford market thing so I would
#
expect a councillor to okay may not basically be a Rubin kind of a personality but at least
#
I told him that you know you don't have to be eloquent when it came to corruption because
#
when somebody is robbing in your house you don't really think about the grammar you will
#
just directly go out there and say and do whatever you have to say and do so I think
#
that is the only dissolution but again that comes again to this model of political intervention
#
that it can't be citizen candidates this is a romantic concept which maybe was done as
#
an experiment at that time was a good experiment but the future has to be political parties
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the future because the sad part is that we look at political parties only in the pursuit
#
of power but the goal of a political party is not the blind pursuit of power it is the
#
evolution of leadership it is to basically nurse leadership in its ranks to be able
#
to support that leadership when it comes to decision-making when it comes to their participation
#
in the legislature and which some parties all said and done actually have a system which
#
more or less functions now we can argue as to whether what those standards are and etc
#
and etc but yeah so that is my answer to the adults thing so again just for the record
#
I still think he is was phenomenally honest I am willing to put my neck on the line and
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say that he didn't take a single bribe in five years but yeah when it came to him basically
#
being the largest spokesperson of the city it was problematic fair enough and I guess
#
at some level it's also you know you evaluate someone against a certain set of expectations
#
and you might realize later on that you know maybe these expectations were not yeah because
#
because let's say if right now I am involved in an experiment called the Indian School
#
of Democracy run by Ujwalji which is again something interesting it's about training
#
people for the job that they seek to aspire for so if I want to be an elected representative
#
do I actually have the right training the right skill set the right exposure which prepares
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me for my job Adolf didn't have that and we thought that he would learn on the job but
#
that didn't happen so I'm going to take issue with something you said that is you know almost
#
delightfully idealistic where you said that you know the job of a political party is to
#
build leadership and it's not the naked pursuit of power wait a minute it is a naked pursuit
#
of course I am not impractical of course whatever a political party does is to is to pursue
#
power but that can be done in a way that you not sure leadership let me sort of continue
#
down that line you know people keep lamenting that the quality of our leaders today is so
#
bad and look at the independence movement and we had you know Patel and Nehru and Rajaji
#
and all of these people and what do we have now and I'd once written a column arguing
#
that it comes down to incentives that that generation of leaders they became leaders
#
not because they lust it for power because there were no rewards to be had for them they
#
were animated by principle that we want to make this country a better place we want to
#
do something for people and therefore we had that quality of leadership today and they
#
were responding to those incentives but you know if you think about what incentives a
#
post independence politician is responding to higher principles don't matter anymore
#
it's about you've got a parasitic state they want to have the levers of the parasitic state
#
and the monopoly on violence and so that they can use some of that power to you know power
#
here is not a means to an end for them it's an end in itself right and therefore the question
#
is and therefore my sort of cynical take on Indian politics is that even when people get
#
into politics for the best of intentions they will inevitably get corrupted because there
#
is a fundamental clash between the will to power and whatever principles you may believe
#
in that ultimately you cannot achieve anything without coming to power you know and especially
#
in the bigger elections you need money to come to power so first you need to think of
#
which vote banks you're going to appeal to you are funded by special interests who will
#
want their pound of flesh and you can rationalize all of that and say that okay it's you know
#
I'll make these small compromises as long as I can you know for a higher cause but ultimately
#
you know politics is corrosive because power always corrupts that's a libertarian a nice
#
argument to look at but the way I look at it is no I'll tell you something it's not
#
a libertarian argument because the argument is not against the state the argument is against
#
this structure of the state if the state was much more local and if politicians were accountable
#
and if the only way they could you know stay in power was by actually doing something for
#
people you know so it's a response to the dysfunctional nature of our state and we can
#
come to specific examples of how that kind of corrosion of character also happens but
#
sorry broadly no so see so there are two ways of looking at it one is if you're looking
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at change you can either do a big ticket reform and hope for the big ticket reform to make
#
all these changes or you can do many small things which are not equal to the big ticket
#
reform but when done synchronously together they are much bigger than the big ticket reform
#
let me give you an example so the playbook that you give which is okay you need money
#
to win an election because you get money from some interest you are beholden to those interests
#
and that cycle continues as soon as you get elected to power and so on and so forth but
#
you can change that all said and done and I am part of the fundraising team in Mumbai
#
we consciously go after funding which is crowd sourced which is small so and also we don't
#
have that culture of political funding in the country I mean when I go to my friends
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and say listen I'm in politics and we contesting the elections and you should fund and clean
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an honest party people ask me why people are just bewildered with it thinking oh you're
#
in power in Delhi you should basically work something out so a that culture that political
#
culture b you can certainly you can certainly disrupt the playbook so if you have existing
#
set of castes and languages and various other groups being brought together you can disrupt
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that you can and and and people do respond to that disruption look at what has happened
#
in Delhi the Arvind Kejriwal playbook of winning election was basically that disruption of
#
of politics that he suddenly said that hey I am the advocate of the poor I am the voice
#
of the oppressed and you you had a new kind of a vote bank being created of people who
#
felt disenfranchised people who felt disempowered people who felt cheated and and you've now
#
been able to disrupt it to the extent that you got elected three times so disruption
#
is possible if you if you change the playbook disruption is possible when it comes to the
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will to power the road to power so I I totally grant that that Arvind Kejriwal as a political
#
entrepreneur sheer genius got the job done but he also claimed to stand for a new kind
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of politics and certain principles now for example what we saw last year 370 was abolished
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not a peep out of him the CAA protest happened you know not a peep out of him and I understand
#
that at one level your rationale is that listen we are doing a lot of things when it comes
#
to you know water and electricity and all of that and to be able to do these things
#
we don't want to get into these controversies but that's exactly what I mean that your will
#
to power is so strong that you're saying what about principles or when Vishal Dadlani had
#
to apologize to that Jan Muni because hey vote bank so where are your principles then in
#
other contexts you speak about free speech but then you make your guy apologize no no
#
no there are too many issues okay I'm sorry allow me to answer it one by one number one
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Arvind did speak when it came to 370 he supported the abolishing abolishing of 370 but he's
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never supported the disruption of JNK or the complete suspension of the internet and the
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crackdown that the state has on its population number one so he's spoken it's not that he
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hasn't spoken on CAA he's spoken so let me use this example we as a country are a very
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religious country if you typically see last time census just 33,000 people have basically
#
identified themselves as atheist so whether people may practice religion in the conventional
#
central term or not they certainly identify themselves with religion so if you have an
#
Arvind Kejriwal come up with an alternative version of religion which is tackling the
#
religion of hate bigotry which we have seen so institutionalized and normalized then why
#
are we being penalized for being smart we won that election I mean we all saw we all
#
saw what happened at JNU we are a government which doesn't have control over the police
#
force let me just interject here with one thing that we won that election is not a defense
#
of this point even Modi won an election right and we are both against no the point no what
#
does that even prove no so the point that I'm trying to make is that had we had the
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police we would have certainly did whatever people were expecting of us an election where
#
you are contesting with limited amount of resources when you have the complete might
#
of the BJP machinery and the state you have to be smart you have to be nimble you have
#
to control your narrative he did that all said and done and that is what delivered us
#
the victory no but you don't understand I accept that reasoning as a reasoning for winning
#
elections I admire his political acumen I'm not arguing on any of those we are not disputing
#
his political acumen what I am saying is that he has mastered the will to power bit but
#
he has no principles because for example let's go back to the have you stopped working with
#
the poor tell me something no let's go back to for example the apology that Vishal Dadlani
#
was forced to make now would he have made the same apology if it was a saint who was
