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All of us are wired for empathy, but we express it in different ways.
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When we see the suffering of others, some of us stay silent and mind our own business.
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Some of us express our sympathy or our outrage if there is cause for outrage.
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Talk is cheap and these days, posturing is easy, especially on social media.
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Some of us go a step further and take some kind of initiative, start an online petition,
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maybe donate to a good cause, share information about how to help.
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Some of us even go out in the real world to try and make a difference.
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Maybe we go to marches or protest rallies, maybe file a PIL or an RTI application.
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But a few people decide to dedicate their lives to helping others.
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They fight to leave the world a better place than it was when they got there.
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They don't know if they'll succeed.
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They do it because they have to.
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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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My guest for today is Kavita Krishnan, feminist, activist, politician, communist.
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Kavita is on the Politburo of the CPI-ML, the Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninist,
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but is best known for her fearless feminism.
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She burst into national attention when a powerful speech by her in the anti-rape protests of
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She went on to write a fabulous book called Fearless Freedom, which lays out the sorry
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state of women in India, but also articulates a feminist manifesto of sorts, which has found
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much resonance among young people.
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Now, Kavita is a card-carrying communist, but that does not make her a dogmatic leftist
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as the stereotype goes.
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Over the years that I followed her work, I found that she is driven by empathy and outrage,
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and not by ideology or dogma.
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She is always open to dialogue, and her loyalty is to her principles and not to any of the
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political tribes around us.
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She was an outspoken critic of the acquittals of Mahmud Faruqi and Tarun Tejpal, who had
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more or less confessed to rape, but were let off by the courts.
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Many hypocritical Delhi elites who call themselves liberal supported Faruqi and Tejpal and attacked
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Krishnan for her views.
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But I share those views, and I admire how Kavita takes no prisoners.
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I was delighted when she agreed to come on the show, because I wanted to understand these
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feminist struggles a little better, not just in terms of theories and ideas, because we
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can all read books and signal virtue on social media, but in terms of the struggles on the
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Our conversation lasted more than four hours, and it felt way too short.
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I didn't cover a lot of the ground I wanted to, and yet I got so much food for thought.
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I also made a conscious decision before this episode that I would not get into arguments
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about Marx or communism or the Soviet Union or Cuba under Castro, all of whom Kavita admires,
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and I absolutely don't.
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I didn't want to get combative about ideology in this conversation.
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I wanted to focus on learning from her remarkable personal journey as well as her powerful work
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This was such a rewarding conversation for me.
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But before we get to it, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Kavita, welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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So you know, before we start talking about our subject for the day and so on, tell me
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a little bit about how the last few months have been for you.
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Like, it's kind of been tough for all of us and, you know, how's it been for you?
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It's actually been very, very, very difficult.
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You know, we all went through such a terrible time with the second wave of the pandemic.
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And I think it came really close home for everybody, you know, it didn't remain something
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So of course, one of the things was that I actually did get COVID.
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So it was reasonably mild and happened about a couple of weeks after my first dose of the
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So maybe that kept it mild.
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But still, it was, you know, stressful, of course, because you worry.
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And I still have some of the after effects, as in, you know, insomnia and all of that.
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But I think beyond that, I think the losses of people, I think in such a short time, we
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lost people, I lost people who were very close comrades, absolutely, you know, indispensable
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people whom I could not have imagined losing at this point.
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Very good friends, very young people, colleagues of my partner, as well as, you know, other
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young teachers whom I have known in Delhi University and all who are about my age.
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So all of those were very, very difficult to deal with.
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And I think for me, the most challenging thing was that because I got COVID, I was not able
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to really step out and be in the middle of any of the relief work physically.
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And I think that was the only thing which may have actually prevented, might prevent
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one from feeling as helpless and as bad, you know, because you are at least able to.
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Last year during the lockdown, I know that that's how we got through it, because this
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terrible scene of the migrant workers, you know, walking and dying.
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The only thing which we did night and day at that time was just trying to keep in touch
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with as many as we could and getting relief out.
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So this time, not personally not being able to do that, I mean, there were others doing
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it, but that was, that made it even harder.
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But I mean, we've picked ourselves up now.
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Yeah, it's interesting, you know, you use the word helpless, because what struck me
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was that early last year, it was probably a time of a certain kind of hope, like even
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though the economy was doing really badly, things were bleak, but there was hope because
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in the CAA protests, we saw a lot of people kind of come together, you know, we saw young
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people throughout the country protesting, waving the constitution, who would have thunk,
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and all of that happening and suddenly boom, you know, COVID happens and, and then there's
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nothing you can do, like, you know, where do you protest?
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It's still just so strikingly tough, and it's still sort of going on.
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Let's, let's sort of move back to...
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You also had the farmers movement, actually.
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You also had the farmers movement in between, which was also a, you know, a restoration
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of hope and all of that.
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But I think the second wave of the pandemic and the manner in which it has, it came in
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a way, I think what made it worse, at least for me was that in a way, I could see it coming.
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So since January, I had friends of mine who got COVID in December, in January.
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So at that time, also, we were trying to, you know, say to people that please don't
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hold panchayat elections in UP in this, in the next few months, and maybe don't hold
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assembly elections now and all of that, because it looked like it was getting worse.
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And you know, anyone following this knew that a second wave was coming.
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That made it much, much harder to feel that your voice is just counting for nothing.
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It's like doubting Cassandra, no?
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That you know what's going to happen, and everybody is going to say, you're doubting
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and look, how good it is, how positive it is.
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No, you mentioned the UP panchayat elections, and my thought went to the, you know, the
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1600, I think the last count was the teachers who died because they were forced to go on
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duty, which is basically murder.
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And it's not, it's not that you were the only sort of doubting Cassandra's, they're used
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to ignoring the activists, but they ignored the scientists, they ignored the experts.
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So that's kind of bizarre.
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They even ignored a chief minister, apparently the Uttarakhand chief minister was, you know,
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replaced by Tirath Singh Rawat, who's now the chief minister, because he was trying
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to say, look, it might not be a good idea to hold the Kumbh Mela in the, at this time,
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you know, it might not be a good idea to advance it a year and hold it in 2021 in April.
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So they told him, all right, we'll send you packing and, you know, get somebody who's
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okay with this package, with the agenda.
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Let's get back to the subject at hand.
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And now that you're finally on the show, you know, take me back to your early life, because
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we actually share the same year of birth.
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I think I'm a few months younger.
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But so I'm curious about your childhood, you know, tell me about it.
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I know from the biographical details that you grew up in, and all of that, but tell
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me a bit about your childhood, what was growing up like and so on.
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I think that I had a bit of an idyllic childhood because I did not really face any difficulties
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It was a very happy time, in a sense, and my because my parents were actually, you know,
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And the strange thing is that I think they were greater after I was born.
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So my dad used to tell me that, you know, theirs was an arranged marriage.
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So they probably came from very different backgrounds.
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My dad was quite conservative in his thinking.
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He had not had much exposure to, you know, young women.
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And suddenly he was married to this extremely smart, very talkative, shameless girl.
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So he suddenly didn't really know what hit him.
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And, but, you know, so they kind of made a go of it.
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But he told me that, you know, it was after I was born that they really had.
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He said, you know, we didn't have our honeymoon period when we should have, but we had it
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after you were born because that's when we really fell more in love with each other and
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So I think that's probably true because my father also kind of relaxed, I think, and,
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you know, forgot about what kind of things he had been taught about how to be a man.
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And he just enjoyed being a dad so much.
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And he didn't think of himself as being the dad of a daughter.
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You know, so it was more of, you know, he was a very relaxed dad.
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And my mother was a natural feminist.
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She didn't use the word feminism very much as we were growing up, but her natural instinct,
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you know, instinctual response to almost everything was very, very principled and very feminist
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and also very, as she would keep saying in circumstances, we would see her doing this.
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So in circumstances where she would be alone and there would be a social kind of consensus
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that something should be done, but she felt that was wrong.
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She would kind of just step in.
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So I did see her do this kind of thing.
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And we kind of grew up thinking this was a thing to do.
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If somebody is saying that a thief has been caught and now he should be beaten up.
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So she would kind of, you know, step in and say, what on earth, why, you know, he is just
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some pocket money, he's just, you know, stolen some little thing and he's a kid and what
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So you'd find her in this confrontation.
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You'd find her confronting people who would be trying to beat a dog to death or something.
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So that kind of thing also sort of came with the package of being my parents' daughter.
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And then there was my sister also.
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So we grew up very, and we grew up without anybody really looking over our shoulders
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I was initially a little bit of a safer place.
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Gradually, it became pretty unsafe for girls.
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But when we were very young, as until I was about 10 or so, we could wander around everywhere.
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We had a stray dog who used to be our guardian.
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So me and several other girls my age would just get up early in the morning and wander
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and have these adventures and pretend we were famous five and this and that with just that
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dog and his dog friends on hand.
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And my parents didn't worry.
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And my mother also had thrown up that way because she said her parents also kind of
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she would walk, wander around Delhi with a fruit and a book in her hand and go to ruins
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in Delhi and just spend the whole day there just reading and so on.
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I said, my God, if you do that now, her parents would have heart attacks because of how unsafe
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But when she was a child, it was possible.
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So that was what it was like.
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I mean, I didn't I wasn't exposed to activism as a child.
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There was activism in Belai at that time, but I was unaware of it.
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I was an officer's daughter in the steel plant.
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We had friends who were workers who would but they were not trade union activists as
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So I did not really know them very well.
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The only trade union person I knew as a child was a somebody who was used to run the Bata
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You know, the shoe shop.
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So he was a Bengali person and he was very much leftist and he was part of trade unions
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and also he would chatter on about trade union.
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My mother used to enjoy these chats.
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So I could kind of pass over me.
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My dad was completely bored by politics, least interested.
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My mother was the journalist's daughter and very interested in politics and also she would
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Many stands to explore her, but take a quick digression and you pointed out that, you know,
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your mother used to walk around Delhi with a fruit and a book and sit in the ruins and
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read and that was no longer possible.
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And of course, today we know how things are.
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Why do you think that things have become so much worse?
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I don't know, actually.
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I mean, it's not just Delhi, of course, even I mean, she's done the same thing in Chennai.
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She said she used to, she and her sister used to just wander around barefoot here and there.
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You know, her parents didn't have to worry so much about safety.
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So I'm not sure what has changed, but I think that what I can imagine at least about Delhi
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is that at that time it was largely a rural area.
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You know, she said that her school was, which was Frank Anthony Public School.
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So she said, you know, walking from Difference Colony to Frank Anthony Public School meant
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you she would be walking through fields.
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There would actually be fields there.
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There would actually be green fields there.
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So I think that the change in Delhi, which was social change and not just a demographic
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change in its becoming a more urban capital city.
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And these, you know, the villages of Delhi becoming, they're still villages in name.
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You know, it's still Munirka Gaon, but it's become a real estate kind of based.
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It's not a agriculture based society.
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It's a real estate based society.
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And I think that somehow that transition has not been very organic.
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I would say, you know, Bombay is becoming a city has been much more organic because
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there's been a large working class and that has shaped the culture of the city.
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But in Delhi, it isn't that it's a rentier class that has shaped it.
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And somehow, I mean, that has not led to a change in how Delhi looks at women.
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So that change I see happening a little bit more now, in fact, you know, with.
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But I know that in the 90s, when I came to Delhi first from Bombay, it was a terrible
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A friend and I came from Bombay to Delhi.
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I had done my BA in Bombay when I came to Delhi.
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We would walk around wearing the same stuff that we'd worn in Bombay, which was fairly,
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you know, raggedy stuff and ordinary stuff, nothing too.
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And we would wonder why is everyone staring at us?
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What is the thing exactly?
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So then we realized that to get stared at in Delhi by men and by not one man.
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It's not like it's like if you're at a bus stop, suddenly you're getting stared at by
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And you realize that it was because you're a woman.
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It's because you're female.
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So the idea that if you're female and out on the road and you, you know, they're speculating
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about what you're doing there.
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It's not you're not expected to be there.
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And I know that for men, they didn't realize this at all, you know, because when my partner
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and I first, you know, got, we were, we were colleagues together, comrades together.
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So we would have to, you know, travel here and there.
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So we'd be at a bus stop, say around nine at night, right?
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Near the ISBT bus stand or something.
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And he would get increasingly uncomfortable because he'd realized that somebody's staring,
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somebody else is staring, somebody else is staring.
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And you know, he asked me what to do.
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I said, look, what's the point?
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If I confront one guy, there are all the other guys.
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I don't want to confront so many and have so much, ignore.
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So then he's like, why exactly do you think they're looking like that?
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I said, they're looking because I fit their box of female.
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Look at the bus stop, how few women there are.
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I'm one of the only women sitting there.
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And so they think this is weird.
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They don't want to put me in whatever box of, you know, I'm a young woman and a young
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So they can't put me in the box of, oh, she looks like someone's wife.
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She looks like someone's, you know, whatever.
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So and she's out here at night.
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So you know, and then police people would come.
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If the bus stop didn't have too many people on it, then you'd have a police guy come up
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and say to him, are you basically suspecting, are you a prostitute?
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Because otherwise, why would you be out at night?
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The idea that you might be a student, you might be an activist, you may be visiting
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Delhi University and then going back to JNU, taking a bus from the ISBT, Basadda.
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This was incomprehensible even to the cops.
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Yeah, the story really speaks to me because I think, you know, what your partner kind
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of figured out at that bus stop is something I've gone through as well in the sense that
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there are things we take for granted, which is this extra layer of awareness which women
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have, which is normal to them.
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And most men are unaware of it, like you said.
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And men are fortunate enough that we can go out on the night and not have to worry about
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who's looking at us or whatever, we can enter a lift and not have to worry about who's there.
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And that extra layer is something that at some point, I guess you begin to become aware
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of till then, you just take it for granted.
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When did you become aware of that extra layer?
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In Belai itself, in Belai, as I grew up, you know, as I entered my teens, I think Belai
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also probably underwent a little bit of change, or maybe as little children, we didn't really
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But gradually, I became aware of it, I'll tell you when actually, I was quite young
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even then, I was still a child, but my mother had started going out to work.
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So initially, she had not found a job, but then she did find a job, she started teaching.
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So she used to take a cycle and head out.
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And she used to leave us alone at, we were latchkey kids, my sister and I, so we'd go
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to school, come back, you know, feed ourselves and she'd be out.
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But then she got a stalker.
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So somebody in a car, whom she later realized was the son of a big industrialist there.
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So he was, you know, this quite, quite well known industrialist in that area.
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In fact, even now I'm stopping myself from naming him and from saying even his car number,
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which we all remember by heart, because that family is, my mother still lives in Billai
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and that family is still, I mean, it is an influential family still.
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So she got the stalker, this man in a car who would, she suddenly realized he's hanging
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out, he's following her wherever she goes.
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So initially she ignored it, then she started getting scared, then she really got freaked
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out because one day, okay, he would make blank calls to the house all the time.
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So, you know, there were the phones, you know, the old sort of black phones, but also these
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were steel plant phones, Billai steel plant, right?
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So they were basically, you know, you could connect to a steel plant operator also if
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you wanted and all of that.
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You know, so he must have found it easy to figure out the number and he would keep making
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calls and my mother was worried that the children, we would pick it up, her daughters would pick
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For herself, she was, you know, kind of confident that she'd deal with it.
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But then she really lost her nerve when one day she just, you know, the doorbell rang,
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she opened the door and this man was standing in front.
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And she totally freaked out because she felt that if we were alone at home.
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So I think that that point, I remember as a change, I don't remember exactly how old
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But she, I remember that that was a time when she felt that her fear communicated to us.
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So her, you know, so we, then she would start telling us that you can't open the door.
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Even if someone says, I'm your father's friend, I'm your mother's friend, tell them uncle,
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we have auntie, we are very sorry, but we have been told not to open the door.
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So I'm sorry, we're being rude, but we can't open the door to anyone.
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And that was the first time in Billai that we had thought of that because we used to
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leave the door unlatched and stuff and not really think twice.
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Then that guy actually ran her into a sort of concrete gutter once near her house.
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So she was coming back on the cycle and since he came so close to her cycle, she panicked
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and had to get off the road and she fell.
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So she came back to the house all, you know, scraped, bruised, not badly hurt, but really,
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really badly mentally freaked out.
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So she was in tears and she was shaking and I remember my father looking very horrified
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and helpless and not knowing what to say, what to do.
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And then our cat came and sat in her lap and, you know, she started crying even more.
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And we didn't know what to say.
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Then I remember hearing my parents talk about this.
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My sister was very young at that time, but I could understand what was being.
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So I remember my parents talking and finally deciding, no, we cannot complain, we cannot
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do anything because the police won't act against this guy and how will we prove anything?
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And what if he gets more vindictive towards the children?
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So then they just became more protective.
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They started having a very lovely neighbor of mine, sort of, we were told not to go to
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our place, but to go to her place.
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So we would have lunch there when we came back from school and then my mother would
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collect us, things like that.
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I think that was the time probably when I realized that the world we live in is not
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After that, of course, there were any number of such instances in Delhi where we realized
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that to be female and out on the road is something.
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And not just in terms of safety, I think also in terms of the way you hold yourself in public.
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So I think for a long time, my mother, quite remarkably, actually, to think about it, held
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herself and encouraged us to hold ourselves without really remembering that we are female.
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So we went, how we hold ourselves, how we sit, how we laugh, what we do, we didn't really
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And my parents, I think, had a very big role to play in that because in retrospect now
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I look at society and I realize that maybe other girls were not as, even in Bhilai, were
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certainly not as lucky as I was.
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I knew that my women, my girlfriends, as in school friends, and my sister's friends, they
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all thought of my mother as one of their friends.
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So they would keep telling me that, you know, they'd keep talking about, you know, secret
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And they'd say, aur kisi ko nahi bata sakte, aunty ko bata sakte.
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Lakshmi aunty ko bata sakte, because they knew that this one is at heart, you know,
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she's not going to chugli karo to their parents.
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So they didn't think of her as part of the, you know, authority figures.
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And I never realized how lucky I was in that, actually.
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I realized that later because it was only probably when I came to Delhi that I began
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to fully realize that being a woman, it's not just about physical safety, it's about
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the fact that you are seen as though you have no business out in public.
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Kar kya rahe ho yahan pe, manne you are not supposed to, you're supposed to account for
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You have to show that I have a good purpose, that I'm not immoral or whatever it is, you
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And even if it is unsafe, I'll have to explain, oh, it's unsafe, why are you out here?
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So the fact that I'll keep on having to explain my presence, I think I never had to do that
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much to my parents, you know.
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The only instance I remember, there was one instance when my mother lost her nerve a bit
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vis-a-vis me, that was one time when I had joined some karate class or something.
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So I used to do it just for exercise, kicks.
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So once I usually used to get a lift back home with one person who would come drop me
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That day somehow he didn't turn up and I decided to have a leisurely walk home.
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So I walked home and it's quite a way from my home, but I walked and it was evening,
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so around 7.30, it was dark.
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And as I, about halfway home, I realized I spotted my parents on the scooter going in
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the opposite direction.
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So I tried to call out to them, but they didn't see.
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So I thought, oh, well, and I walked home.
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As soon as I got home, my grandmother was at home then, and she came out looking very
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horrified and came and hugged me and said, come, come, come.
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So I said, what happened?
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So then she realized and she said, no, no, sit, sit, sit.
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And when your parents come, if your mother gets angry, don't react immediately.
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You know, she told me, don't be angry.
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So then my parents came home, the minute they opened the gate, my mother saw me and freaked
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She said, you're not going anywhere ever again and this and that and that and what, and that
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was so unlike her because she thought I was late and something had happened to me and
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they'd gone to look for me.
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So I said, but I saw you people and I was walking back and it was fine.
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And we always walk and come on and all of that.
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But somewhere in her brain, she had gotten a fear, right?
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So she did, she suddenly became the, you know, the authority figure, mother saying, kuch
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nahi kal se, sab bandh and all of that.
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So I was getting angry.
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Then my dad also came and told me, he said, don't say a word right now.
#
We are very happy that nothing happened and you were not scared.
#
You were enjoying your walk home.
#
So now let your mother get over her fear.
#
You know, she's had a very bad shock.
#
So let her get over it.
#
And of course she never repeated that ever again.
#
I happily went next evening also, no problem, but yeah.
#
Your, your parents sounds remarkable.
#
Look, a couple of threats to untangle there, but before that, a quick question.
#
I'm just curious, right?
#
When the bell rang and she opened the door and it was that guy, what happened then?
#
She says he just stood there and said nothing.
#
And she, you know, she was terrified, absolutely, but she just sort of shut the door and bolted
#
it, locked it and just sat inside.
#
And after a while she looked out of the window and he was gone, but she just freaked out.
#
I mean, she didn't say or do anything.
#
And she did think she said, should I make a call?
#
Should I call the police?
#
And she then decided not to.
#
And I see that, you know, all the time now, when I think about women weighing in whether
#
they want to complain about something, especially stalking.
#
I wrote about this sometime in 2013, when one woman had come to one of the meetings
#
we were having during the Nirbhaya Wala movement.
#
I don't like calling it that, but it was the anti-rape movement.
#
So this woman had come from quite a way, I think she was in Mangalpuri or some place
#
quite far away from central Delhi, which had come all the way to the meeting because she'd
#
heard about it from someone who worked with her.
#
And the person who worked with her was a comrade of ours, a trade union member.
#
So he had mentioned it and she came.
#
And she took me aside after the meeting and told me she was being stalked.
#
So I told her, what do you want to do?
#
And she said, I was so scared that my children would do something, so I didn't want to complain.
#
But now he's actually started following my kids around.
#
And now I feel like then what do I have to lose?
#
I have to complain because I cannot risk something happening to my children.
#
And that kind of brought it alive again.
#
And I remembered all of this and then I wrote about it and I realized that a lot of other
#
women have gone through this.
#
And this fear of the consequences of your complaining, you know, that other people,
#
that your family members might have to bear it, is a huge burden.
#
A lot of people do not want to take that burden.
#
Look at what happened to the Sengar complainant, right?
#
Her family members, so many of them were killed as a result.
#
Or look at Ruchira, I think her name was Ruchira Girotra, right?
#
The child in, you know, the tennis player in, I think it was Gurgaon or something.
#
Some years ago, she complained against a police officer who had been sexually harassing her
#
at the tennis club or something.
#
And they made her life and her brother's life and her parents' life a living hell.
#
So at the end of it, she committed suicide.
#
Yeah, I remember that now comes to mind, yeah.
#
I was struck by something you said and this is leading on to my next question.
#
You know, I teach a writing class, an online writing course, and there one of the things
#
that I tell the participants is that always look for concrete details, which can make
#
whatever you're writing about vivid.
#
And you just did that when you were talking about your mother and how she's come home
#
And you said the cat crawled onto her lap and she started crying, which is so concrete
#
and just makes it so real.
#
So my question here is your mother, of course, taught literature, you've spoken in the past
#
about how you were surrounded by books at home and they were in a sense a window to
#
Like at, you know, in some other interview of yours, you've written about how, you know,
#
even though those were homophobic times, that didn't affect your attitude because you had
#
those books, that was your kind of window to the world and you could sort of get a lot
#
Tell me a little bit about, you know, the kind of stuff you read, the writers you really
#
liked, the writers who stayed with you and are there books that kind of shaped you in
#
that period and even later, which had a profound influence on you?
#
Yeah, I mean, I've I like to think about it because I read so indiscriminately in my
#
house, you know, children's books and adult books were not really distinguished.
#
Even my mother and her sister and her brothers were not brought up that way.
#
So apparently, they never really had children's books, you know, brought for them and all
#
Books were there, all kinds of books, and people just read them.
#
So it was like that for me.
#
So I knew that we read a lot of Enid Blyton, for instance.
#
Okay, so that's something everyone reads, we also read.
#
But I think about it now when I think about what you take away from there, right?
#
So the thing is, there's a lot of now in the UK and other places that are even moved to
#
say ban Enid Blyton or do a sanitizing of her books because she uses very racist language
#
Okay, extremely racist language and racist portrayal of some characters, definitely colonial,
#
you know, if you look at any Indian character in her books, they're a ridiculous kind of
#
thing, you know, somebody, it's not even an Indian character, but somebody acting as an
#
Indian student or something, it's ridiculous.
#
But and of course, it's, you know, it's, it's obsessed by the idea of gender rules, right?
#
Because it's always about, oh, you know, this girl can't do anything, because she's a girl
#
and who's girlish and who's boyish and all of that.
#
The thing is that I think about what I was getting when I read that stuff.
#
To me, the most interesting character was not the ones who were, you know, obeying the
#
The one whom the writer made most interesting was the one who was breaking the rules.
#
So you always, you know, the tomboy character was the interesting one.
#
You know, even in, you know, Little Women, you know, Louisa May Alcott.
#
It is Joe who's your heroine, because she's the one who's actually not the little woman
#
She's not in the mold of women as they were meant to be.
