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When we think of geopolitics, when we look at our neighbourhood, it's natural to first
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India and Pakistan have been in conflict since these nation states existed.
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It may be a hard conflict to resolve.
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It may even be an impossible conflict to resolve.
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But it is a conflict we understand.
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We get the motivations on either side.
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We know where the roots of this conflict lie.
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We know both the what and the why.
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We also know the limits of our engagement.
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But we know none of this about our relationship with China.
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Are India and China friends or enemies?
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Are we engaged more in combat or more in cooperation?
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Do the two sides look at this as a zero-sum game or a positive-sum game, a win-win situation?
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What do the Chinese want from us?
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What do we want from them?
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Do we even know what we want from them?
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These are important questions to understand, especially because China is way more powerful
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than us in every possible sense.
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And while there was relative peace between India and China in the decade since the 1962
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war, things have been heating up in the last few years.
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And before we solve it, we have to understand it.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioural
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Please welcome your host, Amit Borma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is a remarkable scholar, Kanti Bajbhai, whose new book is called India versus
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China, Why They Are Not Friends.
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I've done many episodes on China before, including a deep dive into the history of our interactions.
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So when I first started reading Kanti's book, I didn't imagine I would find much that was
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This lucid and insightful book does the one thing that I enjoy in nonfiction books.
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Specifically, this book builds a frame through which we can examine the India-China relationship.
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It's built around what he terms the four P's, perception, parameters, partnerships and power.
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If you find China to be a bit of a mystery and don't quite understand the contours of
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this conflict, then this book is for you.
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But Kanti and I don't only talk about the book, I love delving into the personal and
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intellectual journey of my guests.
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And Kanti had tons of insight for me about academia, being a public intellectual, how
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one learns, why it is important to forget the inessential, how writing and teaching
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make you a better thinker and so on.
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There's tons of dope in this conversation.
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But before we get to it, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
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In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India Uncut,
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which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
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I loved the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
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I exercised my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
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because I wrote about many different things.
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Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it.
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Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.
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I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write
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regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
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I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
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So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
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Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
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You don't need to go anywhere.
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So subscribe now for free.
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The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
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Kanti, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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Yeah, I'm honored to have you here and also like I start my episodes generally delving
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deeper into a person's journey right from where they went to school, which in your case
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is interesting because you ended up becoming a headmaster when you went to school.
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But before I go back into the distant past, how have the last few months been for you
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like Singapore's been on a sort of a trajectory of its own.
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And right now it seems to have coped with it really well compared to many others.
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And you know, there was this recent announcement by the Singapore government that hey, we're
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just going to treat this as endemic after a certain point in time and not do contact
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tracing and quarantine and all of that.
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But quite apart from that aspect of it personally, how has this time been for you where you can't
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go out so much and you teach and I guess you can't talk to students so much.
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You can't interact physically with other scholars.
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You actually written a book during this period in some kind of isolation, I'm guessing.
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Well, actually, I mean, I'm glad you asked that because I think this book would never
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have got written if I hadn't had the lockdown or semi lockdown.
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And the fact that it came along at a certain time and coincidentally, juggernaut books
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approach me to write the book.
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I'm quite disciplined, but I think if I don't get a smart kick in the pants and an environment
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where there's pressure on me, very long pieces of writing, I tend to start bracketing them
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and putting them aside.
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I write a lot of chapters and books and try and publish in journals.
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But those are, you know, fairly short pieces.
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This was supposed to be 50,000 words and it ballooned in my hands to about 75,000 words.
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And I think juggernaut got quite nervy about the whole thing.
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But I think I needed the discipline or the semi lockdown environment where we weren't
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completely stopped from moving out by July of last year when I began this.
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We could go to restaurants, there was hybrid teaching, I could go out shopping and so on
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and so forth and under certain conditions even see a movie.
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But in fact, it became quite complex to do all of that and rather artificial and sometimes
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stressful because you're worried about being infected.
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Oddly enough, ironically, the COVID contributed to my staying parked at home within these
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four walls in a small study and banging the book out.
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So I'd say, you know, the kind of collateral of it for me was that it concentrated the
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And I just banged out the book in three months.
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I have a bit of a library.
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You know, my kids always say, you buy so many books, what do you do with all of them, Dad?
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And partly, I mean, I do read all of them, but I bank them.
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I bank them for when I will need to reach for that volume, when I need to check a fact
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And of course, the internet rides to your rescue.
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So even though I couldn't get to the library and discuss things with colleagues all that
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much on the book, I could always turn to Professor Google, who had lots of information and ideas
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And so that's how the book got written, really.
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So we'll take a digression here before we go to your history and talk about the act
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of writing and researching.
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Because when I picked up this book of yours, which, by the way, I love reading, so enlightening
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and so lucidly written, when I picked it up, my assumption was I haven't read anything
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else by you except maybe columns here and there.
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But then I realized that one of your earlier books, The Roots of Terrorism, which I think
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you wrote in the early 2000s, I had actually read that while researching for a review I
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wrote of Alan Kruger's book on what makes a terrorist.
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And I realized that I did not remember anything of your book or, in fact, of Kruger's book.
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And also, I have done a number of episodes on China in the past.
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And I realized that while reading your book and taking notes and all of that, that there
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was very little I remembered of them either.
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And this is something I find as I'm coming into middle age that one may read a lot and
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one may try to absorb a lot of knowledge, but it's one you forget.
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And obviously, by osmosis, the frame of how you think about things and the way you look
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at the world might be affected by osmosis in ways you don't consciously realize.
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But nevertheless, you forget so much, you lose so much.
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So in your case, do you have any ways of, for example, doing knowledge management, trying
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to make sure you assimilate all the information that you take in, all the books that you read?
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Tell me a little bit about how you do your knowledge management.
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And after that, we can discuss how you go about writing a book.
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Actually, you made an important point, which you phrased a bit pejoratively in the sense
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that you said, well, I tend to forget.
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But actually, forgetting is a rather important way of managing knowledge.
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I think the brain partly automatically does it.
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If it's not terribly telling stuff, your brain edits it out.
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It doesn't stay in long term memory.
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And that's useful because otherwise, you would be filled with all kinds of stuff that you
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And what you do, the space you need to process more recent readings and knowledge would kind
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of degrade or be compromised.
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So I think a good part of knowledge management, in fact, is creative or periodic forgetting.
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And so I'm quite comfortable with that.
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I mean, I think partly, I just feel if I need something, which has now disappeared from
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my memory banks, I'll just reach for the book or go back to the computer.
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The other strategy, of course, is that I think periodically, as I read, I do kind of do a
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tick mark to myself mentally, which is to say, what is the value add of this?
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I mean, does it just reinforce stuff that I already know pretty well, in which case
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it's dismissable, forgettable?
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But if it offers something that's somewhat different, then I think I tick it off in my
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And at least it stays as a kind of gestalt, a quick picture or an image that remains in
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my brain of a value add that came from a book.
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I mean, take an example in my field, and it's referenced in the book.
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You read so much, but recently, 10 years ago, let's say, I think we all encountered Joseph
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Nye, the Harvard political scientist's idea of soft power.
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And I mean, I don't bother to remember every argument he made about soft power, but basically,
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the concept of soft power, how it differed from other forms of power, remained.
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And I just tick marked it, didn't make much use of it, to be honest, until it came to
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And so I had one of his books, I refreshed my memory quickly on some of the details related
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And I think that's how I manage it.
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I try to consciously tick mark a value add without stressing myself about remaining every
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twist and turn in the tale.
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And I think that's probably what happened with you with my earlier book, which you probably
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said, hmm, something here, but I'm not sure it really necessarily advances the cause tremendously.
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And I think your brain quite rightly just ticked it off as something that you wouldn't really
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And to be honest, I'm not sure I could summarize that book any longer very well either.
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All the bits and pieces of it are now seeping back in now that you've mentioned it.
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I think you're being too harsh on your book and too kind on my brain because I tend to
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I came across this really nice cartoon a couple of days ago where a man is basically asking
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his wife, hey, what's a password to our computer?
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And she says, it's our anniversary.
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And you know, so he's forced to remember it.
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So I think a lot of wives, including perhaps mine, listening to this will be like, oh,
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So do you use any technology or stuff for taking notes and all of that?
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Like earlier, what I would do is I would take copious notes in Microsoft Word, for example,
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when researching for an episode or something I was writing.
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But it would just be a long linear collation of text.
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And now I use something called Roam Research, which, you know, has nested entries, bidirectional
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linking, it becomes much easier to kind of categorize and search for keywords within
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everything that you've ever done and all of that.
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So do you feel that there is a need for that or do you feel that no, you know, whenever
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you get down to writing something, you kind of broadly know that, oh, I need to read this
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And then you go and do that.
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Yeah, I'm the old fashioned kind.
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So and I'm a hypocrite lector.
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I mean, I tell my students, please use technology, please be very assiduous about taking notes
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when I'm speaking or others are speaking when you read and all of that.
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But myself, I'm I'm a hopeless note taker.
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I either slavishly write down every single thing that somebody says or that I've underlined
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when I first scan a book or a piece of writing and I can't see the woods for the trees or
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I'm so lazy that I just give up completely and hope that if it's interesting enough,
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stuff will stay in my brain.
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As I said earlier, as a kind of gestalt, an image or that little bits and pieces will
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remain and I'll go back to the source when I need it.
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Like you say, when I need it, I'll go back to the source, take notes.
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Even then, I'm a pen and paper kind of guy.
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And so I will just yank out my little pad and pen and take horrible scribbly notes.
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And in fact, technologies undermine me because I've got so used to working on a keyboard
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now that I can hardly, you know, handwrite anymore.
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And often when I do my notes, I can't even, I can't make sense of my own notes.
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So I go along as I write, I have a broad sense of where I'm going and I write quite sort
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of ambitiously, I make assertions and then I start to go back and look at whether the
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evidence really bears out what I'm saying and do I need to modify it.
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You made an aside and I'll make an aside based on that and your side was that technology
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is kind of undermined your habit of taking handwritten notes and so on.
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And you know, I teach an online writing course and after one of the webinars of that recently,
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one of the participants asked me an interesting question which got me to thinking because
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I hadn't really thought about it.
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And her question was that is what you write different or is it shaped by whether you are
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typing it on a keyboard and you know, actually handwriting it by pen.
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And at one level, obviously, the answer is no, because words are words.
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And I've always held that, you know, for me, for example, a book is a words and author
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writes everything else is packaging.
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So whether I'm holding a physical book or a Kindle, the words are words.
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But on the other hand, if you, you know, look at the way that you write, like there are
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some people, there'll be videos on YouTube about how you can type as fast as you think
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and the act of writing physically on paper is much slower.
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And therefore, you would imagine that your thinking also has to slow down to match the
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pace of your writing when you're writing by hand and that may change the form of your
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Now, I don't know in what way and I'm kind of thinking aloud, you know, maybe it brings
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some kind of tear off to your thinking and helps it.
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Maybe it harms it because you're not, you know, you're going along slower than you would.
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But since you just mentioned your habit of writing by hand and how technology has undermined
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it, I thought I'd bring it up and see if you have any thoughts.
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Yeah, you know, I've gone through a strange, although perhaps others have as well, but
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a strange kind of transition.
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I began by saying what most people say, I guess of my generation or somewhat younger,
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which is that I could only compose by writing longhand with pen and paper.
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And then I used to type it in the old days when there were typewriters, I couldn't compose
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And when computers came again, I wrote longhand.
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I remember most of my PhD initially was written by longhand back in the 80s.
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And then I tapped it all out on a computer and I just couldn't think and compose properly
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Now I've got to the point where it's the reverse.
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I really can't do the handwriting, I can take notes handwriting.
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I can't really take notes typing stuff out, but I can only take notes handwritten.
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On the other hand, I can't now compose coherent text handwriting.
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My arm hurts, it gets squiggly.
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And I like now the white screen or the slightly yellow screen.
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I like the clickety click of the keyboard.
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You know, I bought one of those clackety, old fashioned keyboards, which are now new
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fangled keyboards, because I like the clickety click and the push back from the keys.
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So there was something tactile and noisy that I need now as a feedback or as a feeling when
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And I must say, so it's reversed for me.
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I do much better when I type out the text originally and then just use handwritten notes
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And you've written so many books, you're a prolific columnist and essayist and so on.
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You know, you mentioned the white screen, which often to me is like the white screen
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of death because so often I will, you know, sit down to write and it will just be a struggle
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and a clickety clack of the keyboards, which you mentioned is what I aspire to.
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But I'm just sitting there and there's a white screen.
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And obviously there are, you know, various hacks writers have to beat this and I myself
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and I teach my writing course, perhaps a little hypocritically, because I don't know my own
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I tell them about how, you know, most of the act of writing is just getting your butt on
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the chair and just actually getting the work done.
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Tell me a little bit about your working habits, because, you know, when one writes initially,
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I guess there are one has to deal with the anxieties of what other people will think
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of your writing and when you're a young scholar, you want to impress others and you have to
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And that can sometimes come in the way later on.
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You have to handle things like the curse of knowledge where, you know, you know, so much
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that you assume that is, you know, is this even worth writing about?
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Surely everybody knows it.
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Am I stating the obvious, you know, which I would imagine will happen to anyone in any
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field when they are so deep into it that everything seems common knowledge to them.
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So what's kind of your work ethic like?
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What are the problems you have faced in your writing life?
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Like, if one looks at your body of work, it's incredibly impressive.
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And one imagines that, oh, Mr. Bajpai just sits down and he just hammers out book after
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But that's never the case.
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So tell me about the kind of problems you faced, how you overcome them and what your
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work ethic is like, like writing this book, for example, during the pandemic, you knocked
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it off in three months.
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You've I think you mentioned that in, you know, in your episode with Milan Vaishnav
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on Grand Tamasha, which I'll link from the show notes.
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So, you know, is that kind of your normal process or is a normal process a little more
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You know, I think that I need to get going quickly.
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And if I postpone writing too much, if I think it over too, too much, then it slows me down.
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I think when I was an undergraduate in Canada and and a bit thereafter, I had this kind
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of sense that you really have to develop a full outline, fill in the subsectors of virtually
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every section, and then when you've got a grand scheme set up almost on a board in front
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of you with connective sort of lines and vectors and got it all figured out, that's when you
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really get going and you write very carefully, very systematically proceeding from A to B
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and end up at Z. And I think as an undergrad in one paper, I remember particularly in my
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English literature class, urged on by a friend of mine, a girlfriend of mine at the time,
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I try to follow that I got the most miserable grade I ever got.
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And I just had a kind of moment there where I realized that I don't work that way.
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I have to kind of get into it and then amend and edit and change.
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And the faster I get to it, the more likely I'm to do something a bit more original and
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actually finish it and and probably do a fairly polished product.
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And when I got to grad school, I somewhat that is for my PhD in America, I somewhat
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went back to that idea that I had to get everything worked out in total before I began to write
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And then I remember that there was a moment, well, partly under the stress of writing so
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much in American grad school, you couldn't quite afford to do that.
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But I remember a moment when it got to my thesis where I was still somewhat struggling
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with these different models and my late supervisor, now late supervisor, Steve Cohen, who was
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remarkably productive, saying to me, look, Ganti, you'll never finish the PhD if you
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don't figure out how to proceed efficiently.
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And he said, what I can teach you is not the substance of what you're going to write, but
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how to get this thing done.
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You'll never write something that is the definitive work for all time.
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That's not how knowledge works.
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So throw that out the window.
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Don't be a perfectionist.
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Write what you know quickly and hard and fast.
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If you get stuck in one section, move on to the next one.
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Don't lose the momentum.
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Write fluently and floridly when things are going well.
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You'll have to come back to those to edit and amend, because what looks wonderful on
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Monday begins to look terrible on Wednesday.
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And be prepared to do that.
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And finally, he said, when you got something done and you're reasonably happy with it,
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put it away in a drawer for at least a week if it's a substantial piece of writing.
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In the meantime, go on to something else.
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And you know, looking at his example and how productive he was, and he wrote brilliantly
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as well, I just decided I've got to give that a try.
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Plus, of course, he said, if you don't give me the first chapter in the next week, you're
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The prospect of a hanging concentrates your mind wonderfully, as Johnson said, and I wrote
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And after that, I think I never look back.
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By the way, I should say, you're very kind.
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Haven't written that many books at all.
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In fact, one of the stains on my record is that I co-wrote one book.
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The book you very kindly mentioned on Roots of Terrorism was written likewise in about
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four weeks in a fellowship in Australia, and this one was written in three months.
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I've edited a lot of books and I've written chapters for books of other people and so
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But I'm a bit of a lazy guy that way.
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I mean, I need someone to really push me and slap me around and kick me in the pants.
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And I write a lot for friends.
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So if an academic friend says, oh, give me a chapter on this or write a piece for that
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or even this book, Nandini Mehta, who was an old friend at Juggernaut, said, come on,
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Kanthi, I've asked you a couple of times, write this book quickly.
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And I wouldn't say I did it out of a sense of obligation.
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I did it out of a sense of friendship and not wanting to let her down one more time.
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So you know, I'm a bit of an externally driven writer.
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If you get me by the throat and shake me up a bit and shame me, I'll write.
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And that's pretty much the problem I face as well, that if I have a deadline to give
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a column by, I'll give it.
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But if I have to be like internally driven, it's a bit of a problem, though.
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I keep telling my students, obviously, about the constant trade-off that everything involves
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between getting it done and getting it right.
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And my point always is when it comes to the first draft, you have to get it done.
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Getting it right is something that you do in subsequent edits and so on.
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Now I'm also intrigued by the notion that you moved away from the thought that you have
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to have everything figured out before you write.
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And I'm reminded of this quote by the economist Deirdre McCloskey when she said, quote, don't
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wait until the research is done to begin writing because writing is a way of thinking.
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Now to what extent does writing and also teaching actually help your thinking with the subject?
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One of the things I liked about this book and that contributed to its lucidity was that
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there's a very clear framework through which you are looking at India-China relations,
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the four Ps, as it were, which we'll talk about in detail.
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Do you kind of begin with a framework?
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Does that sort of framework or the way of looking at a problem, the getting meta about
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a problem, as it were, emerge while teaching, while writing, and then you flesh it out?
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And do you think for that reason that those who write more will inevitably be better thinkers
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and those who write less because writing forces you to think that much more clearly and that
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Yeah, I think you've raised a lot of interesting issues there.
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For me, I mean, with this book, I know we'll get to it, but just in terms of the process,
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the publisher said, you know, write something that's for a general audience, first of all,
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so don't have a big, complicated theoretical framework that leads you into the subject
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and informs it and so on.
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But on the other hand, I realized that, you know, what I would end up with as a result
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then might be just a long list of topics, and there are many things that are missing
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The river water problem, Pakistan as an issue between India and China, trade and financial
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relations between the countries, and they were all there in my original list.
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And I think juggernaut books probably hope that some of those would all be addressed
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But I realized fairly early on that I would just have a list and I would knock off all
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these topics, for instance, also the whole issue of India, China in different regions,
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Southeast Asia, South Asia, Africa, Latin America.
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And you know, first of all, I wouldn't meet the wordage, but secondly, it would just be
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And so it seems to me that one of the things we're trained in an academic life, particularly,
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is you've got to try and develop some kind of an argument.
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And that can come from two places, although I think they're kind of linked.
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One place you get your winnowing out of ideas is you go to theory and you sort of say, well,
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what would theory expect us to think about in terms of the India-China relationship?
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Why they're in conflict?
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Why do they occasionally cooperate?
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And there are some answers there, obviously, from international relations theory.
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The other way is the other source of a sort of framework is to be a bit more inductive,
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From what you know, if you're immersed in the area that you're going to write about,
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you kind of throw up a set of topics, start to sort of group them and categorize them
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and see whether something emanates from that.
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Now, pure methodologists in academic life will tell you never do that, you know, induction
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can never lead you to knowledge.
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I think that's hogwash.
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And I think there's actually a dialectic between the two.
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We bring some theoretical assumptions, perspectives, arguments, always to bear.
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Because in a complex world, you wouldn't see the woods for the trees.
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You couldn't put one foot forward in front of the other unless you had a theory of walking
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and where you're going.
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So you need some proto theory, and we always already have it.
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But you also need to be a bit playful.
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And you're always receptive to experience the empirical test.
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Things are bubbling around you, and they impact on your sense experience.
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They modify your theory.
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So in this book and in a lot of writing, I think I do what my supervisor did as well.
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He would say to me, just chuck out a bunch of initial ideas that you have, a set of topics
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literally spread them out on the page with your pen and paper, your computer, and then
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start to sort of cohere them into boxes, into categories.