#
a BJP person one second Vishal Dadlani is an individual in his own right he is a friend
#
and I think he is best suited to comment over that had it been a political party functioning
#
I would have responded to it this is a private individual what happened there was a decision
#
that he took and I'd leave it at that I think it's the wrong example so you're Arvind didn't
#
ask him that hey why say sorry these are important people I'm not that high up in the party to
#
know what transpired back then okay so fair enough it's an unfair question for you and
#
I you are right that he is a private individual and a great artist by the way it's a rational
#
decision what you know for Arvind to have told Vishal Dadlani if he did tell him that
#
and for Vishal to actually take it's all rational but I'm saying that in that case it's rational
#
in the pursuit of a certain practicality which leads to your winning elections if the question
#
is to be asked that you stand for a new kind of politics what principles do you stand for
#
and you know honestly everything that he said with regards to 370 and CAA was very weak
#
you know he did not take the sort of stances that no no so I'm a little surprised I mean
#
suddenly Sivasena seems to have become the darling of the liberal Janata not mine no
#
maybe but I'm just speaking in terms of the narrative yeah we not only passed a resolution
#
in the house we voted against it in in the Lok Sabha when it comes to every issue of
#
national importance be it demonetization he was the first person who called it a national
#
this is this is a national international scam what has happened when it comes to the migrant
#
worker crisis he's been the first person to speak when it came to the farm bills but but
#
here's the thing here's the thing what I'm pointing out is that in each of these principles
#
no let me no no they are not I'll tell you why why because in each of these cases he's
#
responding to rational incentives let me go through each of them farm bill he's speaking
#
for the farmers because Aam Aadmi party wants to win elections in Punjab at some point farmers
#
are a big vote bank there's your vote bank right there but farmers are a vote bank across
#
the country why is this Punjab I'm saying because that's Aam Aadmi party's interest
#
that is just one that is just one one of the many lenses and we would always speak for
#
our farmers we are an ingredient country at the end of the day so why is this looking
#
no no I buy I buy here's the thing I buy all that see see I buy because it's the farmers
#
of Punjab who are mainly protesting right now the farmers of Maharashtra aren't let's
#
face it and moving on from there you know as far as I disagree with that but yeah sure
#
but as far as demonetization is concerned and I'm not taking a stand with or against
#
the farm bills nor am I saying that Aam Aadmi party is you know out of all the parties they're
#
probably the I shouldn't use a phrase least evil or you will get offended but in all those
#
other cases demon to take care because there's no danger in speaking against demon or all
#
of this but when it comes to sort of the 370 when it comes to CAA you know he doesn't want
#
to piss off certain word banks and the unfortunate truth of Indian politics is that every mainstream
#
party including the Congress of course is very wary of pissing off what they perceive
#
to be the Hindu word bank so I don't think so I think Arvind has redefined Hindu word
#
bank Arvind in whether it is his personal display of religiosity or a very simple aspect
#
of an all-embracing communitarian aspect of religion whether it is the Diwali pujar or
#
anything else for that matter has redefined this this word bank by saying that you can
#
be a Hindu and that can be one of your identities that may be the primary identity for a lot
#
of people but there is a better way of basically being Hindu than the standard playbook which
#
is being peddled by a few people so that's that's that's being intelligent has been smart
#
okay fair enough I don't want to litigate this too much I am also sort of reminded of
#
what one of your early mentors Mayank Gandhi once said about him in his book up and down
#
where Mayank wrote quote let's recall the Arvind I had first befriended he was a man
#
who cared for the poor and the underprivileged he was a man committed to changing the nation
#
without any desire for power or any inclination to engage with messy politicking yet by 2014
#
the same man had surrounded himself with unsavory people built a quarter and abandoned all that
#
we stood for stop quote and in my mind you know this is a classic example of how the
#
will to power leads to the abandonment of principles in a system like ours no no please
#
understand please look at the context of this we were literally the victims of a witch hunt
#
of a government which put nearly 22 of our MLAs in jail all coincidentally have been
#
thrown out by the by the courts we are the only government in the history of this country
#
which had control of an anti-corruption bureau where paramilitary forces were sent in in
#
the in the premises of the ACB to take physical control of it so the kind of a witch hunt
#
and the kind of a crackdown the way our donors were basically harassed because they supported
#
us in multiple instances so you happen you need to run a very tight ship and all of this
#
and Arvind basically taking control making sure that we do the right thing and we do
#
the right thing in the right way so the the political entrepreneurship of it because one
#
slip here and there with the kind of you have a media which just looks towards just amplifying
#
propaganda of you know who so all of this basically comes from that that well we were being literally
#
attacked from us all sides we're a small party we have to stay relevant we have to win elections
#
we have to deliver on our promise and we have to create this new governance model and this new
#
political culture that we keep talking about but that said I disagree with Mayank Gandhi I mean
#
he's my mentor and I have a lot of respect for him and I will still consider him my mentor for
#
the rest of my life but I disagree with this and all said and done Mayank Gandhi doesn't speak
#
anything about Narendra Modi not once if you say Kejriwal has surrounded himself with yesmen no I
#
don't think so I think most people expect that most parties are going to be transparent to their
#
strategy that's not true I know Arvind personally I have engaged with him at multiple points in
#
time and he's somebody who surrounds himself with people who tell him the truth that may not be
#
perceived as people telling him the truth and it's very easy to label some people yesmen but
#
that's that's not true at all he's somebody he's a politician who has his ears to the ground and
#
he has he's always open to new ideas and new people all around and the journey continues this
#
argument that Mayank has of and I've read the book and I mentioned in the book at the three or four
#
instances so it all sounds the ISE part sounds as though it was extremely romantic and here is Arvind
#
Kejriwal who has exactly become the villain that he led a movement against that's that's not true
#
at all and I say this with a lot of responsibility you if you're a member of a political party you're
#
expected to conform with some discipline are you saying that all of us agree with everything that
#
our leaders say of course there are moments of disagreement but there are party fora where that
#
has to be discussed if you have a disagreement with some decision or some policy you can raise
#
it in a particular way I think what Mayank Gandhi did was not just opportunistic but he or what
#
Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan and I remember a moment there was this documentary made on the
#
Ahmadmi Party and and there's one moment in that which I found very telling and correct me if I
#
remember it wrong but at one point you know Arvind says that listen all our candidates will be
#
elected by primaries and at another point he says I don't care about the primary this is a person
#
that I want you remember that moment am I am I misremembering no so no no no so please understand
#
when you when you know so there's a context to this when you actually did an experiment of a
#
primary you had people participate such that the worst candidate would have basically become your
#
candidate so when you are setting up an institutional system no no no no my point is all of this should
#
be done all of this will be done all of this is being done in some measure but it is it will take
#
some time and in the context so his stance here is basically have a primary but I will only accept
#
it if you pick the guy I think is best no that's not that's not true at all that's what you just
#
said that they picked the wrong guy no no no no no no I no no no no no no this this experiment comes from a
#
Lok Satta experiment doesn't come from an Ahmadmi Party experiment where they actually held a
#
primary and everybody participated more people participated than there are because it was an
#
open primary and there was basically an ex-candidate was basically come who would a not so so-called
#
ideal candidate would end up becoming the candidate so I am saying that we are a political party which
#
is a work in progress after independence which political party has basically built itself brick
#
by brick without so-called money muscle power and divisive agenda I know I already granted that
#
political entrepreneurship 10 out of 10 also that no that political culture that political culture
#
about people participating people selecting candidates and selecting candidates is a complex
#
decision it is not as simple as people just voting for a particular person it has to be the
#
person's ability to be able to raise resources it has to be the person's political maturity there
#
is a lot that goes into it and I think over a period of time if you're really looking at us
#
from since we were in existence since 2008 13 years now over a period of time if you look at
#
it from 20-25 years all of these things will basically come in place it's this is a matter
#
of time we are a political startup we are struggling in adverse all said and done as you said in the
#
political entrepreneurship in the most adversarial conditions we are still after the Congress and
#
BJP at least in the mind of public imagination we exist so if you look at it from a be a little kind
#
to us and I think all of all of what we hope in terms of that new political culture in terms of
#
these institutionalized mechanisms you'll get to see see it in in some time no I realize and I'm
#
feeling bad now that I'm being very unkind so I should maybe clarify that one thing I mean this
#
not as an let me let me finish I mean this not as an indictment of Kejriwal or Ramadmi party I
#
mean this as an indictment of politics especially in India and the way it can corrode principle so