#
So I am not really I have, you know, when I look back now, I feel like saying don't
#
tell your children, you don't read this.
#
Let them read everything.
#
I read a lot of Reader's Digest for lack of anything, because I was so voracious.
#
So I wanted a continuous supply of stuff to read.
#
I read a lot of Reader's Digest.
#
Well, here I am sitting in front of your card carrying Communists.
#
The whole Reader's Digest was a propaganda against Communism, okay.
#
They had such, it was a very, very propagandist magazine, okay.
#
But what do I remember from what I read of it?
#
I remember that they used to carry these books.
#
They would carry full book length stories, maybe slightly abridged.
#
So they had stuff from the Second World War about people kind of escaping from the Nazis
#
and you know, what the Nazis did and all of that.
#
I remember all of that.
#
All of that gave a very vivid memory to me.
#
So when I started looking around my own reality and figuring out, oh, these guys are behaving
#
exactly like those Nazis.
#
So that was an easy thing for me.
#
I didn't get the anti-American, anti-Russia propaganda and anti-Soviet propaganda and anti-Communist
#
propaganda didn't really penetrate that much, you know.
#
Of course, there was a lot of Russian anti-US propaganda, which I also read, because they
#
were the people's, was it the people's publishing house, basically the Soviet literature.
#
So they would have these camps and lovely books of all kinds, especially for children
#
and especially science books and all, which were great.
#
And so my parents actually learned Russian.
#
So they were many Russians in Belize.
#
So they would learn Russian and interact a lot with Russians.
#
They had several good friends, but they would laugh at the stories they were being taught
#
because they were being taught stories about people escaping from the US to go to the Soviet
#
Union and say, oh, we are in paradise.
#
And the Reader's Digest would have stories which were the opposite, right, to people
#
escaping from, you know, Soviet Russia or East Germany or whatever it is, and finding
#
freedom in the West and all of that.
#
So my parents would make a lot of jokes about this, you know, so I think it was their treatment
#
of literature or any reading, that this is not something, that you're not just swallowing
#
and believing, that you're actually engaging with it.
#
You can argue about it.
#
You can think about it.
#
That was more of the approach.
#
So in terms of books, I think one book which I accidentally picked up and read was actually
#
the, you know, I read and reread and read it so often, and I was very young when I first
#
The front page was missing, so I didn't know what book it was.
#
I just started reading.
#
It turned out to be To Kill a Mockingbird.
#
I must have been about 10 maybe or 11, not more than that.
#
So I began reading and I had no idea, you know, when they were discussing rape, I had
#
no idea what they meant exactly because I didn't quite know the dynamics of what was
#
So I wasn't much better off than Scout when she's asking, you know, what exactly is happening
#
What is the carnal knowledge of a woman without her consent?
#
But I couldn't put the book down and I felt the sense of a tremendous injustice of various
#
kinds and felt very, very moved by it.
#
And then I figured out later, and I remember I picked this up at my grandparents' house
#
in Coonoor, so I figured out that it was called To Kill a Mockingbird because then I asked
#
my mother and all of that and she said, yes, I think this is that one.
#
So that I went back to several times and I think that in a sense, you know, making the
#
connection with biases in our society and, you know, communal biases, caste biases.
#
I think that was a very, very formative kind of book which made a big difference.
#
And then a lot of, you know, short stories and things like Kate Chopin.
#
So this was also stuff I just discovered accidentally, you know, I would find it lying at the back
#
shelf in Coonoor or in Vilai somewhere at the back and just pull it out and say, okay,
#
book I haven't read yet, so I'd read it.
#
And I realized that it's a book about a, you know, I was reading The Awakening where it's
#
this woman who eventually, you know, leaves her marriage.
#
So I was reading stuff like that without, you know, without a censor and really feeling
#
You know, I would live with these characters for a long time.
#
And I was, as I said, I read anything and everything.
#
So I was reading Max Birbom and James Thurber in Coonoor, again, just finding the books,
#
And then in my school in Vilai, when I went to class, you know, ninth and tenth, I realized
#
that my classes are boring me, okay.
#
I had to somehow pass mathematics, which have terrified me and maths and science had become
#
a burden and found it very hard.
#
But my English classes and social science classes had become boring because, you know,
#
I could make out the mistakes that the teacher is making and I couldn't bear what they were
#
doing with poetry and reading in class.
#
So I realized that what I would instead do was to go to the school library on time, pick
#
up something to read and read it under my desk in my book.
#
So they would know what I'm reading.
#
So I read a lot of Dostoevsky because they had these old Soviet publications of Crime
#
So I read Crime and Punishment as though it was a detective novel.
#
I am waiting with bated breath.
#
And then I'd imagine my God, suppose I end up killing somebody one day, then what will
#
Even if no one catches me, I'll feel I'd be feeling guilty and feeling guilty.
#
Then I found a book by Verier Elvin, Leaves in the Forest.
#
So that I had no idea who's Verier Elvin.
#
I just found the book, read it, and I was fascinated by because they meet Gandhi.
#
So he mentions meeting Gandhi and argue he made me meet C.S. Lewis.
#
And so he meant no, no, CF Andrews, sorry, CF Andrews.
#
So CF Andrews talks about Gandhi.
#
So and it's very funny because they are cocking a snook at the priesthood, you know, because
#
the priesthood doesn't want them joining.
#
You know, the British priests don't want these guys joining, supporting the freedom movement
#
or supporting Adivasis, you know, go on the Adivasis living their lives in their own way.
#
And you know, that I found was fascinating to me.
#
So I had a sort of weird eclectic kind of exposure of this kind.
#
Yeah, no, this is this is kind of nuts, because like when I was a kid, first of all, a lot
#
of the books you're naming are sort of familiar to me, the books and authors, because obviously
#
in India, you only got so much back in the day.
#
So it was pretty much a staple.
#
You're going to radio and Blighton and Hardy Boys and all of that.
#
And I like the Mallory Towers series a lot back when I was a kid, I remember, especially
#
So we have something in common there.
#
And what kind of gave me somewhat startled me was that, you know, my sort of gateway
#
into serious literature was when I picked up Dostoevsky's House of the Dead, because
#
I thought, oh, it's going to be a thriller kind of thing.
#
And I absolutely just fell into it and just read everything by him.
#
Now, on the one hand, it seems to me that, you know, we can complain that there were
#
so few books available, which is why, you know, you and I basically read the same kind
#
And of course, we were indiscriminate because you got hold of whatever you could.
#
And today, everything is available.
#
But on the other hand, we were enormously lucky and privileged because we did read a
#
And I say this in the context of seeing a little bit outside the world that we are in,
#
like, you know, I'm sort of struck by in one of your interviews, you spoke about how you
#
went to Shaheen Bagh when that happened.
#
And the question that you like to ask was, ask all the women gathered there was that,
#
quote, you're afraid of many things, but tell me, are you having fun?
#
The reason this is significant is that because they'd have this newfound sense of solidarity
#
from being part of a women's movement.
#
And what is happening here, it seems to me, is that, you know, some of them at least are
#
getting a glimpse of a world that they didn't really know existed or could never have experienced.
#
There's a sociologist called Timur Kurran, who wrote this book called Private Truths,
#
Public Lies in 99, where he essentially spoke about how many of us will often put on a face
#
which is a lie because we think that that's what everyone else around us thinks.
#
For example, before the Soviet Union collapse, the example he gave was that nobody would
#
express anything against the Soviet Union because my God, and they thought they were
#
the only rebellious people.
#
And then suddenly one day they realized that there are other people like them, and that
#
leads to what he calls a preference cascade when they see that there are others like them.
#
And boom, it seems it feels like it happened overnight, but they all felt that way secretly
#
Now, I think for us, that kind of that awareness can happen through reading, that awareness
#
can happen through, you know, all the privileges that we have.
#
But for most people, that simply isn't there.
#
Like it isn't the case, I would imagine, that most women in India are happy with the
#
patriarchy and yet they are not speaking out against it, you would imagine.
#
So now do you think that in this kind of modern age, where you are sort of surrounded by different
#
kinds of social media, where, you know, people like you have much more of a voice than you
#
would have, say, maybe in the year 2000, you know, that there is a chance of a preference
#
cascade in this direction also happening, that could then lead to sort of an acceleration
#
of the kind of change we'd all want to see?
#
I think that yes, in the sense that yes, you can see it happening among young women, right?
#
So even this whole pinjratod phenomenon.
#
So it's a movement on the ground, but it also has a way of communication and spreading through
#
So people get to know about it and then they want to do their own unit of it and all of
#
So I think that it is something which has helped, of course, the internet has helped.
#
And people get more, you know, they are exposed to a whole range of books or ideas or through
#
other means, you know, it's not just through reading.
#
It's also talking, listening, whatever, you know, they're hearing talks, they're hearing
#
But at the same time, I think that there's a lot of, there's a big digital divide also.
#
So I see that there is a change happening in young women in rural India or semi-rural
#
I can see that happening when I visit.
#
I can see it happening when, you know, there are young women there who are studying.
#
So they're craving for new experiences.
#
They are full of ideas.
#
And it's not just young women, for that matter, even young boys, okay, they are full of questions.
#
And if you just happen to be visiting their home, it's like they won't let you sleep at
#
night because they want to surround you and keep asking you stuff because they are not
#
getting the answers they want.
#
And they are looking for answers beyond the town or the village in which they live, right?
#
And I would ask them to, they say if they're asking a lot of questions about Indian society
#
and so I would ask them, aap log TV pe kya dekhte hain, Ravish ko nahi sunte kya?
#
Because I would tell them, Ravish addresses this issue on that show, wouldn't have heard
#
This was some years back, I remember, in Bihar, they hadn't heard of him, although Ravish
#
So I'd say, so what do you get on TV?
#
They said, arey, jo free mein channel aata hai, wo hi to dekhte hain, aur free mein channel
#
jo aata hai wo Deepak Chaurasia, wo ye.
#
So ye cheeze to aati nahi, humaye dimaag mein ye baate hain aati hain.
#
And we don't know where to get the answer for it.
#
And I realized that they are not that keen on reading, okay, especially reading stuff
#
which is written in the usual sort of, you know, political padrika style.
#
They are not really readers of that kind now.
#
They are willing to read literature, they are willing to read poetry, but in terms of
#
a political polemic, they may or may not.
#
Whereas they really want to listen, they want to interact, you know, they want to get the
#
sense that they are asking something and able to argue and all of that.
#
And I think those experiences are, we still don't realize how precious they are and how
#
little we are able to create of that for most, for the large majority of our youngsters.
#
And that's why when they manage to come from rural, if they manage to make it through school
#
and come to university or college, that is the point at which the world is opening up.
#
And that is the point at which they feel, all right, now, you know, this is where suddenly
#
I have the chance to listen to so much more, know so much more and all of that.
#
And this kind of tells you that there are, you know, people use phrases like malnourished,
#
there are multiple kinds of malnourishment, that not having information, not knowing about
#
the world is itself one such thing.
#
And were you ever into TikTok by any chance?
#
In fact, I am very old fashioned that way.
#
I was dragged kicking and screaming onto Facebook and Twitter later.
#
But even now I look even at something like spaces and say, I haven't been there yet.
#
I have no idea what it is.
#
No, no, I wish before it was banned, you check TikTok out because I just fell in love with
#
And in fact, I taught a very brief online course on TikTok in Indian society before
#
And I thought it getting banned was tragic, because what you're speaking of, you would
#
see glimpses of it there like TikTok was a one app which was for rural India, which
#
was for people left untouched by this.
#
I mean, of course, city kids also used it and all of that.
#
But there was such an explosion of new and different kinds of creativity with people
#
using TikTok in all our villages and towns, especially I mean, I especially noticed this
#
among people of alternate sexualities, for whom suddenly you have all these creators
#
of alternate sexualities creating incredible content and then that was leading to some
#
kind of a cascade where more and more creators like that were coming up because they had
#
new role models, which is very far away from the nonsense that you see in our mainstream
#
And another of the things I noticed is that in many of those, when it comes to romance,
#
you see the woman making the first move.
#
And there was just this whole new kind of language happening.
#
Yeah, yeah, so I really wish that you had seen it, but and that the band, it is just
#
I've heard people speaking about it.
#
But yeah, I didn't see much of it myself.
#
I've seen bits of it shared here and there.
#
And I did think that, you know, people are getting some control over their own, you know,
#
some kind of space of their own to express and all of that.
#
So it's very sad, yeah, that that is shut down.
#
And it was evolving, you had very interesting kinds of dissent also, which, you know, in
#
art, in in creative ways, which you wouldn't really see in any other media.
#
Let's let's kind of go back to sort of growing up process.
#
And eventually you landed up in Mumbai at St. Xavier's and then you went and did your
#
Tell me about your sort of evolving conception of yourself in these times.
#
Like what did you see yourself as?
#
What did you see yourself doing?
#
How were your interests kind of developing and growing?
#
And are there other directions that you could possibly have taken had you not taken this
#
Like how big a role does happenstance play in where we land up?
#
I think a very big role happenstance is what I would I think what I am today is out of
#
I say that it's not it's not only happenstance.
#
It's about my overcoming my own self, my own resistance, because I, I had thought that
#
I would study literature, I might teach literature, I might be a journalist.
#
These were possibilities that had occurred to me and that I had thought about and felt
#
In Belai, anybody who didn't study science or who didn't do either the IIT ki tayari
#
or MBBS ki tayari basically were considered dropouts.
#
So everyone in, you know, teachers were shocked that teachers who didn't know me well, there
#
were a couple of teachers who knew what I really was and they had told my parents when
#
I was in the 8th standard, don't force her into these directions.
#
That is not what she wants to do.
#
So the thing was that then, you know, the arts waale jo bache the, they were considered
#
to be, oh, you know, so everybody's shocked.
#
You know, why are you opting for that?
#
And then there was a pressure that, okay, if you're opting for that, you must be wanting
#
to prepare for the IAS.
#
So then my mother also would tell me, do you think you want to?
#
So once when I visited Delhi, my aunt who lived in Delhi at that time, she was a very
#
So she was a very gregarious, very social person, not me.
#
I was a very private person, very private, always with a few select friends, not interested
#
in meeting everyone, talking to everyone.
#
And she was the opposite.
#
And she told me that I don't think you're going to like this.
#
So she said, look, if you want, I have a friend who's an IAS officer and I will take you and
#
you can sit outside her door, watch what she does in the day and tell me, do you really
#
see yourself doing that?
#
And I didn't do that eventually.
#
I didn't go and observe.
#
But in talking to her, I realized that, no, I wasn't really at all interested in that.
#
So I said, I don't think that's me at all.
#
I'm not a very good organizer, certainly not an administrator, not that kind of an authority
#
Plus, you know, people dealing is not my best strength is what I thought at that time.
#
So I remained my private little self with a few very good friends in Bombay, but very
#
few and, you know, very, very close, but very few.
#
But in, I was very, very concerned in Bombay by the communal violence that happened in
#
So that I was in Bombay when the Babri Masjid came down.
#
I was in Bombay when the riots happened and when the blasts happened.
#
And that stuff did leave a big, big impact on me because I had friends, older friends
#
So they would drop in in the college.
#
So they were formerly from the college.
#
So they would drop in, talk to, there was a group of us.
#
So there was teachers, students, and there was a place called the social science center,
#
the social science center, and we used to hang out in the San Xavier social science
#
center where I used to help out as a librarian with the books and stuff, me and my friend.
#
So there people would come and describe that we are journalists and we've seen police killing
#
And these are not all stories that we are being allowed to print even.
#
So these were journalists with publications, good publications like the Times of India
#
and all, very deeply disturbed by what they were seeing, not able to report on all of
#
So I knew that this was an anti-Muslim pogrom that was happening.
#
I knew that one of my closest friends, who is still my best friend now, so I would visit
#
her house all the time in Bombay.
#
And her parents, her mother, I would meet her mother and her mother would tell me stuff
#
she had heard, which was all myths, okay, that, oh, Matunga mein, there's this big
#
saree store and it's been burned down by the Muslims.
#
So I would store this information away, my friend, and I would store it away, then actually
#
ask someone to check and then come back, you know, do our own fact check basically and
#
come back and say, no, it's standing, ask so and so, they're telling you the damn thing
#
So you're being told these lies by the local Shiv Senix and the local RSS people.
#
So the thing was, you could, you could see this happening then it was deeply disturbing.
#
I think most disturbing also because of the stuff that was being said at that time by
#
these groups about women, right?
#
So I could, I had no trouble at all connecting it with all the stuff I'd read about Nazis.
#
So because, and I would feel totally indignant because it was totally smothering to think
#
about these people marching on the streets, sort of owning the streets.
#
And immediately you realize that, you know, as somebody who was so comfortable in Bombay,
#
but when your rioters are in possession of the streets, it becomes a very different thing
#
because then you are seen as someone who could be a target if they didn't like what you said
#
or did or wore or whatever, right?
#
Another very formative thing I should mention actually is that was Xerius itself.
#
I mean, that was a big point, not in terms of activism.
#
I think the people I knew who later became activists there, who didn't think of me as
#
being a potential activist, okay?
#
So even people like Arun Ferreira, who's now in prison, Dema Koregaon, he and several others
#
at that time, they were activists and I don't think they, you know, I'd hang out with them
#
all the time, but I don't think they really saw me as activist material as such.
#
But in college, my English literature classes, so there was this teacher called Eunice D'Souza
#
who was absolutely the most remarkable teacher and poet, you've heard of her, I'm sure.
#
So her classes and her, especially when she taught us, I remember the awakening I had
#
when she taught the war poets, basically the First World War British poets.
#
So that was anti-war poetry, basically, or even if it wasn't anti-war, it was by people
#
who were fighting the war, who were soldiers, who thought they were good British soldiers.
#
So they were not, you know, they were not dropping out as soldiers, they were not deserting
#
the army, but they were writing about what they saw and they were expressing their loss
#
of illusions about what war was and their extreme discomfort with the patriotic jingoism
#
about soldiers and giving themselves up for the nation and all of that.
#
And I know that that was the point at which I sort of stopped, you know, as a child I
#
always used to stand up for the national anthem, played on TV or radio, you know, there I was.
#
But at that point, I started wondering whether I wanted to do that every time or not, you
#
know, I remember thinking that I need to be thinking about this, what this means, you
#
know, and definitely the ideas about war and nations and all of that were very badly shaken
#
So that was, I mean, that was also formative in ways which I didn't realize at that time
#
probably, but they were formative in the sense that when I saw army out on the streets in
#
Bombay, so they came to very belatedly to control the riots.
#
The riots I'd already, I'd already seen curfews, curfew ridden streets.
#
I knew I'd seen VT station full of Muslims who were fleeing.
#
So I knew that stuff was happening and then there was the army.
#
And I remember, you know, walking out on the streets when the army was doing a, you know,
#
basically the army vehicles were moving.
#
And you would have thought that the army has come to bring order, right?
#
But the men in the army, you know, the ones who were in that, in those vehicles, young
#
men in uniform, their presence on the street was quite frightening to me as a woman, I
#
remember, because they would be shouting from those, you know, their vehicles.
#
They would be shouting, you know, lewd abuse and stuff like that.
#
And it was not something you were particularly used to in Bombay, I can tell you that, you
#
know, because, and it didn't feel, and to my mind, I mean, I was not at all comfortable
#
with what that represented either, because it felt as though the city had become a very
#
alien kind of place, you know.
#
So the city which I, I still love Bombay, I still, I cannot, it's a love that doesn't
#
go away because it's the place where I first became an adult.
#
But I know that that sense of discomfort.
#
You know, Anand Patwardhan's film Ram Ke Naam.
#
So Ram Ke Naam has a scene right at the end where he's filming a march that is for secularism.
#
And that reaches near Florida Fountain, I think it is, or some such place, near, I think
#
it's Churchgate or Florida Fountain, somewhere there.
#
And there's a stone pelting by the, by the Shiv Senex and Hindutva right-wing people.
#
So I, my friend and I were in college.
#
So our college was there.
#
We walked down from there.
#
And we had another older friend with us who was a former student of the college and former
#
So he had gone in a very big brotherly fashion with us, basically a little protective.
#
So we went and when this stone pelting started, this guy who had gone with us started saying,
#
no, I want you guys back.
#
So he kind of persuaded us to turn back.
#
But after hanging out for about 15 minutes in the middle of the pelting stones, he said,
#
no, if you're, and he looks at me and he said, tumhara saar fatega toh you don't even have,
#
like your parents aren't here or whatever, you're in a hostel, just, just come out of
#
If you've done your protesting now, just come right back.
#
So he became very parental and took us back very sweetly.
#
But whenever I see Ram Ke Naam and I see that, I think to myself, yes, I was there.
#
I didn't do anything more in the name of activism.
#
The rest happened when I came to JNU, yeah, for my MA.
#
Yeah, that's, that's actually very evocative and it's very interesting.
#
You know, I'm reminded of this book by Chyna Meevil called The City in the City, which
#
is of, you know, one city that is also, you know, there are two sort of, you know, two
#
sort of simultaneous overlapping cities.
#
And it seems to me that that's also the case with Bombay, that it is actually so many different
#
I mean, the Bombay by night is so different from the Bombay by day.
#
And these different versions also include alternate realities, like when that lady,
#
you know, your friend's mom tells you that XYZ store has been burned down and you find
#
that XYZ store is still standing.
#
It's like in a parallel universe, it's like the city divides into two, right?
#
And one version of the city has XYZ store and in the other version of the story, it's
#
ruined and you have that alternate reality just coming through the ages and just shaping
#
so many people who live in a city that we don't see and we live in a city that they
#
don't see, which is, you know, kind of poignant in a sense.
#
So how did you then eventually, after all this, get into activism and then get into
#
Yes, that is the part where the in spite of myself comes in, because I came to JNU.
#
So my same friend from Bombay, she and I got into JNU together, she in the German Studies
#
Center and me in English Literature.
#
So we were very excited.
#
We didn't like Delhi much, but we did like JNU and we liked classes, teaching, all of
#
But JNU also has a lot of politics and we were immediately interested as soon as we
#
So we were immediately interested in figuring out who would we like to vote for.
#
So you basically come to JNU in June, July and elections happen.
#
You basically come in July and your elections happen in October.
#
So you don't have very long, two, three months to basically figure out your mind.
#
You get a very short kind of crash course in what's happening.
#
And we found that interesting without being involved.
#
So we saw that in 93 when we joined, then there was this relatively new student organization
#
We didn't know it was new.
#
By the way, the first student organization which contacted us was the ABVP.
#
Because actually the letter we got from the university telling us that you have got admission
#
to JNU so that in the official envelope, there was a card by the ABVP signed by a woman who
#
was an ABVP office bearer.
#
And I remember that when I got that in Belay and my friend got it in Bombay, both of us
#
had spoken on phone and said, what on earth, because we knew that if we didn't know anything
#
else about politics, but we knew that the ABVP represented these right wing fellows
#
and we were like, what is this?
#
Is this what is going to happen in JNU that these guys are sending letters with the administration?
#
But then we came and realized that they had basically managed to find someone in the admin
#
who had agreed to put this letter in for them and it had become quite an issue and people
#
had protested it and all.
#
But then the main juggler then was, of course ABVP was there and then there was the SFI
#
which was the established large left organization and there was ISA.
#
So we eventually became very close friends with some ISA women and ISA had a lot of very
#
strong women and what clinched it for us was that whether it was the ABVP or whether it
#
was the more conservative left which was coming to us, they would both try to scare us off
#
from the ISA feminists, okay.
#
So they would both try to tell us that these women are, so that was an immediate clincher
#
They were like, oh really, there are these fallen women, okay, where are they?
#
That sounds interesting.
#
Let's go befriend them.
#
So we kind of really hit it off with them because it was so clear that they were feminists
#
and they are lifelong friends now, but I never thought of getting active with them at all.
#
So 94 happens and 94, I voted for ISA, but 94 happens and in 94, ISA really tried to
#
get me and my friend and some other friends of mine to contest elections.
#
And I resisted it like the dickens, okay, because I could feel the pull, I could feel
#
that I can do this, but I felt tremendous fear because I felt like it will just sweep
#
And everyone knew that I am the one who's kind of holding the others also back, okay,
#
because we would go file our nominations and then the next morning come and take them back.
#
And the person who's my partner, he was the secretary then, very thrilled when suddenly
#
five women have filed nominations and next day, you know, four of them are taking it
#
Very irritated he was, okay, and he's like, what on earth and I hadn't taken membership
#
And I'm like, no, no, no, it's a pleasure.
#
Mine, my ideas won't be mine, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
#
So I didn't contest, but I didn't contest, but in return, I promised to campaign for
#
ISA and that was the first sense of a little shame because I was in my school of languages,
#
I was taking around this group of the ISA candidates.
#
So there are five councillor posts.
#
Had we contested, it would have been at least three women, if not four and one guy, okay.
#
This way it turned out to be all five guys.
