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How do we judge a political party?
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One way of doing so would be to see how well it governs when it is in power.
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By this yardstick all our parties have failed.
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India has been misgoverned throughout the last 74 years, barring brief happy accidents
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like the liberalisation of 1991.
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Bad economic policies have kept millions of people in poverty for decades longer than
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should have been the case.
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Our social ruptures have not been healed.
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If anything they've become worse and new fault lines have sprung up.
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But perhaps judging a party on governance is not fair.
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It ignores their incentives.
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A party's incentives are simply to win elections.
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People don't vote on the basis of governance, but on the basis of narratives.
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Our parties have been brilliant at creating narratives, building vote banks, constructing
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election machines of staggering complexity and equally staggering efficiency.
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And it's so fascinating to take a look inside these machines at the nuts and bolts of our
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioural
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Shivam Shankar Singh, author of two books, How to Win an Indian Election,
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which came out in 2019 and just released The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities, co-written
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with Anand Venkat Narayan.
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Shivam's career graph is fascinating.
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He was studying economics in the US a decade ago when he got interested in Indian politics.
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The India Against Corruption movement filled him with hope and given how bad the government
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of the day was, he saw Narendra Modi as a way out.
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He joined the BJP in 2013 and went to see Modi's parliamentary campaign in Varanasi
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He then did a lamp fellowship, getting deeper insights into how parliament works, or often
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He then took his data analytics skill to be a backroom boy for the political consultant
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He did a ton of work at the grassroots getting Amrinder Singh elected in Punjab in 2017,
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rebranding him from Maharaj to captain.
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He then realised that political consultants were just glorified event managers and decided
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he would learn more by working within a political party.
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He helped run the BJP's campaign in Manipur and Tripura, harnessing new media to do micro
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Then he realised that the BJP didn't really care about development, all that was rhetoric
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and he saw the extent of their divisive politics.
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He even wrote a post about why he quit the party, which then went viral.
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Most importantly for us, he wrote his excellent book, How to Win an Indian Election, which
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is so full of deep insights about the nitty gritties of how our parties run elections.
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His new book, The Cart of Conjuring Alternate Realities, is full of the nitty gritties of
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how narratives are constructed and why we believe them.
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I'm sure you'll find this conversation as fascinating as I did.
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But before we begin, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Shivam, welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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Absolutely amazing to be here.
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Reading both your wonderful books, both of which I learned so much from, one of the things
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that struck me is that your career trajectory would have been impossible a decade ago, like
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a decade before you came into this.
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Modern politics has just kind of evolved to the state where if one may say that a well-educated
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person like you can come back from the US and dive headlong into it and actually be
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part of a lot of what is changing.
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But before we get there, tell me a little bit about your life before politics.
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Like you did a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Michigan, Ann Arbor.
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What was your notion of yourself like when you were growing up?
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What did you want to do?
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What did you want to be?
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So I was actually born and grew up in Delhi itself, went to DPS RK Pram.
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For 11th and 12th, I actually went to a very interesting school called Mahindra United
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World College of India.
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And UWCs are a global chain of schools across the world.
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There were 14 when I was there, I believe there are 18 now.
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And when you go there, they almost guarantee you a scholarship to 97 US universities if
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you get admitted to any of them.
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So I found out that something like this existed, always really wanted to study the US and realized
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that this is an excellent opportunity.
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While I was in the US, I've always been interested in politics.
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But while I was in the US was when the India against corruption movement started, when
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the 2G scam happened, the Colgate scam came into the news, all of these political developments
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that were happening and the momentum that was getting built.
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For the first time in my life, I saw absolutely non-political people give up everything and
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enter the political frame.
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Not in direct electoral politics, but a lot of people who are friends of mine, even relatives
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of mine, went to India gate with Indian flags, sang the national anthem there with the entire
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India against corruption movement, they were looking for a change.
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In this political climate, I believe a major transformation was taking place in the country.
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What also happened and you correctly pointed it out, the space for a young person to contribute
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in politics wasn't there a decade ago, but that space opened up with the onslaught of
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digital technologies, data analytics coming into the fray and becoming extremely important
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So I knew a lot of young people who were working for major consultancy firms, KPMG, Bain, McKinsey,
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major banks who actually quit their jobs and came to support BJP's campaign at that point
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of time, just because of the political climate then.
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And the climate was essentially that the current incumbent government of UPA needed to go because
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of all of the scams that had happened, because of the policy paralysis talk and because Narendra
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Modi came with a very successful Gujarat model on how business would transform India, how
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the country would transform and benefit young people in the future going forward.
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So all of these people essentially came to the BJP and talked to different leaders, talked
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to whoever they could get a hold of and basically asked that, okay, we want to contribute to
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Interestingly the place to do this did not exist.
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A lot of politicians first took on these young educated people with themselves and then they
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realized that it's entirely useless to keep these people in their cars and take them from
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And that is how Prashant Kishore came into the scene because he was already working with
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Narendra Modi in Gujarat and he was given the responsibility to create an entity which
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could house all of these young people, not entirely headed, but at least structured.
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And that was how CAG, Citizens for Accountable Governance came to be as a non-profit.
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And all of these young people, everyone got paid like small amounts, but it was insignificant.
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People came there because they really wanted to contribute.
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In this political climate, while I was in the US, I also started working on the social
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media initiatives of the BJP, supporting their campaign online, did a little bit of work
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with overseas friends of BJP.
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All of this while it was happening, I realized that India really is opening up and a lot
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of people around me were extremely hopeful, especially when the 2014 change of government
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happened, people believed the nation is going to transform and just being a part of it seems
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like a very important thing to do.
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So I started exploring opportunities.
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What is it that I can do after college that gets me engaged in direct politics?
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Like more than that, to get me to understand the political system of the country, understand
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how laws are made, understand how institutions are structured.
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And that is when I came about and found the LAMP fellowship, which is Legislative Assistant
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to Member of Parliament, a very interesting fellowship run by an entity called PRS Legislative
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They select 50 to 55 people every year and then place them with a member of parliament
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So you get to work in the Indian parliament with an MP who has seen the entire political
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process for the last decade, two decades and has actually contested elections, won elections
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and is now working on framing the country's laws.
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So that just seemed like an opportunity that really interested me.
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So came back from the US right after graduation.
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Thankfully, I had applied to the LAMP fellowship and gotten in by then.
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So that decision became slightly easier, came back, joined it for 11 months.
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During this process, a couple of very interesting things happened that pushed me into direct
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That wasn't actually the plan.
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My plan very similar to a lot of people's plan in CAG was to actually work on governance
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and to work on strengthening institutions.
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But what CAG and everyone who worked there realized right after 2014 elections, I realized
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after the LAMP fellowship, the space to get engaged in policy is a lot more limited than
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the space to get engaged in politics.
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And when you work in direct electoral politics, especially on things like marketing, digital
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media, social media campaigning, data analytics, constituency profiling, surveys, if you create
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good content, if you create solid research, which is backed by data and facts, it is more
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highly regarded in the political domain than it is in the policy domain.
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Because policy more or less still runs on gut feeling, which was very surprising to
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But it's like someone in some layer of the hierarchy thought this is a good idea.
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They don't really count on collecting data and information, but the exact same politicians
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who will make policy decisions on gut feeling want data and specifics and research backed
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facts when it comes to elections.
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And during the LAMP fellowship, we did a lot of data work on parliamentary data.
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And a lot of people don't know this, but the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha website are
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You can access every debate that has taken place in the Indian parliament.
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You can access every question that has been asked in the Indian parliament.
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And we realized there was something wrong in the process of parliamentary questions
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So we basically pulled out the data for the 16th Lok Sabha, about 1000-1500 questions
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that were asked by different MPs.
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And then we ran some analysis on it and we statistically proved that the question selection
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Some MPs were getting way more questions selected than other MPs and it was happening because
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they were cartelizing together and asking the same questions.
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We researched and found out how the process was working, but we did not put that in the
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We just wrote on the statistics of it all.
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When that happened, a lot of politicians tweeted it out.
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Dr. Sashi Tharoor was one of the first ones who picked up the article and tweeted it out
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and it went kind of viral.
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And that's how I got my start in politics because people realized that, okay, there
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is this young person who is doing something related to data in politics and policy.
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And that's how I got into IPAC, Indian Political Action Committee, that's the company that
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Prashant Kishore runs, stayed there for a while.
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But what I realized was Prashant Kishore's strength is branding and building the image
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He does excellent events.
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He is a genius at branding a politician.
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But the data work that was happening at BJP was far superior to what any other entity
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in the country was doing and which is something that is still true.