#
I'm just talking sort of it seems to me to be an illustration of that abstract point the other
#
thing that I'd you know just to sort of express why I feel strongly about this because when 370
#
happened and a CAA happened it's part of a continuing pattern of a society basically
#
constantly being fractured being torn apart by this dirty divisive communal politics that is
#
happening around us and you expect people in the opposition to stand up against it and instead what
#
we saw in Delhi was this very rational politician saying that I won't go too deep into this I am
#
not going to speak in support of the Shaheenbagh protesters I am not getting you know I need to
#
win the next election to continue to do the good governance that I would like to do RMP is sorry
#
on this one you hear what Sanjay Singh has to say he's very clear he's very clear about the
#
CA you see what Arvind's interviewers he's extremely clear about the CA this is wrong this must be
#
stopped and we are a political party which voted against it as opposed to a Shrivastava which
#
voted in one house for it and voted in one house against it see if you see how we have responded
#
on both those points please see what we've done in the assembly we see how our MPs have responded
#
please see what Arvind has basically said and while in terms of the popular narrative there is
#
this so-called narrative being woven that is that is not how it is and anyone who knows Arvind
#
anyone who's seen what we've done anyone who's seen the kind of work that we've done in minority
#
areas with our minority MLAs will clearly say that it's it's it's completely contrary to what
#
the truth on the ground is okay and our work is there for all to see so hopefully we'll hear some
#
feedback from people in Delhi your work is there for all to see but you know you can cherry-pick
#
those parts of the work which someone like me will agree with but there are other parts of the work
#
which I don't agree with where I can see you responding to incentives for example you are
#
against FDI and retail and that is obviously because a significant part of your crowd source
#
funds must come from small retailers they are an interest group over there and to me that is a
#
form of corruption how is it not a form of corruption instead of you know and even if I
#
don't want to use such a strong term you are responding to those incentives and the core of
#
it like I remember many years back I had written a column saying something good about Kejriwal by
#
the way I'd written a column arguing how sociopaths and sociopathy by the way is a medical condition
#
where a certain part of the brain there is damage you don't feel empathy and whatever and statistics
#
show that sociopaths are over-represented among prison convicts which you would expect lawyers
#
and politicians or bankers and politicians whatever and my argument was that if you look
#
at most Indian politicians like you know Modi was the example I took and I said that you know
#
a classic sociopath politician will do whatever it takes to come to power and not have any
#
principles so I mused aloud that maybe Modi might even be an atheist for all we know it doesn't
#
matter he'll say whatever it takes to come to power and in that column I wrote that Arvind Kejriwal
#
doesn't seem to be a man who's a sociopath he seems to be someone who is has a lot of heart who
#
has a lot of heart genuinely believes in all of that and instantly one of my friends who you know
#
lives and works in Delhi and whom I respect a lot called me up and said Amit you are wrong he is a
#
big sociopath. I think I have known Arvind for the first time coincidentally Arvind came to
#
Mumbai was in 2009 when we had this experiment after the Adolf D'Souza win in Juhu we tried to
#
do something in Andheri we didn't succeed so I know Arvind since the Adolf era and I have
#
known him see the thing is in politics you have to be extremely headstrong just like any entrepreneur
#
that's your personality type and all of whatever Arvind has done it certainly comes out of empathy
#
I mean imagine to be able to work for the voiceless and the people who come from one of some of the
#
most vulnerable and poor section of society who don't make who don't who aren't represented on
#
the Twitter universe who aren't represented on the Instagram universe and then you have all kinds
#
of judgment calls being made and all kind of expressions being cast but such is politics so
#
when I mean even me sitting here I think when you take a decision to be in public life you have to
#
be open to public scrutiny and Arvind is a human at the at the end of the day and I think as a
#
politician also he is evolved if you wouldn't agree with over the last 10 years I think he's
#
an outstanding politician there I'm not arguing at all okay let me make a case against myself
#
but you're making him sound as you know he's he's immoral no no so let me I'm not true I'm
#
saying he's responding to incentives but let me let me come at that another way and because we
#
contain multitudes as the cliche on the show goes I'll now argue against myself let's say that you're
#
a politician you get in you enter politics because because of certain principles you believe in but
#
you realize that along the way you have to compromise now you have two choices either you
#
don't compromise and you're out of politics because you cannot win elections and therefore
#
you don't make much of a difference to society you're doing piecemeal things or you say that
#
okay I'll make whatever small compromises I have to and I'll come to power and in the end it will
#
be better than somebody much worse being in power and it seems to me that the best way to
#
rationalize the journey of the Ahmadmi Party is that those compromises have been made for a larger
#
better cause I thought you'd agree with this part at least no let me explain so I think I think
#
you're confounding two things one is that irrespective of what your ideology is and
#
irrespective of what your philosophy is or what your framework of thought is irrespective of all
#
of that just to bring governance to an acceptable level of governance is what the Ahmadmi Party is
#
focused right now what you see what we are focused for the last five years you see a focus focus
#
right now it is about giving dignity to the the common man the common woman so that they have
#
equality of opportunity so on and so forth that is one part the second part is that I think we
#
expect and it's a good thing to expect so much of us we're a political party the end of the day we
#
are India's fastest growing political party we are an opposition in Punjab we are making a foray
#
into Goa and to Uttarakhand we recently won over 140 seats in Maharashtra out of the 350 sorry 300
#
we contested so we're a growing party it is we we do we do speak on all these issues but there
#
is a narrative being created the opposition the present opposition is the opposition that the BJP
#
wants clearly they look at us as an existential threat and you see the whole thing right when
#
there was a witch hunt against our MLAs the so-called congress ecosystems the world didn't
#
have any problem with it it's fine because they were you know the up and it's okay if they're
#
getting obliterated and so on and so forth so you are basically against a lot of resources you're
#
you're you're no longer a flash in the pan you've basically build a party you you you are now slowly
#
evolving that discourse into taking that from taking that from an acceptable level of governance
#
to actually looking at things as a poverty is avoidable suffering you're not now speaking
#
about houses you are you're now speaking about about higher education and scholarships and and
#
things like that so give it a little give it give it time for them to be able to lift the political
#
discourse and that will take time that is not going to happen over night sure sure no I mean
#
you know first of all I must clarify that I have less respect for the Congress and for up I think
#
this this this nation really needs a proper opposition which hopefully and I hope you guys
#
can proceed in that direction but to sort of continue with that abstract question that let's
#
say that as a politician you are in that position where you know a politician doesn't have the
#
luxury I do you sit on the outside and you say whatever you want and you have purity of ideology
#
and whatever politician doesn't have that luxury you have to compromise you have to figure out how
#
to be practical without compromising I and I and I and I'm reiterating that for the 10th time on
#
this so my question to you which you know you've you've perhaps answered is that at what is that
#
baseline level where you say I will not compromise on this what are those core values and to sort of
#
elaborate one thing that it is very clear that our money party stands for is that will provide
#
good clean governance that as far as water is concerned and electricity is concerned and all
#
of those sort of local issues will provide good clean governance fine that's what you guys stand
#
for and granted that's what you're working to do beyond that are there any principles that you will
#
not ever compromise on of course why do you think we are focusing on education is it just education
#
as a means to get a job is that the only so-called metric that we're looking at of course not we're
#
looking at a much better society a much more empathetic society and all of that will happen
#
with time I'm saying that you're expect it's good that you're expecting that of us you know I'll
#
just interject since you brought up education people talk about Amadmi party's great work in
#
education in Delhi and all of that again I've heard stories about friends of mine about what
#
is happening to private schools for example there is this private school which was started by this
#
lady after partition for children of refugees function perfectly fine all these years and when
#
the Amadmi party took over they took over with this ideological aversion to private schools and
#
they came out with these price caps that you cannot charge more than this and that became an
#
existential threat to the school when I last heard about this from a friend their reserves
#
had been wiped out it was an existential threat it was like this distrust of the voluntary action
#
of people no no no not at all not at all if this might just basically be one one-off case if you
#
see generally as a thumb rule you typically have private schools which charge a lot of money for
#
not basically giving the kind of facilities that the government gives and at the end of the day
#
what is the incentive for the government to fix the public schools if a large number of the
#
politicians typically run the private schools which is typically how it works across the board we
#
have worked towards fixing that public education to the extent that its its quality and I and this
#
is something which will get tears to my eyes I have gone to these schools I have interacted with