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And he always quoted, I think, Aristotle to me saying, you know, Aristotle said that the
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first move in science is to put things in boxes, and I'm sure, you know, Indian forms
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of knowledge and so on would probably give you some similar, very sensible advice.
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And for me, I think I do go with that.
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I've got some working ideas.
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I don't work at them too much.
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I don't develop them too much.
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And then I throw out literally sort of a bunch of words on a piece of paper, and then I begin
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And I began to think, what kind of boxes are them and linkages between them?
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And how many of these can I really handle?
#
How much of these make for some coherence?
#
What will I have to throw out?
#
Where is it too much work?
#
And I'm simply not an expert enough, and it's not the kind of area I should delve into.
#
Otherwise, I'd make a fool of myself, you know.
#
And I think that's how the four P's emanated.
#
And throughout a bunch of topics, I reworked stuff that Juggernaut had kind of pushed at
#
me, and the four P's kind of popped up.
#
And I tried to give them some clothing to link them up a bit more conceptually back
#
Juggernaut didn't like it very much.
#
They said it was a bit too much for the general reader.
#
We had a friendly disagreement.
#
But you know, ultimately, for a general readership, I think their instinct was correct.
#
And so I didn't elaborate these four P's and where they come from very much.
#
I could probably do that if you push me, or even if you don't, and say a little bit about
#
why I think they are the four important areas.
#
And so I think that's how I operate in my writing.
#
One other thing that you touched on, which is quite nice, and one that I insist on, is
#
the link between teaching and writing or research.
#
And I think it's a very important one.
#
Sometimes you hear from academic colleagues that, you know, there's teaching and oh, gosh,
#
And it takes time away from research.
#
And I just don't buy that.
#
My best ideas have come to me when I've taught.
#
And I've had to explain in the most direct, sensible, clear way to students, what are
#
some of the fundamentals we're dealing with here?
#
And I've understood my discipline better when I've done that.
#
And you know, when you do that also, you kind of, when you're preparing slides or a lecture,
#
you suddenly realize that there are enormous gaps in knowledge.
#
You think that there are all kinds of handy dandy books and articles that will answer
#
a certain question, and then you realize there aren't.
#
And that indicates that there's a gap and an opportunity to write something.
#
So I think that that's very important.
#
But equally, research is very important teaching, which is to say the best moment in teaching
#
is when you can bring to bear an area that you're mining in your research into the classroom.
#
It just, you know, there's then a kind of authenticity to what you say and do and a
#
Students can feel that you have chewed on this and have really made sense of it.
#
And I think they can feel the kind of passion and excitement you bring them.
#
Yeah, that's that's fascinating is something I can relate to in the sense that, you know,
#
I felt that I began to understand writing better when I actually started teaching it
#
and not so much before that.
#
And equally, when I taught podcasting as someone who actually does a podcast, it just came
#
that much more naturally, and it also fed back.
#
So it wasn't just that my doing of podcasting helped my teaching of it.
#
But while teaching it, I began to think more at a meta level, for example, about the nature
#
of interviewing and, you know, the different kinds of approaches you can take to conversations
#
and all of that, which I think also helped my craft as a practitioner.
#
Now, here's a question.
#
When you write a book and not just this book, but when you write any other book in a field
#
where a lot of growth in terms of knowledge is sort of incremental, you know, gradually
#
the layers come over years and decades and so on and so forth, it strikes me that there
#
might be therefore two competing pressures that you might face.
#
And one pressure would be that I have to say something new, that I have to in some way
#
add to this body of knowledge, which could be dangerous because it could lead to someone
#
trying too hard, for example.
#
Or there could be a pressure which would probably, you know, maybe come from a publisher who
#
might want to pitch a book for the masses or whatever.
#
And there the pressure might be that come up with something definitive, like if you're
#
writing a book on India versus China, be definitive about the why, be definitive about what will
#
happen going ahead, which of course you can't because it's incredibly messy and muddy.
#
And, you know, every good scholar will have that humility to accept that, especially in
#
a field like this, that there is so much that may never be known.
#
How do you deal with these sort of competing pressures?
#
Is this stuff that you've thought about?
#
Have you ever as a young academic perhaps aired on one side or the other?
#
I mean, I increasingly have become kind of what's the word?
#
I mean, slightly, slightly more modest is the word that springs to mind right at the
#
moment and or moderate in a way, a different way of saying it is I've stopped taking myself
#
And what that means in the writing is that I'm committed to trying to present stuff clearly,
#
use the word kindly about the book, lucidity.
#
And I think that's an important thing to do now more and more.
#
And take the example of this book, I think those two pressures are exactly right, which
#
is that on the one hand, as academics, we're always taught, you know, value add, look for
#
something quite original that you're you're trying to say and communicate, otherwise don't
#
I mean, you're just adding to the noise in the system and overloading it.
#
On the other hand, you know, I think the publishers set me a time limit, which meant that I couldn't
#
do a very original research, I can delve into some archival material that was that nobody
#
else had touched or brought to light.
#
I didn't have the time to come up with a grand theoretical proposition or a set of concepts
#
that are used to interrogate relatively familiar materials and give us a different perspective
#
So I didn't have that leeway either.
#
And so it seemed to me that, you know, I ought to kind of make a virtue out of all of these
#
different constraints or opportunities and settle for the kind of book in a way that
#
juggernaut were urging on me, which is in three months, can I pull together quite a
#
lot of stuff that's already out there that's quite well known and put it into some sort
#
of a framework, nothing too revolutionary, nothing too rigorous and stringent intellectually
#
such that I would have to get into very convoluted arguments about theories and concepts and
#
to show that, you know, here was a brilliant new incision into the problem and a way of
#
thinking about not just India-China relations, but perhaps all these kinds of enduring rivalries.
#
So it seemed to me that I needed to strike a balance somewhere in between.
#
And I think if the book has success, then it may have struck that balance.
#
I pulled together relatively respectable, well-known materials already out there and
#
pulled it into a simple framework, nothing too sophisticated.
#
And that made it fairly quick and easy to write.
#
I think it makes it and it may solve your problem of someday remembering something about
#
The four P's may stay in your brain for a while.
#
And I think, you know, that might allow me to clothe the material in a way that was easy
#
on the eye of the beholder.
#
I mean, I could dress in a very jazzy way when I go out.
#
But if you dress simply, perhaps the image of you walking around will endure.
#
So I think I tried to use the four P's idea to make it simpler for a reader and yet provide
#
some kind of a scaffolding with which to arrange the empirical materials.
#
Yeah, and you've absolutely succeeded in that, in my view, but we'll talk about that as we
#
Let's go back to your personal history, which is also very fascinating, because you are
#
Your father was a very famous diplomat, Girija Shankar Bajpai, who…
#
That's your grandfather.
#
You have a famous photograph of him with Nehru as well at a 1948 conference and so on.
#
And you travel the world.
#
Like in your book, you've written about how, you know, when the China War happened in 62,
#
you were in London and it was cold and you were freezing.
#
And that strikes me as, you know, traveling around the world and all of that, as a very
#
consequential childhood to have, because it means you are different from all the other
#
kids your age at that point, and one can speculate about why that may be the case.
#
Maybe you are less ossified in your ways of thinking about your people and other people
#
Maybe there's a natural sense of curiosity that can evolve from there and so on and so
#
So, you know, looking back, what was your childhood like?
#
And is there something to the sense that you feel that it shaped you differently from what
#
it would have, say, had you just grown up in Delhi, for example?
#
So I'm a diplomat's kid, Foreign Service brat.
#
And I think those kids all over the world, from whichever Foreign Service they're in,
#
they do tend to be more ecumenical, perhaps more liberal is the word, or cosmopolitan.
#
I think through their schooling, as they move around with their parents, inevitably they're
#
forced to look through other worldviews.
#
You go to school, you encounter foreigners, you in part take on their worldviews inevitably
#
and see the world through their eyes as well.
#
Curiously, of course, the other side of it is that as a diplomat's kid, you're also immersed
#
in your nationalism, your country perspective.
#
Around the dinner table with your parents, your siblings, the other kids in the embassy,
#
the other members of the embassy, there's a very Indian kind of national environment
#
And there's that lens simultaneously.
#
So I think the thing with diplomat's kids is that from almost the day of mother's milk,
#
they're always bifocal, always looking through things through that national lens, which they're
#
immersed in, and their heart beats to it.
#
But they're also constantly encountering other views, how others see us, how others see our
#
country, how others see other countries, third countries, and of course their own country.
#
And you as a diplomat's son have a certain perspective on the host country, and then
#
you get a picture of the host country refracted through the lens of the citizens of that country
#
I think diplomat's kids are like that, and they have to be open to that.
#
They have to fit in in both environments and make sense of both environments constantly.
#
So they're constantly testing reality against both these lenses.
#
And I mean, I think it's a good thing.
#
I mean, I don't mean to say that those who haven't had that opportunity don't have their
#
own kind of strength, perhaps are more unifocal and know what they know and are not easily
#
deflected and have great certainty about things that they do and think.
#
And we need people like that in the world as well.
#
But we also need people who want to roll things around their tongue, who want to be more playful,
#
who want to be experimental intellectually.
#
I mean, I don't mean to say that I'm the most creative human being in the world by any means
#
because of this upbringing.
#
I wouldn't say that's true, and there are other forces that operate on that issue.
#
But I think my reflexive starting point, as it were, is that I don't like to go with the
#
And my antenna always go up when people are too insistent on a singular point of view.
#
And I think that that was a bit of a struggle for me in my childhood.
#
The first 11 years or so, my parents were outside India.
#
They continued to be, but they did feel when I was 11 years old that I had to come back
#
to India and be in an Indian environment, partly because they felt that I was losing
#
a touch with Indian reality and also because they were moving around constantly.
#
And the schools were an unsettling experience if you keep moving schools every three or
#
And so I went back to boarding school in Delhi and then Dehradun.
#
And I think it was a fabulous thing that my parents did.
#
And so I had an upbringing as a diplomats kid where I sort of was raised to be uncomfortable
#
with herd mentalities, with givens, with an orthodoxy.
#
And I think that's remained with me.
#
When I started out in more public life as an academic on television in the 80s and 90s
#
when I was pretty active in Delhi, you know, I exited into a period when I was very certain
#
about stuff and I argued very stringently about things like India's nuclear weapons
#
I think actually after that period, an intermittent phase of being so singular, I've come back
#
to now rolling things around my tongue, I think a bit more.
#
And that's recovering that sort of early immersion in this bifocal world that I grew up in.
#
So just sort of thinking aloud, I mean, this brings me to another sort of question that
#
When I look at young people growing up today, so many of them choose to do all their thinking
#
and their talking and their posturing and whatever it is in public, which strikes me
#
as something dangerous because if everything that I thought or wrote in my teens or 20s
#
was on Twitter and people took screenshots and all of that, one, of course, it would
#
not be fair because young people need that kind of space to grow up and change their
#
mind and roll things on their tongue as you put it so well.
#
But the other thing that it can do is that it can ossify you into positions.
#
Like when you're 17 or 18, you might go online, you might find a tribe and you might join
#
that tribe and you're part of an echo chamber and then you raise your status within that
#
echo chamber with harsher and harsher pronouncements and, you know, by signaling virtue more vociferously
#
than the next guy and so on and so forth.
#
And because you take those chances, you start believing them.
#
They become much harder than they would otherwise have been.
#
And to me, that strikes me as a danger and a shame that like once you write something
#
down definitively, once you identify yourself with a certain way of thinking, then you change.
#
You change to the extent that you're more likely to hold on to that.
#
And so do you think that that's a danger in these modern times where a position once taken
#
actually ends up shaping who you are?
#
Like in your case, you said, you know, you had more certainty about certain positions
#
in the 80s or whatever when you would be on television as a talking head.
#
But those clips don't exist on YouTube, right?
#
People are not going to put screenshots of your old article saying, hey, you said this
#
So you have any thoughts on the changing times and how they can change a person's development
#
of self even because you're just so much more out there?
#
Isn't it an irony that this technology that came along of the social media and all of
#
that and the unending limitless kind of memory now with cloud and so on that's there.
#
I suppose the promise was that this would lead to kind of enormous liberalization of
#
thought that people would be able to express themselves who otherwise would not be able
#
to because they couldn't write a column for a newspaper.
#
They wouldn't be asked on television as a talking head.
#
I mean, because there's so many platforms where they can be heard.
#
And so I guess I mean, I went along with that thought that there's something greatly liberalizing
#
that would happen as a result of this, although I wasn't much until very recently on social
#
media platforms or any of those kinds of instruments.
#
But it's turned out that, as you say, I mean, they've become kind of silos, echo chambers.
#
They become platforms for insulting people.
#
And when you insult someone, I mean, there are a couple of reactions.
#
One is they could exit the system, though that seems to be quite hard to do.
#
You just become aloof and exit.
#
The other is that, you know, you fight back and you fight back, you dig in to your point
#
of view even more stringently and become more stubborn and lose your plasticity and openness
#
to disconfirming facts or to alternative perspectives.
#
And the third, of course, is that, you know, you do sort of on the platforms themselves,
#
you know, show that you can change your mind and and change over time more or less.
#
And I think that it seems to me that all three are quite difficult.
#
But I would like to think that I would try and do the third, which is try to signal that
#
if you do make a point about my work or something I've just said, which holds promise of even
#
a critique of me, that I'm open to it.
#
And, you know, I went on Twitter when this book was coming on online because Juggernaut
#
said, come on, you've got to just get out there and move with the times.
#
And of course, it's good for the book and your ideas.
#
And I've already had people challenge me sometimes dismissively, sometimes slightly insultingly,
#
sometimes generously, but but with disagreement.
#
And I think one has to deal with that.
#
And I hope it hasn't been huge.
#
But I've tried to deal with it by sort of saying, yeah, you may have something there.
#
The book was a first cut at this problem.
#
It's not the last cut on the problem.
#
It's not the definitive word.
#
And by the way, what is a definitive word in, you know, in such a complicated world?
#
But if it's provoking and fostering a conversation, as long as we keep it more or less polite,
#
So I think, you know, to my mind, we're stuck with these platforms.
#
I mean, whether we like it or not, I don't think we're going to resile and move away
#
And there's something emancipatory and celebratory about them.
#
And I think we have to work our way through to a place where some of the really dark tonalities
#
And people will learn that, you know, insulting, terribly stubborn kinds of sticking to your
#
points of view, being dismissive about others really just doesn't work.
#
And I still have that positive progressive view that dialogue in itself, they'll be learning
#
And I think, you know, I'm just getting a sense in the last few months that I've been
#
on Twitter that something like that is already perhaps beginning to happen.
#
And the last point I would make is that, you know, I mean, nobody can be consistent over
#
their entire lifetime, and it would be idiotic to be so.
#
I think that was addressed to Gandhi on his, you know, his change of view of violence and
#
war and his participation, you know, back in the day, he had come out in favor of recruiting
#
troops for the British cause in the early part of the 20th century.
#
He had tried to recruit people for the Boer War.
#
He had, you know, participated as an ambulance person in the First World War, I think, or
#
So people said to him, well, I mean, this back then you did that.
#
And now you're preaching nonviolent, you're not consistent.
#
And, you know, he said, yeah, I mean, I'm not consistent.
#
Why would you expect me to be consistent?
#
And I think Keynes said it more, was it Keynes who said something like, you know, if the
#
facts change, I change my mind.
#
I mean, you said it much, yeah, that's exactly.
#
And I usually push that out there as well.
#
So I think that's a useful thing to say.
#
Yeah, no, I think you've kind of largely had a sort of a lucky experience on Twitter because
#
a lot of your interactions would kind of be self-selected, like people who are A, already
#
interested in your work and therefore a certain kind of person and B, when you follow a lot
#
of scholars you admire, they follow you back, you're kind of curating your feed.
#
And I think one of the essential ways of tackling Twitter is curate your feed very carefully
#
and you can get enormous insight and have great conversations that way.
#
But by and large, the other thing that I noticed about Twitter, which is interesting, is that,
#
you know, we tend to think that the whole space is incredibly toxic.
#
Now the truth is that there are these vocal minorities who are incredibly toxic because
#
they are caught in these echo chambers and always posturing and so on.
#
But there's a vast silent majority, which is not like that at all, which is something
#
that I realize through my podcast and through the courses that I've done where, you know,
#
I popularize them to Twitter, people sign on, you realize what those people are like
#
and then you look on Twitter where everyone is shouting.
#
And I'm kind of baffled by just the fundamental rudeness that Twitter brings to the discourse,
#
like the act of quote tweeting, for example, where you quote tweet someone and you mock
#
And that's so incredibly rude because, you know, if you and I were talking at a party
#
and I said something that you disagreed with, you would not immediately turn to our neighbor
#
and point at me and say, look, this guy is a fool.
#
That's just so incredibly rude.
#
It's so bizarre, you know, that we have to not take anything in good faith at all.
#
But this is a digression.
#
Why should we talk about these times where we still have the past to talk about?
#
So tell me a little bit more about your childhood.
#
You studied at Doon School also for a while.
#
Because on the one hand, you pointed out that your parents wanted you to be back home because
#
they felt that you were being away from the realities of India, as it were.
#
Now, when I look back on my also privileged childhood as a son of a civil servant, although
#
I didn't live all over the world in India itself, but nevertheless massively privileged
#
childhood and going to good schools and so on.
#
And as I grew into adulthood, I realized what a blinkered view of the world I had been given
#
just by, you know, the occasion of my privilege that, okay, I am the child of these people.
#
You know, I'm using my dad's car to go here or to go there.
#
This is the kind of school I am.
#
Everyone else is also an incredibly pampered kid.
#
And this is like one view of India from one particular vantage point.
#
And you kind of grow older, reach adulthood, and you realize that there's so much more
#
And so one, what was Doon School like?
#
And two, I presume that everyone you studied with at the time would be present day elites.
#
Like I did an episode with Ramchandra Guha where he told me about his time in college
#
in Delhi where his list of classmates is like a who's who of India today, a small group
#
So tell me a bit about that experience and how your thinking kind of evolves through
#
And then we'll move on to your personal journey and, you know, what you studied and all of
#
Well, first of all, Ram Guha was with me at school, at Doon School, he was one year behind
#
But I think that, you know, first of all, when I came back to India, I went to St. Xavier's
#
School in Delhi, in civil lines in Delhi.
#
It had a boarding section in those days, and quite a number of diplomats kids, Indian Foreign
#
Service kids were there.
#
And that's where I started out.
#
Although my father was a Doon School boy, in fact, he was the first school captain of
#
So, you know, I had a link to the school.
#
My brother had been there, my uncles had been there, but my father didn't actually send
#
He was posted to Pakistan at that time in the Deputy High Commissioner ship of in Karachi.
#
And he would come to Delhi periodically.
#
And he thought that my transition back to India, along with my two elder brothers and
#
my younger sister, that he would see us occasionally, and that would help us transition back to
#
So, I was in St. Xavier's for three and a half years.
#
And when they decided to close the boarding, he then petitioned Doon School to take me
#
because I joined the school quite late in comparison to other boys.
#
So I think the experience of the two schools were very different.
#
I mean, St. Xavier's was basically a huge day school with this little boarding element.
#
And as you know, it's a Jesuit school.
#
So there was a very, very different kind of atmosphere.
#
I wouldn't say it was a religious atmosphere in the sense of, you know, we all had to keep
#
to sort of Catholic orthodoxies or anything like that.
#
It wasn't shoved down our throat.
#
So there was an evening prayer and you could say it or you could just hold your hands and
#
say your own prayer quietly and so on.
#
But I think, you know, there was studying and there was a bit of stuff on the sports
#
field and that was pretty much your life.
#
And it was very disciplined in the sense that every moment of your day was metered and clearly
#
your studies were the primary thing.
#
And the students there, they were all mostly kids from Delhi, who for one reason or another,
#
you know, couldn't be day students.
#
Maybe they lived too far away in Delhi.
#
They were people from outside Delhi, but from in and around Delhi, not very far away.
#
Some diplomats kids as well.
#
But Doon school was very different.
#
And, you know, I think we think that and there's a view, popular view, that Doon school, May
#
College, which may send their school in Gwalior, these so-called public schools, they're the
#
But actually, the picture is rather different.
#
It's the big day schools that are the Baba Lok schools, because the big business guys,
#
the very senior civil servants, the politicians kids, they tend to go to the big day schools,
#
the Moran school in Delhi, St. Columba, St. Xavier's in Bombay, Campion and schools like
#
Whereas the kids who go to Doon school or Mayo College, these are people who are from
#
the second and third tier towns mostly of India.