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So people in BJP got in touch with me and I got in touch with them.
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We discussed what could be done.
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And at that point of time, BJP did not really exist in the Northeast and they were just
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And they asked me to come on board, help with the Northeast campaigns, especially because
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no one had expertise or domain knowledge in the Northeast within the BJP itself.
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No one understood the tribes there.
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No one understood the culture there.
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No one had prior prepared data on that region of the country.
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People didn't even have digitized electoral rules for that part.
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So it was entirely a fresh operation.
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So they were willing to get new people on board who would start and build this up.
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So I joined BJP, did that till mid 2018.
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That is when things started changing for me personally.
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During 2017-18, it started becoming clear that the development narrative is slipping
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If you look at the political slogans, then BJP started with Achche Dina Aane Wale Hai.
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It started with Bahut Hui Mengai Ki Baar, Ab Ki Baar Modi Sarkar.
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It started with Gujarat model, which was a very development centric model.
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But in 2018, it became entirely clear to at least me within the party and a lot of people
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with me that 2019 is not going to be a campaign centered around development.
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And a couple of leaders explicitly told us so too that if you contest one election on
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development and you contest the next one on development, you have to justify your development
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But if you shift it to an emotional issue, then whatever your development track record
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might be, you don't need to justify it.
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You've completely shifted people's attention to a new agenda and a new issue.
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And that was the plan for 2019.
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So I heard that plan and was kind of surprised and depressed at the same time.
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And I realized that I couldn't be a part of it.
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So I told everyone quite politely that, okay, I am for everything that happens on the side
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I've loved working for the party because it's doing exceptional work in the data realm.
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But if the campaign is going to be entirely around caste and religion and India and Pakistan
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and Hindu and Muslim, then this is something that I don't feel comfortable doing.
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Surprisingly, a lot of people called me up to ask, why are you upset with the party?
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And it became such a frequent occurrence that I ended up writing a blog post so that I could
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And then that blog post got picked up by pretty much all the online media outlets, a lot of
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different people and went viral.
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And that's how Penguin got in touch because no one had written anything on what political
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consultants actually do in the country.
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Who are these young people who suddenly come in and are doing some data stuff?
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They're doing targeted messaging to people and no one really understood this field.
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So an editor from Penguin reached out to ask me to write on it.
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I thought it was a very interesting opportunity and I was also jobless then because I had
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just resigned from the BJP.
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So I had the time to write it.
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Thankfully, the first book became a huge bestseller and like a lot of people knew who I was.
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Because after that, so then I started my own company that works in political data analytics
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and haven't had a dearth of work, mostly thanks to the book.
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I realized a lot of the people who reached out to me to work on the elections is because
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their son had read the book, their brother had read the book and recommended me.
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So that's what I'm doing right now.
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There's another transition that's happened.
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I'm actually enrolled at a master's program right now called Schwarzman Scholars and it's
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based out of Xinhua University in Beijing, which is the university that the Chinese Premier
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Xi Jinping studied at, Hu Jintao studied at.
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And the program is run by the Blackstone Group based in the US.
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It's 40% US scholars, 20% Chinese and 40% from across the globe.
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And the idea is to get people together.
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It's a fully funded master's program for people to understand China.
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The reason that I decided to do this was China became a more politically relevant issue in
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India over the last one year and I realized that the understanding of China in India is
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We have some experts on the border, we have some experts on the military and the PLA,
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but very few people understand Chinese culture, the Chinese economy, the Chinese regions within
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themselves, the structure of the Chinese Communist Party, just the way that the Chinese thought
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process within the population works, the Chinese social media and the internet because it's
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completely different from the normal internet.
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So doing this program right now because it's a politically relevant subject and also like
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a really interesting subject to study China.
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And in fact, I've done a bunch of episodes on China and now that you've mentioned this,
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I'll save some questions for China for you as well at the end of it, because your perspectives
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in many ways seem to be different from what one otherwise hears.
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Now what you've done in the last 10 minutes is you've given us this sort of pressy of
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a career that's much more interesting than these 10 minutes indicate.
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So it's like a long passage with lots of hyperlinks and what I'm going to do for the rest of this
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conversation is do a lot of double clicking on some of those hyperlinks and go in.
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I was struck by, you know, while reading your excellent first book, How to Win an Indian
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Election, when I take notes from a book, I have all these sort of different headings
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and one of my headings was insights because it was just so full of really interesting
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things which, you know, were thought provoking for me and I'm sure for my readers.
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And a couple of them in fact came up while you were speaking just now and one of course
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is about how people within government do policy by gut feel and politics by data, which, you
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know, I'm sure the common perception of it is just the other way around that politics
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is gut feel and you're street smart and you kind of know what works and policy will be
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data but you're mentioning that as the other way around, especially saying that policy
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is gut feel is kind of startling to me.
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And that's also a fascinating rationale that, you know, you mentioned that the leader from
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the BJP gave you that if you fight one election on development to fight the next one also
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on development, you have to show the development so we can't do that, which is excellent.
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I want to double click right at the start and talk about the young Shivam before politics.
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One of the fascinating things that I found that you wrote about your years in the US
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is how there was a hunger for Hindi content that while you were there, you were constantly
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looking for news in Hindi, things to read in Hindi, so on and so forth.
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Now one trope that I have examined over the last 250 episodes, one thing I sometimes come
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back to is how different Indians understand this country differently because of the language
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that they grow up reading in.
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Like, I unfortunately am an English speaking elite, so I, you know, I can read and speak
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in Hindi but as a habit, I'm consuming everything in English.
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That definitely restricts the view I have of the country and this first came to me when
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I was chatting with a couple of earlier guests and one of the context for that was this controversial
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old piece Ramchandra Guha wrote and he's also been on the show many times where Ram's thesis
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was that there are no right-wing intellectuals you can respect in India and that was something
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I tended to believe at one point in time where I assumed that, you know, that what the right
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calls conservatism or whatever cloak they put on their philosophy is just a cover for
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innate bigotry and there's nothing more there and I found I was wrong and I found I was
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wrong while speaking to people like Akshay Mukul, like Rahul Verma, the scholar based
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in Delhi who will also be on my show soon again and I realized that they were people
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who grew up reading in Hindi.
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So they were aware of streams of thought which English speaking elites like me weren't.
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So my broad question is that do you feel that your consumption of material in Hindi gave
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you a sense of what politics was in India, what society was in India, which your English
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speaking peers or those peers who grew up just reading in English may not necessarily
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have had, you know, are there differences in perspectives that came from that per se?
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Oh, definitely, so I think language and the medium that you consume content in has a major
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impact on your thought process.
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This also in a lot of ways connects to the second book because it is on the reality that
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you live in, because all of us live in separate realities based on the information that we
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If you're consuming just English information, your worldview is very different from someone
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who's consuming just Hindi information.
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I am also an English speaking elite in the sense that while I was in India, I mostly
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consumed English content.
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When I was in the US, I realized that I'm losing touch with the language because across
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classes, across your friends group, you're just speaking in English, all of the study
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that you do is in English.
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So at that point, I made a concerted effort to consume Hindi news and at least read news
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in Hindi so that I could at least be connected to the language and retain my reading and
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writing abilities because I also realized Hindi deteriorates extremely fast.
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Your reading speed in Hindi, if you don't read it for two years, three years, just starts
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declining exponentially.
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So to keep that alive, I started consuming Hindi content.
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What I realized there, first of all, was that, yes, there is an alternate set of thoughts
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that exist, but there is also an alternate set of facts that exist.
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If you look at reporting in Hindi and English, then the facts being presented to the audience
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is very different from each other.
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So you would have different worldviews.
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Also an interesting component of it is that even between these two languages, if you start
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going to the other regional languages of India, the content gets even more specific and that
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is why we have states created on linguistic grounds because the thought and culture of
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language is a part of people's identity and thought process.
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So people who speak the same language and consume the same content feel closer together
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in thought than other people who speak a different language.
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And this I believe would continue to exist and it's actually also increasing now because
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as we have a movement towards say nationalism and the English intellectuals don't respect
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India, they are anti-India.
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As this narrative strengthens, people who consume content in Hindi get more basically
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solidified in their own silos and people who consume content in English get solidified
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And politicians, especially in the ruling party right now, absolutely love this.
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As little engagement as there is between the two groups, the more solidified the content
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and the narrative and the silo becomes.
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So it just serves their purpose and somehow language in India hasn't presented to be
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We've always believed in unity and diversity.
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We've always believed that multiple languages, multiple cultures, multiple thought process
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is a good thing, but that seems to be transforming over the last few years.