#
these children I have seen the learning outcomes which is which is there for people to independently
#
measure and assess but Ruben that's orthogonal I am not arguing about the public schools granted
#
but the bottom line is parents need the choice now what has happened over the last couple of
#
decades especially and and what has gone wrong is the fault of all other governments not your
#
government and you're not even in power at the center is that constantly first of all the
#
impression that all private schools are expensive is rubbish there are budget private schools all
#
over the place including in slums let me finish where you know poor parents rather than send their
#
kid to a free government school prefer to pay a little bit and send them to a budget private
#
school and all of that and they've been hit hard by regulation that's a story of the past predates
#
our madmi party not your fault but what I would expect is that while you're fixing public education
#
let private schools continue to operate don't get in the way of the voluntary action of people if a
#
parent wants to send a child to a school let the parent do so it's a parent's choice this ideological
#
dogmatism that we have seen from I don't I don't happen to have enough of information sure sure so
#
let's make a comment on that kind of yeah so let's sort of leave that aside okay fair enough so
#
let's move on from the amadhi party you know we can come back to the amadhi party it is the second
#
love of my life after my mother so we can speak about it as much as you want okay no let's go
#
back to your political journey you know initially you get into politics because you want to do good
#
things you realize that at the level of private charity or whatever things are happening in a
#
piecemeal way and you decide that if you want to do more fundamental good you have to enter politics
#
and you enter politics now beyond this initial urge how does your understanding of Indian politics
#
evolve like you said that JP played a part in that and all of that what are the big sort of
#
learnings that you took you know through your years of political activism once you got into it
#
so I think politics is basically a full-time vocation though I am sadly a part-time politician
#
who has to juggle with a corporate job second is that we do not have a culture which basically
#
supports political aspirants I still remember I was in college and you know I took an aptitude
#
test and the person asked me what do you want to be and I said while I know I'm a good engineer I
#
mean I I would want to be an engineer and etc I would always want to be a politician I always knew
#
that we had really a lot of clarity on thought and purpose for it but it wasn't just one of the
#
things that people would factor in second I remember I went for my first job it was on campus
#
placement and I remember after I joined the political party I went to the HR and I said listen
#
I've joined the political party and now I'm an office bearer and these are the details and my
#
activities are in no way going to harm the company's interest and we're not doing anything
#
lawful I mean I nearly lost my job I had to argue against interests I had to the HR would tell me
#
that no how can we basically encourage such a thing and I tried to give examples because that
#
was an MNC and there are you know people who are part of political parties in Europe and in America
#
and that's fine then why are you frowning down upon it in India and I think that is a that is a
#
problem when it comes to India that you even even right now if you if you are a member of
#
a political party nobody would want to write down write that down in the resume I I on the other
#
hand have always been extremely clear because I don't want people to view these view my
#
association the political party is a surprise so there is no culture in that in that situation
#
what does a person do how does a person earn his livelihood if he is not this traditional
#
entrepreneur if he doesn't really come from a very affluent family which is why you have so many
#
lawyers as you just gave the example of in both the categories our entrepreneur so when you look
#
at the Jeffersonian model of democracy which is that the more you have the more small businesses
#
you have the more entrepreneurs you have the more meaningful the participation in the political
#
discourse so yeah the answer to all of this is entrepreneurship because then you can work for
#
yourself without being answerable to so-called whims of these structures which beyond a point
#
in time doesn't really make sense because we all know in our corporate life that we are working
#
24 seven right doesn't really matter and now with working from home you know the work life balance
#
is certainly been tossed out of the window so yeah I mean in that it's it's it's about
#
yeah it's been difficult as to how do you I mean luckily I've been able to pay my bills and things
#
have been fine but I know a large number of people who would just succumb to some
#
incentive for corruption here and there because just because they don't have their basics taken
#
care of you look at the remuneration that councillors get you look at the remuneration
#
you look at the remuneration that MLAs get and to pretend that that is somehow enough for them
#
for functioning for running a back office for their legislative performance their intervention
#
when it comes to the plethora of committees at their part office is is ridiculous so yeah so
#
one takeaway has been that you have to be financially independent you have to be able
#
to raise resources and and that is still a fight in corporate India that's something that I
#
experienced firsthand so if you want more people to participate in politics you have to you you
#
you can't frown upon a person's political affiliation a political affiliation in India
#
sadly in a corporate setup is seen to be unionization which everybody has a problem with
#
but but that's not the case and again that comes to the political culture so that's the second
#
learning the third learning is that you always prepare for an election so an election is like
#
that exam you've always been preparing for you know everything that you do every person that
#
you reach out to every person that you engage with is part of is part of that effort that you
#
are putting into for your election at some point in time it's when preparation typically
#
means opportunity and you have to be at it and you have to nurse a constituency it's all okay
#
to basically be all around the place but if your local electorate doesn't know you you know what
#
all these all these things don't matter so which is why JP is a great guy but at the end of the
#
day he is a gentleman I mean I can't imagine JP climb over a electric pole and connect which
#
is a great act of politics and and and Arvind's brilliant because he he wedded uh he wedded
#
symbolism with that uh with that narrative so people people actually felt that they could
#
participate in something tangible uh but yeah I think over the over over a period of time it's
#
it's um it's I think politics is uh by far the most competitive uh business that anyone can be in
#
I mean think about it I think every aspect of every aspect of human knowledge whether it is
#
management whether it is finance whether it is psychology whether it is fashion whether
#
it's history geography politic political science all of it uh you know uh are needed and also the
#
next thing is that uh many a times uh because politics doesn't have a set trajectory okay you
#
joined at this age and okay you became this at that age and you became like I I always when I
#
when I when I was in the Amadhani party and when we saw those hundreds uh when I I mean when I
#
joined the Amadhani party and when we saw those hundreds of uh thousands of people on the road
#
during the Anna movement I thought that I'll get elected in the next assembly election that it was
#
just a matter of time the people were prepared and we need to basically go there and just tell
#
them that we exist and they'll vote for us but uh but yeah the answer to that is sadly not true
#
and that uh people's people do vote but people are exacting you have to uh build a party structure
#
brick by brick and there are no answers to that because you don't have existing precedents in
#
India uh so many a times uh it's it's really the domain of the unknown but you just basically
#
have to be at it and uh last and most importantly we need to make a distinction between
#
people and their ideas we fight ideas we don't fight people now of course my best friend Aditya
#
Paul would disagree with me and he would tell me that uh uh people's uh ideas are an extension
#
of themselves and sooner or later they become that but that said I think in politics uh I have
#
always I've always believed uh about this distinction between ideas and people which is why I am I have
#
some very good friends in the BJP in the congress across the aisle and uh I've always said that if
#
our generation uh doesn't bond together and if we aren't friends and if we can't really irrespective
#
of whatever the political compulsions may be outside then what have we even achieved right so
#
so yeah these these broadly basic learnings but but yeah politics is brutal at the end of the day
#
being a member of the Lok Sattar party uh and seeing us uh be defeated election after election
#
has been heartbreaking but look at it from uh as a long haul look at it as a long journey look at
#
your political career uh from a long lens and you'll have you have to be thick-skinned people will
#
call you all sorts of things on twitter you'll have all sorts of trolls that will uh have an
#
impact on your mental health and then you have to choose that oh because you have very little energy
#
and very little time how do you best utilize it and in all of this these are life choices like I
#
I sometimes do end up being uh being lonely I have a great mother and I have a great set of friends
#
and etc but uh but yeah so far I don't have a life partner who would uh be okay with my life choices
#
and and the lifestyle that comes with a politician who's also uh wears a social work hat and also
#
dabbles in policy and does this and that so so yeah it is it is extremely complex but you just
#
have to be at it and yeah hopefully all will fall in place at some point in time. No much admiration
#
and I'm struck by you know what you said about ideas not people like when I used to edit the
#
policy magazine Prakriti my principle always was that don't criticize parties or people just
#
speak about ideas or policies which is kind of what I would try to do but how hard is it that
#
is right to do in this time where essentially in our discourse you have what is a race to the bottom
#
everything is so toxic everything is uh so incredibly personalized uh you know I've been
#
attacked by IT cells of both BJP and Congress uh maybe if I'm on the party as an IT cell they'll
#
come they do have an IT cell and we won't come after you won't come after me no I would imagine