#
So every time, and the campaigners were all women, articulate women, me, my friends, all
#
of all were extremely, so we'd walk into a classroom and these guys would introduce themselves
#
and some of us would also do the talking.
#
And in every class, there would be people asking, why is there no woman on the panel
#
and what's wrong with ISA and here you guys are?
#
And these boys would give us the dirt, okay, saying, look, they're thinking it's our fault
#
and you people should have been the candidates and you guys have made us contest.
#
So we would really be like, kya batayin, toh pehli baar thoda sharam laga.
#
But uske baad bhi after that election also.
#
So in that election, this Shiv Sena guy was a candidate, Bharati Vidyarthi Sena.
#
So he made some horrible anti-Muslim speech and then he came to our Ganga hostel mess
#
and made a very terrible, a long speech about how, about the Hindu Rashtra.
#
So we had gone in there and started sort of heckling him, asking him, what will you do
#
with us, you know, who don't think of ourselves as being Indian first or religion first.
#
He said, you have to be Hindu first, then you can be Indian and then you have to be
#
whatever sect you are and all of that.
#
So we had said, we are women first, what will you do with us?
#
We don't really care which country we belong to.
#
We are Indians and so, okay, we are Indians, but we are women.
#
Wherever we live in the world, we are going to be treated a certain way, what will you
#
So he said, bahot se jel hain and all of that in a very dramatic way, he was a very good
#
So Ravi Dvivedi, his name was, he died later in a pretty tragic accident sometime later,
#
Bhupal ka ladka tha, lekin bahot good looking tha aur bahot pade aadaa se bahot kaha usne
#
We, of course, totally freaked out and also because we could see our own women friends
#
who were Maharashtrian girls and they were supporting this guy.
#
So they were in that mess with him.
#
So then we rushed to the ISA public meeting and got really, we threw ourselves night and
#
day into the ISA campaign because we wanted them to win and we wanted these guys to get
#
to lose, the ABVP to lose and all of that.
#
So after that also, but after the elections also, I wanted to again retreat, I didn't
#
want to be involved, but again, it was a feminist thing.
#
ISA and SFI won the election.
#
So ISA won the president's post that year and SFI won other posts.
#
In 1993, ISA had won all the top three posts and the last post went to SFI.
#
So they remained with the left, but there was also a lot of quarreling on the left.
#
So a lot of arguments on the left.
#
But we did have some very good friends in the SFI also who were basically, again, the
#
feminists were our friends.
#
So there were feminists in the SFI, some who were good friends.
#
And it was again a feminist outrage that led me to get active in ISA finally, the last
#
So the last barrier was that there was an ISA conference happening to select leadership.
#
And there are factions and stuff about, so I didn't know any of this and I decided my
#
woman friend was the leader there, she nominated all our names, three or four of us.
#
So we had all prepared to say, no, no, no, we don't want to be in the leadership and
#
In the meantime, there was this hapless guy who stood up and he spoke.
#
And he said, one woman we have in the leadership, so why do we need four or five more?
#
And then my shyest friend, the one who'd never spoken in public, she went huffing and puffing
#
to the stage and suddenly burst out into an angry speech, saying that what is it?
#
Are we all just body parts over there, irreplaceable one by the other, we are all separate people.
#
You have so many men, nobody's saying you have one man, why do you need more?
#
And all of us then went and gave speeches and all and immediately went into the metritual
#
And my friend was so happy, the one who was already, the two friends we had who were already
#
in the leadership there, they felt like that guy had done their job.
#
They were very, very grateful to him.
#
They were like, so they said he couldn't have done better had we paid him, you know.
#
And then of course, the last barrier was when I contested elections.
#
Again, I didn't want to contest.
#
I was very reluctant to contest, but then yeah, I was kind of persuaded by Chandrashekhar
#
ki ladho chupchap and all of that.
#
So then I contested and won to my shock and surprise.
#
So yeah, after that, I didn't hesitate anymore.
#
I took on a lot of responsibilities after that.
#
And Chandrashekhar you're referring to is Chandrashekhar Prasad, who was killed tragically.
#
The way you've told the story, it can totally be a web series, you know, pivotal scene,
#
guy goes and says these things, shy girl gets up.
#
So tell me something earlier, you've spoken about how you were also, I mean, you didn't
#
use the term shy, but you were kind of happy spending time with yourself, not a very outgoing
#
gregarious person as such.
#
But then when you get into politics, when you get into activism, you're making speeches,
#
you kind of have to come out of yourself.
#
What was that sort of process like that learning to do all of those things?
#
That was the biggest challenge for me.
#
And that continues to be a challenge, I'd say, because I was and am, you know, basically
#
a very private person who, you know, it's the kind of person, if the world was an ideal
#
place, then I would just like to be teaching and reading and writing and living on a mountain
#
side with a dog or something like that, you know, dog and cat.
#
And I sometimes, you know, daydream and think, kash, you know, kisi din revolution ke baad,
#
but I know ki revolution ho bhi jaye to revolution ke baad kaam badh jaayega, ghatega nahi.
#
So anyway, the thing is that I used to resist, you know.
#
So I know that when I contested elections, suddenly I, you know, I was giving all my
#
time to campaigning, right?
#
So the day the elections ended and we won, so Chandrasekhar and I had won, the other
#
two people on our panel didn't win.
#
So he won president, I was joint secretary.
#
So the same evening he came to my hostel, called me down and said, chalo chalna hai,
#
mainne kaha ho gaya na, elections.
#
So he's like, what do you think, people voted for you, come with me, we have to go say
#
thanks to people and all of that.
#
And on the way, you know, and I realized how he's meeting people.
#
People are chatting, people are talking, and he's just, you know, people are telling him
#
all kinds of things about their family members, this, that.
#
So at the end of it, I was like, when will I get time to study if I'm going to be doing
#
So he gave me one look and tried to talk to me and persuade me, ki nahi, you know.
#
And I realized that my worst nightmares have come true, my time is no longer my own, and
#
I was really panicking.
#
But I think that that basically started it, that gradually, and he played a very big part
#
He and my partner also, who was also, who still, I mean, he doesn't really, he is in
#
a sense, he's private in the sense he doesn't like social media, he doesn't want his name
#
out anywhere, he, you know, mostly it's all behind the scenes work.
#
But he was not someone who considered his time and his space to be his own.
#
So he had, you know, his room would always be open.
#
So Chandu's also, and my partner's also, so these were people who lived their lives very
#
much in the public, you know, and so they, you know, seeing them and figuring out that
#
there seems to be a reason for this.
#
It's not just because you want people's votes, you know.
#
It's actually because this is a job, just listening to people, just someone coming and
#
telling them how worried they are about their mother who's sick back in a village.
#
Just someone who's coming and telling them about their love life and, you know, how you,
#
how they are suffering because they think they're feeling rejected or something.
#
All kinds of things they would come in.
#
So not all of them are things which you're going to go and deal with as a Neta, you know.
#
The point is that being a Neta meant that you are actually available to people for a
#
And that, you know, gradually I did adjust to it, but I still find it a challenge.
#
So I still need to, and I accept it about myself.
#
I'm like, okay, I am like that.
#
So I need to recharge sometimes.
#
I need to switch off sometimes.
#
I do need to take off and have some private time myself.
#
So I do that sometimes when it's possible to do it, you know.
#
And then I feel like, okay, now, you know, I feel restored and I can again be at beck
#
and call of anybody and everybody all times of day and night.
#
So now, you know, most of us in our journeys, the things we do are instrumental.
#
So if I'm studying this, it's because I want to become this, or if I'm, you know, doing
#
this work experience is because I want to do that next.
#
This is what it will do for my career, so on and so forth.
#
But it seems to me that with a certain kind of people, you know, whether it's an artist
#
or whether it's a politician or whether it's a whatever, at some point that becomes a calling,
#
you know, in the way that you mentioned Chandrasekhar and your partner, that at some point the
#
doors are open and people can come in and talk and that becomes a calling and that becomes
#
So, you know, and from what it seems to me the day after you win the election, you're
#
not there yet because you're like, hey, how will I study?
#
Why do I have to go now?
#
But then you become that, right?
#
So what is that shift like?
#
What is that transition like?
#
Is there a moment where you step back and say, okay, this is me, this is me for the
#
Is there something like that?
#
I think it happened over some time and I didn't really, it wasn't a moment at all.
#
So I think it was a negotiation throughout and it took time.
#
So I know that in April of 94, April was it, no, April of 95 it must have been, yeah.
#
So that time, you know, you had your end semester exams coming and assignments to write and
#
so much work, you know, you didn't type in those days.
#
So my handwriting is very bad.
#
So it was really difficult to write and took me time and all of that.
#
So at that time, you know, that was time when you only studied.
#
But at that time, you know, there was supposed to be a, a important sort of meeting in the
#
university which was supposed to take decisions about fee hikes and stuff.
#
So the idea was that there was to be a march to the HRD ministry also to say, no, don't
#
hike college fees and university fees and all.
#
And I was like, okay, but basically I realized that, no, it can't happen like that.
#
We all have to take responsibility, otherwise the burden falls only on two, three people.
#
How are they supposed to spare the time?
#
So gradually after a lot of arguments, this, you know, I came to realize this again, you
#
know, my partner is a very, very big part in realizing that because he, and he made
#
a whole lot of us realize it, you know, that this is something serious, that this is not
#
It doesn't matter if you're going to teach later, if you, you may have a job, you may
#
He has a job now, but the point is that if these things that you're doing, these things
#
are not optional, they're not less important than others.
#
They are things that need to be done.
#
So you find a way to do them.
#
So I realized that, yes, if I pushed myself, I did finish all my assignments well, I got
#
good grades and I also managed to do all the work that was necessary to make those protest
#
events a success, you know.
#
So that was a, that happened and then came the time when Chandu's death was a turning
#
point in a way I didn't realize.
#
I had still thought I'd be teaching and all of that after that.
#
And that was the year I was submitting my MPhil dissertation.
#
So I had again, you know, I'd taken off and I told all my comrades that, look, I am studying
#
and unless it's an absolute emergency, do not call me.
#
I'm on the third floor in my hostel and writing.
#
So there was, you know, no mobile phones, right?
#
So there was a call in the, there was a phone niche in the guard's room.
#
So people got calls there.
#
So someone called there.
#
So I was wondering now who can it be and why are they calling me?
#
They all know that there's one month, one and a half months I need to write my dissertation.
#
So anyway, I went down grumbling, took the call and it was someone from my party office
#
in Delhi and they said, Chandu ki hatya ho gayi.
#
I didn't recognize the voice because it wasn't someone I knew well.
#
So I immediately said, you're lying, who is this?
#
So then he gave the phone to someone whom I knew very well and I could make out his
#
crying and he said, yes, it's true.
#
Just now, it was literally minutes after it had happened, minutes after four o'clock.
#
So then I just freaked out and then I had to go and tell a lot of people and all of
#
And then we had this whole movement.
#
So my writing, my MPhil became quite difficult, you know, because literally everyone was on
#
So when I finally got back to writing, I think I didn't do a very good job.
#
And my guide was very upset with me.
#
And among other things, she said, you know, what is this, you know, where were you and
#
how could you not write?
#
And you have to, you have to make a choice, you know, you can't do both and all of that.
#
So I remember thinking, feeling very angry at that in a sense, because I felt like she
#
should have understood that it wasn't physically possible for me to not be out on the streets
#
in those weeks and think that I can actually, how could I, you know, how could I possibly,
#
you know, one of our closest friends has been killed in this manner.
#
So I, with the help of other friends who helped edit, my guide was right in the sense that
#
she was right about one thing, she read what I had written in terms of my chapters.
#
And she said, it reads like an MCD, whatever, drain inspectors report, okay, it was very
#
boringly written, very badly written.
#
So then I had a friend who helped edit it and she was wonderful in the time she gave
#
me editing it and making it actually read like something.
#
So without that, I could never have got through.
#
But because of all that extra editing work I did, I missed out on going to Cuba, something
#
which I will always regret.
#
Two people had gotten a chance to go from our organization to Cuba for a youth conference.
#
And I was one of them and I couldn't go because of my MPhil.
#
I really, really regretted that because yeah, it was sad.
#
But after that, that was a turning point.
#
Somehow after that, I found myself, I did apply, went for a couple of interviews for
#
jobs, didn't get them and wasn't really interested.
#
But I was hesitant in the sense I wasn't sure my party needed me.
#
I thought of myself at that time as a party member rather than just ISA, not just student.
#
So then I went and spoke to one of our party leaders.
#
He said, I said, do you think I should take up a job?
#
He said, if you want a job, you should take it up.
#
You can always do party work with it.
#
I took that to mean, oh, maybe they don't really have anything worth that I can do.
#
Then there were others who spoke to me and said, do you need money right now?
#
I said, no, I'm okay, actually, and I don't have to take up a job right now.
#
So they said, in that case, please, there's lots of work for you to do.
#
So then, of course, the jobs they were giving me, again, every job that I've been given,
#
I've been scared of initially.
#
I've wanted to say no to.
#
So they wanted to give me the ISA president's job and I wanted to say no.
#
But then I went to the meeting saying, I'm going to say no.
#
But then I went there and I said yes, eventually, because I realized, oh, it's the call of duty
#
And yeah, I learned of the job and found I could do it at the end of it.
#
So by party, you mean CPI-ML, right?
#
So what does politics really mean after this?
#
Because none of the communist parties, from what I remember, and you'll have to forgive
#
me if my knowledge of this is very rudimentary, but from what I remember, none of the communist
#
parties were really winning too many seats, certainly not in the north of India.
#
So what did politics really mean in that sense?
#
Because again, it's not instrumental in terms of there's practically no chance for your
#
So are you trying to maybe shape the culture in little ways, making little small impacts
#
I see the job as all of it, including the elections and all of that.
#
I see electoral wins also as important and necessary, as well as all kinds of other changes,
#
which are equally important and necessary.
#
But it's more in terms of I don't see the win as a win for a particular brand name or
#
a win for particular persons.
#
I think that every win which is hard won, very difficult to win, but those wins for
#
a left party are basically wins for a certain class of people who otherwise are always losing.
#
In my party's case, for instance, I mean, I remember that when Chandu did give me a party
#
membership, offered me a party membership, he took me on a long walk around JNU campus
#
and was telling me, and he appealed to my feminism.
#
And he said that, what do you think, wouldn't you want to know more about how women wage
#
these struggles in terms of, for instance, laboring women, Dalit women in Bihar who faced
#
a massacre by the Ranveer Sena.
#
So they faced a massacre because they're in a certain struggle.
#
And it's not an armed struggle.
#
What do they do in that struggle?
#
Aren't you interested in learning from them?
#
Because otherwise you will only have this much experience and that's it.
#
So I noticed that he wasn't telling me, you have a lot to give those women.
#
He was telling me the opposite, that you are limiting yourself because you are not taking
#
what they could give you.
#
And so you should actually, you should be knowing a lot more.
#
So I realized that that was what I wanted to do and I was doing that.
#
And their victories, so every election that they won, our party won an MP seat in 1989
#
and then MLA seats, they first won in the, in 1992, 1996, I think, yes, 96.
#
So that's when the Ranveer Sena massacre started happening.
#
There was this whole pushback and then the Lalu phenomenon was also there.
#
So our party's meteoric rise was suddenly halted because the social justice space was
#
then divided between the Jantadal and our party.
#
So till then, the social justice space was mainly our party.
#
But as the nineties, with the rise of Lalu, that became divided, there was a divide.
#
But I wanted that these forces, these people who are fighting these battles for land and
#
wages and dignity, they're winning an election means it's their victory, their victory.
#
So basically it was, I was doing it for that, so it was, and I still am.
#
So it doesn't matter so much.
#
I mean, I want us to win more seats.
#
I want us to do much better.
#
I'm thrilled when we do, but I am not terribly crushed when we don't, let's put it that
#
It doesn't crush me when we don't, because I realized that, well, that's where the movement
#
That class of people is not anywhere close to winning right now, what to do?
#
So I have three follow-up questions about your political journey.
#
And one of them is that when you join a party, and I think you mentioned earlier in 94, when
#
you were sort of being wooed by different parties and people said, hey, join IFI, and
#
you were like, no, no, I don't want to, you know, I want to maintain my autonomy and think
#
for myself and all of that.
#
And it strikes me that joining a party also carries a risk of pledging allegiance to a
#
tribe, you know, in different subtle ways that you may not even realize yourself that
#
you become circumscribed by that.
#
And that's especially so if it is a political tribe in the sense that the fundamental thing
#
about politics is you need to win.
#
There is that will to power, that will to power involves thinking in certain ways that
#
you might not otherwise do, not just thinking in terms of principles and ideas, but thinking
#
in terms of vote banks, positioning, like you said earlier that, you know, we never
#
looked at our win as a victory for a brand name or a person.
#
But nevertheless, if you are in politics and you want to win and you want to follow the
#
will to power towards logical conclusion, those are sort of things that you are thinking
#
So was this something that, you know, was an issue?
#
Like one thing that I often say and I think is by and large true across the world and
#
across politics is that politics corrodes character because you might go in there with
#
certain principles, but then politics is the art of compromise and it is the art of finding
#
And then gradually you just, you know, you do things you may think are necessary compromises,
#
you don't really believe in them, but you change along the way.
#
So is that a journey that you were conscious of that you managed to avoid?
#
Is that a tussle that is always there or is your party different or, you know, what's
#
I love the question, Amit, because it was certainly in my mind that was certainly a
#
reason why I was hesitant and I have a complete abhorrence of cults.
#
So I won't even use the word tribe, okay, because tribe I can still see as different.
#
I have a complete abhorrence of cults.
#
And on the left, you have no doubt of cults, okay, there are plenty.
#
And I was not, you know, I can, I cannot see myself as being a member of a cult ever.
#
So I was worried about that.
#
But two things that sort of made me understand things a little better.
#
One was that I felt that the idea that I am this individual person and standing alone
#
on something apart from everyone else makes my position more independent or more superior
#
to others wasn't something true.
#
It's not always because I realized that, you know, what are you changing then at the end
#
of the day, change comes when you are interacting with others.
#
And it is always something that's collective.
#
Somebody I admire, an artist recently wrote, I saw a social media post of theirs, won't
#
name them, but I saw a social media post of theirs where they had several posts about
#
how an individual is the one who makes the chance.
#
You get, you know, you get insight into truth only as an individual, not as a mob, not as
#
I thought about that a lot.
#
And I don't agree because I think that truth is not something people get it.
#
It's not just something that's given to you as an insight.
#
It's not just a light bulb moment always.
#
It's often something that you realize you want, but it is possible to get it only by
#
working with a whole lot of other people.
#
And if there, there are people that are going to be differences of opinion.
#
So the issue is whether you're able to have a democratic way of functioning and decision
#
And in ISA very early on, I was very reassured by the fact that this was not a place where
#
everyone agreed with everyone else, very far from it.
#
So there would be these heated arguments without getting our personal relationships altered.
#
So we were very close and loving and caring for each other while being absolutely.
#
So I know that my feminism was something that my, a lot of men in my organization resisted
#
for a bit in the sense that they said, no, no, you are very critical of Marxism, but
#
you haven't read Marxism, right?
#
And I realized that some of what they were saying was true because when we got arguing,
#
I realized that the marks which I had read was the marks I had gotten from postmodernist
#
So then they would poke at me and I would go back and read, you know, what I had thought
#
I had read before and realized that, oh, it's actually saying something a little different.
#
So I would also change my mind, but I realized that they do change their mind on many things
#
and those came out of these arguments.
#
And the best thing was that even where their minds were not changed, I would write leaflets
#
for the organization and they would be signed by everyone, including those who had not agreed.
#
So I realized that that was, you know, I felt very reassured in that, that a feminist thinking,
#
I wrote something called a feminized Marxism.
#
And a lot of the Marxist, Pukka Marxwadis looked quite horrified and asked several of
#
our ISR national leaders, ki yeh kya pagal ho gaye ho kya?
#
What is all this feminized Marxism?
#
So they said, no, actually, she's written it and we are carrying it in our name and
#
It's not, you know, it's not so bad.
#
Don't go beyond the title, read what she's written.
#
So now when I read that title, I cringe a little bit because it's not exactly the way
#
I'd put it now, but yeah, I mean, I do realize that there was a germ of what I hold even
#
now and that happened over a time, over a journey.
#
And collective decision making is still in my party even now, there's no, there's no,
#
you know, cultishness at all, you know, so it's not like koi bada neta hai, to uski baat
#
bas maan lena hai and all of that, not at all.
#
But I do realize that it's a bit different, that there are, there is a chance of this
#
happening in left parties.
#
It has happened internationally, okay, there was a cult around Stalin, there was, there
#
have been cults around other leaders and there have been cults in other ML groups.
#
I see a very cultish behavior in some left supporters online, especially for instance,
#
when they're defending their, you know, the CPM position in West Bengal right now.
#
So it's this blind defense of the indefensible, you know, you are facing a reality, but you're
#
saying, you know, the sun is shining, but you are saying, no, it's midnight.
#
And I believe it's midnight and you people are all liberal idiots who don't understand
#
that it's midnight, you know, or when it comes to China, you know, so if I, if my party criticizes
#
what China is doing with the Uighurs, there are plenty of cultish fellows you meet who
#
are, who will say, oh, this is, you know, CPI ML is a liberal, Kavita Krishnan toh
#
Toh liberal hona bahut kharab cheez nahi hai na, the communist is supposed to be, the problem
#
with liberalism is that they don't realize that those liberal values are not accessed
#
Not everyone can have the benefit of what liberal, the good that liberalism offers.
#
That is a problem with liberalism.
#
The problem with liberalism is not because it's liberal.
#
The problem is because you don't realize how to make it available to everyone.
#
And that can, so the communists have to be liberal for everybody, you know, that's the
#
The point is not that you become authoritarian for everyone instead, right?
#
And so I am, I'm still very, very wary of cults, but I think that somehow in CPI ML's
#
own experience and the way it has developed as a party, some of that's for another conversation
#
But I think that in its own experience of growing, it too has had to consciously avoid
#
So I remember just one small example of that.
#
I know that, you know, the magazine I edit, which is the party organ, is called Liberation.
#
So my party is called CPI ML Liberation.
#
So initially it used to be called the Vinod Mishra Group, because there were groups named
#
after this person, that person, this person, that person.
#
Vinod Mishra, he became the general secretary suddenly because several other people who
#
were leaders died, they were killed by the police, so they were killed in custody, police
#
So he found himself in the late 20s, a young man, suddenly the general secretary of a party
#
which was facing huge violence, facing a lot of repression, that was scattered all around.
#
And he turned that around.
#
And I don't think of it as just being his remarkable abilities.
#
At that time, I doubt whether anybody thought a 27, 28 year old had any remarkable abilities.
#
It was just that it was his job, he had to do it.
#
But he did turn it around and he did it by keeping a very straight head.
#
And the first thing he did was to say, no, this stops.
#
It's not Vinod Mishra Group.
#
It has to be a party and the party means it's a collective, the collective means it's collective
#
If I don't persuade you, it doesn't go.
#
So he then managed to persuade a party that was underground to actually start contesting
#
elections, start doing things differently, start realizing that class struggle takes
#
many forms, caste and gender became pretty central to the struggles that were launched
#
in the 1980s by our party, all of that.
#
And it happened also because there was this very conscious, this thing that.
#
So there are jokes about ML parties, okay, which I'm the, you know, several jokes about
#
ML parties and how cultish they can be, okay.
#
So my own comrades used to tell us those jokes in which there would be about, you know, how
#
to address Charu Majumdar.
#
So should he be addressed as comrade, comrade Charu Majumdar or comrade CM.
#
So the point is that our, our party developed by laughing at this, by joking about this
#
and saying, please, no, this is not what we want to be doing by very far from it.
#
Yeah, it just strikes me that if Sri Sri Ravi Shankar joined your party, you could call
#
him comrade, comrade Ravi Shankar, but so I, I'd actually told you, I had, I'd actually
#
told you, I had three questions about your political journey and I've asked one of them.
#
So you would imagine there are two left, but one more popped up from, you know, what you
#
mentioned about how within ISR you'd have all these heated arguments, but you still
#
love each other and be friends and all of that.
#
And the arguments were just at an intellectual level.
#
And we don't see that in the modern discourse so much.
#
And my theory for why that is, is that what social media especially does is that one,
#
it enables people to form these sort of echo chambers, find their tribe or their cult as
#
And then the incentive there is always to raise the status within that echo chamber.
#
And the only way of doing that is by moving to the extremes and by getting increasingly
#
Sometimes you can, you know, attack people in other echo chambers and never actually
#
talk to them or address their arguments, but just attack them.
#
And sometimes it becomes this quest for purity within your little cult where you attack someone
#
from the same cult for not being pure enough.
#
So it seems to me that therefore our politics in a sense is necessarily going to be driven
#
to extremes in this manner.