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These things which India considered to be a strength are now being exploited by political
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entities, by even other non-political entities for their own purpose and their own gain.
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If you look at nationalism and Indic pride right now, there are a lot of companies coming
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up who sell products based on that.
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So it's not even just the politicians.
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There are social media companies that have been created based on a spirit of nationalism
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that is essentially, okay, these foreign companies where English is the main language is dominated
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by left liberal intellectuals.
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So this language barrier is now also a political barrier and it's also becoming a cultural
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barrier and it's becoming a divide where people with one linguistic consumption habit
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actually dislike and distrust people with another linguistic habit.
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So this interesting transformation will play out over the next few years, but it is something
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that's getting more embedded and becoming scarier over time.
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And is this something that has changed and become more recent?
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Like I did an episode with Srigdha Poonam who wrote this excellent book called Dreamers
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about young India and young Indians and one of the threads in that was that one thing
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she would find in small towns everywhere was his aspiration to learn English.
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So it was Hindi speakers who are not necessarily resenting those who know English and are
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part of the elite, but they want to join that elite and they want to learn English.
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And that's the whole game, you know, where English becomes a sort of a tool for signaling
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that you are on the move, that you're going from here to there as it were, rather than
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just a sort of a medium of communication.
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Is that somewhat at odds with the sort of the resentment and the feeling of otherness
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that you're talking about now?
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Is this sort of this negative more darker shade something that's come about maybe over
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So English has always been a tool for social mobility and it's been a very easy means
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to rise up the economic ladder.
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And this is true for most nations around the world.
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If you move from the native language to English, you will do economically better and your future
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generations will do better because they will start learning the language from a young age.
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So it has been a part of Indian aspiration.
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Higher education has been a part of Indian aspiration.
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The value of secularism and liberality and a culture that adapts to other cultures has
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been something that India has largely been proud of through much of its history.
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All of these things though are being transformed into something of a weakness.
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So when you look at the current politics, the goal is to make you feel bad about it.
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It's about why do you want to learn English?
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These people who want to learn English want to change your culture, want to take something
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And a large set of people are now holding on to a value system where they would rather
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go to Hindi medium schools, rather send their kids to Hindi medium schools, even though
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it's economically worse for them because it is a political statement and they have
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come to believe that learning English and transforming towards English is somehow selling
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And it is a message that our politicians have tried to send to a large part of society.
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If you look at even people who went to foreign universities, people who got great educations,
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it was a thing that generated respect across society.
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But now there is a movement to deride and belittle it in the sense of statements like
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hard work versus Howard coming from top politicians of the nation, in the sense of people stressing
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how anyone who goes to a good institution, even within the country, if you look at something
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like JNU, Jawaharlal Nehru University has been one of the top educational institutions
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If you look at Ashoka University, one of the better private universities, all of these
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bases of intellectuality and learning have been branded into something negative, something
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that is against the nation, something that is anti-national, something that will work
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against the interests of India.
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So there is a concerted attempt to make anything progressive into a bad thing.
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And that also includes the English language.
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So what we see increasingly around us these days is a lot of regressive messaging from
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politicians of all hues, actually.
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For example, just recently there was that, I think, that politician whose clip went viral
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on YouTube where he's saying that, you know, what is wrong with modern women?
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Why are they not getting married to us?
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Why are they not having kids and all of that?
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Leave alone the fact that our prime minister himself hasn't got married or had kids.
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But one can at least understand where that sentiment is coming from, because our society
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is misogynist and sexist, and they want to keep it that way.
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And obviously every Indian male who thinks like that is terrified of the empowered woman.
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So I get where that is coming from, reprehensible as it is.
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But you know, this whole thing that I won't send my kid to an English school seems a little
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I mean, I did an episode with Sujata Anandan about Maharashtra politics where she spoke
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at length about the Thackerays.
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And the interesting thing about Bal Thackeray was that he was a true believer.
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He wasn't just posturing.
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When he spoke out against English schools, he actually sent Uddhav to a Marathi medium
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school, for example, which could have, you know, turned Uddhav one way or the other.
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But it seems that he remained fairly sensible and didn't go down those extreme paths.
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So do you have any theories about why this is so?
#
Because it seems to me like a clash between the individual self-interest and community
#
pride that your individual self-interest would dictate that you send your kids to an English
#
medium school because they'll do better in life.
#
And then one day, hopefully they'll look after you better because they'll have more money.
#
But instead, it's like, you know, apne hi pair pe kulhari kind of thing for this whole,
#
you know, notion of community.
#
And this keeps coming back to me again and again, because like I am someone who values
#
individual rights above all.
#
You know, to me, if you think in terms of groups, that's toxic, that's dangerous, that
#
completely goes against individual freedom as well.
#
But there are many people who, you know, obviously take the contrary view, not just in an abstract
#
sense when it comes to other people, but even when it comes to themselves.
#
So I can't understand this.
#
What are your thoughts?
#
So let me start out by saying that most people, the vast majority still work based on self-interest.
#
If they have the opportunity and the funds, they will still send their kids to the best
#
It will most likely be an English medium school, likely CBSE or ICSE and not the state boards.
#
This hierarchy still remain very much so and that encompasses the vast majority of the
#
But what is happening is that a vocal fringe is coming about.
#
And if you look at it in terms of other nations or other ethnic groups, then we've seen this
#
within Islam, say for a very long time, where there is a push to send the young kids to
#
madrassas instead of sending them to private schools.
#
If you look at a nation like Afghanistan that has just fallen to the Taliban now, they would
#
much rather have the entire population study religious scriptures than study science and
#
mathematics and humanities or not.
#
So this is a thing that exists in most tribalistic societies, in most tribalistic cultures, where
#
the fringe when it comes to power does not want people going to institutions of learning,
#
which will expand your thought process.
#
It wants you and your kids to be in a place which restricts your thought process, which
#
takes you back to something thousands of years ago and you start seeing something that is
#
old and ancient as a great and glorious time period and the current as something that is
#
bad that has come about because of the other side who is trying to liberalize, who is trying
#
to bring in Western values, trying to bring in external things into your life.
#
You start hankering for a past that you haven't lived in because it existed thousands of years
#
This group has started emerging within Hindu India.
#
It did not for a very long time and the aspirations of all of India were basically concentrated
#
around economic development and prosperity and growth.
#
But this recentering that has happened, there are a couple of reasons for it.
#
The politics of Indic nationalism and Hindu pride and Hindutva is definitely one reason.
#
The other reason is that economic possibilities and just people's capabilities to transcend
#
the economic ladder and go up has declined and in India, if you look at the growth trajectory
#
of the country, we used to have something called the Hindu rate of growth, an extremely
#
slow 2 to 3% growth rate.
#
After liberalization in 1991, we started growing extremely fast by 1995-1996.
#
That growth rate survived till about 2012.
#
And after 2012, we basically started stagnating back to the 3 to 4% rate of growth.
#
This interesting thing that has happened has happened for a couple of reasons.
#
One technology is transforming.
#
So India's huge advantage because of which we became a powerhouse for BPO and call centers
#
and business outsourcing from the West is we spoke better English.
#
What's happening now is South Asia, Southeast Asia, the other nations, Philippines, Taiwan,
#
Indonesia, Vietnam, all of them are learning English.
#
Even China for that matter, who focused on manufacturing largely is entering the service
#
domain because people there are learning English.
#
So this competitive advantage is slowly declining in the country.
#
This basically removes a huge chunk of economic mobility because this is what people were
#
entering from 1996 to 2012.
#
When this happens, the value of say going to an English medium school also starts declining
#
They don't see the same amount of like reciprocal returns coming in.
#
So it becomes slightly easier to become like go into the Hindutva camp and be like, we
#
want our old traditional culture, we want our pride because when you don't have economic
#
growth, the only thing that you have to hold on to is pride.
#
This is a very interesting thing that I saw during my time at BJP and after a lot of Karekartaas
#
that you see in politics in general.
#
Most people think that that guy believes in Hindutva, that guy believes in protecting
#
the cow and cow raksha and lynching people who are transporting cattle.
#
This largely is not the case.
#
The interesting components that I started noticing really early on is most people are
#
If you look at a political Karekarta, who is a political Karekarta who is planting your
#
flags on the ground, who is calling people and filling them up in tempos and riksas and
#
taking them to political rally.
#
These people are some of the lowest people in society historically who have not been
#
to good educational institutions, who have not had good opportunities in life, who have
#
not worked at high salaries.
#
They are people who have run some businesses here and there, done some tiny consultancy
#
work here and there, part-time jobs.
#
But they have spent most of their life at the local paan ka dukaan discussing politics.