#
you wouldn't uh and so in this discourse where it is a race to the bottom and shrillness wins
#
where everybody is shouting all the time where everybody is out unnubbing unnub in a sense
#
how how difficult is it then for you to kind of tailor your message or do you just say that
#
ye jo discourse ho raha hai the shrill shouting that's happening at a different level it doesn't
#
matter we have to reach the people directly what what is your approach towards this many things
#
one is I think it starts uh with this belief in yourself and uh there is this line in the party
#
anthem it goes something like this uh and that you are doing the right thing and maybe in the
#
initial sense of I mean in the in the not so foreseeable in the in the immediate future
#
maybe you you're not getting traction and maybe uh it is difficult but uh you're doing the right
#
thing and and uh maybe you might uh lose an election and maybe people will laugh at us
#
because we lost an election and we uh we couldn't uh garner public support and fine and there will
#
be multiple uh multiple views about it but you did the right thing and you stood and contested
#
that election on issues that actually matter that in itself is uh one way to look at it one
#
one aspect the second aspect is that your existing set of distribution mechanisms for the media
#
is slowly taken over by what we see via other media right whether it is your content creators
#
on youtube whether you see the kind of engagement on instagram and things like that especially
#
when it comes to this generation so there are two levels two ways to look at it one way is that
#
you need to consistently come up with an alternative narrative of things and deliver
#
and over a period of time reach that position to be able to influence that kind of change that
#
that you want in terms of this little narrative the third is that you see which is why I come back
#
to my uh thing that uh when it comes to the so-called it cells you have a lot of half truths
#
that are doing the rounds let me give you an example most people conflict dislike with hate
#
it's okay to dislike a certain set of people for whatever your reasons are but there is something
#
certainly wrong in hating them and actively discriminating against them and wishing them
#
death so that distinction suddenly you know is lost so it's difficult you have people who are
#
being poisoned you're being conditioned there is this feeling of victimhood of somehow some
#
historic wrongs being righted and etc so one way is to basically say that okay these people
#
shouldn't be engaged at all and they're not our audience the other way to say is okay for whatever
#
the reason we acknowledge that they exist for for you in your view of the world real or imagined
#
but you engage with them and you engage with them over a period of time they will change and they
#
will vote for you so it starts with look at how we started in delhi when we came to power I still
#
remember we would typically have everybody saying if you're going to vote for them they're good
#
they're nice they're NGO people but they will not win the election so we we had that narrative then
#
we realized that people are ready whether we are ready or not the first election in 2013 when we
#
won 28 seats people were ready but then I think we basically live in binaries we expect people to
#
either like modi or either like arvind but that's not how real life is real life is complex you
#
have a set of people who for whatever reason like modi but they also like arvind now how do you over
#
a period of time talk to this audience if for some reason they have a primary marker of hindu
#
identity how do you come up with something which is more egalitarian something which is more natural
#
and people might call arvind whatever you have to call him but the fact of the matter is he's
#
redefined hinduism with you call it personal display of religiosity you call it that array
#
that is not meant for it or whatever but that is basically being smart you are engaging people
#
over a period of time and you have such a bunch of poisoned people that we hope that with the right
#
education in a state like delhi with uh the right focus on culture with the right involvement of
#
various communities at a mahala level and all that that will change but i'm saying this is a
#
this is really long term so while we are at it while uh while we know and we are of course a
#
product of our movement a lot of what we are is still a work in progress there is while we may
#
be responding to incentives which from the electoral lens we certainly want this country
#
to be a better place we certainly look at hate as not just counterproductive but has to be shunned
#
at all levels and we are working towards that it is just that in the foreseeable future we may not
#
see the kind of results that we expect to see but in the long run it will fall in place i know arvind
#
is a very empathetic a deeply concerned concerned human being you just see uh typically what he does
#
so long story short if you ever see him talk to his constituents or talk to anybody that comes to
#
meet him the first thing that will strike you is is sheer empathy for uh the person's situation
#
and the person's problem if you see all that we've that we've done you can certainly argue as to
#
is this the role of the state should the state be doing this but his argument has always been that
#
okay the state may or may not have to do this but they're dying what do we do so we need to step in
#
until things are better we need to do what it takes to ensure that things are better
#
so this is a long project it's a 10 year 20 year project and i think we at the end of it
#
will be able to uh make indian politics a less a less hateful place let me a very hopeful and
#
nuanced words let me try to kind of unpack uh this um uh what you just said and tell me if i've
#
understood it correctly what you're basically saying is that we cannot think of politics in
#
simplistic terms as in so and so is a modi supporter so and so is a kejriwal supporter
#
you're basically saying what i keep saying on my show that everyone contains multitudes
#
and therefore there could be a person who supports modi for this and this reason which
#
could include bigoted reasons or whatever but at the same time that person also wants good governance
#
and therefore the challenge is that without necessarily you know attacking him on the front
#
on the basis of what he supports modi can you appeal to the part of that water who wants good
#
governance and say that listen all that is fine but uh you know did you want your local government
#
to function so it's that right it's good governance our antidote is our policy our our good governance
#
is is basically what will wean them away from this politics of hatred which right now is a substitute
#
for that good governance it's that palliative that that they're on so it's it's it's really
#
a much more nuanced engagement of the electorate uh because see at some point in time see we believe
#
very strongly that the congress is in a state of freefall right now with uh a very large number
#
of young voters coming to the fore and uh you really have a lot of disruption happening at
#
various local elections we believe that uh people will come to us and over a period of time when
#
you have the way to fight hate is not with more hate or not to say something in an environment
#
and we foolish by saying so you do the right thing you don't give up your principles at all
#
i mean fact of the matter is what the amadmi party has done in delhi i'm reasonably confident
#
no other government has but this is a 10-year project it's a 20-year project it will it will
#
take time and trust trust the amadmi party for that you'll see results so i almost know your
#
answer to my next question is going to be the hopeful one out of the uh two broad options but
#
here's the thing what i and i'm just thinking aloud here that i often talk about the distinction
#
between the abstract and the concrete that when it comes to hatred everything that is divisive
#
in our politics comes from abstract notions notions of nationhood or us versus them or
#
whatever a nationalism all those toxic things but the things which actually make us liberal and
#
bring us together are the concrete things the everyday shared experiences and so on and so
#
forth now what i see here is that uh in a sense the appeal of this larger divisive agenda that
#
is dominant in the country today is an appeal to abstractions and uh would it then be fair
#
to say that what you guys are trying to do is that you're focusing on the concrete
#
so one is that an accurate summation and two if that is to be the case can voters be weaned away
#
because in this age where of you know where narrative dominance matters so much it would
#
seem to me that narratives built around these abstractions seem to matter because people seem
#
to think they take bad governance for granted so they don't even care about no correct so see
#
status quo is uh unsustainable uh people realize it people uh irrespective of whatever the uh chest
#
thumping uh that they may engage in slowly we are seeing that people are increasingly irritated uh
#
people may come up with one bogey after the next and after x they may go to y but i think slowly
#
that will change because while all these things are abstract concepts the othering of a particular
#
people the discrimination of a particular people the unsustainability of people with a particular
#
surname in a particular area is is a real concrete phenomenon the only way to fight that is through
#
better governance so that you make the narrative itself irrelevant not that the narrative will disappear
#
but the narrative then becomes becomes irrelevant fair enough let's let's kind of uh move on to
#
talking about your political journey like one of the uh sort of as an activist one of the causes
#
you took up was the laws against sexual harassment like when the keenan and rubin case happened for
#
example and in 2011 in 2011 tell me a little bit about that and the change that you managed
#
to bring so i think uh what had happened was the mumbai mirror did an article on me and my brother
#
uh my brother had lost his phone and uh because the police wasn't able to find it uh i traced it
#
single-handedly all the way to gujarat and brought it back and the mumbai mirror featured uh as on uh
#
the front page but very interestingly uh they bungled up with my surname and called me rubin
#
fernandez and uh the keenan rubin uh case happened very immediately on the heels of this article
#
appearing so a lot of people thought i had died and uh people started calling my mother and etc
#
and people would ask her and and my mother would basically say that uh you know you uh should do
#
something about this i really didn't have the mental bandwidth at that time because i still
#
very clearly remember uh in 2011 the anna azare fast had got over in august and after 11 12 days
#
i had fallen sick and i needed you know some time just for myself because there was just so much that