#
And you know, I don't know if I am, if this is just the availability heuristic that because
#
you know, I'm on Twitter so much because I noticed this stuff, I'm noticing it.
#
And maybe it was always like this, but my sense is that the discourse has become degraded
#
where everyone is living in their alternate realities and we don't talk to each other
#
What's, what's your sense?
#
What you say about social media?
#
And I'll, I'll speak a little bit about that immediately after, but I just wanted to correct
#
one thing that our arguments and I saw were not just intellectual.
#
I think we felt them very, very personally.
#
So you know, when they say personal is political, it's also that the political is very, very
#
personal to us who are, you know, who are living politics.
#
And I don't think it's only for activists.
#
I think for a lot of people, if politics is at all about your values, then it is something
#
It is something deeply personal.
#
I felt this, you know, when I was reading Anya Lumbaz, who was my guide, by the way,
#
I am Phil, so Anya Lumbaz very, very fine book called Revolutionary Desires.
#
So she's written this book about the women in the first phase of the Indian communist
#
And, you know, that's one of the things which I felt well on reading that book, but these
#
are women for whom it's not just that their personal is political, it's that the political
#
is so deeply personal to them so they can feel, you know, emotional ups and downs like
#
you do in a love relationship.
#
So our arguments were deeply felt and they were personal and we had quarrels, we had
#
I only say that it didn't mean that we wrote off people because of those arguments, because
#
in general, we cared for each other, we knew each other very well, and so we knew each
#
We knew each other's, you know, blind spots also, and so we were very diverse set of people
#
who were still very loving to each other in that sense.
#
And I can't say more than I think most of all for that, I mean, I'm not saying it just
#
because he's dead, but Chandu was really remarkable in that way because he was someone I realized
#
whose politics came from a place of love, not from a place of intellect alone.
#
I think for me, it was more of an intellectual sense and of ideas and duty and all of that.
#
But for him, he really loved people and then he wanted to make their lives better, that
#
And he was that kind of person who would have these very, very loving relationships with
#
people who were in rival organizations, people who were very critical of us.
#
He'd argue bitterly with them, but at the end of it, they knew that if they needed help
#
or if they needed succor at some point, they knew they would find it with him.
#
And that was something which really stayed with me for a long time.
#
But what you're saying now about social media, I think the first problem which I see with
#
social media, apart from the, as you say, the tendency to be more one-dimensional, more...
#
I'm talking even about myself, that if I'm on social media and I see somebody has an
#
argument, my whole body, from my toes to my head, wants that dopamine hit of smashing
#
it back with an answer.
#
I wouldn't be able to do that if I didn't have this at my fingertips.
#
And I realized over time that I didn't like that feeling.
#
I didn't like doing that anymore because I realized that it is making me also react in
#
ways which is unnecessary.
#
Even if it's an unfair attack, I'm not talking about trolls, I'm talking about maybe someone
#
I know on social media, but they don't agree with me.
#
I don't have to smash it out of the court.
#
I don't have to smash it back in their faces.
#
I can wait a little bit, think about it, and then...
#
So I tell myself that it's like drunk driving.
#
So I tell myself, don't drive while drunk, so don't tweet while angry, okay?
#
So I tell myself that if I'm in a particularly angry or volatile mood, maybe I shouldn't.
#
It took me a very long time to come to this place, I can tell you, because I've done a
#
lot of ill-advised tweeting and posting.
#
And it is my comrades, in fact, who have persuaded me, who have gradually gotten me to see that
#
this is not a particularly wise or good thing to be doing.
#
But I think for me, the worst part of social media is that what it does is it teaches young
#
people that you get recognition very fast on social media by doing very little outside
#
Or if you're doing something outside social media, so showing it on social media becomes
#
And so the tendency is that you start thinking of yourself more as an individual.
#
And I'm not saying this badly about the persons.
#
I'm talking about the structure of the social media itself and media, and then media picks
#
But the point is, in the 2013 movement, before 2013 also, I was doing the same thing and
#
had been doing it for more than a decade.
#
But media didn't know who I was, they had no clue I existed.
#
I gave a speech to about 25-30 people outside Shreeladheeksha's house, and 25-30, because
#
by that time, you know, water cannon chal chuka tha and a lot of people had been chased
#
So I gave that speech and left.
#
And that speech went viral.
#
And so suddenly, people realized that, oh, here's this articulate person and start calling
#
me to every media channel.
#
So initially, I had no discrimination, I just got yanked around and go everywhere.
#
Then gradually, I started realizing, cutting it down.
#
And that recognition that came for me as an individual, I realized that I would have to
#
fight to make them take my organization's name.
#
And they would think that this is for political prachar.
#
And I would tell them, no.
#
The point is, I'm only representing, otherwise, I would just be a talking head, no.
#
I'm representing the wisdom, collective wisdom, that an entire organization of lakhs of people
#
is living every day, no.
#
So how is it fair for me to just go as Kavita Krishnan Samajik Kare Karta?
#
You know, I'm going there because my organization does this work, okay.
#
So then I have to force them to do this.
#
My mother used to watch me on TV and text me when she'd tell me, they aren't giving
#
So when there would be a break in between, I'd call people and say, why isn't, you know,
#
because I couldn't see what they're showing.
#
So that took a long while.
#
But the point is, that happened to me when I was in my 40s, okay.
#
I was, when it happens to people who are in their early 20s, I think they find it much
#
harder to think collectively.
#
So then it changes the dynamics within groups.
#
It changes the dynamics of how you, then they start thinking, okay, I'm this political figure.
#
Where can I take this in my bag with me?
#
I started out in this left organization, but if the left organization doesn't have much
#
career opportunity, where will I win?
#
So maybe I can just take all this progressive politics and go with it to Congress or to
#
And I think there, I'm not saying this in a bad way about any of the people who've done
#
I understand how it's happening, but I feel bad about it.
#
And I think that they have often had a very disillusioning experience after that, because
#
they've realized they can't do that.
#
You can't, your left ideology and left politics comes with a certain kind of practice.
#
You can't just pin it on your, this thing like a badge and go carry it with you somewhere
#
You won't be able to do the same kind of politics.
#
So I'll just kind of think aloud.
#
And it strikes me that the fundamental difference here is that for the casual person who's not
#
really into a cause, the cost of posturing has gone down almost to zero.
#
Like I imagine in 1990, let's say you care about cause X or let's say in 1990, you don't
#
care about any cause, but you'd like to posture that, Oh, I am on this side.
#
You can tell it to people in your drawing room at a party and it has no impact.
#
But if you actually want to, you know, build that brand of yourself, you have to go to
#
rallies, you have to put in the hard yards, you have to do all of that.
#
And whereas on social media, the cost of posturing is for all practical purposes, zero.
#
We can just say anything and, you know, appropriate that label or that tag for themselves and
#
Oh, look, I'm so compassionate, I care about X or Y or Z or I'm so Sanskari or I'm so nationalistic.
#
I think this applies to all the cults, of course.
#
And then what happens is that the genuine carers in a sense, and again, I'm thinking
#
aloud, get sort of drowned out by all these shallow posturers who are then competing with
#
And therefore Twitter gets or social media gets further and further away from the real
#
world where people are actually doing real things, but maybe shat on on Twitter for not
#
being pure enough or whatever, maybe any any kind of random thing.
#
I very much agree with you.
#
My only caveat to that would be that then it's not social media versus real life.
#
It's more about movements that are there in real life and are also on social media.
#
So for me, something like Y loiter or something like pinja toad, which is even more so pinja
#
To me, those are in a different category, you know, because they are not just about
#
individuals who are, you know, saying something.
#
It's not just a statement on social media.
#
It's not just a discourse.
#
They're actually trying to organize.
#
And social media is one of the organizing tools of it.
#
Not the only one, but one of them.
#
I think that as far as that's concerned, that's good.
#
But my worry is that it's also the other way around.
#
And I keep seeing that happening, because it's also like if it didn't happen on social
#
media, it didn't happen at all.
#
But the point is, there's lots of movements, lots of interesting political developments
#
that do happen off social media.
#
And not all of them can happen on social media.
#
It's not just about social media space.
#
See, it can be a remote Andolan in a village and you can find a way to get it on social
#
I'm not talking about that.
#
I'm talking about gender politics.
#
I can tell you that much of the work which I do as a feminist activist or which my organization
#
does cannot be ever shared on social media or on media, ever.
#
The reason is because so much of it is in the realm of private talking to survivors
#
and victims of violence.
#
I'll give you an example, and I'll tell you how insidious this is.
#
So there's this comrade in our office here who is one of the most senior members of our
#
party and a very, very, a very, again, somebody who wouldn't describe himself, he wouldn't
#
use the word feminist to describe himself, but who is one of those whom I can generally
#
count on to be the most supportive with any move that is feminist in spirit.
#
And that is progressive in spirit and all of that.
#
He's a very wonderful person.
#
The thing is that newspapers one day were full of stories about a JNU student, a woman
#
who was raped by a Delhi University, some student.
#
So the papers were full of this rape and, you know, the papers obviously did not report
#
on any complaint being filed, any protest, any this, any that, okay.
#
So it so happened that a couple of days after the papers had been full of it and I happened
#
to visit our office and this comrade, he sat me down and no, he didn't sit me down.
#
I realized that he'd been speaking to a whole lot of other people and had been telling them
#
in the office, I think that I saw, you know, it's really become very problematic because
#
look, they're not taking up this issue and why are they not taking it up?
#
It's because, you know, they must be thinking that, oh, this happened in a room.
#
So somewhere, you know, there was a conservative bone that had gotten activated in him.
#
So he thought that because we are sort of these feminists who think in terms of free
#
interaction between the sexes, he thought that maybe that's why they think, okay, because
#
this happened in a hostel room, they don't want to believe the girl or something like
#
So he filled his head with all of this and told several others.
#
So those others told me.
#
So I of course marched into him and I sat him down and I said, why didn't you ask me
#
I wasn't a student then, but I'm a women's organization activist.
#
You could have asked me, I'm in Delhi, or you could have asked some of the students.
#
So I said, now I'll tell you what's been happening.
#
So I told him that look, the same night that the same evening it happened, a night people
#
So ISA activists, one of whom has had training in psychiatry, has had training in counseling,
#
she and some others, they went to meet this survivor, they spent hours with her just sitting
#
quietly until she was, or sitting around until she was in a position to talk to one of them.
#
When she agreed to talk, she told them what happened, but she said that I'm a foreign
#
student and I do not want a police complaint.
#
I do not want an MLC done and I do not want to complain to the university because if my
#
parents get to know that's the end of my education, they will pull me out of college.
#
So a lot of attempts happened to persuade her, telling her that her privacy will be
#
cared for and to go for an MLC also because she was actually hurting.
#
So they said, look, you need medical care, you know, so why don't we take you to a professional
#
who will both medical and psychiatric care.
#
She said, no, because then they are obliged by law to report it to the police and I can't
#
And for two days after that, different people had been to try and talk to her and had not
#
succeeded and she didn't agree eventually.
#
I think at the very end, I think she filed a complaint, not of rape, but of sexual harassment.
#
And so that became grounds for the university to take some action against him.
#
There could never be a police complaint because she was not willing for it.
#
So I told him, why didn't you have faith?
#
And you should have had the most faith in those who were most feminist because it's
#
precisely because they are in so strong support of consensual relationships that they understand
#
So they know to distinct, they're not, you know, you're wrong when they think that because
#
they think it's okay for people to have sex in hostel rooms, that they think that they
#
doubt the statement that this girl says, which is that, oh, I was in a hostel room with him,
#
They're believing her because they understand that you can have consent, non-consent, and
#
this woman is talking about non-consent.
#
But the point is that this takes time and none.
#
He said, lekin akhbar mein nahi aaya, maine kaha ye akhbar mein kabhi nahi aayega, aayi
#
You can't and not, this is just one instance I can, you know, the large, vast number of
#
interventions that we make are of this nature where you will not be able to talk about it
#
So it's hard, you know.
#
I remember that that person was a speaker of a certain language.
#
So one other girl contacted me and she had very angry saying, what is ISA doing and how
#
come it's doing nothing?
#
So I said, you speak that survivor's language.
#
You yourself are a student, you know ISA well, why don't you go and speak to her?
#
She spoke to her, you know, very confidently.
#
And after that, she was absolutely chastised because when she came to me, she had realised
#
that this is a fragile woman in a fragile state of being.
#
The main job right now on our part had to be to reassure her that she was not at fault
#
because like every rape victim, she was saying, why didn't I fight back?
#
Why did I freeze when this happened?
#
He then walked me out to the auto, my God, what was I doing?
#
And you know, people who were experienced had to tell her that this is most common.
#
Even someone you know has suddenly violated you.
#
You are frozen for a very, very long time.
#
So don't blame yourself.
#
And when she's in that state, you can't be pushing her to, you know, say, Andolan kyu
#
nahi kar rahe, aur dharna kyu nahi kar rahe, aur complaint kyu nahi kar rahe, police ke
#
paas kyu nahi ja rahe because you can't.
#
And that person realised it, you know, the girl.
#
The point is that experience makes you realise this.
#
You can't realise it if you have an abstract idea that what feminist activism is, is only
#
about posturing, you know, and only about what is done in the public eye.
#
I took a long time to answer that one.
#
No, no, that's that's very illuminating and, you know, just the messiness of the real world
#
and it's good to get a sense of that sometimes.
#
And this also speaks to, you know, something that you've written about in your wonderful
#
book Peerless Freedom, where you've spoken about how so many girls across India, if they're
#
harassed in school or treated badly, they won't complain to their parents because their
#
biggest fear is they won't be allowed to go to school again.
#
So that's just so poignant and fundamental.
#
Now my last two questions about politics and then we'll take a break and then we can come
#
back and talk about the state of women in India, which is such a huge subject.
#
So my penultimate question is this, that, you know, when you were talking about, you
#
know, the imperative for winning elections with your party and you said that it's not
#
about a brand name winning or a person winning, but it's about a certain class of people finally
#
coming through and winning.
#
Now, my question there is, and this could apply to the left parties, it could even apply
#
to all kinds of parties.
#
Is that this class of people whom you are trying to, you know, empower doesn't vote
#
for you, you know, hasn't voted for you.
#
So what does one make of that?
#
Like, you know, people keep talking about, with good reason, the Brahmanism of the BJP
#
and the RSS and all of that.
#
But the fact of the matter is in both 2014 and 2019 in the general elections, you know,
#
more of the Dalit vote went to the BJP than to any other party.
#
So how does one then in politics, does there come a time when you begin to question yourself
#
and you say that, okay, I am doing this for X class of people, but they don't seem interested.
#
They're voting for someone else.
#
So what's going on here?
#
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that because it's a very, very commonly asked question.
#
And it also ties in with what you asked earlier, which was about, which I didn't answer that
#
aspect of it, which is about the fact that politics in reality involves compromises.
#
It involves, you know, tactical considerations and not just an abstract ideal thing, right?
#
Because your ideas have to be, have to become real, they have to be adopted by people and
#
they have to find space for themselves in a real political fight.
#
And that is going to involve rubbing against, it's not going to be cast in stone what you
#
So for me, somehow my understanding is that this isn't really something that has troubled
#
Because to me, I think, and I think of myself as a very classical sort of Marxist Leninist
#
Because I think, you know, that was the whole thing with Marx and Lenin, that it was about
#
translating Marxist ideas into a political movement in a country very removed from their
#
Marx was writing in a very backward country like Russia and it involved all kinds of compromises.
#
And Lenin is writing about each of those and why those were taken.
#
What he wrote also is not cast in stone, because you can see him changing his mind, okay?
#
As time changed, not just he, you can see him having ferocious arguments with his comrades
#
and then realizing later that some of them were right or them realizing later, no, no,
#
actually he was right, and sometimes the timing for an idea was just plain wrong.
#
Any number of examples.
#
The same thing is what you do, you know, things are not, let me give you an example, jaise
#
humari party mein election contest nahi karna hai, which is Maoists ka, na?
#
Even our party originally at Naxal Party didn't contest, because at that time it was a very
#
different time where there were not, you know, there was only one major national party, the
#
Congress, and there was a tremendous sentiment of people against it and so it was in a sense
#
a revolutionary time, but there was no revolutionary readiness of that kind and so the movements
#
happened but they were crushed.
#
And after that, you had this rise of so many regional parties and all of that and at that
#
time to go on saying, nahi, nahi, nahi, hum shuddh hain aur vote nahi daalenge, we realized,
#
and it took us a good long while to realize it, okay, my party, that in the early 1980s
#
when they realized that people in our party, and they were Dalit leaders, who had joined
#
our party on their own, they had formed the party not because someone from above told
#
them to, because they felt a need for this party, so they made the party.
#
And for them, when they listened to people, they realized that the main issue for the
#
Dalit laborers in Bihar was not ki election boycott karo, it was the opposite, they said
#
humko vote nahi daalne dete, when we go to cast our vote, they kick us out.
#
So they connected that with their sense of Dalit dignity and Dalit, so their political
#
rights and social rights were actually connected with each other, and their economic rights,
#
because they said we are not paid, all of that.
#
So the movement began to fight for their right to cast the vote.
#
And that was a very violent confrontation, because even if you go nonviolently to cast
#
your vote, they would be violently killed, shot for having cast their vote without the
#
landlord's permission and all of that.
#
So then it meant that you had to have some kind of, you had to make this a movement,
#
then you had to ensure, because the police is not protecting you, so you have to ensure
#
that people are protected, and they go together to cast their vote.
#
So you literally have to have a julus even to cast a vote, all of that.
#
So the point is your tactics had to change.
#
You couldn't stick to one thing saying elections are a big, Lenin famously said parliament
#
The point is that he also, his party also entered that big style.
#
And we know it's a damn big style.
#
But the point is that in the sense that big style, in the sense that you're likely to
#
get a mark on you, okay?
#
Even if you win a small panchayat seat, the number of opportunities for corruption is
#
So how do we deal with it?
#
We deal with it by saying, let the public deal with it.
#
So our only stipulation for our public representatives is that they and the party should be accountable
#
So they have to be democratic means where you have to be transparent and accountable
#
So people have every right to dharmapradashan against you also.
#
So you have to be accountable to them.
#
And if you're not, then sorry, you know, you face the consequences, we are not about to,
#
So it hasn't bothered me, therefore, that you have to make these compromises and all.
#
I think I'm getting away from your main question, which you asked this time.
#
I got carried away by that.
#
Which was that, you know, you're fighting this battle on behalf, you said, of a certain
#
Yes, why people don't vote.
#
So I love that question also, because, you know, for me, the point is that it's like,
#
I'll use the Marxist term, which is actually a very useful thing.
#
It's not a piece of jargon, so evocative, because it says that people are, you know,
#
you're a worker in yourself.
#
So you're a worker, objectively, you're a Mazdoor, okay?
#
Your relationship with your employer is that of a worker and an employer or capitalist,
#
But the point is, you're not a worker for yourself, because you're not thinking of yourself
#
You're thinking of yourself as a, you know, different things at different times.
#
You think of yourself as a father, you think of yourself as a mother, you think of yourself
#
as a member of a certain caste, you think of yourself as a member of a certain community.
#
You may think of yourself as Hindu vis-a-vis Muslim, dozen hats you're wearing, right?
#
You know, so your different people are calling you out to identify yourself in different
#
So the Hindutva groups or the Shiv Sena would call out to the worker in Mumbai to say you
#
identify as a Shiv Sena when it comes to vote, even if you're with a left trade union.
#
So that is the whole challenge of trying to create a realization, and that happens only
#
in the course of movements.
#
You can't teach it in a class, you can't do it abstractly.
#
It is in the course of a movement that a worker may realize that she, and when I say worker,
#
I don't mean an economic category alone.
#
I'm saying somebody, for instance, who is oppressed because she is disabled, oppressed
#
because she is Dalit, oppressed because she is a lesbian, oppressed because she is a worker.
#
She can be all those things, okay?
#
One of our trade union leaders.
#
When I say this to you, I'm actually thinking about a specific trade union leader we have
#
who is a Safaikarmi, she is a lesbian woman, she is a, you know, someone who has faced
#
oppression as a Dalit, okay?
#
And now she is all of those things when she's fighting, right?
#
The point is that for her to realize that she is not, there are, you know, the BJP will
#
call out to her saying, identify as a Hindu, hate the Muslims and vote for us, or identify
#
just as a subject of the government who will get these, these things that the government
#
will give you if you are loyal, right?
#
You just be loyal and you take these things, mil jaega, kya chinta kar rahe hoon.
#
So the idea that no, I actually need more.
#
I expect more and I expect a certain dignity.
#
I don't expect it for myself alone.
#
I expect it for everybody, including those who are not part of my group, my organization,
#
So those people who are fighting, right, who are fighting those movements, I'm talking
#
about the victory for that movement.
#
More movement, aksar, it will not always be on part of the majority.
#
It's often a minority that is fighting it even within, among the oppressed.
#
The point is it has a potential to change.
#
So what side do I want to be, does my party want to be?
#
What is the point of CPIML existing?
#
Let me ask it that way, okay?
#
The point of a party like mine existing at all is if it is going to be consistently every
#
time, whatever tactical choices it makes, and it will be, we never used to align with
#
any bourgeois party, we aligned, Congress to chodi do, we did align eventually with
#
some other parties and this time we aligned with the Congress, with RJD, the same RJD
#
jiske saath 90s bhar we remained separate and we were at loggerheads, okay.
#
So how did these changes happen?
#
No matter what decision, because circumstances changed, okay?
#
But you're making each decision thinking about is it going to help and advance this movement
#
that's going on here, these movements, or these, you know, the potential for transformative
#
You know, so every decision you make has to be on the side of that change.
#
If it is not on the side of that change, if it is on the side of saying, okay, let's make
#
SEZ, let's snatch the land of the farmers, let's also do what every other party does,
#
then what's the point of a left party existing?
#
That I think was what happened in Bengal and it should be a lesson to everyone on the left.
#
I'm not saying this to score a sectarian point with the CPIM, but I really think that a party
#
that was loved for its, by the peasantry, okay, with all my differences with it, I have
#
to say that, I mean, CPM had the loyalty and the love of the peasants of Bengal for decades.
#
And that broke because they became a party that took land away.
#
Now other parties take land away and may get votes in spite of that, but not a left party
#
because they're not with you for that.
#
They don't expect you to be doing that stuff, you know.
#
So to my mind, that is the raison d'etre, that that's what you're going to keep doing.
#
And your movements are primary, but your movement, I do not see movements as being contrary.
#
I see the political interventions and the elections as being an extension of the movement.
#
And therefore, and I'm not saying that caste considerations and all are not there.
#
Of course, they will be because they must be there.
#
You know, for instance, all our candidates in the Bihar election this time, it so happened
#
that most of them were from the Dalit or OBC castes, okay.
#
I'm not happy with that.
#
But a lot of people asked us, so did you plan that all these must be Dalit and OBC?
#
And we told them that, look, it happened that way because we only saw, okay, who is the
#
person who is leading movements there and the movements comprise of people from these
#
Naturally, the leadership is from those groups and it's very natural.
#
In some place, if there happens to be a leader who is, and there have been, okay, there have
#
been leaders of struggles of the oppressed who happen to not be from those communities,
#
but they have been accepted as part of those communities because they have literally been
#
willing to die with them.
#
Somebody gave me this answer once when I was asking them, I was playing devil's advocate,
#
So there was a, in the part of Bihar, there was a very terrible attack quite recently
#
some years back and a sudden attack by some, you know, basically upper caste people, including
#
And among those who were killed were one person from a very, very, you know, extremely backward
#
So he was also from our party, he was a party leader.
#
And the other person was also a party leader, but he happened to be from the same caste
#
as the guys who were doing the attacking, okay.
#
And he was also hacked to death.
#
And in fact, they hacked him to death first, okay.
#
So it was, they were, they were clearly, you know, they planned to kill him.
#
So we were talking and I was just playing devil's advocate about this, that okay, you
#
tell me, sometime after that, some meeting we had met other people and I was just asking
#
those, some other comrades, that okay, you tell me, those who come from other castes,
#
those who come from Bhoomiar caste, Rajput caste, Brahmin caste, so would you accept them
#
as a leader of a movement which you are leading?
#
Because you are also a leader, but would they be also a leader of your movement?
#
Why would you accept that as a member of your committee or whatever?
#
So they looked at us and they said, when someone pours blood with us, then we get the blood
#
So when they are ready to pour blood with me, then why would I consider the opportunist Dalit
#
leader who is with the BJP or the LJP or whatever as my leader, who is betraying me, betraying
#
my caste and my class to the oppressor, why would I consider them my leader?
#
I am considering the guy who is willing to be with me, live in my house, eat what food
#
I eat and shed blood with me as my leader.
#
So that I thought was a pretty powerful answer.
#
And yeah, it does happen.
#
But if there is someone like that, they may also contest an election.
#
It's not like that doesn't happen.