#
Waha pe BD Pina, cigarette pina and the conversation is largely centered around politics.
#
They have not ever had respect in society.
#
Within their families, within their areas, within their entire society and their entire
#
caste networks, they have been seen as someone who doesn't do anything, ki local netagiri
#
karta hai, chhota mata gunda karta hai, ki this person is not someone that you should
#
associate with, has been the image.
#
BJP has transformed this.
#
Now that same person at the same paan ka dukaan, if he wears an orange gamcha and he starts
#
talking about Hindutva, he becomes someone who is slightly more respected in society.
#
If he talks about gauraksha, if he talks about ancient Indian culture and wisdom, his respect
#
And because the economic aspect of gaining respect is not there anymore, it is a much
#
Earlier you could get a good job and gain respect in society.
#
That good job is not there anymore.
#
So the way to gain respect is becoming, you enter the fringe, you start saying more fringe
#
things, you start defending Hindutva, you start becoming a spokesperson on your WhatsApp
#
groups and that becomes something that gives you some amount of authority and respect in
#
And this is how most political karyakartas stay engaged with the process and support
#
something that they did not say even under BJP during the Vajpayee years, when LK Advani
#
was leading the BJP after Atal Bihari Vajpayee retired.
#
The same amount of fringe thought was not there because you did not gain pride by it.
#
Now the fringe thought keeps escalating, keeps increasing and it's been especially true
#
If you look at the political climate, a lot of leaders were not willing to give hate speech.
#
The hate speeches were largely WhatsApp forwards, they weren't on national television.
#
They weren't in the television studios.
#
But they came into the television studios, they came into mainstream political discourse
#
and in the rallies and speeches of politicians after 2019-2020.
#
And this process I believe will keep accelerating because it's become more acceptable and honestly
#
it's become something that gives you respect and pride in society.
#
Fascinating and for those of my listeners who would like to sort of learn more about
#
the economic trajectory you described, which is absolutely correct, I did an episode with
#
Pooja Mehra on her excellent book The Lost Decade about how essentially the last 10 years
#
the economy has really gone down and it's not to be blamed on any one party, it's just
#
a confluence of circumstances which she goes into.
#
And I also did a recent episode on liberalisation which was really popular with Ajay Shah and
#
Shruti Raj Gopalan, by which I don't mean to say it was popular with Ajay Shah and Shruti
#
Raj Gopalan, they were the guests, it was popular with everyone else.
#
And I love the irony there that the BJP moving away from a narrative of development to Hindutva
#
when actually it is a very lack of development which is pushing people more and more towards
#
And you mentioned the term Indic that reminded me of a tweet that my good friend Hamsini
#
Hariharan who hosts a podcast, States of Anarchy, recently put out where she said quote, I'm
#
meeting a new set of people who use Indic to substantiate every bigoted belief they
#
Now, one thesis, of course, is that look, there's no development, but so there's no
#
getting ahead per se, but there needs to be pride.
#
You find pride in the civilisational identity and blah, blah, blah.
#
Another an additional narrative, I won't say a counter narrative because these things are
#
multifactorial, but an additional hypothesis that I have written about, and I'll present
#
to you now and tell me what you think about it, comes from this phrase used by the sociologist
#
Timur Kuran in his 1999 book, Public Lives, Private Truths, which is preference falsification
#
and preference cascades.
#
These are the two terms he came up with.
#
And his thesis was that look, in a time where information doesn't spread too well, if people
#
have beliefs that they think don't conform to widespread popular beliefs, they'll keep
#
The example he gave was look in the Soviet Union, you know, nobody knew that everybody
#
hated the state because nobody expressed it.
#
So everybody thought they are alone and they didn't want to take a chance.
#
But once that started getting out, once it reached a tipping point, you had what is a
#
And suddenly it seemed like the Soviet Union fell overnight and everybody had hated it
#
So similarly, my sense is that what happened in India and something that contributed to
#
the burgeoning of Hindutva and the kind of polarizing discourse that we have around us
#
is really social media, that social media created preference cascades.
#
Because let's say, you know, you hate Muslims and you think a woman's place is in the kitchen,
#
but you keep it to yourself because these are not things that you feel it is safe to
#
express because other people might disapprove.
#
And then social media happens and you realize that many, many, many people feel the way
#
So you can enter different kinds of silos with them, as you've described so well in
#
And you are now, you know, emboldened to express yourself.
#
And every time you express yourself, your belief is strengthened and you go more and
#
In fact, when you are in a silo with other people like yourself, the only way to stand
#
out is to become more extreme than they are to, you know, enforce different kinds of purity
#
And of course, these silos and purity tests you also find on the left as well as the right.
#
But right now we're talking about Hindutva.
#
So what is your sense of this?
#
Like much as in a sense, you're making a living depends a little bit on social media and all
#
the data gathering that this great technology enables.
#
But at the same time, well, I'm sure both of us would agree that technology is obviously
#
You have probably seen the negative aspects of it much more closely than many people have.
#
So what are your thoughts?
#
Oh, so this is definitely a major factor.
#
Social media allows groups to basically you get to consolidate people on any fringe thought
#
because you will find a group of people which will be a very small group who believes anything
#
no matter how fringe it is.
#
So conspiracy theory groups that came about in the US even after the elections, like people
#
who believe that the election was stolen by the current president, Joe Biden, or people
#
who believe in the QAnon conspiracy theories, or even in India, people who believe that
#
Shoshant Singh Rajput's death has a major nefarious plot around it.
#
So these groups are something that are created because of social media, because without it,
#
it would be very difficult for these people to come together.
#
When we wrote the second book, we actually studied Russia very deeply because we're
#
studying information warfare and figuring out how is it that people gain power by creating
#
an information environment around you.
#
What we realized that in an autocratic regime, the ruler never wants anyone to find out how
#
Because once they do find out that there are a large number of people who find them unpopular,
#
these people start consolidating into groups.
#
But if they think that they do not like the ruler personally, but everyone else around
#
them is a loyal follower of that person, they'll keep their thoughts to themselves and no one
#
will ever know how popular or unpopular the ruler is.
#
So this is an important aspect.
#
This definitely applies to thoughts that would be considered bigoted, thoughts that would
#
be considered illiberal, thoughts that would be considered bad by society at large.
#
You do find enough people on social media who start supporting your view and you keep
#
getting deeper into the silo.
#
It's also definitely true that once you are in the group, to rise within the group hierarchy,
#
the main thing that you can do is to become more and more fringe and more and more extreme.
#
So these things definitely do happen.
#
Social media itself is, it's a very complicated subject.
#
When it did start out and even right now, it allows you to form groups around anything.
#
So a lot of groups that are formed are around good things.
#
People on Twitter are learning every day, people who are watching YouTube videos are
#
learning something new every day.
#
But it also allows very bad thoughts to get exponential distribution.
#
The algorithms are structured in such a way that once you start viewing one kind of videos,
#
start liking and supporting one kind of tweets, your entire feed will get filled with that
#
because the platform's major goal is to keep you on the platform as long as possible.
#
So it will show you any content that plays to your biases, which will just keep you clicking
#
So this does mean if you believe in something fringe, if you believe in something absolutely
#
false, your life will get saturated by the false content.
#
And on every social media platform, you will start seeing things and information and messages
#
that basically solidify your notion.
#
So social media is doing that.
#
What is tricky right now is that because of this entire problem of misinformation and
#
silos, governments around the world are working to take power back from social media giants.
#
And so the second book's theme is also this, that power in the ancient world was largely
#
based on how much military might you have, then it transformed to how much economic might
#
And that was the history of colonialism where powers which were economically stronger took
#
over much larger countries.
#
Now power within domestic politics and in the international arena is dependent upon
#
who has the means to create an information environment around people and shape their
#
beliefs, shape their reality in essence.
#
So this power has now gone to Facebook and WhatsApp and Twitter and these private companies.
#
National governments absolutely dislike it.
#
So almost every country that is basically big enough and democratic or even authoritarian
#
governments, they are all trying to take this power back from social media giants and give
#
it to the governmental entity to shape people's reality.
#
India is doing it in its own way by asking social media giants to appoint an officer
#
who can be arrested if posts are not taken down so that government can take down any
#
post that it does not like.
#
Right now that power rests with Twitter.
#
Which one is better is a very tricky debate.
#
What I believe is that none of them are better because social media giants will want you
#
thrown into silos that keep you engaged forever, no matter how bad the thought.
#
Governments will try to censor any information that's against their reality and whatever
#
version of truth they are telling.
#
So both of these are horrible entities to regulate it, but this is the fight we have.
#
The only one who is doing something very different is actually China.