#
And in Doon school, they are mostly from the second and third tier towns of UP, now Uttarakhand
#
as well, Haryana, Punjab, sometimes from Bihar, UP, Madhya Pradesh.
#
Some kids from southern India and later some students from northeast India.
#
But Delhi party so-called or Bombay party or Calcutta party, these were really a distinct
#
minority of the school.
#
And the reason for that is that, you know, it was the students from these small towns,
#
Saharanpur, places like that, Bhatinda, et cetera, et cetera, who didn't have a lot of
#
facilities whose local schools weren't necessarily all that great.
#
And the second, third tier elites who wanted to give their kids, you know, an impromptu
#
or a better school experience as well, then look to boarding schools like Doon school.
#
And so actually, most of the students, even in my time, I wouldn't say they were the greatest
#
There were some Maharaja's kids.
#
There were some big business kids.
#
There were some, you know, senior civil servants kids.
#
But there were a lot of kids from small businesses or farmers, children, I mean, I don't mean
#
small farmers, but, you know, medium sized farmer families and so on and so forth.
#
People who were in second and third tier towns from services backgrounds, that is to say
#
they provided some service locally, the tea estates in Assam and so on.
#
And actually, that's grown.
#
When I was headmaster of the school, we did a survey of the kinds of students.
#
And I can tell you that, you know, most of the children overwhelmingly were from the
#
second and third tier towns.
#
And contrary to the view, I would say a very large proportion, more so than when I was
#
at the school as a boy, were comfortable in Hindi primarily.
#
And certainly their parents were more comfortable in Hindi.
#
I would say more than 50% of the kids at Doon school, their parents would be more comfortable
#
in expressing themselves in Hindi.
#
And so that was one part of the school that it actually wasn't that a Babylon elite mostly.
#
And I think the other thing was about Doon school was that it forced you out of, I mean,
#
of course, the school is a gated community, but you have to get out and live your life
#
also in Dehradun on outings, for instance.
#
The school has no amenities of the kind that you have in the big cities.
#
I mean, in those days in Dehradun, and even until recently, there were no malls.
#
There were no multiplexes.
#
There were certainly no discos and all of that.
#
And the other experience was that, particularly to Doon school, was that from the beginning,
#
thanks to the first two headmasters we had and the Indian teachers of the time, they
#
insisted on two things that forced you out into the community.
#
One was from the beginning, what later got to be called in India, SUPW, social
#
use for productive work.
#
And I think it was probably pretty much started at Doon school and a few other schools like
#
that, which is there was an insistence that the students had to go out and do community
#
work in villages in particular.
#
And that was a requirement of the school.
#
You had a little logbook and you had to write down how much of that you did.
#
You could do some of that within the school as well.
#
But quite a lot of it was going out into the community.
#
The second was that every term for five days, you had to go trekking in the hills and you
#
went to very remote places and locales from Dehradun northwards.
#
And I mean, I don't want to oversell it as a kind of foray into ordinary India, but it
#
I mean, you came up against just nature, the mountains, the hills, ordinary people in villages
#
who often helped you as you were dealing with the terrain and geography and so on out there.
#
So I think that in some ways it was more of an experience of getting out of metropolitan
#
life that I had grown up in, because I grew up in Paris and London before I came home
#
And then if I got out of St. Xavier school, it was Delhi of the 1960s.
#
But Dehradun of the 1960s was something very different.
#
And the mountains and hills and surrounding villages, I mean, it was it was not a metropolitan
#
life in that sense at all.
#
And I think the school still gives people a bit of a connect to an India that's outside
#
And one reason I took the headmastership, and I'll just end the segment with that thought
#
perhaps, is that I wanted my children who were growing up kind of the Barbalogue life
#
in JNU, where I was a warden of a hostel, and where they were going to, you know, kind
#
of Barbalogue schools, the new schools, the Vasanth Valley or the Sriram schools, where
#
all the kids were businessmen's kids or very senior civil servants kids who were all very
#
metropolitan and cosmopolitan.
#
Whereas when they got to Doon school and Wellam girls, my daughter went to Wellam girls, later
#
my son went to Doon school, I mean, it was a very different set of parents and boys.
#
And I thought my kids needed that they needed to get out of Delhi.
#
Yeah, that's fascinating a lot to think about, you know, I must confess here that I had that
#
impression of Doon being a Barbalogue kind of school as well you hear about, you know,
#
the Gandhi's going there and so on and so forth.
#
And that's what you imagine.
#
So this is quite fascinating.
#
So you know, we'll take another digression before we get back to our narrative of personal
#
And this, you know, I'm struck by the phrase, it was not like the Delhi of the 1960s.
#
And obviously, I understand the contrast which you're talking about between 1960s Delhi and
#
But you know, for someone who lives in Delhi today, for a young person today, how would
#
you describe 1960s Delhi?
#
Like how has it changed?
#
What was it like back then?
#
Because I would find it impossible, for example, very hard, not impossible to describe 1980s
#
Delhi, which I know a little bit better.
#
But what was 1960s really like?
#
It was a very quiet town.
#
And I literally mean that.
#
I don't mean it metaphorically.
#
You could go out into, you know, central Delhi, Lachin's Delhi, and walk around there with
#
They weren't, you know, pile driving cars and trucks and buses and honking and all of
#
It was gracious in the sense that there wasn't this kind of very aggressive sort of scenes
#
and moments that you felt you feel now or even in 1980s Delhi.
#
And I think it was a Delhi, I think, to be fair, it was a Lachin's Delhi in the sense
#
of an elite that was more anglicized, more westernized, living in bungalow life and in
#
the few select colonies.
#
It was a much cleaner Delhi.
#
It was a very livable city at that level.
#
There weren't any fancy malls, obviously, or fancy cineplexes.
#
There were very few foreign goods.
#
There was none of that.
#
If you went to Khan Market, there were no shop hoardings visible, pretty much.
#
There were a few cars and motorbikes.
#
And you went into shops where everything was available in cupboards and behind glass cupboards.
#
And it was very unglamorous, all Indian goods, basically.
#
So it was a very different kind of Delhi.
#
I think it was comfortable at that level.
#
And it was a pretty westernized, elitist Delhi.
#
And for diplomats' kids, and you know, my father's family had been in Delhi since New
#
Delhi was built in the 1920s.
#
My grandfather had come from UP at that time.
#
And so, I mean, personally, of course, when I did get out of St. Xavier's School, I came
#
back from Doon School briefly on my way to see my parents wherever they were abroad.
#
It was a Delhi where I knew a lot of people through family connections and so on.
#
So it was a different experience, I think, and there's a sort of a sense of nostalgia
#
It was a very tractable Delhi.
#
I think, I mean, when I went from St. Xavier's School to visit my grandmother in South Delhi,
#
you know, she had a plot of land in Friends Colony.
#
My friends who used to laugh at me and say, oh, you're going off to Faridabad, you know.
#
So it was the edge of town.
#
And a really big, adventurous outing was to go to South Extension when my parents would
#
come from Pakistan to visit for a time.
#
They would take me to South Extension and my friends would be very excited about, you
#
know, you're going to the edge of the town.
#
And Vasant Vihar, I mean, if you looked out for Modern Bazaar, the shop there, there was
#
nothing but farmland there.
#
So you know, the landscape was very, very, very different in Delhi.
#
Delhi was civil lines in North Delhi and all of that.
#
And then, you know, Rajpath and Lachin's Delhi and Defense Colony, Friends Colony were the
#
And so I think it was very tractable.
#
I would walk sometimes.
#
I could walk from my uncle's house at Wellesley Road, from the Armed Forces officers mess
#
there to Connaught Place.
#
Connaught Place was a center for things happening, discotheques and shops and fast food, such
#
And, you know, I would think nothing of walking there as a 14-year-old or a 15-year-old getting
#
You know, you would be on a street waiting for a scooter and it would be pin drop silence.
#
And then you would hear a car come.
#
If I could very badly mimic the sense of it, of a kind of eeee, a car would go and then
#
there would be silence again.
#
That's unimaginable, I think, almost anywhere in Delhi today.
#
So yeah, that was in Delhi.
#
But, you know, Delhi today has its own excitement and vibrancy, I think.
#
So you can't live in the past.
#
Yeah, you can't live in the past.
#
You also mentioned that you went to Dehradun because, I mean, one reason was that you wanted
#
your kids to have a life outside the Babalog life and all that.
#
Babalog, by the way, would be such a lovely name for a novel because you can read it both
#
And that's one reason why you went there.
#
But I guess another reason for why a place like that would be extremely attractive is,
#
like you said, the quietness of it, the pace of life being so slow, the hills around and
#
And, you know, at an abstract level, many of us aspire to that.
#
We say, no, we will go to the mountains and live a quiet life like that.
#
But at the same time, the kind of life you might want to live in the abstract collides
#
with the kind of things you want to do in the concrete, which often require being in
#
a big city, which are often not just work, but often just other things, meeting friends
#
regularly and so on and so forth.
#
Is that something you've thought about?
#
Because when I was just reading the bare facts of your biography, it struck me that you bounced
#
around a lot that, you know, you've traveled with your diplomat father, you've been in
#
Doon School and all of that, you've done the schooling here, you're sort of BA and MA at
#
British Columbia, then your PhD at Illinois, then you come back to Doon School and in between
#
you've taught at Doon School, you come back there as a headmaster, then you come back
#
to Delhi, you're at JNU and now you're in Singapore.
#
So how does one think of that?
#
Like does one think of how one wants to live one's life purely in terms of career goals
#
that these are the things I want to study or explore or this would be an interesting
#
institution to be part of or have you also had other considerations while kind of planning
#
your life out that this is also where I want to be, this kind of life suits me?
#
I think, I mean, I'd love to say that, you know, I was a person who thought that bouncing
#
around and moving jobs and so on was, I mean, that I kind of was ahead of the curve.
#
I mean, who stays in a job for very long now?
#
It seems to be the norm that you move around and you're hypermobile between jobs, between
#
But I don't think I was that clever or imaginative or adventurous.
#
I just went where the jobs were.
#
I mean, my father was a civil servant.
#
He had a plot of land that he inherited, but he had no money to give me.
#
He was not really willing to exert himself to get me a job of any kind.
#
And the one time he tried, I mean, it was farcical and it didn't suit me anyway.
#
So I had to make my way in the world and I just went where I thought somebody would actually
#
And my first foray to Doon School in 1979, 80 was, I mean, basically, I mean, my dad
#
made it fairly clear that I couldn't be on the payroll for very long and I had to get
#
off and start arranging my life and my finances.
#
And when I said, no, I'm not interested in sitting for the civil service or going into
#
business, then he was like, OK, beta, then better make some plans of moving on.
#
You can't live with me forever.
#
And not being adventurous, I just looked for who would want me.
#
I hoped that someone in journalism might want me, but there weren't many places in those
#
So I wrote off to my old school.
#
And so I went to Doon School to teach for a year.
#
But what I realized was that I'm not really a schoolmaster per se.
#
So after a year, I went on to do the Ph.D. in America.
#
But when I was finishing at Illinois, finishing the Ph.D., what I did know was that I didn't
#
want to live in America.
#
I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the U.S. and earlier in Canada.
#
But it just didn't seem to me that America was really deep in my heart that way.
#
And American lifestyles suited me, even though, you know, up to that point, most of my life
#
But I just thought that there's something in terms of lifestyles and the future that
#
And my wife was Canadian, white Canadian.
#
And I think she sort of had a little bit of a sense that she would like to be back in
#
North America for the longer time.
#
But she was very, very kind to me and I think indulged me a lot.
#
And she agreed that, you know, we would move back to India.
#
And I was encouraged by my supervisor, Steve Cohen, who wanted to train Indian and other
#
South Asian students to go back so that they could hopefully make a contribution to the
#
intellectual life of their own country, particularly academic life.
#
And so with his encouragement also, I thought about coming back to India as soon as I finished.
#
And my first job, actually, you missed it, but I don't blame you, but it was in Baroda
#
at MS University in Baroda.
#
And that was partly because although JNU was a natural habitat for me, it has such a massive
#
school of international studies, one of the biggest in the world, I had 85 faculty members,
#
you know, at the time that I finally went there.
#
But I still had an instinct that I wanted to start out decentered from the center.
#
I wanted to be away from Delhi.
#
And I'd had my first child, she was very young, my daughter, Gayathri.
#
And I think my wife, Bobby, was a bit dubious living in a small town in India.
#
She lived in Dehradun with me for a while.
#
But I thought that it would be a bit of an adventure and it would be nice to see another
#
And I had a cousin there who taught in the history department.
#
And she told me about the job opening.
#
And there weren't too many other jobs in international relations.
#
And I remember I finished defending my PhD thesis on a Saturday morning or some such.
#
And I was back in India on the Wednesday.
#
And I think I joined MS University on a Friday.
#
I mean, I may have got the days a week and all that mixed up, but it was within four
#
or five days of finishing a PhD.
#
I was back in India and in harness, as it were.
#
And you know, from there, I moved back to the States for a while.
#
I thought the university, which had been glorious for two or three years, was going in a direction
#
that I wasn't enjoying ultimately.
#
And that's a slightly different story.
#
It was getting a bit too nativist for me, but they were good years.
#
And I went back essentially to Illinois for about a year.
#
But again, with no thought of really staying there, although again, I think my wife would
#
have quite liked to be back in North America with her family.
#
But again, I mean, one day I got a phone call sitting in Illinois in my office.
#
And it was Abid Hussain, the famous Indian civil servant and ex-ambassador to the US.
#
And he'd been, I think, deputy chairman of the planning commission or some such.
#
And I had never met him.
#
And he just said, Babu.
#
And I said, I'm sorry, who is this?
#
He said, Arey, main Abid bol raho hoon.
#
And of course, I'd heard of him.
#
But he spoke to me in such a familiar way that I was kind of drawn to him and into his
#
world almost immediately.
#
And he was vice chairman of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and the Rajiv Gandhi Institute
#
of Contemporary Studies, which is the think tank wing of the RGF.
#
And he said, I've heard about you from Steve Cohen, who is here at the Ford Foundation
#
And he said, you're very keen to come back to India.
#
And come for a couple of years and help me with this think tank.
#
And then you can do what you like.
#
And I finished the semester.
#
A few weeks later, I packed my bags.
#
And Bobby and I and the babies headed home.
#
So I think, you know, I mean, I won't tell you every step of the way of what happened
#
But I think I went where serendipitously jobs opened up.
#
I think there was a broad trajectory, which was that I always wanted to be home in India,
#
doing something in India.
#
So it was a personal kind of comfort issue.
#
I did have a bit of a sense of, can I do something for my country?
#
But I mean, I'm not trying to dress myself up as being somebody overly noble and all
#
But I just sort of felt comfortable and good.
#
And it seemed to work for me.
#
And I would say it sort of paid off.
#
You know, my whole professional life developed and flowered really in India.
#
And I'm tremendously grateful to the institutions that took a chance on me, my students that
#
helped make me what I am, the media in the 1980s that gave me an opportunity to make
#
a bit of a name for myself and all the rest of it, I mean, my colleagues.
#
And that's how all, again, why did I go to dune school?
#
I got a call one day as I was rushing off to do my early morning lectures, which I'm
#
never good at in early in the morning.
#
And somebody just said, Dr. Bajpai.
#
And I said, yeah, I'm so-and-so from a search company.
#
And somebody mentioned that you might be a candidate for the headmastership of the school.
#
And I said, oh, my gosh, well, I'm running off to class, but I mean, I can't discuss
#
But no, I never thought about it.
#
And I said, well, are you kind of open to it?
#
And I said, well, which old boy wouldn't be?
#
And they said, but would you like to have a chat later about it?
#
And I said, well, of course, I can't say no to that.
#
And so, you know, another serendipitous thing happened, and that took me off to the end.
#
And what's also fascinating is when you talk about these two phone calls.
#
And you know, I must remind our listeners that today, when we say I received a phone
#
call, it means, you know, you've got your mobile phone, and mine is always on silent.
#
So if I get a phone call, it's because I'm looking at my phone already, maybe going through
#
Twitter like a junkie, and the phone flashes, and I pick it up.
#
But otherwise, I'm not going to pick it up.
#
And at the time you would have got a phone call, it would have been a physical instrument.
#
It would have rung two or three times.
#
You wonder who's calling.
#
And then the person says what they say.
#
And that's also such a charming recounting, Mr. Hussain saying, Babu, it's like it's so
#
cinematic, almost a scene that you kind of describe.
#
So maybe after the biography for movie is made on your life, that could be a pivotal
#
scene, maybe add some dramatic elements to it.
#
Look outside after the phone call and your car blows up, something like that.
#
Anyways, let's sort of go back to the final strand of your personal journey that I'm curious
#
about, which is that how did you get into the specific areas that you got into?
#
Like when people are kids, you know, they'll dream of being a pilot or an ice cream seller
#
They won't dream of being like a foreign policy scholar or a noted academic and so on.
#
So how did this kind of happen?
#
Was it again serendipitous that you do one thing at a time and it takes you to that final
#
Or did you have a sense at some point that these are the things that I find fascinating
#
that I want to go deeper into, that I want to wake up in the morning and look forward
#
to the day and reading these kind of books, studying this kind of subject will give me
#
I think there was no straight line for me as there probably isn't for most people, you
#
And as I said, I was not a person who knew so definitively everything that I thought
#
and wanted to do and how I looked at the world.
#
But I think quite early, I had a sense that something to do with the written word always
#
was very important for me.
#
My eldest brother, Shyam, was, we would say a bookworm.
#
I think he introduced me to the world of books a lot and things like chess and intellectual
#
And my other brother, Ishwari, who went on to be a journalist, he introduced me to sports
#
and competition and being in the world, you know, being outside of myself.
#
And I mean, I play a lot of sports, or I did, but I'm not a sportsman per se.
#
It wasn't that influence that Ishwari had on me.
#
It was that being in the world, being active in the world, and he's a person of strong
#
views and ideas, and he can be much more argumentative in a good way.
#
And I think I got that from him, from my brother.
#
And I think from my younger sister, I got a sense of a certain kind of loyalty or commitment
#
to a sort of family and all of that.
#
And the metaphor for me there is, I think, you know, not being very public or demonstrative,
#
but doing something quietly towards the well-being of others.
#
I think my sister is a very outward person giving to family and all of that.
#
What that means, I think, for me in my arena was, I mean, trying to give something back
#
I mean, I don't want to state it too grandly.
#
I think my siblings had quite an impact on me.
#
But why this area then?
#
I mean, I think it developed gradually.
#
My father forced me to do economics because my brothers, especially my eldest brother,
#
said, oh, no, the way the world is going, you know, they were all history students.
#
My dad had done history at St. Stephen's.
#
Both my brothers did history at St. Stephen's.
#
And they got together when I was finishing at Doon School and said, Dad, you know, Kanthi
#
cannot do history, and better for him not to go to St. Stephen's.
#
Too many bhajpais went there and kind of wasted their time, so get out of it.
#
And my dad was an ambassador, high commissioner in Canada, and I went off to do an economics
#
But my heart was not in economics, really, although I kept and I thank economics for,
#
you know, instilling me the idea of thinking about things a bit systematically, trying
#
to have a bit of a framework, introduced me to issues like the philosophy of science and
#
things like that, that I think held me in good stead.
#
And I loved mathematics.
#
So the only attraction I had in economics was math, to be honest.
#
But what developed in me through my undergrad days in economics was that I started to do
#
some political science courses, and something along the way in my school life, I began to
#
develop this feeling that Indian democracy, I mean, that it seemed very firm.
#
This is, I mean, I went to Canada in 1973, I began my economics degree in 1973.
#
And of course, it was kind of a high tide still of democracy, it was before the emergency,
#
we were still in a kind of post-Neruvian glow, a Neruvian glow.
#
But I think I had a little bit of a sense that Indian democracy was still quite tenuous.
#
And in one of my courses in my second or third year under a professor called John Wood, who
#
was an Indianist, I read a lot of stuff about civil-military relations.
#
And what came out of that was how many countries in the Third World had had military coups,
#
including Pakistan, our neighbor.
#
Here was a military that was born of the same original military, the same genus, the Indian
#
Army, but it had intervened in politics in 1958.
#
And by the way, I'd lived in Pakistan, you know, in the 60s, because my dad was the Deputy
#
High Commissioner there.
#
And so I had a sense that, you know, it may be that Indian democracy was perhaps more
#
And I thought initially that India also might succumb to, in a moment of crisis or instability,
#
a kind of right-wing military coup at some point.
#
And later, I began to worry about the left wing.