#
was happening and uh i initially my initial response was something would have happened and
#
i remember one day i was asleep at home and uh you know uh my friend sagar bakal who is also a member
#
of the litmus test project uh comes to me and says that uh there is uncle valerian uncle who's
#
keenan's dad and he's standing down and uh he wants to meet you and i looked at the vault and i said
#
it's 130 he's like no he wants uh he wants to meet you so i go down and he tells me
#
he uh you do so much for anti-corruption can you please do this for me and uh i said what happened
#
uncle this is an open and shut case there is so much of media scrutiny uh it will fall in place
#
and you know when the guy broke down and uh he said no i'll take you to what happened i'll
#
reconstruct the case for you and we went to this the spot and this was in uh in this area in amboli
#
andheri west i was there and we were i was looking at uh the surroundings uh so i was looking at the
#
scene of crime and um sorry it just gives it gives me goosebumps even now and basically two uh young
#
men were basically hanging out with their friends after the cricket match outside a restaurant as
#
most of us would and there was uh somebody a group of boys who came and molested one of their
#
friends and they obviously asked the guys to you know uh scram and they came back and they killed
#
both those people in i mean 8 p.m and andheri is broad daylight uh and uh the sad part was that
#
not one person amongst the hundreds of people who were spectators people in the bus not one person
#
even called the police okay i can understand if people are moving around with knives you'll be
#
scared for your life and maybe you would not want to get yourself involved and i think i it just
#
completely i mean it could have been me it could have been anyone else and a lot of people thought
#
it was me because it would it would be something that i would have responded to in a similar
#
situation if somebody would have done misbehaved with one of my women friends so we took that so
#
again uh me being me i did some research and then we realized that there is 354 and 509 and uh both
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are sections of the ipc the 354 was uh bailable offense which is essentially people uh could
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basically just pay 1200 rupees a stable bail and walk out uh after molesting women so we said that
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we should change that let's let's speak about justice for keenan and rubin but let's let's see
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the bigger cause as to why did they have to give up their lives to begin with so we landed this
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campaign the zero tolerance campaign we got over a lakh signatures at that point in time uh rr
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patil was the home minister uh prithviraj chawan the chief minister the then chief minister invited
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us uh they passed they amended it in maharashtra and then you had the justice warma uh report
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post-nerbhaya which then uh has the 354 abcd and implemented it across uh the country as one of the
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so-called reforms uh but yeah i think that case in itself the fact that despite media attention
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uh uncle was still threatened uh despite media attention uh i mean all kinds of things happened
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i mean uh we asked for a fast trial court the trial took six years excruciating years and i i
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remember uh keenan's uh grandmother just died right now and she would just cry and they would
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reach out to me and uh they would not have closure because they lost two uh two young men and and yeah
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i think that case really taught me so much that uh beyond all these statistics there are really
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human stories and if even such high profile cases have so many impediments when it comes to justice
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then one can only imagine what's happening with uh with others so yeah so on that note just for
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the record we managed to get a conviction where the perpetrators are now convicted for life so not a
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life imprisonment for 14 years but they will basically be in prison till their deaths and uh
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we managed to get the scenes in the law and of course now we are uh working on uh the preventive
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aspect of things so that you have more people being educated uh more people uh being informed
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of consent culture of what is appropriate behavior what is not uh working with the police so that's
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that's that's something else so one of the most important projects of ztc is to set up
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takshata samitis so you have your local police stations the local police stations were again
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a product of uh a post mutiny legislation so that was never meant to look at indians as uh
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collaborators with the state and the government to uphold law and order it was always meant for
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crowd control it was always meant for systematic suppression and i think that is somehow even there
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right now where you do not have a say in uh what the police station does so you have these takshata
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samitis which are local memberhood groups who come together like i am part of uh one citizens group
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in juhu where we meet month after month and discuss for the police bring up issues of law
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and order of robberies or whatever illegalities that happen there and the police respond so we
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want to have these takshata samitis where uh and we're going to call it the keener rubin takshata
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samitis let's see that's a that's again a proposal with the mumbai police that uh that we're working
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on uh but yeah that's that's if you do call the takshata committees that people will say you
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named it after yourself and we'll have come full circle you know in our informal conversation uh in
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the middle of this recording you were talking about the bandra school of activism and the juhu
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school of activism absolutely so uh activism in mumbai started with the alm movement and uh the
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alm movement is basic advanced locality management that's uh the acronym for alm not all lives matter
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so but it started off with people segregating their garbage and because people were segregating
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the garbage they were uh interfacing and interacting with a large number of uh
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elected representatives pmc officials and they said that look if we're working on garbage why
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can't we work about work on other issues and stuff like that and you had this activism which
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was born then you had the rti uh and uh rti became like this most important tool uh with
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activists to essentially get their problem solved and there was a way to file these rtis and so on
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and so forth so activism started by people uh who were retired largely had time on their hands it
#
was a young thing i mean i still remember people would uh really say oh you're extreme you're a
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child and this was even when i was 18 and 19 and all of that so i think uh it started off with a
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bunch of uh retired people who want to do something on their free time and this seemed like an
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interesting thing which gave them access to uh power which gave them access to uh bmc and which
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gave them access to whatever these administrative mechanisms in the area area isn't they they also
#
was a little vanity that you get some recognition etc so uh broadly that's been how activism started
#
then you had what i call a divergence in the bandra school of activism and the juhu school
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of activism now the juhu school of activism led by the hansel dissusers the prefaloras and the
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adolf dissusers of the world said that no we should contest election and they tasted blood
#
and they got elected so now they start talking about accountability so it's not about okay you
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engage people because you have to engage everybody so you engage all levels of government you engage
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all elected representatives but you are ultimately working that okay at some point in time can we
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get our guy elected you know that is the juhu school of thought the bandra school of thought
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feels that oh we are apolitical and we somehow need to keep ourselves uh like that and we should
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not uh we should not you know join a political party and do something like that but but slowly
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the bandra school of activism has reduced over a period of time and i've always uh basically
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believed that and i tell this to uh the agni people and the entire activist brigade uh that