#
They can do something very different because for one, they do not have the traditional
#
They have their own internet and they control all of the social media platforms on that.
#
But their method is not to specify what content can come about and cannot.
#
They are now working on this algorithm level itself.
#
They are trying to specify what content can go viral and what cannot go viral.
#
So they are not censoring.
#
The algorithms will be designed in such a manner that content that the state disapproves
#
of will stay there, but it cannot have widespread distribution.
#
It cannot reach millions of people.
#
So it is a very interesting middle ground of handling it.
#
I do not know if one can call it a middle ground, I would say it is pretty much the
#
state controlling it anyway, but in a subtle way in which it is not obvious.
#
And you are right that this is something that kind of conflicts me.
#
Like number one, of course, for any of these platforms, it is natural and prima facie,
#
one would say if you know in 2010, if you say what is a perfect algorithm, I would say
#
an algorithm that knows what I want to read and what I want to watch and what I am likely
#
But then you see all these effects of these echo chambers and these silos coming up and
#
the extreme polarization that happens when you wonder is that a good thing.
#
I think but completely the wrong approach to it is a state sort of using its iron hand
#
to clamp it down because state power is something that I am always suspicious of.
#
You know, whenever we compare something that is wrong with the market and we recommend
#
the state action, we look at the faults of the market, but we assume the state action
#
will be perfect while it is absolutely the other way around.
#
State failure is ubiquitous while market failure is rare.
#
So in this case, while I accept that there is a problem with social media and these algorithms
#
and what is happening to our society because of them, which go far beyond politics even,
#
which affect mental health and there are various dimensions to it.
#
I think it is a social problem which should be solved by society.
#
If the state steps in, then we could be in a spot of bother.
#
Now, I want to sort of digress here and raise a question about a phenomenon that you described
#
in your books, but I want to kind of explore the why of it because I do not understand
#
the why of it, which is that, you know, one, of course, we all know why narratives are
#
The world is incredibly complex, we explain it to ourselves using simple narratives.
#
That's important and necessary and our brain is wired to do that.
#
That explains the attraction towards narratives.
#
But a lot of the narratives that have gained traction over the last few years are these
#
crazy narratives like the QAnon narratives you mentioned, then the Sushant Singh Rajput
#
Like people are only familiar with a couple of the common narratives.
#
I have gone into SSR rabbit holes and come across some really extreme stuff.
#
You know, like he is a creator of Covaxin and that's why they killed him.
#
And there's another popular theory where there is something in quantum mechanics by which
#
an atom can be split into two.
#
So the theory is that Sushant Singh Rajput once posted about this, said he wanted to
#
So the theory, this particular conspiracy theory is that he split himself into two.
#
And the SSR who got killed is a duplicate.
#
And the original SSR was a guy who created Covaxin.
#
And he is now in hiding because Yogi Adityanath is looking for him.
#
And this is something of that sort.
#
I'll post the link in the show notes.
#
It's completely bizarre.
#
Again, disturbingly, you know, in your first book, you also spoke about the child kidnapping
#
rumors that spread through WhatsApp.
#
And I had an episode with Pratik Sinha of AltNews where we spoke about this as well.
#
And the nuance that he revealed was that it wasn't just one child kidnapping message that
#
went out on WhatsApp groups and then everybody forwarded it.
#
It was constantly being edited with the name of the, you know, the local place, the district,
#
the village being changed, you know, as it kind of kept on moving.
#
And that's completely bizarre because as you've said in your book and as it's perfectly obvious,
#
this is not something any political party will do because they have nothing to benefit
#
And they won't even think of this.
#
These are private individuals.
#
But the point is these messages work because people are keen to believe this narrative
#
that kids are getting kidnapped and their kidneys are being taken away.
#
People are keen to believe that Sushant Singh Rajput is still alive and his duplicate died
#
and he invented Covaxin and shit like that.
#
So what I'm interested in is the why I understand the human attraction to narratives.
#
But why these kinds of crazy narratives like are we just bored with the world?
#
So this is actually a very interesting idea.
#
Human desire to understand things is definitely part of why people buy into stories and narratives.
#
But why crazy thought processes work is in general linked to people's desires to be
#
What happens is that in the modern world, people aren't really part of too many communities
#
Everyone has their own life.
#
Everyone's chasing whatever they're chasing in their own entire lives.
#
What this does is that it increases your desire to have human relationships.
#
If it's not working out in the real world, you seek it in the virtual domain.
#
And in the virtual domain, the kind of group that you fall into isn't really something
#
What happens is this is actually very close to the formation of cults.
#
And we've explored some religious cults getting formed.
#
And what we realized was most cults like the message itself and what the cult leader is
#
What matters is how distant you can be made from people in the real world and how you
#
can be made to feel like a part of a community within the cult.
#
As long as that is there, you will support any belief system, no matter how absurd it
#
keeps becoming, because then you feel like you belong to a community.
#
You belong to a certain group of people.
#
Those people will stand with you and anyone who does not support it is someone who is
#
against you and against the group and is trying to harm you.
#
This entire sentiment is what major conspiracy theories and cults are centered around.
#
This group thing getting built is very, it's a very weird phenomenon because what we realized
#
in the data itself, we analyzed data about cyber scammers and how cyber scammers got
#
people to give them OTPs, because we were trying to explore what kind of a person falls
#
We found absolutely no correlation.
#
It was not linked to your education level.
#
It was not linked to your language ability.
#
It was not linked to your socioeconomic status.
#
So someone very poor who has not been to school is exactly as likely to fall for a scam statistically
#
as someone who is very educated and very rich.
#
This told us something very interesting that this is something within the human mind and
#
within the human being that leads you to fall for these stories, these narratives and the
#
story and narrative will be different for each individual, not the same thing is going
#
to work for every person.
#
If you bring a concept from the US, like if you look at the US, there are people who are
#
so committed to the right to life that they want to outlaw abortion.
#
That particular messaging does not exist in India.
#
It will probably be a very hard sell to try and build it up and it would take a couple
#
But if you have something like the caste system that is so prevalent in India and there is
#
one caste group who thinks another caste group is against us, you can't take that out of
#
India and try to implant that messaging within a different society.
#
So different messaging works.
#
Who falls for Sushant Singh Rajput versus QAnon versus who falls for child kidnapping
#
rumors is a very interesting area of study that we are still studying and still working
#
on, especially related to geopolitics.
#
So we are doing it at a nation state level, not at an individual level per se, but very
#
I don't think anyone knows the answer beyond people's desire to be a part of a community
#
is much stronger than people's desire to look at what's real and what's not real.
#
I totally buy that the desire to be part of a community is both ever present and poignant
#
It kind of tells you about how even in these modern times with seven billion people and
#
all of that, one can, you know, everybody's essentially in a minority of one and looking
#
for ways to kind of get past that.
#
But as you pointed out, in some of those cases that doesn't apply, like the OTP scams or
#
the KYC scams or whatever, where they're believing a narrative, but obviously there's no community
#
You know, the kind of scam I expected you would write about, but you chose these local
#
Indian scams, but the Nigerian prince kind of scam, right?
#
A Nigerian prince wants to give you his money and blah, blah, blah, and all of that, which
#
is again a crazy story that you believe and there's no community at the end of it.
#
So clearly we are wired to believe this kind of shit, or maybe we are just bored.
#
So you know, it's like, who knows, maybe we are addicted to narratives and you want every
#
hit to be greater than the last.
#
So there actually is a community angle there because most of these scammers are trying
#
to recruit people to be their friends.
#
Like there are two ways to do it.
#
One is to scare people into it, tell them that accounts are going to get blocked, something
#
very bad is going to happen.
#
And they are their friend trying to save them from such a bleak and dark place through which
#
it will be very difficult for them to navigate.
#
The other one is them telling that how you would be rewarded if you tell them the OTP
#
because you won the special prize, you won the special thing.
#
If you look at the Nigerian prince scams, those scams take months.
#
It's not one email and send someone sending you money.
#
It's literally someone cultivating a relationship with you over the course of three to six months
#
or even we've actually seen instances where people have done this for two years and then
#
got someone to give them money.
#
So it's a long term investment in forming a relationship.
#
The other part that I wanted to mention is with any conspiracy theory, it never starts
#
With something like Sushant Singh Rajput, it never starts at Sushant Singh Rajput splitting
#
into two or him inventing a COVID vaccine.
#
It always starts with very reasonable things.
#
It always starts with something which people are likely to believe because there is also
#
tangential evidence linking to it.
#
That evidence is taken out of context, that evidence is placed in a completely different
#
perspective, but it exists and that's how reasonable people come into it.
#
After that is when it starts spiraling into something completely insane.