#
I thought, you know, I don't know at what point, but gradually, perhaps it was the Naxalites
#
My brother, Shyam, had been at St. Stephen's College, and some of his friends had become
#
And so maybe I knew a little bit about that, and I was studying political philosophy alongside
#
And I had a sense that there could be a moment when the right wing and the left wing in India
#
would be thrown into this kind of antagonistic dialectic, and the liberal space in India
#
And my interest in social science became more political science than economics.
#
And even in economics, the course I loved the most was economic development theory.
#
And quite a lot of my interest there was, what are the political underpinnings of economic
#
growth and development?
#
And I thought, perhaps naively, that democracy and liberalism made for, you know, for long-term
#
And I was a bit worried that India, I was puzzled why India as a relatively liberal
#
democratic country was still, you know, in those days, the so-called Hindu rate of growth.
#
We weren't growing very fast.
#
So I think that led me to grad school in America, where I wanted to do civil literary relations.
#
That's why I ended up with Steve Cohen at the University of Illinois, because he was
#
the expert on the Indian Army, on civil literary relations in India.
#
And I didn't know it at the time, but he was already more or less finishing a book on the
#
And I hoped to write a book on comparative civil literary relations in South Asia.
#
I thought India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
#
When I arrived there, he'd already written the book on Pakistan.
#
But what stayed with me there was that, I mean, I was introduced to international relations there.
#
I had come thinking doing comparative politics, civil military relations, doing political
#
theory because I enjoyed that.
#
And I thought American government and politics, because at that time, it was the city on the
#
It was the world's greatest democracy.
#
And if you were concerned about democracy, then maybe there was something to learn from
#
But I started to take some courses in international relations, and I had inspiring professors.
#
And my fellowship was in arms control and security issues, international security.
#
And I saw a kind of nexus, and I'll end with that thought, which is that would democracy
#
survive in times of intense kind of security turmoil, whether internal security turmoil,
#
as I suppose happened in Pakistan, leading to the end of democracy there, or other forms
#
of internal turmoil, or in terms of an enormous challenge externally under which democracy
#
So I thought my worry was that, and a connecting threat to my earlier interest in democracy
#
was whether in India, the discourse around security might lead to a point where democracy
#
might be called into question.
#
And I thought the antagonism with Pakistan, particularly in the early 80s when I was there,
#
and overlooking the possibilities of cooperation with Pakistan, might someday lead to a situation
#
where democracy might come under stress in India.
#
And so my PhD was on SAARC, an unlikely subject, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation,
#
because I wanted to look at the prospects of cooperation in the region and how that
#
might make in all the countries, it might be a part of a kind of democratic spirit that
#
would flower in the region and undergird and strengthen democracy for the long term.
#
I'm probably now reading back into it a bit too much and trying to make myself too clever
#
about it, and maybe too philosophical about it, but there was something like that that
#
And that's how my academic career sort of flowered from there.
#
So when we are young, we are filled with this intellectual excitement whenever we discover
#
a new subject, especially when it comes to answering big questions about the world.
#
So there is this allure of grand theories, whether it's in economics or political science
#
or whatever, the first grand theory that you come across that is attractive and that explains
#
everything in a coherent way.
#
Doesn't matter if the explanations are true or false, because who knows at that time,
#
but that seems to offer a coherent frame of looking at the world.
#
One is tempted to adopt it.
#
And then what happens is that over a period of time, you kind of get mugged by reality.
#
You begin to realize that none of the grand theories are necessarily the whole answer
#
As a friend of mine likes to say, the quote goes, all models are false, but some models
#
So what was that intellectual journey on your part like in terms of what were the theories
#
that you were drawn towards?
#
What frames did you feel had the greatest explanatory power?
#
And earlier in this conversation, you spoke about how you had certainty about a lot of
#
things in the 80s where you weren't afraid to express your opinion firmly.
#
But now your view is much more kind of nuanced.
#
So take me a little bit through your personal intellectual development also of looking back
#
at that time and saying that, okay, these are the things that attracted me then that
#
I felt explained the world and this is how my frame has evolved over time and so on.
#
You know, I was a bit stupid.
#
I don't think I had a huge coherent intellectual framework, partly I think the way my political
#
science training was, was that it wasn't a high theory school.
#
I think some of the other departments were like that in, you know, the great schools
#
of the East Coast or the West Coast of America.
#
But at Illinois, it wasn't such a high theory school.
#
And I think we dealt more with kind of more meso or micro theories.
#
And a lot of my kind of theoretical predilections were towards issues related to deterrence
#
theory, for instance, which is the idea of how you with nuclear weapons or with conventional
#
military weapons, how can you prevent another country from attacking you?
#
That's a kind of a micro theory.
#
And I delved a lot into the logic of deterrence theory.
#
I knew a lot about civil military relations theory.
#
Why do military step into power and then fail to relinquish power at some point?
#
For my thesis, I read a lot about regionalism.
#
Why do countries come together particularly to cooperate at the regional level?
#
I had a whole argument about how we think about regions.
#
I mean, regions are a bit seamless.
#
How is it that we draw a boundary around a region at a particular place, more or less?
#
You know, again, a kind of middle range theory I had, I didn't have a big picture IR view
#
I mean, your listeners may not be in this area, but there are basically three big paradigms
#
in international relations, realism, which is a power-based understanding of the world,
#
liberalism, which is that certain institutions and rules and norms out there like international
#
law or diplomatic understandings and negotiations is what makes the world between nation states.
#
And the third is constructivism, which is that we make our world.
#
There are certain kinds of deep values and identities we hold to that we construct periodically,
#
which have great power.
#
And you know, it's those that affect how we think about other societies and our relationship
#
But, you know, at that time, I wasn't in that game.
#
I was in these middle range theories.
#
In that sense, I was a bit stupid.
#
But in a sense, I was a problem solver.
#
I was attracted to big theory.
#
I read a lot of sociology, literary criticism.
#
I read the French theorists, the Derrida's and the Foucault's and the Roland Barthes
#
and all of that, mostly so that I didn't look stupid.
#
It took quite a long time for that to settle in me to help me make sense of the world better.
#
But I had a kind of problem solving view of theory.
#
It would help me solve certain kinds of intellectual puzzles or concerns and not much more, I think.
#
And so that's where I was.
#
I mean, I looked at problems that interested me.
#
And then I tried to turn to theories that I thought would explain that not very big
#
theories, but kind of intermediate theory.
#
So I didn't have a very coherent picture.
#
Although deep down, I suppose, and I suppose that's true even now, I was kind of a liberal.
#
I'm a liberal in domestic politics, probably, and I'm a liberal internationally as well.
#
And I suppose there was always a substratum of that.
#
I just didn't quite know it.
#
I didn't quite have the language and the profundity to figure that out, or even the self-reflection.
#
But I think gradually that's where I ended up.
#
And I think something of what I learned very perfectly through these French theorists,
#
you know, the postmodernists and poststructuralists and deconstructionists and so on, came back
#
to this kind of bifocal worldview, which is don't make too many big assumptions about
#
there being certainties undergirding your worldviews.
#
There's no language game that produces a stable set of assumptions and arguments for all time.
#
You can't derive an understanding of the world about everything once and for all from some
#
Olympian standpoint, which you hold forever.
#
And so I guess I have a kind of shifting good-humored liberalism, again, a reflex against holding
#
to certainties in a very orthodox position.
#
So I guess my meta theory is don't have a firm theoretical base and be wedded to it
#
So that's my governing theory.
#
So I'll just think aloud here.
#
And because I'm thinking aloud, what I say might be somewhat naive, but then it seems
#
to me that one could say that at the extremes, there are two kind of broad ways of figuring
#
And one is that you have a grand theory and you make everything fit.
#
And the other one is that you have no grand theories, but you get in the nitty gritties
#
of every problem, you solve one problem at a time, and eventually whatever intermediate
#
theory is, as it were, emerge, emerge, and whatever grand theories are useful at a particular
#
moment in time to explain something are fine.
#
And it seems to me that you would then have taken the second of these approaches, where
#
you are not sort of guided by a particular way of explaining the world, but you're just
#
trying to figure small things out and seeing where they kind of lead you.
#
So would this kind of be, therefore, an accurate way of summing up the different approaches?
#
And are these different approaches something that exists out of a thought experiment?
#
Are there people you can actually look at?
#
Maybe this ties into the fox and hedgehog sort of description of Isaiah Berlin.
#
I was going to say, yeah.
#
So is it there within academics as well, for example?
#
I mean, I think, you know, as you were speaking, before you uttered those words, I was going
#
to say, yeah, Isaiah Berlin, hedgehog and the fox, where the hedgehog knows only one
#
thing if I get it right, and the fox is slower, but it knows many things, or it tries to know
#
And I guess I'm more a fox, and I would wear that as a bit of a badge of honor.
#
But again, the world needs both kinds of people, and I just hate monocultures.
#
And so we need hedgehogs and we need foxes.
#
And sometimes we need to be hedgehogs, and sometimes we need to be foxes.
#
So even I wouldn't typify myself totally and forever as a fox, because there are times
#
when I've been a hedgehog.
#
I mean, for some time in the 1980s, 1990s, particularly, I became a hedgehog.
#
I was obsessed with the issue of India's nuclear weapons and deterrence.
#
And that's all I cared about.
#
And I got very argumentative and bolshy over it.
#
I think I became a bit of a bore and, you know, I bored myself at some point.
#
And I think things moved on and quite rightly, and I had to go back to being more of a fox.
#
And so, yeah, we need both kinds of people.
#
And broadly, I think Berlin was right.
#
You can divide the world up into hedgehogs and foxes.
#
And your own persona, at times you're a hedgehog and at other times you're a fox.
#
And I think that's fine.
#
I think that's good for the world.
#
And again, thinking aloud, I wonder if the imperatives of the role that you give yourself
#
actually shape you in one direction or the other.
#
For example, if you're a TV expert, TV experts are supposed to have certainty about the world.
#
So you would imagine a TV expert would be a hedgehog like Harry Truman when he was president
#
once said, give me a one handed economist.
#
And obviously, the reason he said that was all his advisors were saying on the one hand
#
this on the other hand that and he wanted a hedgehog that just tell me what to do.
#
Tell me that this is the way to go.
#
It strikes me that then there is this sort of dual imperative that on the one hand, as
#
an academic, you do want to have intellectual humility, not be tied down to any one idea
#
But at the same time, as an academic, if you want your ideas to be part of the mainstream
#
discourse, then you do want to be a bit of a public intellectual.
#
But being a public intellectual, you'll gain as much visibility as as much as you can be
#
a hedgehog because people crave certainty.
#
People don't, you know, crave nuance.
#
So is that something that you've thought about or is that something that when you look around
#
you and you see public intellectuals or you followed their journeys as academics to a
#
particular place, do you see that kind of sort of tussle happening within them?
#
I mean, and as I said, society needs both kinds of people.
#
And so it's right and proper that there are those who are the hedgehogs and they have
#
a very certain worldview.
#
They express themselves very unambiguously.
#
They tell us how we should proceed.
#
And we need that in times of crises and so on.
#
And they often lead us in whichever field, including the political field.
#
But as a check and balance, we need foxes.
#
And I think that's important as well.
#
And there are times when I've been a hedgehog.
#
My children would probably say that I was too often at home, but and sometimes I'm impatient
#
with myself and I think, well, both in academic life and in public intellectual life, I should
#
have been more of a fox or certainly my television experience.
#
Trust me towards being a hedgehog.
#
And sometimes my brother, who is in television, used to say, don't do this on the one hand,
#
on the other hand, umming and eyeing.
#
You've got 30 seconds before the anchor interrupts you.
#
And there's no time for that.
#
If you want to make an impact, be blunt.
#
And I think there's place for that.
#
And I tried to do it, but it was never quite me, I think.
#
And I think there are people who read me that way.
#
I did a, you know, an interview with a student of mine who's now in Australia yesterday.
#
And he said that, you know, a lot of former students of mine who were never very happy
#
with my political stance in India thought that I was a died in the world, peacenake,
#
liberal, secularist, and I couldn't listen to anyone else.
#
I mean, I must have come across like that.
#
And some part of me is that, that I do hold those values dear.
#
And sometimes I do get on my horse and insist on that.
#
But I think deep down, I'm willing to listen and adjust and think things through.
#
And of course, be persuaded and so on that I'm not the last word by any means and I don't
#
So I think that's important.
#
And you know, I mean, cometh the hour, cometh the man, cometh the hour, cometh the stance.
#
There's sometimes when you might just have to take a stand and take the risk of holding
#
to a, hewing to a point of view and sticking to it.
#
And you probably know that moment when it comes.
#
And I think you have to rely on your instinct and your ratucination at that point to tell
#
you, here, I have to take a stand.
#
And I can't listen to too much nuance and all of that.
#
I've just got to stand for something.
#
But that can't be a permanent position, it seems to me.
#
So I think I'll just let it wash over me.
#
When I feel I absolutely have to take that stand, I will.
#
Does that mean that I'm the person that you would always call up in a crisis or to sign
#
a petition or to stand shoulder to shoulder on an issue and all of that?
#
Yes, no, maybe, I don't know.
#
That's someone else's judgment.
#
But I think more and more to myself, I'll have to take the risk of making those judgments
#
as and when the moment comes.
#
And just again, thinking aloud, I'd say that the way I sort of determine this for myself
#
is that when it comes to values, I'm a hedgehog.
#
There are certain things I believe in and I'm unequivocal and I have certainty of those
#
and individual rights and personal autonomy and all of those things, whatever they are.
#
But when it comes to facts, then I'm a fox.
#
I'm willing to consider different interpretations and different versions of events and I'm always
#
I don't have one big theory that kind of explains the world.
#
But when it comes to values, I do have a very clear idea of what I stand for.
#
We'll go in for a quick commercial break now.
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Welcome back to the scene and the unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Kanti Bajpai about a superb book on India-China relations, India versus
#
And before we get to the book itself, which as I told you, I found very enlightening and
#
lucid and I think everyone can really read it in one sitting, honestly, which is a compliment,
#
Tell me about your interest in China personally.
#
I followed the thread up to your, you know, getting interested in international relations
#
and you know, beginning with, you know, looking at civil military relations and all of that.
#
And I presume during this phase you would have studied the 62 war and all of that.
#
When did you really start looking at China closely and start sort of refining your prisms
#
and also this entire period when you've been an academic is a period of almost tectonic
#
change in both China and India in different ways where just so much has changed.
#
And at the same time, how has a scholarship been changing?
#
How has, you know, within the academic world, for example, is it a danger that there are
#
fashions in terms of ways of looking at a particular subject or a subject area?
#
How has that been evolving?
#
When did you start getting into it?
#
How did your thinking on it evolve as the years went by?
#
So, you know, you pointed out that in the book in 1962, my dad was a diplomat in London
#
in the High Commission and at the time of the war, it was sepulchral at home.
#
It was not that we talked about the war a lot.
#
In fact, it was the opposite.
#
There was just a kind of gloomy silence in cold London during those weeks.
#
And so I think, you know, something like all Indians, the war has left a bit of a scar
#
and a vestige in our, you know, memories and hearts.
#
And I think the Chinese don't quite get it.
#
But it's there in most Indians, at least to the elite middle class type of people.
#
So I suppose it was there in me, but my focus, as I was explaining earlier, was really much
#
more India, Pakistan and South Asia and the prospects of cooperation and the possibilities
#
So China was not a big thing, although in the early 90s, I wrote some stuff on, well,
#
two or three things happened.
#
The first was somebody asked me to write on confidence building measures, this idea that
#
countries that were locked into conflict could through some forms of communication and transparency
#
ensure that they didn't get into a scrap militarily unwittingly, that out of uncertainty and miscommunication,
#
at least you wouldn't fight.
#
And so military talks, better diplomatic contacts, arrangements like that would ensure that it
#
didn't happen unwittingly.
#
So I wrote a piece on that, but again, drifted back to South Asian issues, particularly the
#
But Abid Hussain actually, you know, coming back to him, put it in my brain, I think a
#
little bit that China had to be watched.
#
He was very liberal, but he began to focus on this issue of India's economic reforms
#
and how India had to get out of a Hindu rate of growth and so on.
#
And, you know, this is the period of 1992-93.
#
The economic reforms had just begun after the crisis.
#
And he was looking at China and asking the question, how come they've done so well and
#
So talking to him and helping write some speeches and so on, my friend and colleague Varun Sani,
#
who is now vice chancellor of Goa University, we were part of his little kitchen cabinet
#
where we would toss issues around, and he was constantly talking about India's prospects
#
and we would look sideways at China.
#
And one time we were visited by quite a high level delegation of think tankers and academics
#
And what struck us there was how much more work on India there was in China than there
#
was in India about China.
#
And I remember in the meeting there in Hindi, Abid Hussain told me, and he said, arey babu,
#
we've got so many people who have learnt Hindi and Indian languages, humare kitne log honge,
#
you know, who can speak Mandarin?
#
And I didn't know the answer quite, but I said, I don't know.
#
I mean, through the various programs, maybe we could get 20-25 people outside of the diplomats
#
who had learnt Mandarin in China.
#
And he said, oh, yeh toh mein kai nahi sakta inke saamne kind of stuff.
#
I'll have to fake the figure a bit, otherwise it looked very embarrassing.
#
So China was beginning to seep in and he was always talking about globalization and how
#
China had taken advantage of it and India had got left behind.
#
And from that, Varun and I both began to think and write a little bit about how India would
#
begin to try and maybe catch up with China.
#
What kind of growth rates would we need?
#
We didn't write a lot about it, but here and there.
#
And I think that thought stayed with me.
#
And I think I wrote some pieces at that time, late 90s, middle 90s, about the gap already
#
with China was beginning to be very significant.
#
What would be the implications of that?
#
And then I think that went into cold storage.
#
I went back to the nuclear tests and Pakistan and so on and so forth.
#
And then when I finished dune school, I went to Oxford.
#
Instead of going back to JNU, I had an invitation to come to Singapore, but I chose to go to
#
And there I found that a lot of the kind of excitement was over China and its rise in
#
a way that I hadn't appreciated being at dune school and dealing with South Asian issues
#
China was in everyone's lips all the time in a way that India certainly was not.
#
And it just struck me then more and more.
#
And then another one of those phone calls came along.
#
I got a call from my old friend, Kishore Mahbubani, who I had met at Harvard many years earlier
#
at a conference on civilizational conflict, which Sam Huntington had organized.
#
And he wrote the paper on Southeast Asia and civilization issues.
#
And I wrote the paper on India.
#
Anyway, he had asked me earlier whether I had wanted to come and teach at Singapore,
#
at least for a couple of years.
#
And I had chosen Oxford at that time.
#
He said, you know, China is the big issue.
#
Sitting here in Southeast Asia, we can see it even more clearly than you can see it sitting
#
And by the way, this is the place to think about and study China and India-China.
#
And why didn't you come here instead?
#
And various things happened.
#
And there's a story there.
#
But at some point, that was part of the reason that I made the move to Singapore.
#
And of course, once I made the move to Singapore, it was China, China, China, but also very
#
importantly, quite a lot of interest in India in a way that was not true, oddly enough,
#
Those two things came together, and Kishore played a big part in sort of pushing me more
#
in that direction of develop this idea of India-China relations, cooperation in the
#
And I suppose that's what really then brewed and brewed.
#
And I did various things here to take forward an India-China agenda, which I could talk
#
about if you're interested.
#
But in a way, that led up to the moment when I got that other phone call, which is from
#
Nandini Mehta on behalf of Chikki Sarkar, to write this book on India-China relations.
#
I've just read one book by Kishore, which has a provocative title of Can Asians Think?
#
I read it a couple of decades ago.
#
And I noticed just now, I couldn't remember the name of the book that I've read.
#
So I Googled that, and I noticed his latest book is called Has China Won?
#
Which is also a provocative title, good title for books.
#
Do tell me more about the India-China agenda.
#
Like, first of all, to begin with, in Singapore, how different would the gaze on China be?
#
Because it's physically much closer, because I guess there is much greater access to insiders
#
and to Chinese scholars and all of that.
#
And how did your interest develop here?
#
What are the areas you were looking at?
#
This is quite fascinating.
#
So one part of your earlier question I didn't answer, which was kind of the thought process
#
about how to think about China academically and so on.
#
So I think certainly when I was at Oxford and earlier, the burden of scholarship was
#
China's peaceful rise and seemed to be going well.
#
And the idea was how to continue to bring China into kind of a liberal international
#
And the prospects seemed quite good through trade.
#
China was joining all these international institutions.
#
And so the narrative was all good.
#
I mean, there was uneasiness here and there and particular episodes where China was a
#
But on the whole, there was a sense that, you know, China was rising peacefully and
#
would play a more or less responsible role.