#
So one quick follow up question before we go to the break, just part of this thread with
#
Like, you know, one of the cliches on my show, which has become a cliche because I say it
#
so often is that, you know, we all contain multitudes, people contain multitudes, which
#
of course comes from Walt Whitman's famous poem.
#
And that's part of the answer you gave that why don't these people vote for us?
#
Because there are many aspects to their personality.
#
And in a sense, that can give us hope that today, if a particular party is appealing
#
to one particular aspect of their character or personality or beliefs, that maybe there
#
is a way to find something else to appeal to maybe the better angels of the nature,
#
But the question then that also comes up is that, are you in any way that as a party,
#
when you focus on this one thing, say maybe it's their identity as workers in the broad
#
sense that you mean it in, or whatever the locus of oppression is, does that then become
#
reductionist in some way?
#
Like, is there a danger that there is one hammer you're taking to every nail, and that
#
these people may not necessarily see themselves as only that, that I am my identity is X and
#
therefore I am only oppressed, a lot else is there.
#
So do you think there is that danger, does that kind of self-doubt ever creep in?
#
Yeah, I see what you're saying, and totally, I don't think that that is a danger in the
#
sense that I think, you see, somebody who is part of such a movement wants to be able
#
to live a fuller life, right?
#
So they would like to go on a holiday, they would like to have fun, they would like to
#
But the point is that their location makes it such that they are either deprived of the
#
means to enjoy this, or deprived of even the right to dream of enjoying it, or to demand
#
So they are joining a struggle with the sky being the limit, okay?
#
So I often say this, that I've had that argument in my head once with, I think, an essay I
#
read once by TM Krishna, where he had written something about the left being, I think, why
#
does the left think that the working class doesn't deserve to have consumer products?
#
And I felt that he was wrong to think that the left thought that.
#
I never got a chance to ask him, in fact, why he thought that way, why he felt that
#
the left actually has such a constrained vision, okay?
#
I remember that, for instance, what struck me when I read about the Russian Revolution
#
is that one of the first things that happened there, quite apart from a whole lot of collectivization,
#
by everybody got a right to go on a holiday to the beach.
#
Okay, so entire working class families were getting to enjoy holidays at the beach and
#
enjoy a vacation, which otherwise they could never have dreamt of doing.
#
And to my mind, something like that, which is an act of pleasure, it is not something
#
which is, so it is not a philosophy of deprivation.
#
Your struggle is not something which is valorizing deprivation, which is valorizing starving
#
yourself of the good things in life.
#
Rather, it is saying that we are struggling so that everyone gets the good things in life.
#
Which means that then your identity also, it's not so much about saying, okay, I am
#
this worker and must always be that, right?
#
It's like, again, that beautiful thing that Marx writes about, what he says is that in
#
a truly revolutionary society, somebody could be a fisherman in the morning and play the
#
violin in the afternoon and be this philosopher in the evening and so on and so forth.
#
So the point is that you can be all those multitudes that you contain and you can be
#
You don't have to first swear one of them to be the other, right?
#
And I keep saying that even now, I say that to myself also, because sometimes the pressure
#
of work is such that you forget the other people that you are, right?
#
So I, of course, I'll be saying it on your podcast and now everyone will realize the
#
I lurk on Insta, I don't post much political stuff there, only in the last year I've had
#
to because during the lockdown, people started doing Insta lives and all.
#
But otherwise, I used to lurk on Insta only to post all the kutta billy nature pictures
#
because that is a big part of who I am.
#
I'm an amateur, complete amateur, but I love sort of wandering around looking at things
#
growing and figuring out how animals and birds live and this and that and enjoying all those
#
So the point is when I travel, I do a lot of this picture taking with my phone.
#
What do I do with all of that?
#
It's not part of the Andolan stuff that I'm going to post on my Facebook or Twitter.
#
So then Insta is the place where I park that and I'm that person there.
#
So I have a whole lot of Insta friends who are basically just cat aunties or cat mothers
#
or who are wonderful cooks or something all over the world.
#
So they're not people who necessarily know much about what I'm doing in my other lives.
#
But I'm that person also and I think of Rosa Luxemburg.
#
I've just gotten a copy of her book.
#
So they published her herbarium.
#
So she was a committed communist leader.
#
She all her life was like that.
#
But she also, wherever she went, she was very interested in nature.
#
So she used to collect plants and flowers and try and figure out what the name was,
#
what the genus was, what the species was.
#
And you realize when you read her writing about this thing, that she's also writing
#
with such love about this, that this is something, you know, she's not writing, she's not reducing
#
any of this to explaining it away in some some sharp Marxist phrase.
#
She's realizing that in this natural world and in animals, there is so much to understand
#
and their emotions and understanding, which human beings have not yet fathomed.
#
They don't understand it.
#
So she's writing about it with such feeling, knowing that in a way she's writing about
#
the unknown, you know, she's writing and there's almost a sense of a spiritual sort of enjoyment
#
in that, a spiritual experience in that, let me put it that way, you know, and she maintained
#
it till her death, you know, while being all the other revolutionary leader that she was.
#
So she wasn't, you know, I have good friends who remind me not to become a stick in the
#
mud who, you know, has no time for leisure and pleasure and for being these other people
#
You know, the moment this conversation ends, I'm going to go to Instagram and see your
#
cat pictures and dog pictures and all of that.
#
I think Instagram will crash because the moment people listen to this on my episode, there'll
#
be a rush of, I just, I just hope the trolls don't land up there.
#
So, you know, we could talk about politics for another three, four hours and I'd actually
#
have a lot to argue with you about, but we'll save that for another day.
#
We'll take a break now.
#
And when we come back from the break, you know, we'll talk more about the subject at
#
hand of the state of women in India.
#
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Welcome back to The Scene on the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Kavita Krishnan about a formidable career in life so far, but also
#
about the state of women in India and her feminism and so on.
#
And let me begin with this question.
#
You know, I've heard you say about your mother in an interview, I found that, and you said
#
it at the start of the show as well, that she was, quote, a feminist by instinct rather
#
than by training, stop quote.
#
So, and I presume that's the way for every feminist.
#
That first it is, of course, the instinct.
#
You feel that this is the right thing to do, it's the right way to behave and so on and
#
And then eventually, you read more, you learn more, and that training sort of happens in
#
different kinds of ways, whether through, you know, osmosis or just reading up on the
#
subject once you get interested in it.
#
Tell me a little bit about your journey into actually thinking about feminism in that kind
#
of formal way and how it evolved.
#
Like would you define it differently today in any way or nuance than you would have maybe
#
I think that for me, I mean, the way I came to feminist reading and feminist literature
#
and so on was, I guess, in my BA in Bombay.
#
So at that time, of course, I mean, I was, I had access to a lot of feminist writing
#
and some of it was part of a curriculum.
#
Some of it was just stuff that our teachers would read.
#
And so they would encourage us to read.
#
And then the same happened, continued in JNU also.
#
So you were, you know, you were exposed to a lot of feminist literary criticism, feminist
#
writing and all of that.
#
So that, of course, I got only later in life during while studying.
#
So the only thing is the way I would define myself would largely be the same as it always
#
was, which is the idea of an instinct, I mean, a basic, basically the fact that you are striving
#
for truly a society which is truly free of discrimination, of an oppression, of oppression
#
and of structural inequality.
#
But I think that my ideas about how to achieve that, how you're going to get there, those
#
have probably undergone some change.
#
For instance, had you asked me when I was in school, before I came to Bombay, I used
#
to think that I was not in support of reservations.
#
So the idea of caste or gender based reservations, had you asked me, I would have probably said
#
But the thing is that that was the time when the Mandal Commission had just been implemented.
#
So I came to Bombay in 1990.
#
So just in the wake of that.
#
So there were the anti-Mandal agitations happening and all of that.
#
And I am enormously relieved that as someone who is born in a privileged caste and had
#
the privilege of not thinking about caste, right.
#
So I had spent 18 years of my life with the great privilege of not having had to think
#
about caste because nobody was oppressing me on the basis of caste.
#
So I could say, oh, I'm free of caste.
#
But I'm usually relieved that in Bombay, being in the social science center, you know, being
#
I studied English literature, but since I happened to sort of fall in with the social
#
science center and there was someone called Father Rudy Heredia there, he's still here
#
But Father Rudy was there, there were others, there were my friends there, there were other
#
young students or former students who would come.
#
So the talk there that I was exposed to, the arguments I was exposed to there, very quickly
#
disabused me of these ideas of an abstract equality.
#
So the point was that they would, you know, it would very quickly come, I remember having
#
this talk with Father Rudy, asking him with a great deal of diffidence, what do you say
#
to people who say that the OBC reservations are wrong, Mandal Commission is wrong?
#
So he very patiently explained it to me.
#
And he said, you know, there is inequality, no, all around.
#
So there has to be something to correct that inequality if you're going to say in the name
#
of equality, if you're going to apply the same thing to everybody, then you're actually
#
perpetuating inequality because you're giving everyone the same means, you're not correcting
#
So if you don't correct for that, if you don't acknowledge that inequality exists.
#
And from there, I started thinking about, you know, the idea that yes, then even when
#
it comes to feminism, surely then you have to realize that all women also are not constituted
#
Women and men are not the same, that's one thing.
#
But all women also, you know, there are differences which are socially there.
#
So somebody who is a domestic worker, somebody who is from an oppressed caste, someone who
#
has the privilege of studying in an urban center in an English medium school, and someone
#
who doesn't have that privilege, there are enormous, you know, chasms there.
#
So instead of talking only about, you know, as being a feminism, talking about women as
#
a category, right, as an abstract category, you would also have to talk about pretty specific
#
other kinds of oppression that are happening, right.
#
Then in terms of other changes that happened was, very early on, I can say that I was very
#
much in support of LGBT rights, especially in terms of the L and G parts of those, which
#
I was more, you know, which I had a reason to think about and directly sort of experience
#
and interact with much earlier on in my BA days itself, okay.
#
So close friends who had, you know, come out to me as lesbian, my own thinking about my
#
own self and sexual self and, you know, which is certainly such a part of yourself, right.
#
But even thinking about that self and having, you know, very close relationships that were
#
with women and not so much with men at that time.
#
So the point is that then you were, you know, you're going through a period of thinking
#
also and of doubt and of recognizing that obviously there is this spectrum inside you.
#
At that time, the word spectrum was not used that much.
#
But when I came across it, I could immediately connect it with my own sense of self and say
#
that, yes, instead of ticking a box that says heterosexual tuck, you know, it's not exactly
#
Or you can't just stick heterosexual or bi so easily.
#
The point is that you are someone who, you may be someone who occupies some places on
#
a spectrum and that place shifts depending on who you are and who you're meeting and
#
where you are in your life, you know, all of that.
#
But for me, the new thing was that I did not know, I knew very little about transgender
#
So I had, I had experience of meeting trans persons in Bombay, but I didn't really have
#
enough to understand or to get to know more.
#
That happened over time and I would now correct a lot of my articulations.
#
So just to give you an example, one of the classic things which I, you know, when I'm
#
explaining gender to somebody, the first thing I would say is that, look, there's biology.
#
So there's, you know, what you're born with and there is the socialization aspect of it.
#
So biology is ladka hona ladki hona, but the idea that there is a masculine and feminine,
#
this is something that comes with socialization, simple.
#
But now all that is complicated because who you are born, it is not, I can't say that
#
I can't go and repeat this anymore unquestioningly because clearly my understanding of that has
#
been completely scrambled by not only the fact that political movements have developed
#
around transgender identities, but also the fact that the science on this has changed.
#
You know, the science on this tells you that, sorry, you know, your biological gender is
#
not something just fixed, you know, by certain body parts.
#
It is not, you know, so your chromosomes are there and there is a spectrum even there.
#
And the point is that it's not, and who you're expressing yourself, yourself, as in just
#
like your sexual orientation, who you are inside is eventually something which you experience
#
And what if you feel that you are somebody who is a woman, you know, who is trapped in
#
a man's body or the other way around?
#
You know, who is someone else to tell you that, oh, this is just a statement you're
#
making or something like that, right?
#
So I still think that my learning on this is still underway.
#
I still find it difficult to, I still feel very self-conscious if I use words other than
#
So if I try to write W-O-M-X-N, I feel self-conscious because it's not something I'm used to doing.
#
And so I feel a little, oh, but I really, and then I often don't use it, okay.
#
So I then go back to using what I'm comfortable with.
#
I'm not saying that's correct.
#
I'm not saying that's right, but I'm just saying that it's a, I think it's a process
#
where one continuously thinks about things and, you know, makes oneself uncomfortable
#
and welcomes discomfort.
#
So for me, feminism in a way is about welcoming discomfort about one's understanding of the
#
world around us and of recognizing that there's inequality and recognizing that therefore
#
for equity, it's not, in a real sense, then you have to recognize that people are equal
#
and then you can't have a one size fits all for everybody.
#
And then I realized that this idea is actually right there up there in Marx also, because
#
when he talks, I think in the Gautha program about socialism and what happens after socialism,
#
he actually says that, that in socialism, you know, you can have it to each according
#
to his work and from each according to his capacity.
#
But ideally, you are working for a society where it's to each according to their need
#
and from each according to their capacity.
#
So it doesn't matter about how much work you're able to do.
#
You may be elderly, you may be disabled.
#
So the kind of work you do, it's not about how much you contribute.
#
It's about what you need.
#
So society owes you what you need, and you do according to your capacity.
#
So you know, that's that also he explains this Marx explains this at great length about
#
the fact that when you're going to apply equal things to unequal people, then you're not
#
going to get equity as a result.
#
Okay, I'm not quite a Marxist as listeners would know, but I am definitely a feminist.
#
So I'll come at a long winded question, and, you know, begin with sort of where I got my
#
understanding of feminism from and how that kind of evolved and my basic I mean, obviously,
#
you begin with instinct that hey, everyone should be treated equally and all of that.
#
I think my first fundamental influence on me in learning about feminism was one that
#
perhaps a lot of people share, which is Mary Wollstonecraft's, a vindication of the rights
#
of women, because before that, I really got into law and natural rights and the right
#
to self ownership, all other rights coming from there, blah, blah, blah, the whole classical
#
And Wollstonecraft also read Locke and got her sort of principles from there except that
#
She said that these rights should be everybody's not just men, but also women.
#
And in those days, of course, you didn't use neutral pronouns.
#
So but Wollstonecraft's big thing was saying that, yeah, Lockean, but for everyone, women
#
should be treated equally.
#
And that's, you know, pretty much for the next, say, 170, 180 years that that's basically
#
what it was that men and women should be treated equally.
#
Now, a couple of decades ago, Christina Hoff Sommers wrote this book called Who Stole Feminism,
#
where she spoke about, you know, the two sort of schools of thought within feminism, which
#
were coming up and you know, equity feminism and gender feminism.
#
And about equity feminism, she is basically this whole Lockean Wollstonecraft view that,
#
you know, it opposes sex discrimination, other forms of unfairness to women, and so on and
#
And it guided the first wave of feminism, launched the second wave, so on.
#
And gender feminism looks at, you know, a more, in Steven Pinker's words, and I'm quoting
#
from a blank slate, gender feminism holds that women continue to be enslaved by a pervasive
#
system of male dominance, the gender system in which bisexual infants are transformed
#
into male and female gender personalities, the one destined to command the other to obey.
#
Stop quote, and then later he sort of writes about what this means, what this difference
#
means in practical terms, where he says, quote, equity feminism is a moral doctrine about
#
equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology
#
Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature.
#
The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology
#
but are socially constructed in their entirety.
#
The second is that humans possess a single social motive, and that social life can be
#
understood only in terms of how it is exercised.
#
The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with
#
each other as individuals, but from the motives dealing with other groups, in this case, the
#
male gender dominating the female gender.
#
And what we see in modern times with intersectionality and all that is that it's not just male gender
#
dominating female gender, but within these there are groups and subgroups.
#
But the overall narrative is a narrative of oppression and victimhood.
#
And it could be argued that this, you know, it's important to acknowledge all aspects
#
It's important to acknowledge all aspects of oppression.
#
But it becomes reductionist if you define yourself only by this.
#
It's almost like the language of class warfare that happens in all of this.
#
And according to Pinker, this is why a lot of people who would otherwise agree with all
#
feminist aims in terms of, you know, treating people equally and all that vehemently dispute
#
that they're feminists.
#
Like he points to a 1997 study when 70% of women surveyed in the US said they're not
#
And even in India, you'll hear that kind of nonsense from random film stars and all will
#
say that, oh, I'm not a feminist, you know, as if feminist is a bad word or a dirty word,
#
but I would imagine from the way that I am looking at it as, you know, as an equity feminist,
#
as someone who's come from that whole Wallstone craft and lock kind of thinking that every
#
decent human being is by default a feminist otherwise, you know, but what's your kind
#
of take on this because we see some of these battles and some of these fissures play out
#
And I'd argue that in an Indian context, it doesn't really matter because things are
#
just so horrendously bad in terms of equal treatment that, you know, that these are battles
#
that, you know, one can fight at a later point in time.
#
But what's your sense of this?
#
So, see, my sense on this has actually changed in the past seven, eight years or so, maybe
#
decade or so, because I did used to, you know, earlier my answer to people who said, okay,
#
feminist, you know, I'm not a feminist would be to say, no, you know, recognize that you
#
actually are because you stand for this value, that value.
#
But I later realized that actually I take it far more seriously now when someone says
#
they're not feminist because I genuinely think that they're not feminist because I realized
#
that they're not, you know, even on and this goes, I mean, across ideologies, okay.
#
So even I find people on the left also may define themselves as not feminist.
#
So I realized that they are not feminist and that's not good because in my book, somebody
#
again, you know, because I am Marxist in method.
#
And for me, I wouldn't be a I don't think anybody can be a Marxist in that sense.
#
So they're not feminist, you know, sorry, they're not okay.
#
So you're not because you are your anti-feminism is such that you are you're able to say I'm
#
not a feminist because you are somehow operating under that same liberal idea that there is
#
a category of human and you're standing for all human rights and women are part of that
#
So you are not recognizing that the whole problem is what Wollstonecraft was talking
#
about, which is that the category of human is excluding women.
#
It's treating women differently right now.
#
So you're just saying that, oh, I am standing for all human beings is not good enough because
#
you are not recognizing the many ways and the ways in which that discrimination operates
#
is, you know, the both the kinds of categories you described, right?
#
So the idea is it's I don't really see a dichotomy there because I think that, you know, that
#
the social, the psychological, the, you know, even the definition of, you know, even your
#
basic biological functions, every sphere of anybody who occupies positions that are not,
#
you know, heterosexual male upper caste, whatever, is something which is, you know, they're having
#
they cannot take the selfhood for granted at any point.
#
So the point is that you are then having to recognize that this world is not all right.
#
And if you don't recognize that, and if you're not specifically fighting, you know, supporting
#
the fights, and there's no going to be fights, you know, call them class war, call them what
#
war, they're going to be fights, they're going to be acrimonious battles, okay?
#
You cannot do feminism without disturbing the idea of a happy family.
#
You're never going to be able to do it, sorry, you know, even I, okay, who come from such
#
a supportive family and all of that, I cannot say that there has been no friction at all.
#
Of course there will be, because the whole structure that doesn't mean about it's not
#
just about those individuals.
#
The problem is that the family situation is structured such that your labor is expected.
#
I mean, Marx's daughter went through this, not because her father was a patriarch towards
#
her, but because he was an old man who was ailing and she was the youngest daughter.
#
She was extremely active.
#
She was the one who was unmarried.
#
And she realized that she had to at some point choose between being around to help her father
#
and between, you know, pursuing her life as an activist, because there was no way to,
#
because your social structures don't offer that kind of support structure to allow women
#
to be free of this caregiving role.
#
So she went through a lot of distress and I identify with that distress so much because
#
I don't think there's any woman who doesn't go through that, okay.
#
So my point is that I think that, so if you're not a feminist, I take it very seriously.
#
I say, yes, you're not a feminist because you're not thinking in a feminist way about
#
You think you're for equality, but you're not, you're actually ending up working against
#
everybody's rights because so, and I'll give you an example, which is a more of a very
#
I don't know if it's the best example, but say, you know, somebody like a liberal person
#
who enjoys a lot of influence, someone like say Dhruv Rathee, okay.
#
So if he says that black lives matter should call itself all lives matter or that feminism
#
should call itself humanism, it has a branding problem.
#
You know, the point is that that is wrong, right?
#
He's putting it very boldly, but my assumption is now my tendency is that when someone says
#
they're not feminist, to assume that at best that's what they mean.
#
And at worst, what they mean is that they're really okay with the way things are.
#
They really think that they want, what they're saying when they say I'm not feminist is to
#
say, I don't want to be this fighting person.
#
I don't want to be perceived as someone who is negative, someone who is opposing a situation
#
where women are expected to behave in a particular way, then you're not feminist.
#
Because being feminist and being part of a feminist movement, you're going to be, you
#
know, challenging expectations.
#
You're going to be prodding on toes.
#
No matter how decent and persuasive you are, somebody is going to say about you that you're
#
a shrill fighter, okay, or you're bossy or dominating or whatever it is, okay, happens
#
You know, I have learned with years and years and years to, you know, I've become more and
#
more and more persuasive, more and more and more patient in my way of responding to questions
#
which may seem banal or whatever it is, I'm very, very patient, largely, okay, largely
#
The point is, I realized that no matter how patient I am, if you ask someone who is observing,
#
what do you think of this person?
#
What do you think of Kavita?
#
They're going to say, oh, she's the scary feminist.
#
They're going to say that because you are challenging what is, you're challenging something
#
so central to their understanding of the world, that it is damn scary.
#
So you know, I don't see any way to sweeten that pill, you know.
#
No, I do think that many people who say they are feminist are not feminist, but what you're
#
saying that if they say they're not feminist, I take them at face value is interesting because
#
my sort of response was that maybe you're not, but maybe you are, maybe you're just
#
defining it kind of differently.
#
And I think there's a little bit of a dichotomy, I'll tell you what the dichotomy is, in the
#
sense that, you know, a lot of people like myself would consider their feminism to be
#
rooted in individual rights, every individual should be treated with the same amount of
#
dignity and be given, you know, have the same amount of agency and autonomy and all of that.
#
And it's important to recognize in all of this, of course, that certain groups of people
#
over time, historically have oppressed other groups of people.
#
But when you actually start thinking at the individual level of how you approach it, I
#
think there's a danger of heading down a slippery slope if like if you say that I am an individual
#
and I demand equal treatment, that's great.
#
If you say that I'm a woman and I demand equal treatment, that's great.
#
But if you say I'm a woman, men have always oppressed women, therefore men are the enemy.
#
And this can go down a slippery slope, you know, back in the day, you'll remember that
#
there used to be this thing that some feminists, and I'd call them the scary feminists, would
#
say things like all intercourse is rape, right?
#
And this is the image that a lot of people have of feminism, this extreme thing where
#
everybody is your enemy.
#
And I think the danger with, you know, at the level of description, at the level of
#
analysis, it makes sense to talk about oppression and, you know, to think in terms of groups
#
But if we have to come out of it to perpetuate this sort of group violence in the way that
#
we think, I think that, you know, these are two different things and I can see where,
#
you know, the fault lines lie.
#
Yeah, I mean, certainly, I would not endorse much of an idea about, you know, groups in
#
But I'm talking about, I think, you know, understanding not so much oppression as privilege,
#
So, see, oppression has happened and men too are oppressed by patriarchy.
#
Women more so, of course, but yeah, a lot of men.
#
I think that I truly believe that for a true liberation of human society, you know, a feminist
#
liberation is a central part of that for everybody.
#
It's not just for women to be free of men.
#
It's about men and women to be free of patriarchy, of everybody, of every gender, every sexual
#
orientation, to be free of this disgusting patriarchy that has actually stifled us, that
#
has, you know, that binds us, that chokes off our potential and forces us to act in
#
ways which are so horrible to other people also, right?
#
But also, I'd say that, let me put it this way, instead of gender, if you talk about
#
caste for one second, okay, because reservation is again something which, and I think caste
#
and gender overlap there.
#
So the idea that if you, the minute you think as an individual, you can, you know, you may
#
say, yes, every individual deserves equal opportunity and equal access and for the minute
#
you talk about reservations, an upper caste person may feel, they do often feel, that
#
I as an individual am being discriminated against by that individual who is enjoying
#
reservation because he's got less number than me and he's getting in and I'm not, right?
#
So how do you change the way of looking at that situation?
#
Because if you look at the situation only in those limits, yes, that's true, right?
#
You look at it just in this frame.
#
If you don't look what is happening outside that narrow frame that you've drawn, then
#
yes, here you are, both of you standing there, you with two marks more, this person with
#
two marks less, that guy is getting in, you are not, and there's a limited number of seats
#
and you deserve it and somebody else is getting it, right?