#
Yeah, yeah, that's a really great point because I think the first conspiracy theory was, oh
#
look, his agent, Disha Salian died a week or a couple of weeks before that and there's
#
a crooked politician involved and all of us know politicians are crooked.
#
So all those are plausible bits of information which are verifiable because it is a fact
#
that she did die a couple of weeks before that, but then you build them together and
#
make this kind of crazy story out of it.
#
Having digressed so much, let's go back to your personal history and let me now kind
#
So I've hit the back button on the browser and now I'm double clicking on another of
#
So an interesting thing that you kind of mentioned again while talking about the Bachelor of
#
Economics that you did there is that just because everyone else was kind of doing it,
#
you said, let me also do computer science.
#
And by the way, there was this recent video which went viral on Twitter, which you must
#
have seen where people were mocking this kid, this poor kid who got into one of these IITs
#
and he had studied very hard for it.
#
He didn't go to parties, just that kind of work ethic and he said, I want to do computer
#
science and the person asked him why and he said, because everyone else is doing it.
#
And these snobs on Twitter were mocking him for it because why is he doing it if he doesn't
#
I thought his reason was perfectly good and it turns out that he actually did finish his
#
course and he's now got a plush job in Korea and all of that and he's really good at computer
#
And so while reading your book, it struck me that hey, Shiva, I'm also in that category.
#
But that turned out to be really fortuitous for you because that was practically the base
#
of whatever you went on to do.
#
So tell me about your sort of entry into data analytics and computer science and did it
#
in some fundamental way change the way that you looked at the world around you?
#
Like I didn't study data analytics, but I was a professional poker player for a few
#
years and, you know, got deep into math and probabilities and game theory and all of that.
#
And I just found that probabilistic theory just completely changed the way I look at
#
every single thing around me.
#
So was there something, you know, analytics, data science played that kind of role for
#
So I yes, I did the computer science courses because a lot of my Indian friends were doing
#
So just because I wanted to be in the group while they talked computer science stuff and
#
I wanted to understand what they were talking about, I did a lot of computer science courses.
#
Definitely one of the most valuable courses I've done, at least in my worldview at this
#
point of time, at least understanding how code works helps you in pretty much every
#
Because even if you don't code yourself, at some point of time, you will need to explain
#
to another coder because everything is moving online in one way or the other.
#
Every space that we see around us, there is some amount of automation coming in.
#
There is some amount of technology coming in to transform those spaces.
#
So that way, I think it's extremely valuable.
#
It does transform your way of thinking in econometrics and statistics.
#
It does tell you how biased your thinking is.
#
In a way, what happens is on one side, while studying econometrics, you're being told
#
how human biases play in because a lot of the questions that we answered in class, the
#
guess that you would have, the gut instinct that you would have is far off from what the
#
And then on the other hand, like learning computer science, you realize that the computer
#
is a very efficient thing, but it's also a very dumb thing.
#
People think computers are smart, but code needs to be written in a way where every step
#
There is no space for ambiguity.
#
It's not like a human being that you tell them, okay, go to the market and then get
#
You have to specify every step.
#
You have to specify every action that the computer needs to take for it to work.
#
It's changing now with machine learning and AI coming in where computers can also teach
#
some things to themselves.
#
With traditional computer science, it does tell you that the thought process must be
#
so systematic where you need to specify every step of the way.
#
Once I started doing this in life and after the entire political journey, after writing
#
two books, I realized something special about the stories that people tell themselves.
#
What happens is that you try 10 different things, political parties try 10 different
#
things and three of those work wonderfully well and then someone comes to the TV studios.
#
I have also been to the TV studios and done this.
#
Then you tell a story that, oh, this happened and then we saw this data and then we saw
#
That's why we built this campaign and then we did this campaign next and then we did
#
this and this is how we got the votes and it's an excellent story.
#
Everyone's like, oh my God, that is so smart, that is genius, except in life, everyone is
#
trying 10 separate things at the same time, 2 or 3 of them work, 7 or 8 of them don't.
#
You disregard the 7 or 8 entirely and you form a story around those 2 or 3 and that's
#
how my life has been too.
#
Now I am clear what I am doing, so I have a story around how I was always interested
#
in politics, might not have been the case if I was not so successful within my journey
#
in politics and political consultancy in general, might have been an entirely different story.
#
So computer science does get you to think this way in steps and stages.
#
So what we'll do now is that we have pretty much done with your pre-political years, we
#
might come back to it later.
#
So let's take a quick commercial break and when we come back, we'll take you to Varanasi.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog, India Uncut,
#
which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
#
I loved the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
#
I exercised my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
#
because I wrote about many different things.
#
Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it.
#
Only now I am doing it through a newsletter.
#
I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write
#
regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
#
I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
#
Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
#
You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
#
Welcome back to the Scene on the Unseen.
#
I am chatting with Shivam Sankar Singh about the two wonderful books he has written, How
#
to Win an Indian Election and The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities and of course they are
#
But you know, before we even sort of get to those books and before your Lamb Fellowship
#
even, you've described in your first book about how you landed up in Varanasi in 2013
#
because you were kind of disgusted at what was happening to governance in India.
#
You realized it was time for a change.
#
You bought into some of Modi's campaign rhetoric about, you know, development and so on.
#
And you came out here and you went and volunteered in Varanasi.
#
Tell me a little bit about that experience because like number one, did you ever think
#
that you also want to be in politics per se and were you exploring that when you went
#
What was your immediate motivation per se or did you just find it an interesting field
#
at an intellectual level and you were like, hey, I want to understand this or was it this
#
vague notion that, you know, I want to help take my country forward and let me dive into
#
this and see if there is something here.
#
And of course, in hindsight, like you mentioned before the break, this clarity, you can construct
#
an exact story and how you got here from there.
#
As it were, the code of our lives is often written in hindsight after the program has
#
already played out as it were.
#
But at that time, you know, what were your motivations?
#
What were you looking for?
#
What were you thinking?
#
Take me through some of that.
#
So this was 2014 right before the general elections.
#
Primary motivation was that I had never actually seen an election in real life and I was interested
#
I already knew at that time that I would be joining the Lamb Fellowship and working in
#
I really wanted to see an election.
#
And what I realized was that you can actually just go and see an election.
#
India is an amazing country that way you reach out to a politician.
#
Most of them are extremely welcoming.
#
You tell them, I want to see your election campaign.
#
They will invite you to their constituency.
#
They will get you to sit in some random Karakarta's car and they will be like, go to this rally
#
here and they will be very excited to do it.
#
So that was my level of engagement in Varanasi.
#
I was largely an observer.
#
I wasn't helping out with the campaign in any way, also wasn't in a position to help
#
the Prime Minister of the country in his election campaign in his constituency.
#
But it was an extremely interesting journey, went to a lot of different places, talked
#
to a lot of different people.
#
The first thing that I started noticing was that the Modi wave in 2014 was so strong that
#
you had random kids shouting BJP slogans wearing BJP hats.
#
So I even have pictures posted to Facebook where random kids are hanging on to me wearing
#
BJP hats and that entire situation that was there at that point of time, the entire euphoria
#
that was there in the entire population made me really excited about elections in general.
#
So some of the most exciting days in my life have been one, one and a half months before
#
elections and it doesn't even matter who I am supporting, it's just the atmosphere
#
Urban elections for most people in urban India are these things where people are debating
#
on TV, angry at each other, shouting at each other.
#
In most of India, outside the urban metros, elections are festivals.
#
It's huge rallies happening.
#
It's crowds coming to cities from different villages with politicians arranging free transport
#
It's an entire holiday outing.
#
They come to the main metro city to listen to the speech, but then after the speech they
#
shop there, they go around there, the buses take like the next five or six hours just
#
standing there while people explore the towns and the cities of this country.
#
A lot of times political parties also pay people to come to rallies, which is obviously
#
a horrible thing for democracy, but is also a form of economic redistribution.
#
Political parties and politicians made money.
#
When the election is happening, that money is going to come out and that is going to
#
go to citizens, that is going to go to tent wallahs, that is going to go to rickshaw drivers,
#
that is going to go to bus drivers.
#
This entire process, extremely illegal, extremely horrible for democracy, but when you see it
#
on the ground, it feels like a really cheerful thing.
#
It seems like a festival with gifts being distributed by the politicians to the voters.
#
So this experience of one election in Varanasi got me excited about elections for one, gave
#
me an understanding of what democracy and elections mean to people in this country.
#
What the value is, we value elections a lot less than this country's rural population
#
and this country's poor population, because the results of elections do not affect our
#
If say someone else wins today, my life would largely remain the same.