#
But I think that Singapore did partake of that.
#
But Singapore's always had its weather veins or antenna up and sensitive to other perspectives
#
And I think Singapore certainly wants to ensure that exactly that happens, that China rises
#
peacefully, it's accommodated appropriately and that it is socialized into this more or
#
less rules based liberal order.
#
But it's always had a worry that that might not happen, that other countries might provoke
#
China beyond a point or that things might develop within China that would deflect us
#
So I think that I kind of followed that trajectory, which is I went from quite a complacent attitude
#
towards where China was in the world.
#
I mean, when I was charting this idea of China's growth and what it implied, it was more how
#
could India reach those kinds of growth rates and catch up, but not from a very alarmist
#
point of view, you know.
#
And I think that fitted in with this kind of China rise thesis that was prevalent everywhere
#
There were lessons to be learned from China, and then China was to be accommodated in the
#
correct way, not to be appeased, but to be accommodated where appropriate.
#
I think in Singapore, there was already a sense that that might not quite work out.
#
And so one had to give thought to something else.
#
But of course, Singapore itself very much needs and wants and hopes that China will
#
be peaceful and it will be accommodated in the right way.
#
And it has friendships with the West and friendships with China.
#
And it tries to reconcile that.
#
So when I came here, I think I began to look a bit more at the arguments for why the rise
#
may not be altogether peaceful.
#
And in the context of India-China, where I had been a bit more complacent, I began to
#
think that everything may not be necessarily quite so smooth.
#
I mean, I came here in 2010, 2011, and already there were signs that things were sharpening,
#
although the relationship was not where it is today, of course, I think.
#
And a lot of my colleagues look at China issues, and there's a lively debate here on relations
#
And one of the things that Singapore deals with is that, of course, geographically, it's
#
much more proximate to China.
#
It's got a population that is 70% of Chinese ethnic origins, 70 plus.
#
So there's another kind of relationship to China that goes beyond just geopolitics.
#
There's an economic relationship to China, which is very vital, as it is for everyone
#
So I mean, thinking about China here is a very different ballgame.
#
There are many other factors at play here.
#
And what that suggests is that it's not just the China rise story.
#
When you're in a region like Southeast Asia, the connective tissues are ethnic, diasporic,
#
cultural, historical, very profoundly.
#
They are questions of geography and the intimacies that come from that, which even a country
#
such as India may not quite have because it's got the Himalayas in between.
#
And certainly the Western countries don't have that kind of intimacy.
#
So they look at China in a different kind of way.
#
But this region must factor that in constantly when thinking about China.
#
And they have many deep institutional links over the last 20, 30 years with China, through
#
many international institutions, ASEAN, East Asia Summit, APEC, bilateral dialogues, et
#
cetera, et cetera, which India, at least until the last 10, 12 years, did not really have
#
and which some Western countries, most of them don't have except for the United States.
#
So I think that there are many more lenses through which you look at China here in Southeast
#
And perhaps that's why my book also has these four different peas or lenses through which
#
The general ontology, the broad way we think about a subject and its constituent parts.
#
In this part of the world, it's a more pluralistic ontology of looking at China.
#
And I think maybe some of that filtered into my book.
#
So we'll come to your book in a moment, but a final question about this sort of field
#
of India-China studies, like it strikes me and I'm thinking aloud and you can tell me
#
to what extent this would be true.
#
One, a lot of policy of countries is shaped by elites in some way or the other.
#
I mean, obviously, politicians have incentives where more and more they have to be populists
#
and they have to think about what the people feel and popular sentiment and all of that.
#
But a significant amount of it is shaped by elites in most countries.
#
Number two, my premise would be that, therefore, academics like yourself and academics in all
#
the places where you've taught and worked have some kind of influence.
#
It's limited, but they have some kind of influence that they will often consult for governments.
#
They'll have entry points to talk to babus and sometimes some politicians and all of
#
And the third thing that I'm then struck by is that whatever the extent of this elite
#
shaping of public policy might be in, say, countries like the USA, which has a rich tradition
#
of think tanks and parties feeding into the think tanks, and to a smaller extent in India,
#
what is that extent in China?
#
Because China, from the outside, at least, seems to be an incredibly opaque system where
#
the people in charge are not as accountable to the people as in these democracies.
#
Though as Manoj Kevalramani enlightened me in a previous episode, they do really care
#
about what the people think and they're always trying to shape those narratives, but not
#
in the same way as in India where there are elections all the time and so on.
#
So how much of an influence are thinkers and academics like yourself in even more of an
#
ivory tower when it comes to the context of policy within China than there would be in
#
And this seems kind of rambly again, I'm kind of thinking aloud, so excuse me if any of
#
these are just, you know, wrong assumptions.
#
No, I think you've got a lot that's spot on there.
#
I mean, I mean, first of all, academics, you know, I think we ourselves undermine our influence,
#
but after all, we're the people who educated the people who run the country.
#
We're the people who educate most of the elite because they all go to colleges and universities.
#
All the journalists who shape opinion and the broadcasters all went through our hands.
#
All the businessmen went through our hands.
#
So I am sometimes very puzzled by this notion that academics are lotus eaters, thumb suckers
#
out there somewhere in some ivory tower, you know, and that's all they're kind of useless
#
people who that we sort of tolerate them.
#
They have a profound impact on how we think about issues because they train people and
#
then those people go out and shape the world every day and shape wider opinion.
#
So it seems to me that point academics everywhere, including in China, I mean, who in China has
#
not been educated by an academic and the university structure there.
#
So they're all products of that.
#
And to that extent, I mean, their influence, the influence of academics is profound, lasting
#
So I don't think we should ever undermine that that kind of thought that they're important.
#
I think in China, it would be a mistake to think that academics, public intellectuals,
#
even journalists and so on, social media, you know, that it doesn't have an impact.
#
I mean, this is my instinct.
#
I am not a China specialist per se.
#
I visited several times, of course.
#
I talked to Chinese colleagues and you just get a sort of a sense of it, you know, reading
#
their press and opinions and things like that.
#
And then I teach Chinese students.
#
We have a good number of Chinese students in my classes and so on.
#
I mean, it would be astonishing if Chinese people were not influenced by their academics,
#
their media, their social media.
#
I mean, they would be the most amazing people on earth if they were more or less impervious
#
to it, no matter how much the government tries to control it.
#
Indeed, their elites, the Communist Party, their rulers would be amazing people like
#
And we know that even gods are influenced by human beings.
#
So, you know, I mean, just begin with the presumption that they lend an ear, they're
#
influenced by, they can't separate themselves from the people and their thoughts.
#
And I think they made it very clear over time that they are affected by those pressures
#
and imperatives and, you know, what ordinary Chinese people may be saying.
#
And we know that at the micro level in government, in China, local protests, the interaction
#
with local people, with the Communist Party and administration, I mean, they have an impact.
#
And the Chinese Communist Party is extremely sensitive to what people out there think.
#
I mean, they may not show it, they're not going to declare it.
#
But they are extremely sensitive.
#
And my instinct is that particularly in India, this government is very, very attentive to
#
how the Chinese Communist Party as a party has sent its influence and its kind of administrative,
#
you know, tentacles to the smallest, most remote part of China.
#
And those tentacles, tentacles may not be quite the right word, those arteries, I mean,
#
they take ideas arterially out there and a certain number of ideas and perceptions come
#
back up through the arteries.
#
And I think this government in India, particularly the BJP and its various affiliates, are quite
#
intrigued by how well, in fact, there is this movement of ideas and thoughts from the party
#
down to the micro level and back from the micro level in a constructive way to the party.
#
And I think there's something there.
#
It would be amazing again if the Chinese Communist Party could just sit up there on these Olympian
#
Heights, sending out Femans and diktats and so on, and not bother to listen to anything
#
And that's not the history of Chinese political thought either.
#
I think that there's much more going on at those levels and the Chinese Communist Party
#
is very attentive to it.
#
And one of the difficulties probably in respect of India-China relations and dealing with,
#
let's say, the border issue, is that today you don't have a magisterial personality like
#
Mao, or a super-magisterial personality like Mao, or even Deng Xiaoping, who could swing
#
a deal where China makes some significant concessions on the border with India in the
#
way that they could have.
#
I mean, Xi Jinping, he is magisterial in some ways, and we hear every day about how he's
#
taken control and he's president or general secretary for life and all that kind of stuff.
#
But I wonder, he's not Deng Xiaoping and he's not Mao.
#
And he would, in a moment, if you could get him to really talk to you personally on the
#
Amit Verma show like this, I think he would confess that he could not swing a deal necessarily
#
as his predecessors, two or three of his predecessors could have.
#
So I think there is an elite there, they can have an impact.
#
And you know, the thing about the elite is they're like the middle class.
#
They connect upwards, sending ideas and feelings and perceptions up to the rulership, and they
#
communicate downwards from the rulership to people below the elite, the masses, so-called
#
ordinary folks, they're a vital element of a society, just like the middle classes.
#
So they both shape and are shaped by ideas.
#
And I have no doubt that the elite there is a very powerful force.
#
That's a very interesting point about Xi and, you know, Modi not being able to sell concessions
#
to their people, because, you know, in your book, you've mentioned Nehru and Mao and what
#
magisterial personalities they are.
#
But even there you point out that in circa 57, 58 or something like that, Nehru tried
#
to push through his cabinet the proposal that the Chinese be allowed open access to Aksai
#
Chin so that they could, you know, get in and out of Tibet easily.
#
And this cabinet didn't let it go through.
#
So eventually they allowed that access only for civilian purposes.
#
And that kind of remains a problem even now.
#
So even back then, when these leaders were so strong and had the aura that they had,
#
that there was a limit to how much they could get through.
#
And this seems a good time to kind of ask that meta question about, you know, the constraint
#
that politics holds upon actually having meaningful action forward.
#
Like you talk about elite influence now, China, obviously, everything you said is very illuminating
#
for me because I don't know anything about China.
#
But looking at India, I'm not sure it's true, because none of the political class have actually
#
been educated by academics, despite, you know, Supreme Leader having a degree in entire political
#
If there's any university whose ideas they have imbibed, it's really WhatsApp University.
#
And I'm kind of being flippant here.
#
But it is also kind of true that when you look at the underpinnings of the things that
#
drive these guys, I don't see any of that influence.
#
For example, just today, and we are recording this on, let me check the date on my computer,
#
And just today, Meenakshi Lekhi, who's the new Minister of State for External Affairs,
#
has said, quote, some have expertise in making virus, some in making vaccines.
#
Now, this is a very jingoistic and incendiary thing to say and totally not on for an external
#
For God's sake, this is not how we want to talk.
#
And as you pointed out in the book, a lot of the Chinese attitudes towards us are shaped
#
by what they see in our media and how they interpret it.
#
And when they see a minister talking like this, that some make the virus, some make
#
the vaccine, it's just completely out of line, but this seems to me to be shaped by a certain
#
kind of jingoistic nationalistic rhetoric, which is popular on WhatsApp, devoid of reality,
#
something that no academic would support.
#
And more and more, you get the sense that our politicians can kind of drive themselves
#
Now, it is OK that we have a skirmish with Pakistan and, you know, our leaders can sell
#
the narrative that we did a surgical strike where they basically bomb a few rocks.
#
But when it comes to China, it's a whole different ballgame.
#
This kind of posturing can be extremely counterproductive and just takes us into the wrong direction
#
and then it becomes like a vicious circle.
#
So one, what would be your response to my counterpoint that, you know, even if there
#
is some academic influence on the way, say, bureaucrats may think, it's not there in politics
#
and this force of domestic politics, this force of populism and this particular kind
#
of nationalism makes a lot of other things that we might talk about more.
#
I mean, I don't want to suggest that, you know, everyone has read their political science
#
textbook or their economics textbook and then, you know, really makes policy and even constructs
#
a worldview out of that necessarily and very easily.
#
But just does seem to me that, you know, whether they acknowledge it or not, and sometimes
#
they produce what they learn.
#
I mean, saying stupid things despite your training is something that we've all done,
#
I may know something intellectually and then I've made all kinds of foolish remarks.
#
And I think politicians are exactly like that as well.
#
And of course, they may be more prone to display that because it might win them elections and
#
But just still seems to me that at least a good part of what they mouth and so on has
#
come from some branch of their training and thinking.
#
And even what's mouthed on WhatsApp has come from people who were educated at universities
#
and high schools and so forth.
#
So I mean, I guess I'm giving you a fairly prosaic answer, which is a literalist answer
#
that you went through school and college and so you picked up a vocabulary which then allows
#
you to make certain kinds of assertions and arguments even on WhatsApp and in political
#
life, which otherwise you couldn't possibly make.
#
But yeah, I mean, I suppose my sense is that it's true that a little learning is worse
#
But on the whole, I would bet on education, university education in particular, still
#
bringing us to a place of some moderation and thoughtfulness and progressiveness.
#
And I wouldn't want a world where that possibility didn't exist.
#
So it may be that leaders and elites, or particularly political leaders, are not as well-schooled
#
or as well-educated as we academics would like, and they ignore their own training or
#
the best thoughts that we try to communicate to them and instill in them.
#
But that's the world, you know.
#
And we as academics ourselves in our personal or micro social existences don't always live
#
by the thoughts that we espouse.
#
So I'm a bit more forgiving of politicians that way.
#
I mean, what else is nationalism but, you know, a set of ideas that probably almost
#
certainly were put together by sort of academics themselves, first of all, given the kind of
#
modern shape that we today recognize as nationalism.
#
If you trace the origins of nationalism to things like the development of national languages,
#
I mean, Benedict Anderson, the famous historian, late historian in his book, Imagined Communities,
#
talks about, you know, the role of the kind of nationalization of a language, which is
#
the dialects and so on were reduced and squeezed out.
#
And mass education began to teach a standardized script and grammar and language.
#
And that's such a powerful kind of vehicle for nationalism.
#
It wasn't the only one.
#
The book is much more interesting than that.
#
But he does show that as other theorists of nationalists.
#
And you know, that was philologists and grammarians who we would call academics who did that.
#
So Ernest Renard, the historian, said that, you know, nationalism becomes possible through
#
And historians are also part of this forgetting.
#
We band together as a people by forgetting some of the terrible things our co-nationalists
#
once did to us back in the day.
#
And I think historians play a role in that.
#
They help us contextualize something that happened back in the day.
#
We forget some of the hurt and anger that our forebears may have had because we see
#
what happened in some context, which is kind of a forgetting.
#
We forget some part of the anger and the resentment we feel because of this larger context within
#
which certain decisions and episodes occurred.
#
And sometimes historians tell us that certain episodes that we think were central, forget
#
about them because actually that wasn't the biggest thing at that time.
#
So yeah, I think historians have had a very big role in fostering this nationalism as
#
I know we have historians in India, I mean, I'm not part of Indian historiography and
#
its study, but very national historians, both of the right wing and of the more liberal
#
left-wing kind who are very much how we see nationalism today came out of their writings.
#
So again, I would say, you know, whether politicians understand it or not, they are mouthing the
#
lines that academics have taught.
#
And, you know, I mean, I guess it brings me to the larger point, which is that academics
#
have an enormous responsibility.
#
We can't keep criticizing politicians and lampooning them and caricaturing them because
#
we have helped make those leaders.
#
It's our ideas that are being used out there, misused by politicians and other influencers.
#
And we do have to be careful, I think.
#
And perhaps the best thing we can always do is insist that, you know, well, if not a hundred
#
flowers bloom, but a multiplicity of flowers are considered.
#
And in our pedagogy and in our classrooms, at least convey that spirit of even if you
#
don't agree with something altogether, try and live that spirit of weighing up things
#
and telling the other story and all of that.
#
So I certainly wouldn't exculpate academics from the things that are going wrong.
#
I mean, I have a couple of thoughts here and one is about, you spoke about, you know, the
#
importance of history and memory and at an individual level, you know, one of my big
#
learnings about memory, which I remember discussing also with Anshul Malhotra in an episode I
#
There's this lovely book on partition of people remembering through objects that they've carried.
#
And it's a big deal learning about a memory for me because how memory apparently works
#
is that when we remember an event, the first time we remember an event, we remember the
#
But the next time we remember it, we remember the remembering of the event and so on in
#
a case of Chinese whispers in our brain, which is why, you know, two people who shared the
#
same experience can 10 years later remember it completely differently because each remembering
#
it has altered a bit because of so many other factors and that seems to me to be the case
#
in a sense with a collective memory also, historical grievances that a lot of the grievances
#
that we have that the Mughals did this or so and so did this or so and so did that.
#
You know, I don't even see why they should be relevant to us in the modern day, but we
#
have these simplistic history, which then create these simplistic sort of grievances
#
which feed into the things that we do today.
#
And the other aspect of it is the aspect of where academics are important in sort of keeping
#
the those dialogues and you know that nuance alive, like you mentioned nationalism.
#
Now in the last episode I recorded with Pranay Kotasane, which is coming out after we are
#
He spoke about how one of his favorite books is the Gandhi Tagore Debates.
#
And you have mentioned in your book and I'll quote those lines where you write about how
#
Gandhi and Tagore and one matter on which they agreed viewed nationalism, where you
#
have written quote, especially for Tagore and Gandhi, nationalism is both emancipatory
#
from colonial rule and oppressive.
#
It encourages individuals to sacrifice their creativity and moral sense for the collective
#
and to make excuses for social violence.
#
States built on nationalism are inevitable, but for both Tagore and Gandhi, individual
#
self-restraint and moral behavior are the key to peace and order.
#
If you all respected certain norms of behavior towards each other, irrespective of nationality,
#
governments and states would become largely irrelevant stop code.
#
And it's a sort of a broad sort of view of nationalism, which encompasses more than,
#
you know, our current narrow divisive visions of it.
#
Let's come to the book because otherwise your publisher Chikki will get extremely upset
#
if you don't discuss a book at all.
#
So let's actually talk about this framework, which I found so fascinating, the four P's.
#
So tell me a bit about the four P's and how did you arrive at the framework?
#
Did it happen over a period of years or did you start thinking about this book?
#
And then as you started making your notes, this came to you.
#
And then, you know, we can begin with the first of the P's maybe.
#
Well, it happened with the fifth P, which is panic.
#
I guess in conversation with Jagannath I'd set myself such a big list of things I was
#
saying earlier, you know, river water issues with China, trade issues with China, our influence
#
in third regions with China, Pakistan, another P. And the list was just getting bigger and
#
bigger and I was getting more and more panicky because on some topics I thought, oh my gosh,
#
if I have to cover all of these, first of all, the length of the book, how will I accommodate
#
Basically, I'll either write some pablum, another P, something so boring that, you know,
#
everyone knows already, or, you know, I won't have enough to say.
#
And some chapters will be humongous, like the perimeters chapter, which is about the
#
border and to where and in others I'll be buttering something for about four or five
#
pages and then I'll be done and it'll look very odd, the book will be imbalanced, you
#
So out of that panic about, oh my God, and time was ticking.
#
So I think about three or four weeks into the book, I began with what I knew already,
#
the perimeter, the border issue, that's where I started.
#
So I thought that would be chapter one, turned out to be chapter two eventually.
#
And I thought the power chapter had to be done, obviously, weighing up the relative
#
So those two were very clear.
#
So I started in the Steve Cohen mode, just start writing, don't think about it too much,
#
start getting stuff on paper.
#
So I started that way and then I had fingers crossed that other things would fall by the
#
wayside or fall into place as I went along.
#
And I guess in a way that's what happened.
#
Out of that panic and beginning with what I knew, slowly it dawned on me that the length
#
of these chapters, I was already getting to the halfway point of the book, it didn't lend
#
itself to too many more chapters.
#
So I had to start to squeeze down and then I began to sort of just play it backwards
#
from what I knew to what I would declare to be a virtue, which is, you know, what did
#
I know best and what could I write about that would be most interesting to me and possibly
#
to a reader, to what ought to be properly in the book rather than some grand scheme.
#
And I just thought, yeah, something about the perceptions of the two societies towards
#
And because Juggernaut had said, you're trying to infuse a bit of your own personal experiences
#
I thought that's where the perceptions would come in, like trips there, sometimes a conversation
#
with some Chinese people or students or some visitors from China, I could resurrect some
#
So I thought a perceptions chapter would get Juggernaut off my back there where they would
#
say, oh, my God, don't just narrate all this at third hand, but give us your firsthand
#
experience or some stuff.
#
So that started to form itself as that chapter.
#
And then obviously, there's a geopolitical context in which India, China interact, and
#
that was the partnerships chapter, the fourth P. And actually, for myself, I think that's
#
the least successful chapter of the book.