#
Now how I, my approach there is that where any inequality is concerned, if you just broaden
#
the frame a little bit more and you first understand that there are several problems
#
One of the problems is that historically and even today in society, that person is facing
#
a kind of discrimination and reservation cannot address economic disparity, but it does address
#
or eliminate to some extent at the point of admission, it eliminates social prejudice.
#
So somebody who's going in for an interview, who realizes that they know that your, maybe
#
your surname, maybe your way of speaking a language, so many things indicate in India,
#
people can tell your caste from, you know, osmosis, okay, they know that immediately.
#
You're sending those signals, they get those signals and then they, you know, there's prejudice
#
in the mind and we know this from studies, right?
#
We know this even in studies in the West where people have done it for gender, where people
#
have written the exact same word for word application, one in a man's name, one in a
#
woman's name and sent it to an employer and the employers pick the man, right?
#
So we know that this is maybe, it may be unconscious, but it's operating.
#
How do you address that?
#
Then you need something to say that in order to get rid of that bias there, that bias is
#
not something the upper caste person is feeling, the bias is something that Dalit person or
#
the OBC person is feeling.
#
A, B, the other thing is that, oh, but don't I deserve to get a seat?
#
But the answer to that is not to say that that person is depriving you of your seat,
#
but to say that why aren't there enough seats for everybody?
#
You know, if so many people want to be doctors or engineers, why on earth would you have
#
Why can't you, can't this country do with more doctors?
#
It's not like you have enough doctors in this country.
#
You need far more doctors.
#
You know, you create, why can't you prioritize education so that people get, everybody gets
#
And the notion that reservation results in less quality is complete nonsense, two quick
#
answers to that, where gender, caste, no matter what you see.
#
The point is that you find, you know, medical system in Tamil Nadu, for instance, being
#
one of the best in the country where they have the most reservation.
#
The point is that that and the point is that the looseness is at the point of entry.
#
At the point of exit, everybody gives the same exam and passes the same exam, right?
#
So that in my sense, even when it comes to feminism is my approach, which is that if
#
you think only as an individual and only in a very narrow framework, then you're getting
#
You're getting, you're going to get your answers wrong because you're framing your questions
#
And in the same regard, I'd say, and we can talk more about that, but I'll just put in
#
that one sentence here, is that as a feminist, I think that those who think in terms of individuals
#
alone tend to get, you know, you get with an idea of a liberal feminism, which sometimes
#
gets it very wrong when it comes to understanding larger social structures and processes.
#
So I have many examples of that and we can talk about that.
#
As I said, at the level of analysis, I think we have to look at groups, we have to look
#
at all these patterns of oppression and everything that is structurally wrong.
#
But when you're moving ahead, I think if you think only in terms of groups, it's a bit
#
You know, I asked you about feminism, you went into caste, it was almost like looking
#
London talking Tokyo, but I love the fact that the question that the person complaining
#
about reservation should ask is why aren't there more seats?
#
I actually think reservations are in fact a feminist tool, not just where women are
#
I actually think so because I can see so many women having benefited from caste-based reservations.
#
They are in college and university today because there's caste-based reservation and they would
#
not be here otherwise, you know, and that's why, you know, for me, actually, I don't make
#
For me in India, especially caste and gender are absolutely, they're in bed with each other.
#
They're totally embedded.
#
So let's move on from here.
#
And I have a bunch of general questions about, you know, broader questions about the state
#
But before we get there, I was sort of struck by the beautiful way in which in your opening
#
few chapters of Fearless Freedom, you've kind of laid it all out and summed it all out.
#
And one of the first sort of fundamental things that you speak about is this mindset which
#
creates a dichotomy between safety and freedom.
#
So, you know, it seems really fundamental and which is kind of all around us.
#
And tell me a little bit about that.
#
Yeah, Amit, I just wanted to ask you before we go there, my brain is still stuck in your
#
previous question a little bit in the sense that one part of it, I sort of, you know,
#
when it comes to, you know, liberal, the idea of the liberal individual based feminism, vis-a-vis
#
So if I just can have, you know, if I can just…
#
Please, please, please, no, go ahead.
#
So I just wanted to say that, for instance, today in the world, there's this whole idea
#
about the lean-in feminism and, you know, CEOs writing about breaking the glass ceiling
#
And the idea of feminism as being individual achievement, okay, so an individual woman
#
who has broken the glass ceiling, right?
#
And I'm extremely uneasy with that because I feel that that's exactly where, that's
#
where I think my Marxism comes in, okay, because to me, that is the main, to me, the idea,
#
you know, of Marxism is not, it's not a Marxism that is not feminist, okay, it has to be feminist.
#
The point is, it has to be a feminism that actually thinks about feminism for most women,
#
And there, if it becomes something which is about individual achievement alone, what it
#
ends up doing is that it often pits women against each other.
#
And it often means that a privileged woman is actually gaining her breaking of the glass
#
ceiling at the cost of other women who are actually, you know, in the very powerful image
#
of a friend of mine who's written a book called Feminism for the 99%.
#
She says, you know, somebody breaks the glass ceiling up there, who's cleaning the shards
#
And it's supposed, it's some cleaning worker, a woman, presumably from some oppressed race
#
and so on, who's actually doing that.
#
So where's the feminism for everybody, you know?
#
So where is the idea that everyone's going to get to play on that field?
#
And that can't come only by looking at the category as individuals.
#
I agree with you entirely, that's not just about women versus men, okay?
#
In fact, I am uncomfortable now even with the idea of saying just intersectionality,
#
because intersectionality implies that there are these different roads which are intersecting,
#
But that's not how reality is, right?
#
Suppose, you know, if I think of someone, somebody who's a lesbian and a Dalit and a
#
worker, doing an extremely dangerous and menial job, okay?
#
So it's not just that caste, gender, class are all intersecting in her.
#
She is this whole person, no, in which all these things are expressing themselves integrally
#
So you have to find a way to address all of this together.
#
And so the system also is not, patriarchy is not separate from the way in which our
#
society is economically arranged.
#
It is not separate from caste.
#
It is not separate from, it's all, it's working together and it's not just intersecting.
#
It's all part of one system.
#
It's not several systems that are intersecting, let me put it that way.
#
So when I look at it whole and I want to find a way of fighting it whole while recognizing
#
that there are all these different things happening, that's where I find that I find
#
it more useful to think in terms of a, you know, I find Marxist methods useful there
#
because they allow me to address a variety of questions of oppression while knowing that
#
I want this whole system to change.
#
I don't want to just tinker with this bit of it or that bit of it.
#
So I don't, I'm not happy enough just saying, okay, I want this bit to change or that bit
#
So I'm recognizing that, you know, there may be disagreements about what you want in terms
#
of the systemic change, but surely you would agree or anybody who is, you know, invested
#
in an egalitarian society would agree that just someone, woman becoming a CEO or having
#
more women CEOs is not going to ensure that you're going to have enough women, the large
#
vast majority of women actually living their lives with dignity.
#
So for me, the thing to pursue would be where is the collective childcare?
#
Where is the, you know, where is better wages for everybody?
#
Instead of privatizing everything, why can't there be more access to socialized healthcare,
#
you know, and you notice that even capitalist societies now are where the idea of socialism
#
was taboo are today beginning to talk about that.
#
Now in America, it is no longer taboo.
#
You know, you're having up and coming politicians speaking in these terms now.
#
I think because, you know, there's no way to really look away from that.
#
So I'm not saying we repeat mistakes.
#
I'm, as I told you earlier, I'm deeply, deeply suspicious of authoritarianism and cults.
#
And I think that the left in its historical journey has a lot to answer for because if
#
they have become synonymous with authoritarianism and cults, it's not only because of bourgeois
#
It's also because of what has happened in the real Soviet Union, what's happening now
#
You know, it's very real.
#
Even what has happened in Cuba, where a lot of very good things managed to survive, but
#
one can't deny that there was also this whole thing of the sense of a cult and the sense
#
Galiano has a beautiful quotation about Fidel Castro that expresses this dichotomy there,
#
but that's another thing.
#
But I'm saying that acknowledging all of that, that explains why I'm still invested in the
#
idea of a transformation.
#
My feminism is, my feminist impulse and the work we do, work I do, comes from that sense
#
of wanting to work for a collective transformation.
#
No matter what, who knows when we'll see that happen.
#
Thank you for that nuance.
#
That's a lot of nuance and a lot for me to think about when I replay this episode a few
#
times hopefully and take notes.
#
And I'm really glad that this is the point of the show where you actually spoke against
#
the authoritarian left, because see, none of them is going to listen to this part.
#
They would have reached your cat mom part and they would have said, Arni Sunna, so you
#
They're not going to lash out on Twitter at this anyway.
#
And in fact, even before my freedom versus safety question, I mean, part of why that
#
begins, your book also seemed to me to be pertinent to the germination of the book itself.
#
Like it was in the anti-rape protests of 2012 and all of that where it kind of germinated.
#
You used that phrase in that very memorable speech that you gave, which I'll of course
#
link from the show notes and went viral for a reason.
#
Why can't things like that go viral instead of bloody viruses?
#
So tell me a bit about the germination of the book and then how you started conceptualizing
#
it, because this is all stuff you know.
#
India is a deep, deep mess in a million different ways.
#
How do you give it structure in a book when you start thinking about it?
#
So actually it didn't start out as me thinking about a book at all.
#
In fact, the book thing happened only because these couple of young women from Penguin reached
#
out to me and said, we want you to write.
#
And I said, you know, the only thing which I've been thinking about systematically for
#
some years now has been exactly this issue.
#
So well, if I write at all, then I can write about that, you know, that's all.
#
But when it started was, I remember exactly when I started thinking on these lines.
#
That I remember very clearly.
#
The thing is that for some years I had been a little uneasy with our own movements against
#
sexual violence because I felt that we were appealing to a sense of community outrage,
#
assuming it was there and finding it very easily, a little too easily.
#
As I said, I'm always on the lookout for how can I invite discomfort into our zones.
#
For me, feminism and all my activism is about, and I think the only useful activism is when
#
you're continuously inviting discomfort into your own zone, you know, rather than just
#
sitting in judgment on someone else far away.
#
So what was happening was we would have these anti-rape protests and all of that, and they
#
Everybody is saying, and a lot of it would be saying Farsi though, you know, because that
#
is very easily it comes to mind.
#
And my own organization used to demand that and all of that.
#
It's deeply uneasy with all of that.
#
So I would keep arguing that, look, that is not okay, because you're giving the power
#
And why the hell should the state have that power?
#
And what are we talking about to kill someone?
#
And how does it at all help us?
#
Because it's so easy for the ruler also to say, ha ha ha, Farsi though, Farsi though.
#
Because what does it cause them?
#
It doesn't cause them a damn thing.
#
Whereas actually the things you need to prevent and prevent sexual violence or other forms
#
of gender based violence, to give justice and to create spaces where women can be free
#
of this violence, that stuff these guys are not doing, governments are not doing.
#
It's all too easy for them to periodically hang somebody, doesn't make difference.
#
The other thing was that, as I said, the slogans, other slogans also, they would all be, they
#
are all raised in a way which were not creating discomfort to anybody raising them and to
#
anybody listening to them.
#
And I would keep wondering uneasily, is that community really with us on this?
#
Are they really with our feminist cause?
#
Because the minute you talk about what is rape, you would realize that even among the
#
women protesting this particular rape and among people in the larger society, definitely
#
part of the same village, part of the same juggi, part of the same community, part of
#
the same colony, the minute you actually talk about rape as it mostly happens, which is
#
rape not, which is not stranger rape, which involves someone known to you, someone known
#
to and generally loved, trusted, whatever.
#
Most rapes are like that all over the world.
#
But the most protests don't happen about rapes like that.
#
As I said, not everything happens on social media, media and on the streets.
#
So much of those things are not things anybody really wants to, no one wants to, even the
#
victim won't want to go and dharnapradashan faro karo about that easily, because it involves
#
a family member, it involves her guru, it involves a teacher, it involves whatever.
#
When that comes up, then immediately all the other sexist tropes come into play.
#
And most of all, what occurred to me is that in Indian society, when you talk, then the
#
distinction between rape and consensual sexual relationship is, there isn't a line there
#
Most people use the same word when they or the same concept when they are talking about
#
their daughter who has run away to marry somebody and someone they don't approve of, and when
#
they are talking about rape.
#
So they think, so the idea of consent is missing.
#
So the idea of rape as a violation of a woman's consent is missing.
#
And instead you have the idea of the violation of a woman as sexual property.
#
So she is a virgin, her parents are supposed to hand her over whole to some guy of the
#
And if she has been raped, it is the violation of the property of a future husband.
#
And this is embedded in the law, by the way.
#
This used to be embedded in the law.
#
So in many ways, I mean, I don't remember if I can actually recall the details right
#
But can I read out those sections?
#
Yeah, I've written about it in the past and it just for the sake of my listeners, because
#
I don't think many people realize how our laws have actually embedded women being the
#
property of men as such.
#
Now section 497 of the IPC, which deals with adultery, which was struck down in 2018, which
#
He dealt with it for 71 years, that said, quote, whoever has sexual intercourse with
#
a person who is and whom he knows or has reason to believe to be the wife of another man without
#
the consent or con nuance of that man, such sexual intercourse not amounting to the offense
#
of rape is guilty of the offense of adultery and shall be punished with blah, blah, blah,
#
And the point here is, of course, he doesn't need the consent of the woman.
#
He needs the consent of that man as if she's property.
#
And section 498 of the IPC, which is titled enticing or taking away or detaining with
#
criminal intent a married woman, thereby implying the possession of some other man.
#
This one reads, whoever takes or entices away any woman who is or whom he knows or has reason
#
to believe to be the wife of any other man from that man or from that person having the
#
care of her on behalf of that man with intent that she may have illicit intercourse with
#
any person or conceals or detains with that intent any such woman shall be punished with
#
imprisonment of either description of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
#
And of course, it's it's written almost as if it is too obscure, which is why, you know,
#
if it was written in simple language, I think it would create a little more outrage, hopefully.
#
So yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I'm glad I wanted to remember exactly that adultery
#
I couldn't remember the section and all of that.
#
So that's where I began writing.
#
Now, I began writing about that, actually, somebody in a website called Sanhati.
#
So they had asked me to write about sexual violence.
#
So when I wrote about it, I started raising these questions about what slogan should be
#
raised, what form should the protests take so that you are actually conveying, you know,
#
you are promoting an understanding of consent and promoting an understanding of rape as
#
a violation of consent and therefore supporting a woman's consensual relationships also.
#
So you are not just saying a no is a no, you're also saying a yes is a yes, you know.
#
So women's respective women's yes and respective women's no, you know, both.
#
So how are you going to say that?
#
So I began writing about that and one essay was published by them on their website.
#
So that had happened, I think around 2011 or 2012 only sometime.
#
And in the course of several struggles in 2012, I began thinking about that and trying
#
to suggest slogans or ways of addressing things that would actually bring this in.
#
So I was just playing around with it and didn't really have a clear picture of how to go ahead,
#
but would practically try, you know, that how do you get people.
#
First, I would try to tell people kindly don't raise the Fasido slogan.
#
Though if others are raising Fasido, it's not that you tell them, okay, stop it.
#
But it's more about what other slogans do you offer which are more useful in talking
#
But I hadn't really hit upon the best way to do it.
#
And somehow society also wasn't tuned in.
#
What I think is that in 2012, December, what happened was that suddenly a lot of people
#
And suddenly there was people listening to you, actually listening, okay.
#
So men, women, a lot of people.
#
And so when I spoke about this then, and I suddenly was able to explain this, I've been
#
struggling with explaining this for a long while.
#
But in that speech, it came out with a certain clarity.
#
Because just before the speech, some young woman journalist had come and asked me that,
#
look, people are saying, okay, fine, I shouldn't go out at night.
#
But if someone has a job, a nurse works at night, how can she not go out at night if
#
she has a job at night?
#
So something in me got, you know, sort of possessed with rage at that.
#
Not at that person, not at the young woman there, but at the idea that why should somebody
#
have to explain to themselves a victim or a potential victim?
#
Why should she have to explain why she's out in the night?
#
So then I spoke from that place saying that, look, in the name of safety, there's some
#
problem with saying suraksha.
#
Because what people understand by safety is there's a code there.
#
And the secret code is that all those codes for safety are for the women.
#
They are not for male behavior, they're for female behavior.
#
And it will be women who are asked to enforce all of this also.
#
It will be a hostile warden, it will be your mother-in-law, it will be your mother, it
#
will be these people who will have to do the enforcing much of the time.
#
But the point is that you are, you know, you're not, do we really want this?
#
We want to be able to have an unconditional access to public spaces and unconditional
#
safety in living our lives in private spaces also, without having to explain ourselves
#
So you know, we should ask for freedom, not for safety.
#
So that is what I was going for, that basically the idea of, you know, keep me safe and so
#
look, you know, oh yes, we'll keep you safe.
#
So let's lock you up to keep you safe.
#
No, you know, don't lock me up to keep me safe.
#
Please do something that can safeguard my freedom instead.
#
And I realized that because so many people had tuned in then, the first minute I had
#
no idea, okay, I was not on Facebook, or maybe I was, I think I was, I'd been dragged there,
#
I was only like I am on Insta now, okay, so I used to, yeah, basically it's cats and stuff.
#
So and I was not on Twitter.
#
I had no clue what going viral meant.
#
I only thought songs like Kola Vari went viral.
#
Viral hona means mujhe laga koi gaana geet viral hota hoga and I always used to suspect
#
ki koi isko promote karke viral karata hoga.
#
I never imagined ki cheezein viral hoti hain.
#
So I got a call suddenly from, and tell me if you think I'm digressing too much or something
#
Please digress, this is very much the show for digressions.
#
So I'm, I had gone back, you know, this was around the 19th of December, I think.
#
So I went back to my office where I was working on my liberation magazine.
#
And the 20th and 21st, in the weekend that was coming up, there was this huge gathering
#
So a bit, you know, so it was in the 21st and 22nd, I think.
#
So I had a couple of days just before that.
#
So I'm working on my computer and trying to finish because I wanted to be at India Gate
#
when people were gathering.
#
So the phone rang in the office and they connected it to my floor, not my mobile phone, so phone.
#
So I picked up the landline.
#
It was somebody from America somewhere, some Indian guy, who said, yeah, actually, we wanted
#
So I said, okay, who is this and all of that.
#
And so they said, no, we are looking for you because we wanted to speak to you about your
#
speech that has gone viral.
#
And I said, no, I think you have the wrong person.
#
I have no idea, you know, who are you looking for exactly?
#
What speech, what viral, no clue, okay.
#
So he said, your Kavita Krishnan, no.
#
So there's a speech of yours and it's got viral.
#
So I'm like, what speech and I have no clue.
#
And I was a little impatient also because I was eager to get back to work.
#
So he said, no, there's a speech, no, which is online on the Arab movement.
#
So I said, oh, I have no idea.
#
Anyway, he wanted to talk to me.
#
I talked to him about the movement and all of that and put the phone down.
#
Then I wondered what is, so I started asking people in the office, koi speech lagaye kahin
#
Then I realized that I went to Facebook, okay, which I generally didn't access at all much.
#
And I realized that Facebook ka inbox me jane pe, matlab messenger me, when I went to messages
#
from people I don't know, I just checked.
#
So I suddenly realized that my Facebook inbox is full of messages, many of them from young
#
women, most of them from young women who are saying that you gave this speech and we are
#
so thankful to you for saying this because we need to be hearing this.
#
It's very affirming to be listening to the idea of freedom versus safety.
#
And one overriding concern for a lot of them was that they were worried that the media
#
attention around the rape in Delhi and Delhi is being talked about as the capital and whatnot,
#
meant that their parents were reluctant to send them to study outside whichever small
#
town they lived in or, you know, because they had been hoping to go study in Delhi, go study
#
in a city and their parents, those who were studying in Delhi were saying, you know, our
#
hostels are tightening up on curfews, our parents want us to go back, some, you know,
#
some were feeling threatened that their parents may just say forget it, don't study there.
#
So there was this whole panic also that was building up and they felt that this speech
#
So I realized that by asking some of them what speech, that they sent me this YouTube
#
So then I realized that it's my friend, Vijay, who is a filmmaker and a photographer.
#
So he had been documenting, he has been documenting many movements and generally used to come
#
to whatever protest we were doing and take photographs, take video and upload here and
#
there and none of us had paid any attention much.
#
It was just there, okay.
#
And I never used to share those links on social media and all also because I didn't use social
#
And he said, yes, I forgot to tell you, I took yours, everyone's, I took yours, I took
#
Suchita's, I took Shweta's, but yours has somehow blown up a bit and it seems to be
#
getting a lot of attention.
#
So even he was not the kind actually to really, you know, worry too much about what was happening
#
to the videos he was uploading.
#
So he said, yeah, yeah, I was meaning to tell you, yeah, there seems to be a lot of attention
#
So then I told him, yeah, if it is getting attention, then let's put in at least a bio
#
there that explains to people who they can contact and who I am in the first place and
#
what the organization's name is and all of that.
#
So that at least they know it's not just this, you know, video.
#
So then we immediately did that.
#
And then he started asking, he said, a lot of people are asking for an English translation.
#
So then a journalist from Tehelka, yeah, actually did that translation and she did a great job
#
of the translation and it appeared in Tehelka the next day.
#
And that translation then we linked to this video also saying, okay, whoever wants English
#
So that I think was my, you know, my moment of realizing that there is a huge resonance
#
to this idea that people, that women are not concerned just about not being raped.
#
Of course, they're concerned about not being raped, but they are concerned also about what
#
the fear of rape or the pretext of protecting you from rape, how this fear or this conservative
#
pretext basically, you know, regulates their lives and chokes off experience for them.
#
So both things, one is a genuine fear that your parents may have for you, of course,
#
but there's also the thing that that fear sort of, you know, meshes very easily with
#
your parents fear that you may fall in love and marry the wrong guy.
#
So both those fears, you know, they're running into each other, which is why if you run away
#
with someone and marry someone, your parents can go file a complaint of rape and say that
#
he's abducted you and raped you.
#
And so I began thinking about that more and, you know, talking about it, writing about
#
So in the course of that movement, I think the conversations were amazing.
#
And that is why I will argue very fervently with anyone who tries to tell me that essentially
#
that movement was largely a conservative one that was obsessed with the death penalty.
#
Because I think that there were both strands in it.
#
But in my experience, a lot of the sadharan log who had come without any specific agenda,
#
but just thinking that rape is a bad thing.
#
I had personal experience of stepping into a huge crowd of people yelling for the death
#
You couldn't hear yourself speak.
#
And stepping in and trying to raise an alternative slogan and not able to think of what and then
#
starting the slogan, which, you know, which says my line, I'm on the Azadi.
#
It's a very flexible slogan, right?
#
Because you can fit a lot of things into it because you can explain what that Azadi is,
#
And of course, that slogan has two histories.
#
One is, of course, with the Pakistan women's movement started the slogan of my line, I'm
#
And of course, the cadence of the slogan also has to do with the Kashmiri movement.
#
And a lot of Kashmiri feminists also reminded us of that.
#
And we said that absolutely, we must talk about Kashmiri women's concerns as well in
#
So, I found myself with great trepidation, me and another comrade of mine called Sujata.
#
We would have the small hand mic.
#
Okay, so you couldn't hear yourself speak and you couldn't, that hand mic also was pretty
#
useless in India Gate because it was so loud and you couldn't hear yourself think because
#
our mouth was open, what would come out of our mouths was to hang.
#
Because you couldn't hear any other word.
#
So then we said, all right, we're going to try.
#
So we got into one crowd, one such crowd and started shouting this, my line, I'm on the
#
And it caught on because people were just starved of what to raise also, it hadn't occurred
#
So then we started saying okay, school maybe, college maybe, sadak par bhi, ghar me bhi,
#
And we realized and then we'd after people had raised the slogan for a long, for a while,
#
And then I'd start, I talk briefly also.
#
So I tell them about Soni Sori or tell them about Kunan Pushpura.
#
And to my absolute amazement, okay, I did this with a lot of trepidation because I thought
#
if this is some conservative RWA crowd, then they can beat me up only here for starting
#
to talk about how rapes are done by the army, okay, towards women in Kashmir or something.
#
So I was a little scared if I talk about Manipur or Nagaland and Kashmir in this context.
#
But never once did we face any pushback, never, we did this dozens of times in that movement.
#
And we never came across an instance where somebody came up saying, what the hell, you
#
In fact, people were listening wide-eyed and saying, really, we haven't heard about this
#
And two highlights of that, if I may.
#
One was when we were raising the slogan and then some girls from the crowd started raising
#
a slogan saying, we were saying, kaap se bhi aazadi.
#
And they started saying, kaap se bhi aazadi, bhai se bhi aazadi.
#
So it was a real thrill for Sujata and I because literally we had goosebumps, okay, because
#
we were like, that wasn't something that had occurred to us.
#
But that was precisely what we were saying.
#
And that was precisely what we wanted, that rape and gender-based violence is not just
#
something that strangers do to you in a bus.