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hey man you guys are old and you need to pass the baton to young people and you need to create this
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problem-solving community of young people if you right now this problem-solving community is a very
#
small community it's the same people cleaning the beach it is the same people saving the metro and
#
it is the same people saving ra and it is the same people doing whatever next problem that the city
#
faces so unless and until you're not going to expand it and get young people all that uh progress
#
over the last 20-25 years uh in mumbai would just basically be lost so that is something that i'm
#
presently working on first is an rti portal so we're trying to create an rti portal using ai so
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people can solve problems in a better way by asking better questions wow yeah so that should
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basically be launched sometime this year of course it's the it's uh post-covid so everything's
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disrupted so we don't know when but we'll hopefully prepare a date uh the second is uh model uh bmc
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which again is uh about rather than doing a model united nations uh you speak about uh model bmc so
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you speak about uh you take five aspects of bmc you speak about water garbage health uh education
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water and sanitation and you actually go in communities and solve these problems real time
#
so rather than somebody giving you a presentation you actually go there and say okay you go to that
#
particular community you understand what their problems are and solve that problem so you
#
actually see the life cycle real time you actually get an orientation okay how does the city work and
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how can you engage with the city so that you at least know how how the city works so that you can
#
get it to work for a community issue so that is again something that we wish to launch this year
#
that's like a flagship how do you juggle all this you're an engineer right so what do you
#
have a job right now yeah i have a job i have a job i consult for a consultancy firm wow okay so
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moving on to the you know the next big project that one associates you with there is this
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common notion in india that listen one of the reasons our politics cannot be reformed is that
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what does apathetic people don't vote look at the numbers and uh you fundamentally didn't agree with
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that and were one of the people who started this jagore campaign tell me a bit about that
#
so jagore was started by janagraha in 2008 i was still in college we were part of the loksatta
#
movement back then and this was a movement far ahead of its times because i remember
#
in the name of it back then they would just have five computers so that is like an it enabled
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college and obviously you didn't have a online voter services portal like we have right now
#
where you can just go online and you can just put everything there and you can actually track what
#
happened to an application so this was this was just like a black box right you would just fill
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a fill a form six which is what the form for first time registration is and you would send it and you
#
don't know what happened after that it's either a hit or a miss so jagore said that okay there
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there is a problem because while most people turn 18 and you know want to run to basically get a
#
license nobody wants to go and get registered so uh so that's the that's that's that's the problem
#
so can we at least get young people interested in politics so that was uh something back then
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though uh even then the i would still get the question as to okay we got ourselves registered
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whom do you vote for so yeah so jagore in many ways was uh uh like a precursor to politics because
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yeah uh you had to engage young people you had to tell them that they had to register and
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that their vote actually matters so yeah we registered quite a few people uh i i think that
#
is still the record in maharashtra and gujarat uh and yeah we oversaw that and that was 2009
#
yeah so it's almost like building demand before the supply is there yeah but um something but
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interestingly i i still remember during jagore you had the 26th uh 11 uh terrorist attacks and
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on the website we saw traffic just increase so uh we had a lot of young people who otherwise
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apathetic saying that the least that there is anger but of course all of this is a manifestation
#
of a systemic failure uh for a long period of time incapacity etc but that was like uh as bad
#
as it can get like 300 uh uh hours of life terror and uh and yeah i think uh jagore was
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in many ways a registration problem which is a first generation problem right now uh what we did
#
with the election commission was a second generation problem but now that people are registered
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how do we mobilize them uh because the assumption that just because you registered you would
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because you were active enough uh to you know involved enough to register you will also
#
vote is not true most people again through our uh uh studies we found that people looked at it
#
as another identity card like a very middle class thing but yeah i think uh that sort of
#
down tailed into what we did with uh the election commission and uh yeah that's results are there
#
for all to see so before i kind of go to my uh next question a brief digression uh you know you were
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part of laksa to start with uh you know you were with uh jp and then you you've said before in the
#
past that you even tried to bring jp and irwin together as so many people did but that never
#
worked out why didn't they work out like what were the fundamental problems uh uh no i don't uh
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first think that at when i said workout was we thought that uh a laksa would merge into an app
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but i think uh right now jp has taken a decision that uh he wants to continue with the policy
#
advocacy way because he feels that he'll be able to create much more impact there than uh the
#
uh the political way which really requires much more uh than just a uh a logical argument so
#
that's that so that is the reason why it uh didn't uh didn't work but uh all said and done i think
#
that uh it's not true that uh jp and uh don't work together i think jp is very closely involved with
#
the policy team the last i the last i heard so his uh feedback from uh somebody as uh nuanced uh and
#
with such experiences him is is uh definitely important and i think we're already already
#
working on that front uh but yeah politics requires uh if you a short version of that is a lot of the
#
uh the laksa people thought that uh change will just suddenly happen one day because suddenly
#
people will have this uh moral impulse and people would recognize that we are the right party and
#
people who vote for us but that's not how it was we saw what happened in hyderabad where uh there
#
was uh love a lot of love and i use the term love and not respect there was a lot of love and respect
#
for jp across the board but when it came to replicating that win so the only person from
#
laksa ta who ever won was jebaka sanan nobody else has ever won anything uh both at the council
#
level and both at the state level or multiple states for that matter they were forays being
#
made into uttar pradesh they were forays being made into maharastra etc and it was heartbreaking
#
at a point in time but you uh you move on you need not just a leader who is charismatic but
#
you need a leader who is able to get large talent density around you and then you have to have that
#
dogged approach over a period of time and uh you have to basically uh so like a jp wouldn't believe
#
in symbolism jp would basically say that hey i can just sit down and i can just have a conversation
#
but the common people are not like that they want some symbolism to be able to associate with
#
abstract concepts of governance it's all good you know when we talk about governance and say you
#
vote for us and we will get elected and if we get elected in the right number then we form the
#
government and then we'll formulate policy and then we'll implement policy and if that policy is
#
implemented well then your life will change so that's a little far-fetched but if you do that
#
with uh with the right symbolism and say the right things because it still has to be symptomatic so a
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jp would say that arvin kejriwal running after corruption is symptomatic you know the problem
#
is bigger but an arvin kejriwal would say the common people understand just that so you start
#
by saying that you know why your bills are high it is because of corruption and if if you do x y
#
and z we can do this better and so on and so forth so i think that is the fundamental difference
#
between a jp and an arvin but i still think that both are uh phenomenal sons of india and
#
i i look up to both of them as some as phenomenal leaders and if my dream somewhere if you ask me
#
at least when app started would be uh you know uh an arvin as the the popular face and a jp as
#
the brain i think some we've achieved it to some extent but i hope that uh it happens completely
#
sooner or later yeah and and and would it then be fair to say that if you are sort of pursuing a
#
path of clean politics part of your mindset has to be to forget about the results and think about
#
the process that you know you you just focus on constantly growing through the daily grind of
#
politics and not focus too much on results as in oh change will happen or oh we will win elections
#
or whatever no so uh no so arvind is very clear he says that i'm not here to be and also ran
#
i want to contest elections i want to contest elections by disrupting the space by doing the
#
right thing because all said and done uh and arvind has demonstrated that amadmi party can win