#
I do not depend on government benefits, I have not been to a government school, my kids
#
are very unlikely to go to a government school.
#
The roads that we go to, we end up paying tolls on all of them.
#
We do not avail of any of the different government schemes.
#
We are not getting housing under Indira Abbas, we are not working for Naregha, we are not
#
taking ration from the PDS system.
#
We are extremely distant from the government, but this country's poor population and this
#
country's rural population, almost every person is getting the benefit of some or the
#
other government scheme.
#
They are getting rations, they are getting houses, they are getting toilets built, getting
#
The impact of a government change on them and then there is another aspect to it that
#
is slightly more negative.
#
The parties are based around religion and the parties are based around caste.
#
So in urban India, these things matter, but they still matter less.
#
In rural areas, one party comes to power that is based around a certain caste group, that
#
caste group feels emboldened and empowered enough to suppress other caste groups within
#
They feel emboldened enough to do illegal things, like with BJP in power.
#
The consequence on a rural Muslim household on a daily basis is going to be much worse
#
than housing discrimination in Mumbai, which exists, which is a major problem, but it is
#
In the other parts of India, it is a daily problem.
#
So who comes to power, who wins an election, will influence the course of your life much
#
more than it would for you or me.
#
And this is something that you can only realize once you go to an election campaign and talk
#
What are they doing there?
#
Then going to Banaras, Varanasi also helped in another sense, I understood the election
#
economy slightly better.
#
I went to Kashi Vishwanath, I went to a couple of other temples, I went to the Hanuman Mandir.
#
Kashi Vishwanath is also a very big political entity in Varanasi.
#
So I talked to the Pandit there for a really long time and I had also gone with some political
#
people so they assumed I was important enough to engage and talk to.
#
So we talked for a really long time and he told me about Arvind Kejriwal coming to Varanasi
#
and his discussions with Arvind Kejriwal, he told me about his discussions with other
#
people and how he was supporting Narendra Modi and what his motivation was.
#
And then you start to realize how important these different people are in elections.
#
It turned out to be incredibly helpful while I was working on election campaigns in the
#
Northeast because we are dismissive of people who try to say that I have 500 votes, I have
#
1000 votes, I have 400 votes.
#
But once you meet a couple of them, you start to learn how to analyze if they actually have
#
these votes before you even engage with them.
#
So while I was in the Northeast, there are a lot of tribal chiefs, there are a lot of
#
village heads, village tribesmen, elders in the village who have the capacity to shift
#
votes in their local village, in their local area because the community respects them.
#
So they have demands from you, some of them are political demands, some of them are demands
#
for the local area, some of them are like social demands, some of them are like personal
#
demands for their own personal benefits.
#
All of that happens together but you realize that these people exist in the country who
#
are respected enough or feared enough in the community to transfer votes and this value
#
of these people in democracy I saw in Banaras for the first time.
#
So a lot of fascinating things there and one of the insights I noted down while reading
#
your book was when you talk about whatever other data or whatever other metrics you look
#
at, one metric that you feel is reliable for identifying if there is a wave or not is how
#
excited the children are and you said that's when you were in Varanasi and you saw all
#
these kids who were enthusiastic about Modi that you realized that there was something
#
there that was pretty big, much as you know people say that if an earthquake is coming
#
But you know my question there is that you know if your dog is acting weirdly how do
#
you know whether it's hungry or there's an earthquake coming, you can't assume there's
#
an earthquake coming every time but I don't have a dog so I don't know that very well.
#
So I have two or three questions that arise out of what you just said and one of the things
#
that really intrigues me and which you would know intimately but I don't and most of my
#
listeners certainly don't so we are hoping for some enlightenment there is what is the
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ecosystem of party workers like across parties?
#
Like it's a question that often comes to me that what motivates a party worker?
#
A lot of party workers for example don't even really get paid, you know most of them can't
#
really aspire to realistic power.
#
Of course they might have little dribblets of power by virtue of being somewhere in the
#
party hierarchy and that can be intoxicating on its own and once you have it you don't
#
want to let it go, I get that.
#
But by and large most party workers you know what are they motivated by, what are their
#
You know at the level of the BJP to some extent I know a lot of their foot soldiers were of
#
course provided by the RSS and all that and there's a deeper connection to community and
#
to ideology that goes on there and I get that.
#
But I look at all the other parties and all of that, what's the scene out there?
#
Like in your case you're a professional, you're coming with data analytics, part of what is
#
driving you is also a hunger to learn.
#
Like you talk about how you know during the Amarinder Singh campaign in Punjab which of
#
course we'll come to a little later because I have questions on that as well but during
#
that campaign you landed up and you realized that there was no data analytics, it was just
#
boring data collection and you didn't want to do that so you focused on another domain.
#
So you're driven at that point by curiosity and the hunger to learn.
#
But what about actual party workers?
#
What about Kariyakartas?
#
How is this ecosystem kind of held together?
#
Give me a sense of that.
#
So one sad reality is that most party Kariyakartas are people with very low opportunity costs.
#
This is true largely because someone who has a good job has a stable family and has to
#
go to office 9 to 5 and gets a good salary is very unlikely to resign from that job and
#
become a party Kariyakarta because there is no real future to it.
#
So it's largely people who were just surviving and they have a couple of reasons to get into
#
the party structure and get into a party hierarchy.
#
One is obviously a sense of belonging and purpose which is something that everyone is
#
A lot of people find it in their careers, a lot of people find it in providing for their
#
family, a lot of people find it in politics when they are contributing to a party coming
#
So that is the first part.
#
This also includes the RSS Kariyakartas who support the BJP, they are there for the purposes
#
of supporting an identity, supporting a belief system because it gives them a sense of purpose.
#
There is nothing real and tangible that they are gaining out of it other than a friend
#
circle, a community and a purpose and something to do in life.
#
The second kind of Kariyakarta that is there which is a much bigger proportion actually
#
is people who are there because they see it as something that can provide some amount
#
of social mobility and the social mobility includes economic mobility because sometimes
#
they will reach out to someone higher up in the party hierarchy and be able to deliver
#
on a couple of projects.
#
They might be able to get someone like a college admission, a school admission, they might
#
be able to get someone a really tiny tender for a road repair work, things like that.
#
They might be able to go to the local police station, call their superior in the party
#
hierarchy or the MP or the MLA and the MP and MLA would recognize that okay he is my
#
Kariyakarta, so they will talk to the police station for you and help you with a couple
#
of cases here and there.
#
So that is a very big set of people.
#
There is a local economy built around it.
#
So if you see a village and if you see someone who is having a problem, say someone goes
#
to get pension but the official there, the government official refuses to listen, does
#
not give them the form even and throws them out.
#
Do they directly go to say the nation's capital and talk to the Prime Minister?
#
They cannot go to the Chief Minister.
#
They cannot even reach the MLA or the MP because these are busy people who live very far away
#
They live in the district capital.
#
What they do is that they know which party is in power, they know who is the local Kariyakarta
#
for this party within my village, within my area.
#
They reach out to that guy.
#
And then they tell them that I have voted, my work is stuck, you get it done.
#
Then this Kariyakarta goes with them to the official, talks on their behalf.
#
He is somewhere in the party hierarchy so he is also more confident.
#
He tells them with confidence that okay I am this, please do this work.
#
Sometimes money exchanges hands at this level, sometimes it does not.
#
But at the end of it, local work gets delivered.
#
So these people are someone in society and some people are running the households off
#
But it provides value to them directly.
#
Then there is a third kind of Kariyakarta.
#
The third one is someone who is actually an aspirant.
#
They believe that at some point in the future, they could contest say a ward councillor election,
#
the local panchayat election.
#
Even if they do not contest, they could become part of the village monitoring committee.
#
They could become part of different committees like there are railway committees, there are
#
committees on women and child development, there are committees for everything in India.
#
And a lot of these people who are nominated to these committees are actually political
#
And that is how it has been across the history of India and that has been the means of rewarding.
#
Kariyakartas were slightly above the ground.
#
So distinctly these three types.
#
Yeah, it's a fascinating ecosystem and when you sort of said at the start that party workers
#
are those with the lowest opportunity cost.
#
The first thought that came to my mind is, oh, then all the losers become party Kariyakartas.
#
By which of course, it is true that many people don't have opportunity costs for anything
#
simply because they're not born into privilege.
#
They haven't been able to get an education, they're poor.
#
But even within that strata, those who are likely to have the least opportunity cost
#
are the sort of the losers in that bunch.
#
So it is not a completely terrible situation once it's also not some type of hunger.