#
I mean, that's the one that ought to be my bread and butter, India, China, Russia, Soviet
#
Union, USA, but I don't know, I found it the most difficult to write.
#
And I think it's the least successful, I don't know, I almost think if I had it over, I would
#
You know, I think that's a curse of knowledge speaking, that you know the subject so well
#
that you assume that you're stating the obvious and you're like, what is that?
#
I'm just stating the obvious.
#
But no, for a reader who doesn't know a lot of that, I would actually disagree.
#
I'd say that, no, it's a great chapter.
#
Of course, a perimeter chapter is the longest, but I guess one needs to go into that kind
#
of detail because they are the kind of concrete details that animate the relationship that
#
So for me, you know, you've almost framed your explanation of the book as if it is something,
#
you know, you're responding to this from the publisher, that from the publisher.
#
I will just assure my listeners that it doesn't read like that at all.
#
I would never have guessed that it feels very self-contained and just an excellent systematic
#
building of a frame to look at China.
#
But I'm sorry I interrupted you because I felt that I had to disagree with your pejorative
#
view of your own excellent chapter.
#
Yeah, so I think the one way of saving that account that I just gave you, this other disjointed
#
as it actually happens existential account, is to maybe draw an analogy to personal life.
#
You know, why these four?
#
So if you do that, I mean, the first thing you can say is that how we relate to another
#
person is refracted or affected by how we perceive each other.
#
So we have some perceptions of each other that grow and chop and change and form themselves
#
and we can't even quite account for why we may think about people in certain ways.
#
But that has a very powerful framing effect.
#
So I think that's one justification for putting the perceptions chapter in there and putting
#
it up front, a more kind of conceptual way of talking about these four P's.
#
Although, I mean, drawing this analogy to individuals is not a very good way to think
#
about social affairs, but it's one way of kind of just, you know, giving it some respectability,
#
I think, and communicating to your listeners about why these four are important.
#
The second piece is perimeters.
#
So the analogy there in our personal lives is, of course, you know, to my neighbor, to
#
others, you've got to respect my property, which is territory in geopolitics or international
#
affairs, but my home and hearth, my belongings.
#
I mean, if you try to steal them, if you try to break them, if you violate them, we've
#
got a fight on our hands here and I will defend them to the death, presumably.
#
So of course, perimeters matters because our property matters in personal life and we will
#
The third P is partnership.
#
My friends' friends are my friends, my enemies' friends may be my enemies, my enemies' enemies
#
That's true in personal life, I think, you know, at least it's the first clue or gesture.
#
If my friend introduces me to their friend, the chances are I'm going to be congenial
#
If my enemy introduces me to their friend, I might look sideways and suspiciously at
#
that third person, et cetera.
#
So I think, again, partnerships are important and undergird that's, you know, they come
#
from that sense that our larger network of sort of connections has a role in whether
#
we are friends with someone else or not.
#
And we learn from third parties.
#
If we're friends with X and they say Y is a bad person and Y is my neighbor, then I
#
might suddenly start to look at Y in a jaundiced way because X who has had some other experience
#
of Y that he or she narrates to me and so on.
#
And the fourth is power.
#
So of course, all our individual relationships are mediated by power at some level, some
#
And again, the relationship between countries turns on relative power as well.
#
So I mean, I would say that that's four more formal arguments if you'd accept the analogy
#
to individuals and their relationships.
#
That made me think that, you know, I was a bit on a bit more solid ground.
#
I wrote it not that way, a bit more conceptually, and then my publisher said this will bore
#
And I think they were right.
#
And that's why I dismissed other P's and other aspects of the relationship, such as water,
#
such as Pakistan, such as influence in third regions and trade and so on.
#
And I said, those are more effect than cause.
#
So they become problems between India and Pakistan because of some fundamental conflict.
#
It's not that they are the cause of the conflict.
#
I don't think Pakistan caused the India-Pakistan conflict.
#
It's that the China-India conflict caused Beijing to reach out to Pakistan.
#
And that drew Pakistan into the India-China conflict more and more.
#
So I think sometimes we are mixing up cause and effect.
#
And of course, at some point, effect becomes cause in a further loop.
#
So I don't deny that sometimes what Pakistan does with China then affects India-China relations.
#
But to give the book a succinctness and a direction, I decided to go with these four
#
P's and just make it more readable for the ordinary reader.
#
The four P's to my mind do strike me as sort of a foundational frame to look at the relationship,
#
as you correctly pointed out, Pakistan, whatever is happening, there is more effect than cause.
#
And I love this quote from your book where you quote the former Prime Minister Yusuf
#
Jilani talking about Pakistan's relationship with China.
#
And he describes it as, quote, higher than mountains, deeper than the ocean, stronger
#
than steel and sweeter than honey, stop quote, which is incredibly romantic.
#
Let's move on to the first of the P's now.
#
Your first chapter is called perceptions from regard to disdain.
#
And that does indeed seem to be the movement, though it's a bit more nuanced.
#
And of course, it wasn't always regard and it isn't necessarily just disdain now.
#
But as you point out, for about 15 years out of these 70, we had great relationships, especially
#
in the early 50s, mid-50s, the Hindi-Chinese bye-bye and Nehru overflowing with goodwill,
#
almost like Mr. Jilani, towards China.
#
And then it gradually began to go downhill.
#
But you kind of go a little deeper into history, into the past, into the kind of interactions
#
we've had through the centuries, which also I found very interesting because growing up,
#
what I've been taught in school or what is there in the popular literature, we know enough
#
about India's troubled history with those who colonized us and our history with those
#
who invaded us or those who visited and so on.
#
But China is just kind of mentioned in footnotes, even though they are our immediate neighbor,
#
like we know of Heung Seng and Fa Hain and all that, which we read in our school books,
#
also with a different spelling than the ones you've used, which I assume are more authentic.
#
But we don't know much more about them.
#
But actually, the truth is that India-China have had, in terms of people-to-people contacts,
#
pretty deep relationships for centuries.
#
So can you briefly give me a sense of sort of this historical journey of the contacts
#
we have and how they shaped our perceptions of each other?
#
So I think the story really begins with Buddhism.
#
I mean, I'm sure there was contact before then.
#
But I think most people begin the story there.
#
I mean, I'm not a historian of India-China, but just picking up the synthetic material
#
that's out there and rendering it for readers.
#
So you begin with Buddhism, which actually probably almost certainly went from Central
#
Asia to China first, not from India, as I think we sometimes think.
#
And so it was indirectly from India, but not directly.
#
The Indian influence comes later, when particularly I think Chinese pilgrims and monks and so
#
on came to India to receive wisdom and to pick up texts and practices and take them
#
And then some Indian monks and Buddhists went there to help translate and communicate and
#
So I mean, from that time forwards to roughly, I would say, the 10th century, very broadly,
#
crudely, you could say that China had regard for India.
#
And even there, as I try to show, China did have a sense of its own kind of importance.
#
And there were certainly segments in China, the elite people around the court, who at
#
various times reacted quite negatively to Buddhism.
#
And in effect, you know, they were able to accept Buddhism by synthesizing it.
#
I mean, so they weren't negative towards India necessarily, but they wanted to synthesize
#
There were some elements that claimed that Buddhism was actually a Chinese religion originally,
#
the Buddha was Chinese, et cetera, et cetera, that it was actually, you know, synonymous
#
with Taoism and things like that.
#
I think nonetheless, the broad story is that until about the 10th century or so, China
#
had a regard for India through Buddhism.
#
There was trade, there was other stuff going on, particularly in Buddhist relics and things
#
like that, and the Chinese goods coming to India.
#
But it was born out of Buddhism and the learning associated with it and the practices.
#
But at about that time, which is about a thousand of the Christian era, Buddhism was more or
#
less ending in India and, you know, Brahmanism or whatever you want to call it, made a push
#
And in a sense, I mean, I think this is what came out of one of the seminars I was in after
#
the book, Buddhism became naturalized as a kind of part of Hinduism.
#
So it didn't die in the sense that it was completely vanquished and obliterated.
#
It just became a part of the pantheon of Hinduism.
#
You know, so you have Buddhism as another god in the Hindu pantheon.
#
And so, but as a result of that, I think the Chinese pilgrimages to India and the looking
#
up to India kind of began to die.
#
If China began to export Buddhism to parts of East Asia and even parts of Southeast Asia
#
and perhaps look for Buddhist interactions and influences elsewhere and develop their
#
And by the 15th century, I would say somewhat earlier, the tables were turned, as it were.
#
And in the parts of India began to look up to China, to the Chinese court, the Chinese
#
imperial domains and parts of Malabar, southern India, where there was a lot of trade and
#
where the great Chinese admiral, Cheng He, visited.
#
And before that, you know, the great Khan, I mean, there were kingdoms in Bengal that
#
also were sending tribute to China.
#
So you know, I think the relationship was somewhat reversed.
#
There are parts of India that began to look up to China and perhaps even to some extent
#
fear China, and there was some interference by the Cheng He and so on in Indian affairs.
#
And even going back to Harsh Vardhan's time in northern India, there was a kind of Chinese
#
military expedition that was sent to India to take some amount of revenge and sort out
#
some of the affairs of some, you know, at the time of Harsh Vardhan and so on, when
#
some Chinese envoys had been humiliated and killed.
#
So you know, there was a kind of fear and respect for China at that point.
#
Then there's a hiatus in a way, I mean, there was trade increasingly, there was contacts
#
between Indians and Chinese and third regions, Southeast Asia, elsewhere.
#
But colonialism, Western colonialism arrived, and I think increasingly the relationship
#
was mediated through the Portuguese, the Dutch, and increasingly by the British.
#
The opium trade began between India and China.
#
And out of that and increasing colonial influence in China, the century of humiliation and all
#
of that, the Chinese looked at India with two kind of jaundiced eyes.
#
The first was, you know, they looked at Indians in China, the policemen, the Indian troops
#
that were being used by the British, some elements of Indian traders in China.
#
Of course, the opium trade, which clearly had a very bad effect in amongst a segment
#
You know, so that led them to a kind of negative perception of India and Indian society.
#
And associated with that was the question amongst a group of Chinese reformists who
#
were Republicans, mostly, and were trying to reform China.
#
And the question they asked was, and this is what I recount, you know, how come this
#
great civilization west of China, we think of China as a northern country, but they think
#
of us as being in their west, how had this great civilization fallen on hard times?
#
Why did it fall to the British?
#
And this was asked at the time when China was going under.
#
So you know, they wanted to figure out how such a big landmass, huge population, vibrant
#
civilization had fallen to a handful of imperialists and remained under their jackboot.
#
So the answer they came up with was, in a way, a pretty familiar one, one that we tell
#
They didn't fight hard enough, the Indians.
#
They had been driven by and developed a psychology of being disunited by waves of invasion.
#
They were not able to mount a, you know, a united kind of response to invaders.
#
That different groups played out their animosities through these invaders, including the British,
#
and they wanted to settle scores with other Indians rather than keep the foreigners out,
#
And one abiding image was India was a country of many castes and religions and hopelessly
#
pluralistic and divided.
#
And they were a kind of Luan people, Luan means sort of chaotic.
#
There was no center there.
#
And this society was therefore hopeless and could not mount an effective response.
#
And China, there were signs that China could become that, and it should never become India.
#
So they drew a negative lesson from India, that China should not become that.
#
And that's not a very pretty picture of India.
#
So by the late 19th century, their view of India was rather negative for all these reasons.
#
And then fast forward, of course, you know, to the the Neruvian period and Mao and the
#
Communist Party come to power, I think there were elements of that that still hung around.
#
I mean, you're right that there was also an appreciation of India.
#
Even now, Mao continued to famously say, apparently, that, you know, if a Chinese person was ever
#
born again, they should be born Indian, some sort of quite well-known statement amongst
#
So there was a kind of regard.
#
And of course, the admirers of Tagore and so on that I mentioned in the book had an
#
And I don't want to deny all that.
#
I would say on the whole, you know, by the Neruvian period and beyond, they began to
#
be kind of looking down the nose at India and to tell the Indian side of the story.
#
I mean, I guess developed also, although I don't do enough of that in the book, I just
#
didn't have time and I don't have enough access to it, but also perhaps both a regard for
#
China that was there, but also in the modern period, a kind of negative view of China,
#
partly racist that we learned through the British and the Westerners.
#
They were yellow people with strange ways and, you know, consumed by drugs like opium
#
and so on and so forth, or arrogant and warlike, again, learned from the West, you know.
#
So I think mutual disdain was the story and elements of that remain the case.
#
So a few aside from this historical journey, like one part I found fascinating was where
#
you write about how when Buddhism first came to China, it wasn't entirely smooth.
#
There was a little bit of friction in its acceptance and many people fought back because
#
they said, you know, Daoism and Confucianism, they are our natural dissing, but then as
#
Buddhism declined in India itself, they kind of appropriated it and it just became like
#
And it's interesting that, you know, what you just mentioned here, I don't remember
#
reading it in the book, that they tried to paint Buddhism as a religion that originated
#
But we've kind of seen a similar thing in India where, for example, the wacky quote
#
unquote historian P. N. Oak, he would write about how Christianity originated in India
#
and Jesus Christ was Indian and Christianity was originally called Krishnanithi.
#
And this is the same guy who, by the way, said the Taj Mahal was originally Tejo Mahalaya.
#
So I don't know, you know, whether this is whether these ancient civilizations have this
#
kind of inferiority complex that they need to make up these kind of stories to sort of
#
make themselves feel better about the influences coming in.
#
And speaking of influences coming in, there's also a nice section on trade where you talk
#
about the opium trade and you point out that we would give them opium and in return, one
#
of the products that we would take is white sugar, which we therefore call Chini.
#
You know, Chini because Chini is fairly obvious.
#
So all you Indian nationalists listening to this who feel glad that TikTok has been banned,
#
kindly stop eating Chini also, which is actually good for the health.
#
I mean, if you stop eating it, that will be good for the health.
#
So that's one way that xenophobia may actually work for you.
#
Now the other interesting thing that strikes me with this disdain is that, you know, you
#
point out about how in the late 19th century, they lose the war to Japan and you write about
#
how young reformers in China are now saying that, listen, we need to be more like Japan,
#
Russia and Germany and the country whose fate we need to avoid is India.
#
As you point out an implication that the yellow races are as talented as the white, but not
#
the case with other races.
#
And you quote from this very interesting article, I think it's a 1906 article, a series of articles,
#
which is called The Causes for the Demise of India.
#
And in that article, the author writes, quote, the word India is in fact nothing but a name
#
Ah, yeah, their land is all smashed to pieces.
#
This brown race will be forever enslaved.
#
Looking at China today, it is like India in the past.
#
As a matter of principle, it were the Indians who brought about the demise of India, the
#
character of the race is chaotic, their language is topsy-turvy, their religion is all separate
#
There is no unified spirit, no patriotic thinking.
#
The elites are drowning themselves in song and dance and know nothing of great purpose.
#
Alas, India is lost, stop quote.
#
And later you point out a sort of a similar tendency when Tagore visits in 1924.
#
And there are small groups of people who welcome him and give him the respect he deserves.
#
But you also point out, quote, he was roundly denounced and ridiculed, particularly by leftist
#
communist revolutionaries, old and young, including former admirers and translators.
#
He was seen as extolling traditional feudal Asia and romanticizing the Orient against
#
the material industrial Occident.
#
And later you quote Ram Guha quoting the Chinese scholar Wu Chin Hui, and forgive me if I get
#
the pronunciation wrong, where Wu Chin Hui says of Tagore, quote, Mr. Tagore, a petrified
#
fossil of India's national past had retreated into the tearful eyes and dripping noses of
#
the slave people as a conquered country, seeking happiness in a future life, squeaking like
#
the hub of a wagon wheel that needs oil.
#
All of which, lovely little snippets.
#
Now my kind of question here is, and we've also obviously at different times had sort
#
of xenophobic views of them.
#
You talk about how a lot of Chinese came to Calcutta, settled there, especially in the
#
bar bazaar area, the sort of frictions that would often be there.
#
But the other thing that I wonder about is how much are contemporary frictions or contemporary
#
impressions shaped by things that happened in this distant past, like do these sort of
#
narratives that are there in the popular culture actually carry on as a kind of oral history
#
from father to child and so on all the way down so that one generation will in some way
#
without knowing it by osmosis replicate the attitude of like five generations ago or do
#
some narratives just naturally get lost to history and it is the imperatives of a future
#
time that they are perhaps revived in some way.
#
Yeah, I think that, you know, you're right to shine the light on this issue of whether
#
these negative views and disdain and so on going back to the 19th century still really
#
alive and kicking in China and likewise, where the elements of racism and so on on our side
#
to and negative pictures of China persist from long ago or even whether the regard remains
#
on both sides and still affects us.
#
I mean, I suppose I think they do.
#
I mean, that's the whole premise of the chapter in a way is that the something of that as
#
a vestige at least remains some sort of collective consciousness is handed down from one generation
#
to another and they they can be in very seemingly innocent popular remarks and things, you know,
#
Indian people are like this or Chinese people are like that.
#
So there are these tropes that are out there even now, you know, I mean, very good nature
#
Chinese have said, oh, you Indians are also talkative and argumentative to pick up sense
#
That's there from somewhere.
#
It may not necessarily be from, you know, received from or mediated through British
#
After all, they had their own popular kind of encounters with Indians who were in China.
#
And likewise, I mean, Indians who had some contact with the Chinese here and there might
#
very well have kind of concluded that the elements of Chinese culture that seems strange
#
and not so nice, I mean, an extreme materialism is, I think, I suppose, a particular kind
#
of trope or image that a lot of people have towards China.
#
And I think this is associated in India with a view that they're somehow very violent people
#
and can be very cruel or despotic.
#
And I don't know quite where that comes from, but maybe it came from Indians who were also
#
involved in the trade in China, might have run into troubles there, or soldiers that
#
serve there and brought back some stories.
#
We know now from a recent diary, of course, a different view.
#
I forget the name of the diary that has been written by this Indian sepoy, which has now
#
been translated and made available, which shows that actually there was a very great
#
regard for his Chinese hosts, that he admired the ordinary Chinese people and their struggles
#
But yeah, I mean, I think overall, there's probably some basis for the kind of pictures
#
we still have of each other.
#
And just like in personal psychology, I mean, you may be early in your life, you receive
#
certain kinds of cliches and prejudices from your parents and those around you, but your
#
own experience gradually as an adult gives you some more.
#
And I suppose in the life of a nation, that's true, too.
#
So the 62 war, the terrible problems of the border, the sense of mutual betrayal on Tibet,
#
you know, those kinds of things in turn has only amplified some original kinds of bad
#
feelings on both sides over time.
#
So the reason that chapter is there first is because I wanted to show that over time
#
we do have evidence of these kinds of at least ambivalences on both sides.
#
And you know, one section of the book in the modern period, I worked through three books,
#
Vikram Seth's book of his travels through China.
#
You know, it's Chinese views of India through Indian eyes.
#
So Vikram Seth looking at interacting with Chinese people on his bus journey and all
#
of that, and giving us a sense of how the Chinese look at India.
#
And then this lady in Singapore who I met Anurag Vishwanath, who over many years did
#
research there, how she encountered Chinese people in China and sometimes how they looked
#
And then lastly, Reshma Patil, the Hindustan Times correspondent in Beijing and this very
#
nice book she wrote, also recounting many stories of how the Chinese people looked at
#
So I use that section to show how even now, I mean, from the Vikram Seth's journey was
#
in the early 80s or late 70s through Anurag Vishwanath's journeys, which are through over
#
many years up to a contemporary period, and then Reshma's just seven, eight years ago.
#
But there is a thread there of negative views of India, but also some approbatory or positive
#
So this ambivalence at least is quite deeply there, you know, and I don't have so much
#
data on the Indian side, though I tell a few stories there.
#
But I'm sure there's a research project waiting to be done there of mining Indian perceptions
#
of China, even in the modern period after the 62 war, in novels or, you know, commentary
#
and stories of individual kind of encounters with Chinese people that we could put together.
#
My guess is that both sides are at fault there, if that's the word.
#
There are bad perceptions and some good perceptions on both sides.
#
Yeah and they come through in these books you mentioned, like in Vikram Seth's book
#
from Heaven Lake, he writes about how he needed to get a permit to visit Tibet.
#
And one thing that enabled that was he could, he discussed Awara with the Chinese official
#
who was supposed to give him the permit because they were big fans of Bollywood.
#
And similarly in Counterview to that is in Reshma's book, she writes about how, you know,
#
she sort of asks the Chinese broadcasting executive, she meets about his views of India.
#
And there are these two really pithy lines which say so much, quote, children in India
#
are naked, they piss on the streets, stop quote, which is such a succinct way of just,
#
you know, putting the impression of a country.