#
It is something that people you love may do to you because they believe in an idea of
#
how you are supposed to behave.
#
If you don't confirm to that, they may think that they are entitled to stop you from living
#
your life as you choose to live it, right?
#
So this was something which exactly we wanted to do that and that was happening.
#
And I'll tell you something, that these efforts are something which even a lot of people I
#
admire were otherwise very progressive on many things.
#
Usually men chose not to see what's happening.
#
They chose not to know that feminists were making these efforts.
#
So I've had a person I admire very much, a human rights activist, and I felt very bad
#
about this because we attended a program together somewhere and we were at an airport and a
#
call came in from some journalist who clearly didn't know anything.
#
So she is asking me, okay, I want a bite from you about how the death penalty is a good
#
So I said, have you even ever heard me or listened to what I say or what I write?
#
I'm against the death penalty, damn it.
#
So I told her that first do some homework and then call.
#
I'm not, you can't take a bite from me in favor of the death penalty.
#
And I knew some people who'd done this because they wouldn't even call me and they'd just
#
use my name and put, okay, Kavita Krishnan demanded Farsi for so-and-so.
#
And then I have to call up their publication and say, you didn't speak to me.
#
How did you say that I demanded death penalty?
#
Because I wouldn't, because I don't stand for it.
#
So this person was standing next to me, this very well-respected human rights activist
#
So he asked me, what was that all about?
#
So I told him and I said, oh, you know, people don't keep track.
#
And they think this movement is, you know, that 2012 movement was all about Farsi, Farsi.
#
So he said, but it was, no.
#
And you guys also were with that only, no.
#
And I looked at him with such a sense of betrayal, and I remember that I wasn't angry enough.
#
I think I was just very bemused at that point.
#
And you only think of smart things to say later.
#
So I later thought, you know, that I wanted to tell him, and I don't remember whether
#
I finally did or not, maybe I did, tell him that, you know, how could you?
#
We were spending our time and energy intervening in this instead of assuming that these are
#
a bunch of, you know, irretrievably right-wing conservative fundamentalist idiots.
#
We went to people and we started finding a way to intervene and talk about feminist concerns.
#
And you have the luxury to think that, oh, you know, you people were all part of that,
#
no, that kind of that movement that wanted all these draconian measures.
#
No, we were not, you know.
#
So that was one moment.
#
The other highlight, which I'll always remember with a great deal of joy, is that at the Jantar
#
Mantar, there was this one chap who was a permanent fixture at Jantar Mantar, always
#
raising slogans for the death penalty and looking very large and aggressive.
#
And he was obviously a sort of Delhi ka local.
#
Toh wo pandaa waha saara bin rahata tha, every day.
#
And he looked pretty daunting, you know, and he wouldn't respond to anything we were saying.
#
He would go on saying his own thing and raising his own slogans or mostly alone.
#
So one day in February, we had this larger program where we for the first time raised
#
And it was a slightly raised platform.
#
So on that raised platform, many people spoke and spoke about explaining why the death penalty
#
Even I spoke and all of that.
#
So after I spoke, and I had spoken about many things, when I got down from there, this man
#
So I was a little wary because I was like, okay, maybe he's waiting to confront me with
#
And he came to me and he said, Madam, itne dino se aap roz aati rahi hain, mainne na
#
aapko pehli baar suna theek se.
#
Toh isse pehle na mai suna hi nahi tha, aap kya boli thi.
#
Toh aap toh bol rahi thi, wo toh bilkul aacha laga humko toh, aap toh sahi bol rahi thi.
#
Toh he said, bas mujhe do cheezon pe thoda sa doubt hua.
#
Toh one of the things that he had doubt about was this death penalty thing.
#
So he asked me, he said, lekin aapko nahi lagta ki jisne itna kharab kiya hai, unko ni
#
Lekin faasi ke saza milni toh, saza milni chahiye ek toh sabko, consent violate karne
#
Lekin faasi ke saza dekhar ke, mainne mahalaon ka faida kiun hoga, rather you will allow
#
the people who are wanting to change the conversation from women's rights to just feeling happy
#
that somebody has been hanged and congratulating themselves and going back to treating women
#
in their lives the same bad way.
#
So he said, haan ye toh sahi baat hai.
#
And I also said, look, there are many instances in which innocent people in all kinds of cases
#
So death penalty is irretrievable, you can't change it, you can't bring somebody alive
#
once you've killed them.
#
So what if you've killed the wrong guy, right?
#
Is the police always reliable?
#
Do they always catch the right guy?
#
So he's like, haan, that's true.
#
Then the second question he had was, he said, achha apne army ke baare me bola aur wo sab
#
bola, so don't you think that militants also do violence against women in Kashmir and in
#
North East and all, or wherever?
#
So I said, of course, but the point is that the law does not make an exception for them.
#
If a militant does that, they are considered punishable by law.
#
So our problem is that nobody should be given an exception for these things just because
#
they are wearing an army uniform, right?
#
Haan, bilkul theek bola aapne, he said.
#
And I went off feeling a sense of triumph in a way.
#
And when I told my partner this had happened, he said wo kya hai na ki wo, he's been so
#
busy talking that he hasn't, you were at the same level and he didn't hear you and you
#
didn't have a good enough mic.
#
This time it was on a platform, you had a mic and in a way it was loud enough that he
#
actually stopped continuously talking himself and listened.
#
And he was like, haan, makes sense.
#
So yeah, even a very paka death penalty guy was actually persuaded the other way, yeah.
#
Remarkable story, totally a web series should be made on your life.
#
Maybe the narrative in this episode can be the skeletal structure.
#
You sit down with me and then all the events unfold in vivid flashback.
#
So before I lead to my next big question, I just want to make one observation of my
#
own, which you can respond to if you have something to add.
#
And I'll also quote a couple of times from your book because I want to elaborate on things
#
that you mentioned in your own words.
#
And then I'll get to my question.
#
One as far as the death penalty is concerned, the reason I am against it and in fact against
#
all death penalties in any crime.
#
But for rape, just the economist point of view is that you're creating an incentive
#
If the punishment for murder and rape is exactly the same, then in the criminal's mind, it
#
doesn't make a difference in terms of the risk, but it makes it less likely for him
#
to be caught if he murders a person he's raping.
#
So why do you want to create that incentive?
#
And the other more deontological standpoint there is that it is wrong to kill even if
#
And the point is the state gets so much wrong.
#
I mean, listeners of the show would realize I don't trust the state with anything.
#
You know, power always corrupt.
#
So whoever is in control of the state at a particular point in time, why do you want
#
to give them the right over life?
#
And what you what you said about the army is actually very striking.
#
I had an episode with the philosopher Jason Brennan where we kind of discuss the right
#
to self-defense and to defend others.
#
And one of the points that he made, in fact, he wrote a book about it, is that even if
#
somebody in uniform is doing something right, there is absolutely zero extra protection
#
that that person should have just because they're wearing a uniform or they're an officer
#
So if you see someone beating up a young girl on the street, it's your moral duty to intervene.
#
Even if the person doing the beating up is a policeman, which is a convincing argument
#
and an interesting episode.
#
Now a couple of important observations, and I'm only you've already mentioned them, but
#
I just want to emphasize on them because they made an impression on me.
#
And I think they are, you know, powerful insights.
#
And I'd like my listeners to realize.
#
And one of them is that you have a chapter on how in India, people treat the home as
#
Women are not supposed to go out and so on and so forth.
#
But you point out that women are safer on the streets than in their homes.
#
And this is, in fact, worldwide, like you talk about a United Nations study that shows
#
that women who are the victims of homicide globally, about half of them are killed by
#
intimate partners or family members and only 6 percent of men in Ireland.
#
In fact, that's 87 percent of the women who were murdered in Ireland were killed by a
#
And equally, you know, as you've pointed out, the figures overwhelmingly show that a lot
#
of, you know, rapes and sexual assaults actually happen in the home.
#
The other important point to make is about how the way people define rape in India doesn't
#
often take consent into account, which is bizarre.
#
And this goes in both ways, as you pointed out, that our notions of consent and non-consent
#
are screwed up, where you've pointed out that how a tremendously large number of rape cases
#
are actually filed by parents against a man their daughter has eloped with.
#
So they are calling it rape because their property has gone away with somebody else.
#
And even those two people might have consensual sex or even a kid together, but they call
#
And on the other hand, because their daughter is property, they decide who to give her away
#
And you have all these arranged marriages where poor, bewildered women have to move
#
away to wherever and just begin negotiating life again and are raped by their husbands.
#
And that's not considered rape according to the law, which is again something you've eloquently,
#
you know, spoken about and written about in the past.
#
Now, my question here is this, that we spoke about, you know, how in the law, which is,
#
of course, Victorian-era relic, the IPC, and we know the values they brought in, that women
#
were treated as property of the men.
#
Our culture is very much like that, like I realized that there are different strands
#
We contain multitudes and there is a liberal strand as well.
#
And in fact, I'm reminded of this book I discovered while recording an episode in the Geeta Press
#
And you must have read the book many, many times because just the title is so awesome.
#
The title is Mark Swadho Ram Raja by Karpatri Maharaj.
#
Yeah, you're familiar with the book.
#
And one of the arguments he gives against communism is that because there is no private
#
property there, men can't own the women.
#
So all women are like, you know, they are in a bucket which any man can drink from,
#
that's the image that he used.
#
The Communist Manifesto actually says that, no?
#
The Communist Manifesto that Marx and Engels wrote has a line to that effect because they
#
say that the minute we say that a property will be collectively owned, that minute the
#
bourgeois ideologues start saying, oh my God, that means women will be owned in common.
#
And he says they don't understand poor things that we don't look at women as property.
#
Women will not be property.
#
They will be, you know, in charge of their own lives.
#
Communist Manifesto has a line exactly to that effect in reply to this kind of nonsense.
#
I didn't know that you've kind of completed the story for me, but I found that line by
#
Karpatri Maharaj, a bucket that anyone can drink from, just both hilarious and deeply
#
And I say deeply disturbing because I think it's reflective of a certain common way of
#
thinking that is in our culture, which kind of leads me to my question, which is that
#
agreed that there are multiple strands, but a dominant strand in our culture, certainly
#
today, is this kind of regressive strand which says women are the property of men.
#
They should be in the house.
#
They should take the permission of whoever the male guardian is before leaving the home
#
and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
#
We know all of that, therefore reducing half of Indians to a subspecies.
#
Now my question then is this, and this is of course a strand that's become dominant,
#
but which was always there.
#
Now one question that I've asked multiple guests who have come on the show, especially
#
when we are discussing the constitution, is that if assuming that the constitution was
#
a liberal document, and it's not liberal enough for me, but it's more liberal than our society.
#
Now assuming that our constitution is a liberal document imposed upon an illiberal society,
#
how can that imposition itself not be illiberal?
#
And this is a dilemma I can't get around because you and I would share certain values.
#
For example, the primacy of consent and the fact that coercion is bad and we would share
#
But we are elites in a bubble in a sense.
#
Most of the country doesn't share those.
#
Now Mahatma Gandhi's way would have been to change the culture, right?
#
Politics is downstream of culture.
#
Change the culture first and then things will change.
#
And that looks like something that we, and this is a very broad tent including the liberals
#
and whoever feels this way, that we failed in that.
#
That society hasn't changed.
#
If anything, politics is now caught up with society.
#
And that makes me feel very bleak because where is the failure?
#
Was the failure inevitable if these beliefs are so deep rooted in society?
#
And I don't know if I have a question, but it's kind of a depressing observation.
#
What do you think about this?
#
I actually attended a seminar once, which was organized by people who were basically
#
very good scholars about India, Indian politics, Indian society, and specifically the constitution.
#
So this was actually, it had been organized, I think it was in Norway.
#
And what we said there has been published as a book, which I, as usual in my post-COVID
#
brain, cannot remember the exact title of.
#
It was India at 70, something or the other.
#
We'll have it in the show notes.
#
But the thing is that there was actually a session where I had spoken and I had spoken
#
in response to, just the session before that, people had discussed exactly this about whether,
#
because they had said that the Indian constitution was more something that was sourced from good
#
practices all over the world.
#
And so it was experts who were doing the sourcing and it was very different from say, the Paris
#
Commune writing, or even the Soviet revolution, some constitution being written there.
#
Because those were things in which people who were writing the constitution, the doors
#
would keep opening and people would actually be coming.
#
You can hear, you can read about these descriptions, both for the Paris Commune and for Soviet
#
constitution, Bolshevik revolution.
#
People coming in and saying, you haven't added this.
#
What have you written about us here?
#
You have to change this.
#
And that's what is a democratic process and a much more chaotic process, but a much more
#
So are we imposing a constitution on, is it more of a pedagogic exercise that you are
#
So the way I look at it is, and what I said there also, is that I don't think that's
#
See, in any society, just put India aside for a minute and think about any society in
#
They still have illiberal tendencies.
#
And quite possibly, if you put things to a vote, I mean, I would say that even in a country
#
like Ireland, I mean, getting the right to abortion or other countries in which homosexuality
#
being decriminalized and all, they've been able to do it through a referendum.
#
I think the fact that they've been able to do this in the 21st century and not before
#
this tells you that for all this while, the societies were not at that place.
#
And I doubt if any of the societies were.
#
Even today in the US, I would be suspicious that if you were to put the right to abortion
#
to a vote, or if you were to put the right of gay people to marry to a vote, I am not
#
sure which position would win.
#
It is not by any means certain.
#
So the whole point is that democracy is not just about what the majority believes in.
#
It's also about protecting the rights of the individual and the rights of the minority
#
to not be imposed on by the majority.
#
And when I say majority-minority here, I'm not talking about us as some educated elites
#
I'm talking about people.
#
For instance, if you look at inter-caste marriage, the fact that there is such a almost sort
#
of a moral panic about inter-caste marriage and inter-faith marriage, and it's growing
#
right now, is because more people are crossing those boundaries.
#
You're having people putting their lives on the line, marrying in the same gotra or across
#
castes or across communities, which is why every time you see a louder voice in society
#
railing on, even in history, I was taught this as a literature student long ago, that
#
if you're reading something in which you are, if somebody is writing the Manusmriti and
#
trying to lay down the law on this and that, they're having to do that because clearly
#
people are not doing that on the ground.
#
The reality is they're not reflecting reality.
#
They're trying desperately to regulate reality and regulate an unruly population.
#
In India also, I feel that the Manusmriti may have been there and dominant castes and
#
dominant culture may have lived by those values, even if they did not exactly read the Manusmriti
#
The point is the Manusmriti has encodified a lot of things which were seen to be the
#
right things and which may have been expressed in a variety of ways in more popular literature
#
and scriptures and documents.
#
But the point is that clearly even in those societies, there were those who were not following
#
There were those who were breaking those laws.
#
I find it fascinating to read Wendy Doniger's latest, I think it's her latest book, which
#
is called Beyond Dharma.
#
She's written repeatedly about, she reads the Arthashastra and the Kamasutra as being
#
documents that are sort of dissenting against the Manusmriti.
#
So these are things that are in conversation with each other and are very subtly dissenting.
#
So they are paying lip service to all the rules, but then they are actually preaching
#
something very different.
#
So they are saying, so the Kamasutra is saying, haan, manusmriti wale niyam.
#
But in reality, they are dealing with a reality in which people are conducting secret affairs,
#
people are having relationships with people which are forbidden, extramarital relationships,
#
relationships across castes and all of that, right?
#
So my point is that therefore, the constitution is not entirely alien document and it wasn't
#
perceived or received as only an alien document.
#
So if you look at this book called, again, I'm terrible with the names, the People's
#
Constitution by Rohit Dey.
#
I remember the author's name, but not the...
#
So that is a fascinating book, isn't it?
#
Because it is about people, basically ordinary Indian people picking up the constitution
#
and deciding that they wanted to use it as a shield, use it as their instrument to claim
#
inclusion and claim rights, right?
#
So I don't think of it, therefore, as only...
#
I agree with you that I think that it's not liberal enough.
#
There's a lot more that the document could have been much more.
#
Certainly, in reality, it has not been translated into reality at all, right?
#
But on the whole, I don't see it as entirely an alien thing, okay?
#
But to me, what I look at is what you're going to see, there are two ways of looking at this
#
dichotomy between what the constitution represents as an idea and what is there in reality, right?
#
So if I am Ambedkar, if I follow Ambedkar, then Ambedkar said it right then when it was
#
He said that, sorry, you have one man, one vote, but in society, it is not one man, one
#
You still have a society which is deeply illiberal, where democracy is only in the top soil.
#
So at the end of it, what was he saying?
#
He was saying, if it's at the top soil, please help it to get more rooted, no?
#
He wasn't saying that, therefore, this is an alien document that you will have to keep
#
through lack of consent or whatever, right?
#
He was talking about changing society, therefore, as, you know, he and Gandhi, what you said
#
about Gandhi, actually, that applies a lot more to Ambedkar because Ambedkar was exactly
#
saying this, that after all, then you need to be able to change society so that it is
#
actually one human being, one value.
#
But if I'm Ram Madhav, writing in 2017, when I feel that my ideology of the RSS, which
#
was, you know, personal namangrata in 1947 and certainly after 1948 when Gandhi was killed,
#
the RSS was a hissing and a byword.
#
But today the RSS is in power and he thinks he's triumphant, he thinks there's going
#
to be a Hindu Rashtra by 2025.
#
So writing in 2017, Ram Madhav writes about this exact situation, the same gap.
#
He doesn't say constitution, but he means it.
#
He says that, you know, our rulers immediately after independence, all the governments since
#
independence before this one, they were alien to the country because they did not operate
#
from the place of what he calls the genius of India.
#
And he defines this as being caste, community, religion, festival, guru, something like that.
#
So, you know, and he says that this is all Western liberal values that they embraced
#
and this is the first government that is in tune with the mob.
#
And he deliberately uses the word mob because he then taunts those whom he says are Westernized
#
liberal intellectuals and says that, you know, you are so alienated from family, caste, community,
#
guru and whatnot, that you are crying now because the mob is happy now.
#
And he is referring to the protests against mob lynching because he's not saying it, but
#
he's using the word mob because he wants to say the mob is happy because they're free
#
to lynch and they can, you know, the government will say damn good job done, good job, rather
#
than saying, oh, you violated the constitution, you know.
#
So my point is Ram Madhav is reaching the exact opposite conclusion that Ambedkar is.
#
He's saying, you have a government that is in line with the mob now.
#
And the ideals that the society, that your own society has values in it, it can be a
#
better version of itself, rather than, you know, looking at these values as being alien,
#
liberal, Westernized values, which is complete nonsense if you look at it that way.
#
Because my point is, you know, for instance, feminism, they love calling us feminists,
#
you know, Westernized, you know, cut off from the world and everything.
#
But please tell me, I mean, you know, what, what do you say about, and I've written about
#
this in my book, that what do you say about, you know, some 13th century nun who is writing
#
What do you say about a 19th century housewife who's writing about yearning to be free?
#
And they face the same gullies of, arey yeh sab free sex karti hain, that we are facing
#
I mean, in different words and different, but the idea was that you are, you are not
#
Feminists being accused of being cut off and, oh, your idea of freedom and all has come
#
up only because you are Westernized and so on.
#
And those women who are not educated, who were, you know, the real women of India, they
#
are not bothered about all this.
#
Because if you look at centuries ago, long before any idea of, you know, formal feminism
#
or a feminist movement came into being, the yearning to be free, the yearning to be free
#
of an abusive husband or free of even domestic chores.
#
As I said, you have the Buddhist nuns writing about this centuries ago, saying that I want
#
to be free from the chakla belan and whatnot, you know, the home chores and kitchen and
#
I want to be free of an abusive husband.
#
You have, you know, a 19th century Bengali woman from a conservative household teaching
#
herself to write secretly and saying that I know that people say that if women learn
#
to read and write, then they will become immoral and so on.
#
And she says Kalyug will come and she writes, I say blessed, blessed be that Kalyug if it
#
means that girls will get to read and write, you know.
#
And she talks about feeling like a caged bird and wanting to fly free.
#
So what I'm saying is why assume that a woman in a conservative household today who lives
#
a circumscribed life inside the four walls of the home does not dream of living a larger
#
life, does not want her daughter to have a different life.
#
So I think we cannot concede that, and I refuse to concede that, you know, in general, all
#
Indians, barring a small educated liberal elite, basically are, you know, conservative
#
and share the RSS's values or whatever it is or casteist values or whatever.
#
I think that they have a potential.
#
In fact, I would hazard a guess that at least on some issues, it is actually a minority
#
that imposes these things on the majority, for instance, meat eating, okay.
#
I am a vegetarian by choice because I, you know, I would hope to be vegan and so on and
#
That's for a different conversation another day.
#
But my point is that I realize that in India, diet and so on has so much to do with inequalities
#
I cannot go around imposing being vegetarian as a moral value over those who eat meat the
#
I have to support those who are being attacked and killed for eating meat, right.
#
Now my point is, if you did a poll in India, I really challenge it.
#
This is one thing on which I am very confident that, you know, the far right would lose a
#
If you were to do a poll on meat eating, because most, you know, the large, vast majority in
#
India is not vegetarian, okay.
#
It simply is not, you know.
#
So it's a wrong impression that they are.
#
So on some things, I think it's, it's actually a majority that is imposing values on the
#
minority because they are much louder, much more powerful and dominant.
#
But in, in some other things, suppose you say that, okay, inter-cast marriage, most
#
people would not want it, gay rights.
#
Most people may not want it.
#
They may feel that this should be punishable.
#
This should be, they want to, there are in fact people who are campaigning for getting
#
rid of the right to marry, you know, inter-cast and so on.
#
And I think about the change that has come about.
#
You think about a film like Chamele Ki Shaadi.
#
Chamele Ki Shaadi was made, I don't know, sometime in the seventies, probably, or eighties,
#
Sometime, you know, so it's that lovely film where you have, you know, Amjad Khan at the
#
So there is this girl who has defied her parents and is marrying someone whom it is implied
#
So it is implied that he's from an oppressed caste or whatever.
#
There's an inter-cast marriage happening, you know.
#
And her parents come up and say, no, this marriage cannot take place because she's our
#
So Amjad Khan comes up and says, no, no, there is a constitution of the country and it is
#
written in the constitution of the country that she has grown up, so the marriage, where
#
she has grown up, she is still young.
#
This is exactly what happens all of today.
#
And Amjad Khan says, aaye toh madam, and he calls her school madam and he says, dekho
#
school certificate me jo naam likha hai, uske hissaab se ye 18 saal se upar hai, so she's
#
She can marry who the hell she likes.
#
And they're like, what on earth?
#
We didn't know this was the law or we didn't, you know, they're upset about it.
#
And then he gets them around.
#
The point is that a film like that could be made then.
#
Could it be made now for a mass audience?
#
You could have it on Netflix, I'm sure.
#
But the point is that today you're having a complete shift where, ironically, from the
#
90s onwards, the idea of people marrying for love, breaking, you know, defying parental
#
this thing and marrying for love, even if it's a tragic love, even if it's a Romeo
#
and Juliet, kaimat se kaimat tak story, suddenly with the liberalisation coming in, you simultaneously
#
have a conservative streak where suddenly you have to ask parental permission for everything.
#
Okay, with hum aapke hain kaun aur dilwale dulhaniya le jayenge.
#
This whole thing about reimposing these ideas, you know, these are back in vogue.
#
And now you have an entire political movement which is in power today, which is determined
#
to turn the clock on all this.
#
And I insist on saying that no, those youngsters who want to marry intercaste are Indians.
#
They are part of our society.
#
They are not elite, you know, this is happening in more first cells.
#
This is happening in small towns.
#
This is happening in villages.
#
This is happening everywhere.
#
And we are going to stand up for that India because that is an India that wants to come
#
And that's a far better version of the India that the RSS wants to bring into being or
#
that we had before the RSS also.
#
That's both eloquent and passionate.
#
And I agree with you completely.
#
And I have so many sides that I've been writing them down.
#
I hope I don't kind of forget something.
#
First of all, I wouldn't blame it on liberalisation.
#
I'm not sure about that causation, but we can leave that for another day.
#
Secondly, you know, you had earlier mentioned not standing for the anthem and you just mentioned
#
So there's an anecdote I'll share with you and my listeners that about 12 or 13 years
#
ago I was called as a panellist on Barkha Dutt's TV show, We The People.
#
And the subject was national symbols because I had said that I had blogged that I don't
#
stand for the anthem and that we shouldn't take the flag so seriously and all that.
#
So they called me as a panellist and Smriti Irani was also there.
#
This would have been around 2009.
#
And at one point towards the end she went, Barkha went around asking all the panellists
#
that do you believe in sacred cows?
#
And when she came to me and asked do you believe in sacred cows, I said the only kind of sacred
#
cow I like is a divine steak on my plate.
#
And Smriti smiled then, but she was a little upset after the show about my insult there.