#
elections uh with the least resources without uh resorting to the tactics that our competitors
#
resort to so it is extremely important to look at it as a no-nonsense game we are very if i'm
#
contesting the upcoming elections i will contest to win i am not here uh for for time passed and
#
sometimes that gets that gets difficult given the fact that you have limited resources given the
#
fact that not many people are even willing to you know keep their get out of their comfort zones and
#
actually uh take to a life of politics with the kind of uncertainties that they are so the answer
#
is that you need both you need your eyes on the goal it's important you can't and and arvind is
#
that leader who i still remember uh when the loksabad results came we thought that all was
#
lost and arvind actually calmed everybody down and went uh booth by booth and set up an organization
#
and we won the election everybody thought no that's actually what i meant when i spoke about the
#
hard grind in the process was exactly what you guys are doing that you have to go through the
#
process anyway and others might get this heart and and but you have to have your eyes on the goal
#
so you can't blindly go through the process and uh you know say that it would eventually yield
#
results it has to yield results if it's not yielding results you basically need to it's like a startup
#
right if you have to be nimble you have to be agile if things uh are not working then you need
#
to change your strategy no and i understand i understand jp's thoughts on uh sort of symbolism
#
as well because you know when india against corruption happened i remember writing a column
#
at that that point where it struck me that the whole campaign misunderstood the fundamental
#
cause of corruption corruption of course was a symptom but what was it a symptom of which was
#
too much discretion given to the state which will obviously then lead to corruption so the way out
#
is to reduce the discretion of the state but what iac was asking for was auric committee bit house
#
cube no no no that's not what iac was asking about what iac was asking about was uh basically
#
the jan lok pal bill was a much more effective mechanism to tackle corruption but you're not
#
reducing the discretion no no let me explain let me explain so you this is the example that jp
#
always gives that 10 percent of the people will always do good 10 percent of the people will
#
always do bad and the remaining 80 percent of the people who will follow those 10 percent who are
#
being rewarded so right now you have 90 of the country being corrupt because you have an
#
incentive for corruption you will save time you will save energy you will save money if you
#
choose to resort to corruption that if suddenly you make it easier for people to do good and
#
difficult for people to do bad which is what the jan lok pal bill in essence was and suddenly the
#
country from being 90 corrupt the 80 would follow the 10 who are being rewarded which in this case
#
i think the only way to do that is actually you disagree with what i just said no i agree with
#
the theoretical point that a mechanism like this would be great except that it wouldn't work because
#
you'd be giving another layer of people more discretion i think the only way to reduce
#
corruption is to reduce discretion the state has too much arbitrary power and if you reduce that
#
in all the areas where it doesn't need to be there uh then uh you know like needing 60 licenses to
#
open a business for example you automatically reduce corruption to say that no let the state
#
have all this power and we'll have another committee of unelected people on top of that
#
is to give power to another bunch of people this is in the context of jan lok pal per se but i'm
#
saying look at what we've done when it we don't have we don't have control over the acb okay so
#
technically we don't even have the police force that you know we can actually get a vigilance to
#
follow up on cases but what we've done is right to services which we've now said that certain
#
services are deemed we've been able to revamp the whole system that right now we are able to
#
provide free health care we are able to save money on project extensions for large projects and make
#
sure that medicines are free right now if you are not able to get yourself an operation that is
#
prescribed by a doctor within a stipulated period of time you can go to a private place and get it
#
done free of cost so all of this is uh is reducing corruption just the manner in which uh these uh
#
reforms are being implemented sure anyway i don't want to litigate that i was an aside
#
oh my final question to you actually my second last question to you i would ask you two questions
#
i've taken enough of your time my second last question is this that you know one of the things
#
that kind of saddens me is that jp left politics because uh you know in the sense that he is one
#
of my intellectual heroes and when someone like that is in politics and you can look at politics
#
and say that there is hope to do good but okay i understand it happened so here's my hypothetical
#
question to you uh you've chosen politics as your life's work clearly uh is there any hypothetical
#
situation in which you would say no no that is uh just not an option uh because that's that's
#
that's the easier option i mean uh we i could have uh in life uh i've uh had to take a lot of
#
decisions which uh have ended to be life choices which a lot of my other friends would basically
#
disagree with but it's something that gives me satisfaction and uh you have to be committed to
#
the choices that you make so this is a life choice which we will continue and no matter uh right now
#
we are on the ascendant and it looks good maybe at some point in time uh it may look bad but yeah
#
this is this is something that uh i will dedicate my life to yeah you are on the ascendant i'm not
#
sure the country is but more power to you i hope you can actually make the difference uh uh you want
#
to make and my final question is that given the range of possibilities before us because again
#
none of us are in a simplistic way only optimistic or only pessimistic we recognize that there is a
#
range of possibilities in that range if you look at the india of the year 2030 what do you think
#
is the best case scenario and the worst case scenario i think the worst case scenario is uh
#
if you typically see what happened to the uh vajpayee turns into adwani turns into modi turns into
#
whatever next i think i leave that to the imagination of our listeners so that's the
#
worst case scenario uh the best case scenario would basically be uh i would say a coalition of
#
a lot of regional parties coming together uh even right now the mood of the nation poll basically
#
said that uh arvind is uh the next most popular leader against uh i mean after najendra modi so
#
and i've always believed that a coalition government even if you historically has done much
#
more uh work on reforms than i think party governments uh if you studied all the governments
#
per se so i think the best case scenario would basically be a coalition government with
#
multiple regional parties and i think that is much better than where we are right now i think
#
anything is much better than where we are right now so i nationally uh i've reached that stage
#
right anybody but modi and i think everyone else has reached that stage so yeah between
#
best case and worst case fascinating and but yeah but the best case for us would also be uh
#
sending uh much more mps to the house uh i think slowly down the line uh we are being able to
#
make in the roads uh in a few states it would be also controlling a few more state governments
#
where you would have a full state as opposed to delhi and uh maybe then uh your criticisms
#
wouldn't hold because we'll be able to demonstrate much more i hope so yeah yeah and and my criticisms
#
i have to say comes from a natural skepticism of politics not of a particular politician
#
uh yeah uh uh and you know you're standing for uh you're probably standing for elections in the
#
upcoming mumbai municipal elections so best of luck for that and also why the municipal elections
#
like in um 2014 you went all out and said okay we'll just stand everywhere and take a shot the
#
yugendra yada plan and that was a mistake in hindsight uh but is this a new kind of bottoms
#
up approach or is this one where you say individually as individual politicians is better that you play
#
the kanga league first and the ranji trophy and then inshallah you play test cricket no so i think
#
it's a mix of both one is from a political party standpoint uh you have to see you can't have a
#
set of people vote for you and then in the next election tell them hey we're not contesting so
#
you better figure out whom you want to vote for it doesn't work that way uh you are a member of i
#
mean you're a political party you've started something people will expect you to give candidates
#
number one so you have to have continuity uh understand how the shiv sana is where it is
#
they contested elections time and again uh and there were various experiments at basically
#
increasing their uh vote share so on and so forth so uh that's one second is uh most people uh think
#
like you know like all my friends told me why are you running for a counselor and i would my response
#
to that is that it's it's it's okay to be to be humble to start something where the possibility
#
of you winning of this clean politics actually working is higher because typically you just need
#
about seven to eight thousand votes to win which is much smaller a number than a 65 or 70 thousand
#
votes at an assembly uh so so yeah so i think uh we start small and we contest all elections and
#
uh in mumbai uh we had at one point in time a very large support i think even now our internal
#
surveys put us at a reasonable number so yeah it is about consolidating uh all that goodwill building
#
a structure building an organization because without an organization all this goodwill exists
#
but it will not convert into votes so yeah so it's it's wearing for the long haul it's it's uh maybe
#
i might become a middle-aged mla uh hopefully may not be a young mla but it'll happen at some point
#
listen as long as rahul gandhi is in indian politics you will always be young
#
yeah yeah 55 year old young man so ruben thanks so much for coming on the scene and the unseen i
#
know we have we've been a little combative but uh i have enormous respect and affection for you and
#
uh it's it's such a joy to have you on the show thank you thank you so much i i hope i've
#
made myself amply clear and uh thank you for this opportunity
#
if you enjoyed listening to this episode head on over to twitter to follow rubin at rubin mask
#
that's r u b e n m a s c you can follow me at amit varma a m i t v a r m a and you can browse
#
past episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening
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