#
And then apparently he added, but all Indians have inner peace, which is like a kind of
#
a backhanded compliment.
#
So I love these and of course, you know, these three books contain kind of, I guess, impressionistic
#
And you've presented a lot more systematic data on Chinese perceptions of India.
#
The Simon Shen's 2011 survey, there's a survey Shen did with Debashish Roy Chaudhary where
#
you wrote about their survey, at a broad level, they found that the Indian media's coverage
#
of military affairs is marked by shrill jingoism and distrust reflecting the paranoia at the
#
heart of India's elite perceptions.
#
The Chinese media is more sober because it is under the watchful eye of the government,
#
but it has increased its coverage of India and feeds off what it reads in the Indian
#
media to produce its own brand of self-righteous anxieties.
#
And this kind of worried me because then you feel that this might be a vicious circle forming
#
itself where, you know, the jingoism on each side is leading to increased reactive jingoism
#
The other fascinating part of this chapter and there's much within this chapter alone
#
that is fascinating, leave alone the rest of the book, is when you talk about the three
#
Indian worldviews and the three Chinese worldviews.
#
So would you like to briefly go through them because, you know, one of the conclusions
#
that you later come to and it struck me is that out of all these six worldviews, the
#
three Indian and the three Chinese, there is only one which, you know, can actually
#
work for a positive future for all of us and that is the least likely to happen.
#
So just take us through these worldviews.
#
So beginning with the Chinese, let's just begin there.
#
I mean, I said they have three.
#
I mean, obviously there are probably more, but these are three big ones.
#
The first is this idea of Tianxia, all under heaven, which is really the kind of view of
#
China at the heart of the world and certainly of Asia.
#
And mostly we know it as the tributary system.
#
China sits in the middle and there are all these smaller powers around it historically
#
and they send tribute to China.
#
The tributary system had then China give something back and generally it's accepted that the
#
Chinese emperor gave back more than he received in the form of legitimacy to these smaller
#
countries, sometimes interfering in their affairs to, you know, prop up rulers who wanted
#
his help and of course, mostly opening up Chinese markets to their exports.
#
But this Tianxia system, if we go from that, then where is India in that worldview?
#
India is another potential tributary basically.
#
And now having said that, obviously, if you were a Chinese looking at these tributaries
#
around China, India is the biggest tributary by far.
#
So I mean, the Chinese are not foolish.
#
Certainly India, and this is a thought experiment, I mean, I haven't asked Chinese people this,
#
but proceeding from this Tianxia view, India would be the biggest of the tributaries and
#
therefore had to be given a certain kind of special position amongst the tributaries.
#
It would be grander and deserving of a more respect and autonomy, but certainly all tributaries
#
were in a subordinate position ultimately.
#
So India appears there at best as a kind of junior partner.
#
Then there's the kind of a communist worldview and the Republican worldview where, you know,
#
this Tianxia and all that is thrown out, the empire is dismantled, the emperor is bid idea
#
made into an ordinary human being.
#
And what replaces it is communism and basically a Republican view, which is that people by
#
merit will rule the country, either the Republican view of the Go Mindang or the Communist Party.
#
So there, I mean, again, you can see, let's just take the communists.
#
The Chinese communists certainly thought that, you know, the great fight was with capitalism.
#
Who would lead that fight?
#
Well, the great centers of communism would enlist all the minor socialist and like-minded
#
oppressed people and lead the fight.
#
And very quickly Mao decided that the Soviet Union under Khrushchev, he was a kind of,
#
you know, he was too weak and cowardly.
#
And the fallout with the Soviet Union at that time was that they were too cooperative with
#
And therefore it was actually China that would be the leading edge of the revolutionary struggle
#
Where would India appear in that?
#
I mean, if the Chinese accepted, as some did, that eventually, not initially, that India
#
could be a kind of ally, that it was a sort of socialist aspiring country, that it was
#
not altogether, you know, a petty bourgeois, also ran, you know, a sort of running dog
#
Then India could be admitted again as a junior ideological partner and revolutionary partner
#
China would lead the struggle and provide leadership and backing to these minor powers.
#
But India would not lead the struggle.
#
India might, more than some other centers of socialism and resistance, be a partner,
#
The third is, of course, as China exited communism mostly, the third great worldview is China's
#
And there too, China now, the only peer it recognizes is the United States.
#
And if the China dream is correct, then under Xi Jinping, then China will be not just the
#
peer, it will be the superior.
#
It will be the hegemon.
#
It will be the greatest power on earth.
#
And even the Americans will be in second place.
#
So where is India in that?
#
I mean, very charitably, the Indians hardly see India as a great power.
#
At best, they sort of see India as an aspiring power.
#
They call us an important power with a role in world affairs, very grudgingly.
#
And even that's a kind of backhanded compliment.
#
So in all three worldviews, India appears as a secondary junior partner at best, you
#
know, and maybe even ignorable at worst.
#
So the Indian worldviews, likewise, if we go from this sort of mandala picture from
#
Kautilya, well, there, I mean, China is a neighbor and your neighbor is your enemy and
#
And then, you know, the Vishwa Guru or before that, the Chakravartin keeps expanding and
#
takes dharma to successive entities that it conquers.
#
But not even in the greatest Indian fantasy can one imagine Indian armies, even in the
#
past, really, traversing the Himalayas into the great flat plains of Tibet and then moving
#
on and conquering China.
#
So the mandala system, the best that can be imagined is that India cultivates your neighbor's
#
neighbors and they become your friends.
#
But that doesn't work too well for India, because if you follow the logic through, then
#
the Russians should be our friends against the Chinese.
#
But they've got to deal with the Chinese, at least contemporaneously, and become the
#
junior partners of the Chinese against the West, because their mandala is, or whatever
#
their strategic, you know, kind of system is, is that the West is the bigger problem.
#
They look westward, they have a neighbor that's threatening as the West, and the Chinese are,
#
you know, the enemy's enemy and so their friend.
#
And India no longer really appears very important to them.
#
So then Japan is a neighbor's neighbor, but Japan is separated from the great landmass
#
The stopping power of water prevents Japan playing a very big role on the landmass and
#
can't help India out too much.
#
So in the mandala scheme, the only people who can help India is by extension the West.
#
And not surprisingly, America and the Western powers are our enemy's enemy who become our
#
But in all of that, you know, China never appears as a friend.
#
Then if you look at the second worldview, which is the worldview of India from the perspective
#
of cosmopolitanism, you see, I almost forgot my own book.
#
In this cosmopolitan Neruvian Tagore vision, see, that's the most soft-eyed, twinkly-eyed
#
view of China as a fellow Asian civilization.
#
It's a viewpoint where nationalism doesn't count for so much.
#
In fact, nationalism beyond the point might be the problem.
#
Then it's India looking at China through a different lens as another potential civilizational
#
partner or another part, another civilization that deserves respect, that one can learn
#
from, work with, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And that's a worldview that can accommodate China, that can look at China as a friend,
#
as a kin through softer eyes.
#
But then we come to India's third worldview, which is our great power view.
#
And actually, here I club Nehru and Golwalkar, you know, the RSS supremo, in one bag because
#
I don't think Gandhi and Tagore would have talked about India as a great power.
#
That wasn't their kind of vocabulary.
#
But Nehru partook of that vocabulary, and Golwalkar did as well.
#
So in that worldview, then China is a rival.
#
And it's not geography that makes China a rival.
#
So that's, you know, that's a Mandela theory.
#
But this great power view is that China is a rival because it's another great power.
#
You see, just in that worldview, even the United States would be a challenge to India
#
because it's another great power.
#
So China, from this great power view, is that, well, great powers can never be really good
#
Although in Nehru, you know, you said earlier that he had this kind of nice view of China
#
and a romantic view, but he also always had a doubt and worry about China as another great
#
And some of his views are almost racist as well.
#
And Golwalkar too, you know, wrote sometimes about China in a very bad way.
#
And the book that he wrote it in has, you know, you can't buy that book.
#
It's been taken away and hidden by the RSS and so on.
#
So, you know, both of them with their own great power view could not look at China as
#
anything but a kind of a rival, although their view was slightly different about where the
#
The only out of these six worldviews, three Chinese and three Indian, the only nice one
#
was the Gandhian Tagore one.
#
Gandhi didn't know China that well, I think, just my sense of it.
#
I don't know enough about his writings on China, but Tagore of course knew it much better.
#
And then, you know, he started China Bahavan and the whole attempt to bring Chinese and
#
Indian aesthetics and artists and writers and intellectuals together.
#
You know, those were the only two who could really have a very nice, accommodative kin
#
And yet, as I point out, and you reminded me that those are the only two who today,
#
where do those worldviews figure?
#
I mean, there's the obvious, you know, October to view of Gandhi, which even the right wing
#
But there's no great affection or, you know, kind of partaking of Gandhi and thought beyond
#
the point in India anymore.
#
I mean, it's an obligatory schoolboy view, father of the nation view, but not a real
#
engagement with Gandhi and his values.
#
And likewise, where is Tagore today, I think, and his thoughts about post-nationalism or
#
a worldview transcending nationalism, again, sadly, I think, probably really not there
#
Yeah, and it's very interesting that you should talk of Nehru and Golwalkar at the same breadth.
#
Like I often say that, you know, Modi for all his rants against the Congress and the
#
family is actually very Nehruvian in his top-down vision of how the state should rule society.
#
And it's very much like Indira in his unquenching will to power, as it were, and the desire
#
to do anything to get there, that whole oppressiveness and authoritarianism that comes from him.
#
But Nehru and Golwalkar is an interesting sort of connection there in this context as
#
Let's kind of talk about perimeters there.
#
And I found that chapter really fascinating.
#
And I have actually covered elements of it in previous episodes with Manoj Kevalramani,
#
Ram Srinivari Arun and Shivani Mehta, I've done a bunch of these episodes.
#
But nevertheless, briefly, give us a sense of what actually happens.
#
Like at one point, you talk about, I'll quote from your book, because I found this a very
#
illuminating paragraph too, which kind of sums a lot of things up, where you write,
#
quote, in the 1950s, both saw the other as insincere and stubborn in the border discussions.
#
They concluded that the other had failed to honour commitments in Tibet.
#
And they came to regard the other as militarily aggressive and themselves as militarily defensive.
#
Having said that, now and then their differences on the border did narrow, they agreed on the
#
status of Tibet in 1950, 51 and 54, and they tried to avoid escalatory military actions.
#
So it seems to me that one at a level of where they're posturing is that this belongs to
#
us and that belongs to us.
#
There's absolutely no way that there is a common ground there, that if one army is an
#
exposition, which the other country claims belongs to them, it will be viewed as an act
#
of aggression by one and as an act of defence by the other.
#
And there's no getting around that.
#
Yet it seems for decades, for large parts of our history, there was a certain practicality
#
about how far you can push these differences, whether at Aksai Chen or Arunachal or whatever,
#
and they weren't skirmishes.
#
In fact, at one point, there was a proposal of doing a kind of a swap.
#
So tell me a little bit more about sort of the arc of this relationship as regards to
#
border differences and the possible reasons that it's kind of exploded in phases over
#
the last decade, like really coming to a head last year, of course, in Ladakh.
#
Yeah, the border issues and the perimeters issue, and I call it perimeters just to stay
#
with the P's, but it's an interesting one because I think we've lost track of that.
#
It began as a cooperative venture.
#
So definitely the two sides did begin a process of negotiation and talks, and it seemed to
#
go fairly well for about four or five years until about 1954.
#
And the issue of the border cannot be divorced from Tibet, because obviously Tibet is where
#
And so it was intimately connected with the status of Tibet as well.
#
And again, the first four or five years brought cooperation on Tibet.
#
India conceded that China basically owned Tibet and concluded a treaty in 1954 and backed
#
a certain agreement that the Chinese had with the Tibetans in 1950-51 as well.
#
One might have expected that things would get better, and that was belied, obviously.
#
And what I try to show in the book is, in as balanced a way as possible, is that in
#
a sense, it wasn't maliciousness and it wasn't point scoring and it wasn't a desire altogether
#
to hurt the other side.
#
In those initial years, I pointed out that there was a split in the negotiating stance
#
There was the so-called Sooner School, my term, and the Later School on both sides.
#
So my grandfather, Girja Bajpai, and KPS Menon, Shiv Shankar Menon's grandfather as well,
#
they were two of the senior most Foreign Service people.
#
And they were in the, with Sardar Patel, they were in the Sooner School.
#
Negotiate with China because the Chinese are going to raise the border issue and twin an
#
agreement of the border to the status of Tibet.
#
We will agree to Chinese kind of sovereignty over Tibet if they come to accommodation of
#
But Panekkar, who was our ambassador, the historian, geopolitical thinker, who was our
#
ambassador in Beijing, he was of the Later School.
#
He said, don't raise the border issue because we won't agree, and then we'd be forced to
#
negotiate and we don't want to negotiate because in some ways our position in administrative
#
control in the furthest reaches, particularly in Nifa, which is Arunachal Pradesh today,
#
So we've got to buy time.
#
It'll come, but let's wait for the Chinese to raise it.
#
And Nehru kind of oscillated between the two and then eventually came out on the side of
#
And the Chinese, you see, I think, and I tried to show, had exactly the same debate.
#
Their Tibetologists and their cartographers came to the view that the Indians were not
#
playing fair, the Chinese had a case, and they should raise it sooner rather than later.
#
And the politicos, that is, Zhou Enlai and Mao and others in the Communist Party felt
#
that the time wasn't right, that China was too weak.
#
And they would deal with India later on this matter and not provoke.
#
So the first five years, from 1949 to 1954, they were both tiptoeing around the issue,
#
both kind of expecting to join the issue at some point.
#
And probably, you know, they were still fairly friendly, rhetorically and so on.
#
And an accommodation might have been reached, but it wasn't.
#
And then things got worse and worse.
#
But when they did begin to talk, and then I'll roll the movie forward faster, when they
#
did begin to talk in about 1954, both sides did things or said things that could be prone
#
to misinterpretation by the other side.
#
You know, Nehru insisted on issuing some maps where Aksai Chin seemed to be very much within
#
And he did this just around the time of a meeting with Zhou Enlai.
#
Zhou Enlai didn't take Umbridge, but as soon as he went back, the Chinese began to issue
#
maps of their own that contradicted that claim.
#
And when India objected, the Chinese said, oh, no, no, these are the old Go-Mindang maps.
#
So we did stuff with maps that they didn't, that caused suspicion amongst them.
#
They did stuff with maps that we thought was dishonest as well.
#
Nehru was not even sure that we really had a strong case on Aksai Chin.
#
And some of his advisors also didn't think so.
#
It was really only when S. Gopal, the historian, went to Britain and looked at the archives
#
there and came back that India began to feel that it had a much stronger case on Aksai
#
Chin and Nehru began to make much stronger statements publicly about owning Aksai Chin.
#
And the Chinese went through something similar.
#
Their records also had been disrupted by the Civil War.
#
At least that's a thought experiment that I do.
#
Some records may have gone to Taipei when the Go-Mindang ran away with all those documents.
#
Some may have been destroyed in the Civil War.
#
So they had to reconstruct their stance as well.
#
So I give both sides a long rope, in effect, saying let's not jump to this conclusion
#
on both sides that the other was thoroughly dishonest and trying to out point the other.
#
They were genuine administrative, political doubts, worries, weaknesses.
#
They had come out, both had come out of a civil war.
#
In India, the civil war was Congress Party and Muslim League.
#
In China, it was Go-Mindang Communist Party, which was a literal civil war.
#
They had both come out of a partition.
#
After all, the creation of Taiwan is a partition.
#
And Hong Kong was still there and Macau was still separate.
#
They had both come out of a world war.
#
They briefly fought on the same side against the Japanese, but they both came out of a
#
chaos or a world war, the Chinese particularly, because they were occupied.
#
They both came out of a period of war.
#
We were fighting the Pakistanis in 47, 48.
#
They were fighting the Americans and South Koreans in Korea.
#
Both were confronting the Cold War.
#
So you know, it's quite forgivable that they didn't know their minds altogether about the
#
border themselves, each other, et cetera, et cetera.
#
You know, so let's be a bit more forgiving of both sides and not jump to the conclusion
#
they just wanted to screw each other.
#
And that's what I tried to reconstruct.
#
But of course, they also did, unfortunately, read each other in a negative light.
#
What might have been innocent prevarications, contradictions, hesitations was seen as the
#
other side as you're trying to screw me and being dishonest with me and fooling me.
#
So not surprisingly, things increasingly fell apart.
#
And that brings us to the swap, which I suppose was the last great moment when things could
#
The Chinese under Zhou Enlai, when he came for that fateful summit in 1960 to Delhi,
#
the Indians already knew that he was bringing a proposal like that.
#
And this whole idea that Nehru and his advisor were naive, he was Chacha Nehru in his kind
#
of slightly indulgent, benighted, faltering, foolish way.
#
You know, he knew from the beginning, thanks to Pannekar, that there was a problem.
#
Thanks to G.S. Bajpai, thanks to Patel.
#
The letter that Patel wrote in 1950 just before he died to Nehru alerting him was written
#
by my grandfather, the draft, and then Patel played around with it and sent it off.
#
They were not naive at all.
#
But you know, there were other considerations.
#
Anyway, Zhou Enlai arrives in Delhi, as the Indians expected with the proposal.
#
But Nehru and his advisors already had lost courage.
#
Nehru said, famously, which I quote in the book, if I go for the swap, I will not survive
#
And who are the people who would have been his biggest critics, the right-wing critics
#
in his own party and the right-wing critics outside his party, the Jansang and others,
#
but also perhaps the Swatantra Party of Raja Gopalacharyan, who were more America inclined.
#
And they turned out to be formidable forces, as Ram Guha shows in his work on this period.
#
So they very quickly basically shut Zhou Enlai down.
#
And you know, they had reasons.
#
It wasn't just the domestic political sphere.
#
They had concerns of, as I think RK Nehru said, or is it BK Nehru at that time?
#
I forget, I'm forgetting my own book here.
#
But and the foreign secretary of the time was saying, you know, in 1960 that if we give
#
into the Chinese now under pressure, because border incidents were already occurring, what's
#
to stop the Chinese learning the lesson that if you push the Indians militarily, they will
#
And then they go, oh, no, we actually, oh, Ram, forgot, we want some more territory.
#
And then there's another set of border incidents.
#
And there would be the expectation that the Indians would cave in again.
#
And they also concluded that a joint, I had never put anything down on paper.
#
So this was a kind of chatty proposal, and what was really the, would Mao go for it?
#
Were there other forces or was this more or less a good-natured proposal by Zhou Enlai,
#
slightly intended to smoke the Indians out and buy time?
#
So there are all kinds of reasons that India could worry about the status of the proposals.
#
I mean, the Chinese concluded from this episode that the Indians were simply not willing to
#
A, enter into discussion seriously, they were not going for a reasonable proposal.
#
They were imperialists.
#
They wanted to take over Tibet, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And you just couldn't do business with them.
#
Even so, there were still some attempts to try and deal with it, but it collapsed, partly
#
with these military moves that occurred.
#
And so, you know, the chapter shows that one period of proto-cooperation through a collapse
#
into war, peaking in 62 occurred.
#
And just to take very quickly the story forward, after 62, we go through almost a similar arc.
#
Again, almost immediately in 63, 64, India sends out messages to try and get some talks
#
It has a certain amount of receptivity, an arc of cooperation begins, and it does well
#
until a much longer time scale here, right up to about, I would say, the early 2000s.
#
Maybe 2006 is the turning point when the Chinese ambassador in Delhi, very publicly at that
#
time, says, by the way, we own all of Arunachal Pradesh, so please, you Indians, don't forget
#
And there was consternation because we hadn't heard that kind of blunt statement for the
#
Chinese for a long time.
#
And from 2006 onwards, then, you can see a deterioration in the relationship.
#
By 2010, India, perhaps in reaction, stops making fulsome statements in the joint statements
#
that happened with summits about, oh, yeah, yeah, Tibet is yours.
#
And so we stopped doing that.
#
They keep insisting Arunachal is theirs.
#
I mean, of course, they'd said it earlier, but there was a long period of time where
#
they stopped insisting on it very publicly.
#
Just 2010, 2013, we're almost back to where we are now.
#
You have the Deptsang Plains incident when Manmohan Singh is in his last year.
#
That occurs just as Lee Keqiang, the current premier, is coming to meet Manmohan Singh.
#
Modi and Xi are sitting on a jhula in Gandhinagar, and the troops are faced off in Chumar.
#
2015 is Bertsi, and this is an episode that people have sort of forgotten.