#
The other thing I'd like to point out is you mentioned free sex and there is this very
#
badass incident from a while ago where you were asked about free sex, is it okay for
#
women to have free sex?
#
And not just you, but also your mother said, yes, we have free sex.
#
All sex should be free.
#
So you know, much credit to you for saying that that's just wonderful.
#
What I also want to do is in the course of this, you know, four episodes I've done came
#
So I'll quickly plug them all for the listeners and have them in the show notes.
#
One is with Madhav, but not Ram Madhav, it's with Madhav Khosla on the pedagogical aspect
#
of the constitution, exactly what you were talking about and which Madhav has written
#
a fantastic book on and is very eloquent, though I don't entirely agree with all of
#
his arguments because I think some of them go too far in justifying some of the illiberalism
#
Madhav is a great scholar.
#
Again, Madhav Khosla, not Ram Madhav.
#
Another episode I'd like to recommend is by Tony Joseph, you know, early Indians, where
#
he kind of points out that if you look at the genetic evidence, you'll find that till
#
the year zero BC or zero AD or whatever it is that turning point, India was there was
#
a party happening here as it were, you know, all the different immigrants from all over
#
were just having a party.
#
And then one particular caste based ideology from the Gangetic Plain somehow gained dominance
#
and endogamy became common, which is why the Indian subcontinent.
#
When you look at it has often been described not as a large population as the Han Chinese
#
would be, but as a collection of many small populations.
#
That's how bad the caste endogamy kind of got, which, you know, speaks to your point
#
that India wasn't always like this.
#
We were a powery culture once.
#
And to underscore that, I had an episode with Madhavi Menon on the history of desire in
#
India, where we speak in detail about the wild and libidinous time our ancestors had.
#
And just now you spoke about, you know, small towns in India that they have aspirations.
#
I'd done an episode with Sringdha Poonam also on what young people in small town India want.
#
So all these things are there.
#
As far as Ambedkar is concerned.
#
It's interesting that, you know, this sense of go beyond the top soil, you know, change
#
the culture was something that was one thing that Ambedkar and Gandhi could agree on.
#
So Ambedkar in 1954, I think, did also say that given the state of what the constitution
#
had become, he would like to burn it.
#
And indeed, one of the problems with our constitution is that as a cartoonist once quipped, it's
#
They keep changing it regularly.
#
And another episode listeners can go and listen to is the one I did with Tripur Dhaman
#
Singh on the First Amendment, where it all started, where, you know, one thing people
#
don't realize is that, yes, the sedition law was there from British times, but it was
#
ruled unconstitutional by an Indian court in 1950.
#
And then Nehru brought it back to deal with his political enemies, which just shows that
#
power does corrupt and people do contain multitudes that one can be both liberal in one way and
#
illiberal in another way.
#
And finally, what you said is that all these laws actually indicate that, you know, these
#
laws came into being when society was progressing.
#
So people felt the need to bring these laws to kind of control it.
#
And I remember my friend Shruti Rajgopalan wrote a controversial piece about this, where
#
she said that, you know, if you look at the love jihad laws, one way of looking at it
#
is that there are more such marriages happening.
#
That's why the law was felt necessary.
#
And unfortunately, on social media, that piece whipped up a storm because everybody interpreted
#
it as saying that she is for the love jihad laws, which of course she is not, which she
#
I did defend her in many places.
#
And it's an abominable law when she clarified that, take her at face value.
#
But people just wanted to draw the conclusion, you know, very often the captions misleading
#
and people don't read anything about the caption.
#
Yeah, that's the problem.
#
People don't read anything.
#
And I mean, I disagreed with the argument in the sense that I think these people have
#
been trying to do a love jihad law since the 1920s.
#
I also disagreed with some of her arguments.
#
But my point is, I said she's not saying that the love jihad law is a great thing.
#
I mean, she's not finding an excuse for it.
#
She's not excusing it at all.
#
And social media mob kind of went after her.
#
Now, finally, leading on to sort of my next question.
#
And this one came from, you know, you spoke in your first chapter about this placard that
#
you saw at that at the anti-rape protests of 2012.
#
And this placard said, quote, we live in a society that teaches women not to get raped
#
instead of teaching men not to rape, stop quote.
#
And this reminded me of something Jackson Katz once said in a TED talk, which is a really
#
important point about the use of language, which I'll quickly read out, quote, we talk
#
about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women.
#
We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many
#
We talk about how many teenage girls got pregnant in the state of Vermont last year rather than
#
how many men and teenage boys got girls pregnant.
#
So you can see how this use of the passive voice has a political effect.
#
It shifts the focus of men and boys onto girls and women.
#
Even the term violence against women is problematic.
#
It's a passive construction.
#
There's no active agent in the sentence.
#
It's a bad thing that happens to women.
#
It's a bad thing that happens to women.
#
But when you look at the term violence against women, no one is doing it to them.
#
Men aren't even a part of it.
#
And my question here is this, that to what extent do you feel that more men are sort
#
of looking inwards or looking at men as the crux of the problem?
#
A lot of the solutions that people seem to come up with are either these populist ones
#
like, oh, hang the rapist and all that, or it is that, you know, it's those quote unquote
#
pragmatic arguments that women should not go out late and you know, what was she wearing
#
and all of that, you know, the owners going on the women.
#
And this kind of brings me to the immediate peg.
#
The reason I reached out to you is I saw your tweet about the Tarun Tejpal judgment, which
#
is a horrendous, horrendous judgment.
#
And the whole judgment reads like it was the survivor on trial and not Tejpal.
#
The owners was again suddenly on the women.
#
So what are your sort of thoughts on this?
#
So first, I mean, I was there were several, several thoughts I was having.
#
So I should have also put down my thoughts as you were speaking.
#
So you may have to remind me a couple of things that you said.
#
But one thing that occurred to me was before you spoke about the Tejpal judgment about,
#
you know, this whole thing about focusing on men, changing men's behavior, right, changing
#
the behavior of those who are committing violence.
#
So my thoughts on that, on changing the conduct of not just men, but say, you know, anybody
#
who behaves in a violent way, so lots of structural violence, you know, recognizing it's happening.
#
So it's caste violence also and all of that.
#
How is this change going to happen?
#
And because we were talking about the Constitution and this whole pedagogic, whatever.
#
One thing that really struck me last year was the Shaheenbaghs.
#
What I felt was that I had for long been thinking that, you know, schools ideally, if I had
#
that kind of a power, then I would want schools to change the way, you know, for instance,
#
we all have moral, moral science or whatever.
#
So instead of that, I would say teach constitutional morality.
#
So constitutional morality in the Ambedkar sense, okay, in the, it's not just what is
#
written in the Constitution.
#
It's precisely that concept, because I don't think anybody has a quarrel with that concept
#
of constitutional morality, which is that the rights of the individual cannot be subservient
#
to, you can't say that, all right, you're gay, but because the majority thinks that
#
being gay is a crime, we'll keep it as a crime.
#
No, you know, because that's the very essence of constitutional morality is that it cannot
#
be a majoritarian morality, right?
#
So there's a distinction between what society currently accepts as being moral and what
#
has to be a constitutional morality that we all agree to uphold, right?
#
So I may not want to live my life in a certain way, okay?
#
I may want to arrange marriage and so on and so forth, but I cannot have a right to endorse
#
violence against somebody who wants to live their life as a single woman or live in with
#
somebody or whatever it is, right?
#
So this is what constitutional morality is about.
#
So why can't schools teach constitutional morality?
#
I have to keep thinking this, but I would often think about what would it look like
#
in a classroom situation, you know, in the usual kind of school that we have, okay?
#
And then when I saw the shine bugs, I felt like, all right, a class on constitutional
#
morality should be held in a climate like this.
#
So the idea should be to create a climate, you know, where there are diverse people who
#
are feeling a sense of freedom to speak and freedom to argue with each other without being,
#
you know, hit on the head with something telling them to shut up.
#
And because I saw that happening and I'm not talking just about what was happening on stage.
#
So in the shine bugs off stage also, I was seeing, you know, parents bringing, Hindu
#
parents bringing their kids to the shine bugs just to spend time there because they felt
#
that there was hardly any other space where the child would be exposed to a variety of
#
people, a variety of ideas and, you know, to a sense of love for the constitution and
#
the flag and the anthem.
#
That was not about standing at attention and, you know, it's not a military drill.
#
You know, there's a sense of actual love in terms of what am I investing in it?
#
I don't have to stand up for it or not.
#
My point is, why do I love this?
#
What do I love about it?
#
And what do I disagree with in it?
#
And how do I see my relationship with these things?
#
Because I, you know, the country is me first, it's people.
#
So what do we want to change about this country and, you know, the culture that we love and
#
Because there's so much that we love here, even those of us who want to change a lot
#
There's so much that we will carry with us even, you know, wherever in the world we go,
#
because these are things that are part of us and we love it because it is, you know,
#
in a broad sense, Indian or whatever it is, right?
#
So I think that is the kind of thing which I think of in terms of change, okay?
#
And the other thing, and even men, therefore, you know, exposing boys to, you know, ideas
#
So in my opinion, even when people say we want to give safety lessons to women, okay,
#
self-defense, I am all for self-defense, but I think I don't want to teach women that
#
what Akshay Kumar does, which is to say, you can, you know, karate chop somebody and so,
#
you know, you should be able to and I'll teach you how.
#
No, you may be a wonderful karate car, but you may still get raped.
#
You may still be raped.
#
You cannot prevent rape.
#
You just can't because rape is not something which is only going to come as physical force.
#
What if somebody you love and respect violates your boundaries and you are frozen at that
#
You can, that can happen to you even if you're, even if you're as strong as Mary Kong, okay?
#
So it isn't about, rape is not about that.
#
It is about understanding consent.
#
It is not about developing muscles or learning karate chops, but for all mean, by all means
#
teach women, you know, physical, to be physically more confident, that's fine, but I think as
#
a part of self-defense and a more important part of self-defense is accepting yourself,
#
you know, which self are you going to defend?
#
So teach women to defend, to love themselves, to accept themselves, to figure out what is
#
their self as separate from what their parents want from them or what their boyfriend wants
#
from them or whatever, right?
#
Because I'm not saying, I mean, boyfriends can be just as oppressive as parents, okay?
#
It's not always that you're, you know, running away with your boyfriend is necessarily going
#
So Uma Chakravarti has this wonderful story about a girl whom they helped to, you know,
#
defy her parents and marry this guy, a bahut saare feminists ne help kiya.
#
And then once they were married, this guy would tell this girl, achcha, aap to shadi
#
ho gayi hai toh aap tum yeh sab skirt, jeans wagraa pehna chod do na, kya tum mere liye
#
itna bhi nahi kar sakte ho?
#
And you know, you have to hear Uma Chakravarti say this actually, you know, because she says
#
it with such outrage because she said, this is a girl who's gone, you know, kitna ladhi
#
She's had to, you know, leave behind so much and fight so much.
#
You bloody haven't had to get rid of anything.
#
And now she's with you and now you're telling her, you can't do this much only for me, that
#
you should now give up bits of your personality and your life.
#
So of course, I mean, teaching women to respect themselves, teaching girls to respect themselves
#
and to understand consent in terms of their right to draw boundaries, you know, even then
#
you may not be protected from violence.
#
But the point is, you at least will feel that if violence happens to you, you won't be the
#
first to blame yourself because there'll be this voice in your head telling you, no, let
#
me remember what I was taught, which is that I can draw this boundary.
#
And I know that this is my boundary, but if somebody violates it, they're in the wrong.
#
I can't be responsible for their violating that boundary.
#
Just because I had a drink with them and happened to fall asleep doesn't mean they had a right
#
to assume I was available and to violate my boundary without my permission.
#
Fantastically inspiring words.
#
I hope many young men and women sort of listen to this.
#
One more thing was which I wanted to say about men was that I wish that more men would speak
#
to more boys because I feel that while I've spoken to a lot of young men and with very
#
good results, I will assure you that I have been surprised on occasions by, you know,
#
if there were time I would narrate a fantastic story which happened to me on Rajya Sabha
#
TV, but I've written about it on Facebook, so you can link it if you want.
#
But it was fantastic in the sense in one sentence what happened was that it was a debate on
#
marital rape and the two male panelists marched out in a rage because they were angry with
#
what I was saying and another women panelist was saying.
#
And the person running the show, there was an audience, so it had a lot of young men
#
in it and they were clapping for those guys and we thought they were supporting those
#
When those guys left, the poor woman conducting the show thought, okay, the show is dead.
#
But then I told her to just check.
#
And so she asked the audience, what do you feel?
#
And suddenly we realized that the majority of the men there are against the exemption
#
So this lady asked them, but why were you clapping for those guys?
#
They said, we didn't know how to show our opposition because we are sitting in the show.
#
So how to make a noise?
#
Toh hum toh unko majaak mein kar rahe the, unko to taunt them.
#
So the problem is I've noticed this on other occasions also that people don't know, you
#
know, the idea of clapping, it can happen when something very sad is said, when something
#
outrageous is said, you know, clapping is your way of saying, okay, I noticed this.
#
And you know, how ridiculous also sometimes.
#
So it turned out that most of those young men were saying, we are disgusted by the idea
#
that the law says that if I marry my wife, then I have a right to her, whether she likes
#
So I was very reassured by that, frankly, and I believe, but I wish a lot of more men
#
would take it on themselves in a systematic way, you know, to talk to more young boys
#
about respecting consent.
#
So that's a wonderful story.
#
Maybe there's a preference cascade already happening and that's great advice from you.
#
And as I was saying, I hope a lot of young women and men both, you know, get inspired
#
by your words and read your book.
#
I actually wanted to discuss your book chapter by chapter is so full of insights and all
#
of that, but I won't do that.
#
I think I've taken enough time.
#
So one final longish question, which is, you know, I've been meaning to invite you for
#
the longest time to this show.
#
I've admired your work and your writing.
#
And it's really sort of the Tarun Tejpal thread that kind of got me down to it because I was
#
just absolutely disgusted for a number of reasons.
#
I mean, he was acquitted of a crime that he had basically confessed to.
#
He had, you know, in his confession letter, in fact, he had sort of shown that attitude
#
of treating women as a property of men when he offered to apologize to the boyfriend of
#
You know, if you remember, which is bizarre.
#
And you've written a wonderful sort of dissection of the judgment, which I just came across
#
this morning, which are linked from the show notes.
#
And that says everything.
#
And in the past, also, you've written about, say, someone like Mahmood Farooqi, who was
#
first convicted and then acquitted by a higher court on the grounds of what is famously known
#
as a feeble no, where the judge said that the woman had said no, they accepted that,
#
but they said, you know, it could be a feeble no who is to say why, why is a poor man to
#
Everything but what shocks me more than just these judgments.
#
By now, you have the new rape laws in effect that were done after 2012 and all of that.
#
So the laws are in place.
#
The judgment is horrible.
#
The Tejpal judgment, in fact, was by a lady judge.
#
So one, you have the law letting these guys get away with the shocking sort of reasoning.
#
And two, these guys are going to be rehabilitated, you and I know that, you know, Farooqi was
#
Next year, I won't be surprised if Tejpal is also there.
#
I mean, I honestly don't know what the freaking organizers are thinking.
#
And you actually have these, you know, cabals of Delhi liberals who are on their side.
#
So my question here is this, that given all of this, you know, at one step, it would seem
#
that is two steps forward and four steps forward, three steps back is perhaps more like it.
#
And I'd find reason for hope in the fact that in exactly the anecdote that you described
#
at that show where all these men are kind of clapping that, you know, possibly there's
#
a lot of silent people out there who may not speak up now, but who realize that there are
#
others like them who are, you know, who feel the same way and a lot of people who may,
#
you know, listen to you or read you and they may change your mind.
#
So that makes me kind of hopeful.
#
But at the same time, you look at these judgments, you look at what's going on and the way the
#
country is descending in all kinds of different ways, it also makes us despair.
#
So looking ahead, looking, say, 20 years ahead, what makes you hope and what makes you despair?
#
So what makes me hope is I think that I feel that the backlash we are seeing now in these
#
judgments also, or in the love jihad laws or whatever it is, I feel that that is more
#
of a backlash of the privileged who are, you know, banding together either in a very organized
#
way with the RSS and the BJP, but even I would say across party lines, you know, in order
#
to basically band together to push back against some kind of feminist assertion.
#
So what you're seeing in the Tejpal Farooqi kind of context, and I can tell you something
#
that the BJP kind of trolling and he trolling has never bothered me very much.
#
Some of the worst trolling I have received and which has really, really troubled me and
#
given me sleepless nights has been the trolling by friends, by those I would consider on our
#
side on these two judgments, these two cases.
#
Okay, so Tejpal Farooqi, both cases.
#
I mean, really very, very disturbing the kind of things that have been said and said not
#
only about the survivors, but about us.
#
My only thing which I just wanted to say before I get on to, you know, what makes me hopeful,
#
I just want to say since you mentioned those judgments at length, I just wanted to clarify
#
You see, I am at the end of the day, I'm not someone who is just out for, you know, punish,
#
punish, punish, punish.
#
That's not my concern, okay.
#
How much punishment also is my least concern.
#
I do not, I'm not talking about severity of punishment.
#
Frankly, I'm not, you know, I engage with the law only to try and make sure that it's,
#
it doesn't become the worst law possible.
#
Even in 2012-13, my only fear was that they would bring in all kinds of horrible things
#
and how to prevent them from so doing.
#
So that was more of the effort.
#
My point is that I am all for, I will not quarrel with an acquittal.
#
If the acquittal is on the grounds that, look, whatever evidence is being brought here, we
#
are not able to make it add up to say that beyond reasonable doubt, this must have happened.
#
So while we acknowledge, I'm saying even in the Tejpal case, okay, he wrote these letters,
#
But suppose, you know, for a minute you forget that this is Tejpal and forget that it is
#
these particular letters and what the letters content is.
#
Imagine some other case.
#
I would say that, you know, suppose somebody writes letters and is asked to write letters
#
by an institution, he writes them, and then there is a court case and so on.
#
I would say that perhaps he is within his rights, his defense is within his rights to
#
say, look, you know, you obtain these confessions as a form of punishment and now you are using
#
them, you know, for another punishment in another forum.
#
So don't you think this is wrong or whatever?
#
So in another case, I'm not talking about the Tejpal case right now, but I'm saying
#
that I can imagine that being an argument.
#
So on any grounds, if the judge were to conclude that, you know, evidence doesn't meet up,
#
but therefore I'm acquitting, I'll say fine.
#
I'm not going to, you know, I would not feel particularly bothered by that.
#
I think what bothers me about both the Tejpal acquittal and the Farooqi's High Court acquittal
#
was what was said in order to do this, which is that you are basically saying that you
#
are setting absurd standards, which no woman can ever match up to.
#
You know, it's hard enough for a woman to actually say no.
#
You're conveying no with everything in your body and you're this thing.
#
The law does not, the letter of the law does not say you have to say no.
#
The letter of the law says that the man should not proceed unless, you know, by word or gestures
#
So the point is that, but most men who violate these rules, and every woman I can tell you
#
has an experience of this, everyone, I don't know anybody who doesn't, okay, they may not
#
have complained, they may not have, everybody, including me, we have experiences of people
#
violating our boundaries and telling themselves that we are consenting.
#
No matter how often, it's like you're talking to, okay, in one instance that I recall in
#
my own experience, here I am continuously, you know, twisting my body, making it stiff.
#
No, the guy still thinks it's okay to, you know, pat and touch and whatnot.
#
And then it goes further.
#
The guy starts sending love letters and whatnot.
#
I'm replying over and over saying politely that I respect you, but I'm not interested
#
I don't feel for you at all this way.
#
Guy takes my respect your statement to say, I realize that you're in love with me, but
#
this will be a secret between us.
#
And I'm like, where did I say this?
#
So the point is the guy who was doing the violating doesn't respect my agency.
#
He is, he want, he is constructing a, you know, he may be telling himself that I'm consenting.
#
He is lying to himself also, but that doesn't mean that the onus is on me to make him understand
#
The point is if I've said no, let him kindly accept.
#
And if there's a doubt, then give me the benefit of doubt, say that I'm going to back off until
#
I'm sure that there's this heavy enthusiastically yes happening.
#
So it's as simple as that.
#
But the point is these judgments don't do that.
#
These judgments set absurd standards.
#
How is she supposed to scream no?
#
How loud should that visible be?
#
What is this thing of saying, how should a normative victim behave?
#
And as my piece says, I'm not going into the details, I'll just say that my piece elaborates
#
It takes down the idea which some of the age pulse friends are saying, which is that no,
#
no, ignore the misogyny bit.
#
That bit may be wrong, but substantially there are facts which have been brought forward
#
that prove the, uh, you know, complainant to be lying.
#
And that's what my piece takes down because in fact, what the judge is doing is she's
#
accepting Tejpal's letters as fact conveniently when she wants to.
#
And she's using those fact, she's in a sense saying guy says that you didn't complain and
#
So you're lying when you said you complained and you cried and there was an incident.
#
Now how can this kind of reasoning, you know, in the face of this reasoning, no fair trial
#
No woman can ever hope to be believed, right?
#
So this is what I want everyone to think about there.
#
As for hope, even in these very, very bleak times, I feel that the hope comes from those
#
who are fighting back against these things.
#
The ones who are trying to say what values do we stand for?
#
Do we decide on a matter of rape?
#
Do we decide where we stand based on who is accused and who is the survivor?
#
What is their community?
#
What is their politics?
#
Or do we decide that even if it is one of our friends, one of our own who is violating
#
Do we decide that, okay, the consensus in those who are triumphant today, those who
#
are claiming to be all powerful today are telling us that inter-religious marriage is
#
wrong or that the Muslims do not have a right to be, their citizenship should be in doubt.
#
We should have a right to, the state should have a right to reject or accept them as citizens.
#
They have to throw their citizenship in doubt.
#
Are there people who are willing to fight back, who are willing to say, no, no, no,
#
no, no, democracy is not about just accepting every law that is passed.
#
Democracy is about every citizen questioning the government and speaking up even at risk
#
I think there's a lot of that happening and there's enough of it happening to give me
#
I'm deeply pained by the thought of the young women who are in jail today, you know, what's
#
the lawyer's name, Tushar Mehta, on the Tejpal case when he's arguing in high court, he's
#
saying, oh my God, I'm a feminist and why is it wrong to be a feminist and all of that.
#
And I thought to myself when I read that report yesterday in the paper that he's defending,
#
you know, he's questioning the Tejpal acquittal and in the appeal he's saying why are feminists
#
being attacked and even I'm a feminist.
#
I feel like if I were to meet him, I would ask him, your government that you are defending
#
is locking up feminists, locking up a young woman like Natasha, not even allowing her
#
to meet her father, you know, who died without him, his daughter being able to meet him.
#
Natasha, Devangana, Sudha Bharadwaj, you know, these people, the thought of them being in
#
prison today bothers me, but I also get hope from the fact that they are taking this risk
#
They are taking this risk to try and defend the values that should be giving us hope.
#
And so I feel that in this pandemic times, I feel that although the suffering has been
#
so terrible, the fact that people helped themselves, formed communities of help, irrespective of
#
caste and community and all of that, helped each other, helped each other to try and live,
#
helped each other to breathe, helped each other, you know, to have dignity in death.
#
Somehow I feel that if we draw upon even that very deep grief and sorrow, that would be
#
truly a positive thing.
#
I'm not talking about, you know, this negativity, positivity, all this government is trying
#
to tell us, not saying that.
#
I genuinely feel that the most positive thing that we can do as citizens is to draw hope
#
from that deep collective grief and to say that if we find our way back as a society
#
of caring for each other, mourning those who have died, not just those who died of COVID
#
and of oxygen shortage, but those who died in last year's lockdown, migrant workers,
#
those who died because of lynching, those who died because of medical care, those who
#
died because of lack of food, all these things, if we find a way back trying to figure out
#
how to care for each other, I think from there you will, I hope for a new politics, a new
#
political awakening and somehow a society that finds the courage and the moral value,
#
the moral strength to actually take us to a better place than the terrible place we
#
And you mentioned Natasha Narwal and I was just heartbroken by that picture of her going
#
back into jail with that smile on her face and maybe the young will save us, maybe people
#
of our generation kind of took it for granted that India has gained freedom, that the country
#
is what it is, it's been made, the job is over.
#
And maybe the young today can look around them and realise that the job isn't over.
#
We've still got a fight on our hands.
#
So Kavita, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your time and insights.
#
It was absolutely a pleasure, Amit, and I've admired your show and enjoyed it since last
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year, I didn't know about it before that because as I said, I began listening to podcasts only
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last year during the lockdown, but I enjoyed so many of yours so much and I really enjoyed
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do check out the exhaustive show notes and
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enter rabbit holes at will.
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You can follow Kavita on Twitter at Kavita underscore Krishnan.
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You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
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Thank you for listening and hey, speak up for something you believe in.
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Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
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If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
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You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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this podcast alive and kicking.