#
I don't know why the Indian media has largely forgotten it.
#
And so 2013, 14, 15, annually, there are these fracases or confrontations.
#
2017 is Doklam, 73 days of staring each other in the face.
#
And 2020 is Ladakh, back in the eastern sector with Chumar, Deptsang, and Bertsi.
#
So we didn't end up in the 62 war, we ended up in Ladakh 2020.
#
It's an arc of cooperation through attempts to settle the issue.
#
There were very thorough border talks from 1981 onwards.
#
We've never stopped negotiating on the border after 1981, which people forget.
#
But again, it degraded, and we went into near war in 2020.
#
In 62, we went into war.
#
So you know, it's an odd thing that we've had two repeat cycles.
#
And at the heart of it, I mean, I don't know exactly what the answer is, but fundamentally
#
there's an issue of trust there, which is a tautology, right?
#
You don't cooperate because you don't trust, and you don't trust because you don't have
#
a history of cooperation.
#
So then, by the way, tautologies are useful because they make us ask, well, why don't
#
How can I break out of this tautology?
#
And here I would just end with some thoughts, which is, they're unprovable, but they're
#
up for discussion, which is the political cultures of the two sides really, in a sense,
#
you've got liberal India working in constitutional ways, taking constitutional ways from the
#
British and that whole mindset from internal negotiations to external negotiations of a
#
certain kind, you know, that settle borders by treaty and customary understandings.
#
And that's how you deal with the problem with China.
#
That's Nehru, whereas the Chinese, there are two revolutionaries there, hard-bitten, cold-eyed
#
men who went through cataclysmic total warfare.
#
They are dealmakers, they're strategic minded people.
#
They think that the liberal adornments of law and constitution and all of that is some
#
bourgeois idea, which is supposed to mask reality.
#
After all, what does the middle class do when they're capitalists?
#
They pretend to give you all these freedoms and protections of the law to make sure that
#
they actually come out on top.
#
So they looked at this whole insistence on constitutionalism and negotiation and insistence
#
on rule of law and treaties as trying to fool the Chinese.
#
So you know, they just couldn't quite comprehend where Nehru was coming from.
#
And likewise, the Nehruvians thought that they were dishonest.
#
And then, as I said, all these hesitations and cartographic kind of weaknesses that they
#
had made each suspicious of the other.
#
And that's just, you had both sides, ironically, were weak states, and weak states find it
#
difficult to cooperate with each other, because they can't convince the other that their moves
#
are, you know, then there's history, the two countries I try and point out or the two civilizations,
#
their two heartlands never had a very rich diplomatic history, they traded, monks went
#
back and forth, etc, etc.
#
But empire to empire, they have a long history of knowing each other's ways, which could
#
And what do they get from that history?
#
They get predictability of how the other, but most important, they learn a lesson about
#
does the other side keep to commitments, i.e. promises.
#
If you feel the other side keeps to promises, then you might begin to think, okay, if we
#
did a stucco deal, they'll honor it.
#
And the last point is, where does trust come from?
#
It comes from, you know, if you're part of the same civilization or culture, you have
#
a certain kind of sense of, I understand where you're coming from.
#
We come from the same place kind of stuff.
#
But for all that, China and India, you know, don't come from that place.
#
They don't have that assurance or that immersion in a common culture.
#
And so I think, you know, those are some reasons that they just, there was a lack of trust.
#
And to some extent, all that continues to be the case.
#
So your other two piece, of course, are about like one is about partnerships, which is about
#
how geopolitical considerations have kind of kept them on the opposite side with, you
#
know, India will first go with Russia and then with the US and, you know, and all of
#
these things ensure that they never end up on the same side.
#
I mean, basically, like you pointed out, they're on the same side only once, which is in the
#
Otherwise, they're never on the same side of a conflict.
#
And your final chapter on power is about the great power imbalance, where China has become
#
a much more powerful country.
#
And therefore, China is saying we will not give any concessions because we are much more
#
And India, which recognizes that it is not as powerful, but it aspires to be, will say
#
we will not make any more concessions because, you know, all kinds of reasons it looks bad
#
and you know, what would our voters say and all of that.
#
I'll direct listeners to go and just buy the book and read it because it's a fantastic
#
And really, I don't think we'll do justice to it if we try to really summarize it.
#
But I'll end with a couple of final questions.
#
And one of them is this that it seems to me that post 1950s what has happened to our relationship
#
is almost like this great tragedy where both countries for various reasons, various reasons
#
with which are rational and understandable have somehow gotten locked into this antagonistic
#
relationship where it has become impossible to trust the other side again for good reasons.
#
It's not as if there are any bad actors in this, but it becomes impossible to trust the
#
other side and which led to that one eruption of the 62 conflict.
#
But what has happened since then is that both sides seem to have recognized that this is,
#
you know, let's make a stable equilibrium out of this and not enter into any more skirmishes
#
because war after all is a negative sum game and blah, blah, blah.
#
So let's just ignore the problem and we'll make occasional noises and we'll posture occasionally,
#
but we won't actually do anything against each other.
#
And let's just keep it as it is.
#
And it's it kind of stays that way for decades.
#
And yet over the last few years, it seems to have exploded into a different kind of
#
place where the Chinese clearly want something and these border disputes don't just seem
#
to be about borders because, you know, I mean, these are, you know, Siachen is important
#
for India, Xiachen is important for China, but they're not that important that you risk
#
a full-fledged war or that you break this equilibrium.
#
Also the danger here is we enter a vicious cycle where we have jingoism on one side met
#
by jingoism on the other side, and it just escalates and becomes worse and worse.
#
So the first of my two questions is that why is this happening?
#
Why the sudden belligerence from them?
#
Why have they kind of upped the game?
#
What are the kind of competing theories and what seems most plausible to you?
#
Well, I'll go back to these four P's.
#
I would investigate all four, but I think that, you know, in search of a fairly simple
#
answer, I would go for the simplest, which is that it's the perimeters of Tibet, which
#
is the Chinese built a lot of infrastructure in Tibet, which is relatively easy to do because
#
it's a plateau and they did massive amounts of building there in the late 90s, early 2000s.
#
India then alarmed by this suddenly started to get going on, building its own infrastructure
#
under the Manmohan Singh government first, a little bit under Vajpayee and then again
#
with Modi, so all three governments have played their role in pushing or playing catch up.
#
The difficulty on the Indian side is that our roads are twisting, turning.
#
We're going from the plains up in straight up into these massive hills.
#
So our road building and infrastructure is much more difficult to do.
#
And so it's not surprising that it's slower.
#
I mean, there are other reasons to be reluctant to build it earlier and so on and so forth.
#
So we've slowly started to catch up.
#
We've rehabilitated some in our flatlands in Aksai Chin.
#
We've rehabilitated some of the airfields going back to an earlier time, excuse me.
#
And that has alarmed the Chinese as we've caught up.
#
Now we can say it's unfair because they did their infrastructure first.
#
Why should they object to ours?
#
But this is a strategic issue.
#
There's no fairness issue here.
#
This is again, you know, we're talking the fairness game.
#
We're talking a strategic picture.
#
And to understand what's strategic about it, which again, we don't appreciate enough probably
#
on our side is, and I've been saying this in some of the other talks, is when you think
#
the border issue, when you think conflict with China, please think Tibet.
#
They are so super sensitive about Tibet in a way that we don't appreciate.
#
You know, we think that, oh, we did that deal back in 54 that they should be happy with
#
it and that's the end of the story.
#
No, there was a rebellion in Tibet after that that they accused us of fostering and working
#
And there's evidence that certainly the Americans very much pushed it.
#
But beyond that, when you build these roads and infrastructure, I mean, they're reading
#
that as not a defensive move, but potentially a move into Aksai Chin to again endanger their
#
road from Xinjiang down into Tibet and to potentially at a moment of internal instability
#
And I'll come to that in a minute that India could play a role then.
#
I mean, maybe not invade and take over, but cause significant trouble at the border and
#
send a message to rebellions within Tibet, which then the Chinese would have difficulty
#
So I think that's the thing that we have to keep in mind on the Indian side.
#
And we're going into a dangerous period.
#
So it's not just the roads per se.
#
It's that for China, we're going into a dangerous period for them.
#
Well, the Dalai Lama is a wonderful person, and I hope he lives for a very long time.
#
But we know we're entering a period of transition.
#
And he will depart this world, sadly, at some point.
#
The Chinese will put up their successor.
#
The overseas Chinese community, including very powerful in India, will want to do their
#
own succession planning and process.
#
They may be Tibet diasporic communities in the West who will do their own search, which
#
would not agree with either of the other two searches.
#
So one can imagine a very difficult time if you put yourself in the place of Beijing.
#
And strategic thinking, you have to think about how your adversary thinks about problems.
#
So they can see a political strategic problem arising in the next 10, 15 years, perhaps
#
sooner, where the Tibet issue boils up.
#
The Indians have completed their infrastructure and are much more able to intervene or cause
#
trouble at the border, coincident with an internal rebellion and uncertainties.
#
And you know, it may be that they would be generous towards us and say whoever's ruling
#
in Delhi would not deliberately stoke the problem, but would an Indian ruler, given
#
public opinion in India, be able to handle the fallout of the succession and what it
#
So from every point of view, they would be extremely worried about the Tibet problem.
#
And that's the issue, you know, I think, which is that it's a bit incomprehensible to us
#
that they're so substantially in charge of Tibet and all of that.
#
What are they worried about?
#
Why do they worry about the border?
#
We can't invade them, et cetera.
#
And as you said, the slices of territory that might be involved, barring Arunachal Pradesh,
#
But there's Tibet, there's their worry about Tibet.
#
And this, I think, is the problem.
#
And it's almost like a structural historical moment or a conjuncture that we've reached
#
of the fatality of human beings that the Dalai will leave this world, sadly, current Dalai
#
Dharma, and a decision has to be made about the future of Buddhism in Tibet and the governing
#
arrangements, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And the fatal problem, fatal meaning, it's out of our hands that there's a Tibetan community
#
here who will want to have a say.
#
Nothing in Beijing can't do anything about that existential reality, Delhi can't do anything
#
We're not going to force out the Tibetans, we're not going to put all the Tibetans in
#
jail so we can avoid a problem with the Chinese.
#
The Chinese can't do something about the Tibetans in India beyond a point, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So I think it's a real difficulty.
#
And that may account for the very serious kind of problem that occurred last year.
#
And you can see 2013, 14, 15, all in eastern Ladakh.
#
2017 is a bit different, but that's a different part of Tibet.
#
And by the way, the problem is in eastern Ladakh.
#
But if, you know, going back to 62, Mao took a decision to hit India hardest in Nifa, in
#
Arunachal, where India was probably strongest militarily, because he wanted to make the
#
point that if we're going to hit India, we're going to teach them a lesson.
#
You can't do it where they're weak, because they'll find excuses saying, oh, they beat
#
us up where we're weak.
#
No, we're going to beat you up where you're strong, to really make the point that, you
#
know, we are angry with you.
#
So this may be, again, the problem.
#
And the further issue is that they lay strong claim now, as they didn't as much back in
#
They may see economic resources in Arunachal that they didn't earlier, river waters, agricultural
#
lands, minerals, and all of that, timber.
#
And it's symbolically important, because coming back to Tibet, Tawang Monastery, that's there.
#
We can't give it to them.
#
When the next delay comes, it will be in the mix of things that has to somehow, you know,
#
that might play a role.
#
So Arunachal is important from that point of view as well.
#
And lastly, where are their main military headquarters?
#
They're near Arunachal Pradesh.
#
I mean, Lhasa and all of that is near, it's not in Ladakh.
#
They're not in eastern Ladakh.
#
So the command headquarters are in Chengdu and neighboring areas like that.
#
They only have one big command center, and that's in Houtan in Xinjiang.
#
And that's quite a distance away from eastern Ladakh.
#
So I mean, a commonsense prediction would be that if there is a problem, we could have
#
a very serious problem in Arunachal Pradesh, because that's where their military strength
#
and command strength is.
#
So you know, I'll cheat.
#
Before asking my last question, I'll ask a follow-up question to this.
#
You've been so patient with me, my God.
#
And here's a follow-up question.
#
The stakes are huge, right?
#
If you look at it as a negative sum game, as all conflict inevitably is, it can get
#
just much worse and worse.
#
And it doesn't matter how bad it gets for China, it'll get much worse for us.
#
And we don't want conflict.
#
And the positive sum game of cooperation and trade and all of that, the benefits are also
#
So now the question is that, what should India do now?
#
Like, going by this analysis, that this is a problem, these are their worries, there's
#
historically been distrust.
#
Let's resolve it once and for all.
#
And let's kind of move ahead and let's do what it takes to resolve it.
#
What should India do now?
#
Yeah, I mean, having said all this stuff so passionately, you put me on the spot, which
#
is a difficult one for academics particularly.
#
But fair enough, I mean, you know, the book doesn't answer the question really.
#
So because I got cowardly and I ran out of energy and time.
#
You were more foxy than hedgehoggy with this.
#
You put me in my place there anyway.
#
But I guess that for me, ultimately, at this point, I would say there has to be a thorough
#
excavation domestically on both sides.
#
And I think that, unfortunately, you know, on the Chinese side, even if it happens, we're
#
not going to see it, because they don't do that kind of stuff.
#
They don't open up in their system domestically, let it all hang out.
#
And warts and all, you see their debate and their mayor culprits.
#
But we can still do it because we're still open enough, you know, and we still have a
#
bit of a political culture, I would say, where we could open it up.
#
So I think that, you know, this is a difficult question.
#
But probably for me, the answer is that Beijing and China are not going to carry out this
#
internal somewhat public discussion, which is probably necessary.
#
I mean, they may do it internally and it could be effective.
#
But in a sense, it can still happen in India more easily, given our relatively open system.
#
And so, you know, it takes courage.
#
But I think India has to begin to vent, to open, to excavate, to take a risk, to open
#
Maybe some things can't altogether be opened up.
#
But I see a kind of opening up already happening.
#
I mean, you know, there've been some very interesting books just recently, Sir Robert
#
I know you interviewed, I think, Anand Krishnan, perhaps.
#
I haven't spoken to Anand, but I've spoken to Manoj Kevalramani on his book Smokeless
#
Manoj's work, which I don't know yet, actually, and so I must read that.
#
Thanks for alerting me to it again.
#
I know there are at least a couple of Indian diplomats who are very soon going to come
#
They're China, you know, at least three of them, very, very high ranking diplomats.
#
I'm not going to mention their names because I don't think it's my call to mention it
#
when they still haven't come out very openly.
#
But you know, in a way, through them, we are beginning to open it out in a way that we
#
haven't done for a very long time.
#
And so I'm kind of still hopeful that these books will start to open it out.
#
And if my book also plays a bit of a role there, you know, in just provoking people,
#
then I think that would be a mission accomplished.
#
So I think there's hope there.
#
And this government and Shivshankar Menon and Manmohan Singh also began to open up the
#
So I think that, you know, both these last two governments have played a role in encouraging
#
And I think Foreign Minister Jayashankar and Modi himself, to their credit, I think are
#
Yeah, I think that's what's got to happen.
#
If out of that debate, then, you know, you see, then it's not just Modi taking a case
#
There's a whole range of people who will begin to open things up, talks like this and other
#
The Indian elite and middle class will begin to access these debates.
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So by the time a Modi or his successor comes to really sort of go back to China with a
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possible deal, they will already be a kind of civic society support base, which will
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say, all right, we're kind of ready.
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And I think that maybe already, barring some real fanatics here and there, there is a willingness
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now in India to kind of revisit the whole thing.
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On the Chinese side, too, I think there are constituencies there.
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But I think it'll probably take India to kickstart it at this point.
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I know that's a hard one for us to swallow on, because we think we've been wrong very
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badly by China, including last year.
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But from the spirit of your question, leaving aside, you know, this episode and that episode
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and who was at fault altogether, do we fundamentally want a resolution of this issue so that we
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can all move forward and deal with other problems?
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I think from that much bigger strategic perspective, I think we will have to take the lead in opening
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I mean, I obviously don't know India-China relations remotely, as well as experts like
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But from the little that I know of Indian politics, somehow I'm a little less hopeful
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My final question is this, given that the stakes are so high, a lot can happen suddenly.
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You know, the world can change in a week, as it were.
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If I ask you to look forward to, say, 2030, in the context of India-China relations, what's
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a best-case scenario and what's a worst-case scenario?
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Well, the best case is kind of this increasing internal debate, which in a sense was catalyzed
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by the events of last year.
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So if one could put it that way, the Chinese may have done us a favor by that.
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They may have catalyzed an internal debate that will culminate by 2030 in new perspectives
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And, you know, I mean, I can't say I'm a big fan of this government, but the chances are
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that Mr. Modi or a successor will be re-elected.
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And if they come back fairly strongly, they might be able to take this change that is
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And it may be that if it's Mr. Modi himself, that he would see that as part of a legacy,
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So to personalize the possibility, maybe that's the way it'll work out, is that he would take
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And by that time, who knows, Xi Jinping may also be looking at a legacy issue.
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And they decide to go for it, and it works.
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And we have catalyzed the debate enough internally that there'll be enough support for a Modi
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And so we get an agreement.
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Does that mean all quarrels will be over?
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But it means that at least this big one will be over, and then we can see whether we can
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adjust other matters between us.
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The worst case is, of course, that, you know, that doesn't happen.
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And the Chinese, you know, going back to what you paraphrased nicely for me, just the gap
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between the two countries either remains substantially like this or gets worse.
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And if that happens, then the Chinese would be even less prone to to concede to anything
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And we would find it even more difficult to, you know, do a deal which wouldn't look like
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I mean, our nationalists, super nationalists, and their super nationalists might just it
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India might drift closer and closer to the United States to compensate for that power
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gap, which will antagonize the Chinese even more.
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The Chinese will overread it and something will happen here or there on the border.
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And we could get into a serious problem.
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What might salvage it for India, of course, is that despite the disparity in power, geography,
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the Himalayas and so on will still play a role as a stopping factor.
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And, you know, it may be another stalemate, but it could be a fairly it could be a little
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I mean, the optimistic part of that is 1962 war.
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We think of it as one month long, but it's actually only 11 days of fighting in two phases.
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And really for such a massive border, sad as any casualties are, the casualties were
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relatively low in the history of warfare.
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And that's probably going to be the case again, it seems to me, you know, unless people lose
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their heads completely on both sides.
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So I think that's the worst case scenario that we do actually go beyond what happened
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last summer to an actual fight, maybe mostly centered on the eastern sector.
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And that would be, you know, unpredictable exactly where it would go.
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But again, it would make the problem worse for another 20, 30 years.
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Yeah, and if other countries get drawn into it to some extent, then it affects Asia.
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It has Asia wide ramifications.
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But I still remain somewhat optimistic that the events of oddly enough of last year may
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have catalyzed something, particularly on the Indian side, who knows how much on the
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Chinese side, and out of this something positive may come.
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And we could now one last thought on again to personalize it, both she and Modi have
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shown that they can make dramatic moves, either in their internal politics or externally.
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In India, you know, demonetization, GST, you know, certain kinds of other decisions that
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One day, Modi flies to Pakistan to make peace in 2015.
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The next day, we do balakot or whatever, you know, provoked by the Pakistanis.
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One day, there's Doklam, the next day, Modi is meeting Xi Jinping in Wuhan and then Mammalapuram.
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The Chinese likewise do all kinds of one day's full four year diplomacy.
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The next day, Xi Jinping is telling his diplomats, can you please ease back and use less harsh
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language and and be nice, play nice.
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So you know, we could see a dramatic reversal to Wuhan, the spirit of Wuhan and Mammalapuram
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And you know, we have ambivalences about the relationship with the Americans.
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So you never know, it might turn on these leaders suddenly making a switch strategically.
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I'm struck by the fact that even in your worst case scenario, it doesn't get too bad because
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Lovecraft himself might have put it, the mountains of madness save Chinese tentacles from entering
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And you know, but I'm also struck by the fact that some of the hope comes from the possibility
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of small men looking for big legacies.
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So who knows what will happen.
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But you know, I've I've learned so much by reading your book.
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I've learned so much by talking to you for almost four hours today.
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So thank you so much, Kanti, for your time and insights.
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It's been a wonderful tour, I must say revisiting my own life and learning from you.
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And I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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And thanks for talking about the book as well.
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It's a wonderful forum that you have here.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do head on over to your nearest bookstore online
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or offline and pick up India versus China, Why They Are Not Friends by Kanti Bachbhai.
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You can follow Kanti on Twitter at BachbhaiKanti, one word, and you can follow me at Amit Varma,
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
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Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
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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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