#
You have to realize that it is someone who has enough land say in the village to support
#
his family or who has a parent who has say a permanent government job, who is a school
#
teacher, who is a postmaster and this guy is surviving off of the family.
#
So lack of opportunity cost in that sense also that he can feed himself and he's got
#
that kind of security and all of that.
#
And for my listeners, another concept I'll kind of talk about here is that coined by
#
an economist called Manker Olson called stationary bandits and roving bandits.
#
And where Olson comes at is that imagine that there's just a village in the middle of nowhere
#
and you have bandits coming and going.
#
Now a group of roving bandits, it'll come and it'll just take everything.
#
It doesn't give a shit about what you're left with.
#
It'll come, take everything, go away and it's done.
#
But then a group of bandits will come which will decide that they want to stay there.
#
And they are what is called the stationary bandits.
#
And for them it doesn't make sense to rob the people of everything because hey, they're
#
going to stay there and they need the people on their side and they need to not kill the
#
golden goose as it were.
#
So they start sort of governing these people as it were, whom they've kind of whose lives
#
they have taken over and helping them in small ways, but continuing to kind of rob them.
#
And the state is basically a stationary bandit.
#
And I remember I had once written an essay in the context of Naxalism in those areas
#
when Naxalism does take place, where my point was that the state hasn't taken that role
#
The rule of law is absent.
#
So sometimes Naxals will come and they'll be roving bandits.
#
Sometimes the state will do exactly that.
#
And sometimes Naxals will actually try to build an ecosystem so that they can be stationary
#
And it strikes me that what you describe as ki mera yeh kaam nahi hua, you go to the
#
party karya karta, it's almost as if with the state being really weak and rickety and
#
absent in some ways, you have the party machinery of whichever party is in power taking over
#
some of those roles and saying, fine, you voted for us, so we'll look after you in that
#
very bandity quid pro quo.
#
Now, I did an episode with Milan Vaishnavan, his excellent book on crime in Indian politics,
#
And one of the points Milan made was that, look, elections take a lot of money.
#
And you've detailed that in fact in your book with a lot of fantastic figures.
#
Elections need a lot of money.
#
So initially, in independent India, there was that thing that, OK, who has money?
#
The local gang lord has money.
#
You take money from him, you do your quid pro quo.
#
And later on, at a later point in time, the gang lord himself kind of gets into politics
#
because he's like, I have the money, you know, why should I give it to someone else?
#
I'll become the MP, which is what you find throughout central India.
#
And there, I guess, incentives of the party workers may be a little different because
#
the party workers are actually part of the gang.
#
Like, you know, the way our democracy is, I often talk about our political parties as
#
competing mafias, which, you know, rival mafias which compete every five years to take a monopoly
#
on power that the state kind of gives you.
#
But anyway, all of that is kind of a digression.
#
Tell me about sort of the role that money plays in all of this, because one of the things
#
that we all know is that it takes an enormous amount of money to just contest an election,
#
And power and money, of course, have a circular relationship.
#
The point is, if you invest, one, you need money from somewhere to invest.
#
And when you invest, you need a return on investment.
#
So you're giving contracts to people, road banao, ye banao, wo banao, all kinds of corruption
#
comes in, which is taken as power for the cause, which people even understand and expect
#
And there is this sort of circular relationship, therefore, going on.
#
At a time when I was professionally writing limericks for the Times of India, I'd come
#
up with one called politics.
#
So I'll just read that out.
#
A Neta who loves currency notes told me what his line of work denotes.
#
We steal people's money and use some of it to buy their votes, stop quote, which kind
#
of is, you know, an ironic truth about the predatory state, which most of us have just
#
All this time where you were in these different machineries in Punjab, in the Northeast, and
#
all of that, you know, working with the party machinery, how did that kind of function?
#
Like, number one, I assume that as a political consultant, you were paid.
#
And regardless of your individual case, were there a lot of paid workers as well, professionals
#
who were actually getting money for what they were doing, or were they more like true believers
#
or who just wanted to be part of the process?
#
And how does that funneling of money happen?
#
You've also spoken about how, despite demonetization, you know, parties still figured it out.
#
They had money to spend and all of that.
#
So tell me a little bit about the financial ecosystem, which is, you know, sort of fueling
#
Is that something that you were acquainted with and had special insights on?
#
Or, you know, were you just an executive and it wasn't your job to think about where the
#
So as a consultant, almost everybody is getting paid, but the interesting part is that during
#
elections, every Karkarta, every worker is getting paid.
#
They're not getting paid year round.
#
Most of the times they're just working for the party.
#
But when it comes time for elections, literally everyone who has anything to do with politics
#
is getting paid at some level or the other.
#
Some people are getting paid because the party thinks they can transfer votes.
#
Some people are getting paid in the name of bringing people to rallies.
#
So they're getting paid for arranging the buses, arranging the food.
#
But it's always like a surplus amount attached to it that they pocket, which is a very well
#
If you look at polling agents, so every party needs people at the booth during polling day
#
who basically write the party, hand it over to the people, then they go inside and vote.
#
These agents basically get paid from 1,000 to 2,000 in North India.
#
If you look at South India and the North East, then it starts at 5,000 below that, no one
#
is really willing to engage with you.
#
So every booth that you look at and a parliamentary, even if you look at an assembly constituency,
#
it's 200 to 250 booths and it's five times this in a parliamentary constituency.
#
So 2,000 into this is just your expenditure on election day to have one person at each
#
So it's obviously a very expensive exercise, where it is becoming more expensive is that
#
it's very difficult to get your name out to the voting public.
#
For people to even know that you exist, you now need to spend on social media, you need
#
to spend on Facebook, you need to create these groups which can create graphics for you,
#
You need people around you who are clicking your pictures and posting it continuously.
#
Then you need paid advertising in newspapers, you need these radio jingles made for you,
#
you need video vans going around in constituencies that play the parties, movies that play your
#
songs all over the place.
#
So the costs are increasing for two major reasons.
#
One, the means of information dissemination have increased.
#
Like earlier India decided that, okay, we will give you free air time on the national
#
DD network and we will give you free air time on All India Radio.
#
All candidates still get that free air time.
#
There is a lottery on when you will get to speak, how long you will get to speak and
#
It's a very interesting process, but no candidate cares.
#
So from the party, I was deputed to go collect that slip because no one wanted to do it.
#
The reality is now there are so many private channels, there are so many newspapers, there
#
are so many radio stations that the government providing you free air time on the national
#
one doesn't mean anything.
#
Social media becoming this new thing that is a major drain on resources.
#
Somehow people think that social media is cheap, it is not.
#
An entity like Facebook is a very money hungry entity in the sense that organic reach has
#
essentially become zero.
#
If you want your message and posts seen, you need to pay that.
#
Other than this, when you are organizing an election campaign, you need to get people
#
In my experience, you can change the election day result by 4 to 6 percent just based on
#
booth management on like one day before election and the election day.
#
So in two days, if you are so much better than the other side, you can shift the results
#
So something like this also requires money because you need people to go out, you need
#
people to fill other people in autos and rickshaws and get them to the polling station.
#
It is called a get out the vote campaign like it is in the US, except it works very differently
#
So these things matter.
#
How the money comes in is undergoing a massive transformation in this country.
#
If you look at what happened after independence, you are right that industrialists and local
#
mafias funded the politicians, then they decided to become politicians themselves in a lot
#
A lot of contractors and builders who used to fund the local politicians also decided
#
to become politicians themselves because all their work and contracts is anyways dependent
#
So they realized why not cut out the middleman and do this myself.
#
What is transforming under the current government though is that resources are getting centralized.
#
Most political parties in India depended on a mix of candidates.
#
Some candidates used to be people who can fund elections for themselves and other people.
#
So those constituencies, the ticket used to be sold and then that money used to cross
#
subsidize candidates who were good, who could win, but did not have the money to contest.
#
This was the regular system that was at play.
#
Local candidates were expected to raise their own local resources from their friends, family,
#
businesses, any interest that they could find.
#
Now it is becoming more and more centralized.
#
BJP as a political party does not really depend on the candidates.
#
To a large extent, they understand that the voter is voting for Narendra Modi.
#
The campaign is being done around the Prime Minister.
#
The campaign is being done by BJP.
#
The local candidate does not have much to do with it at all.
#
Local candidate can raise and spend whatever they want or not want.
#
The party will spend the huge amounts.
#
The party will do all of the advertising around a central image, which is right now the Prime
#
Minister, and then build an entire election campaign where the voter knows that they have
#
to press the Kamal because they want to vote for PM Narendra Modi.
#
And this is true everywhere from say a municipal election to the state level elections to obviously
#
So the MPs and MLAs and their spending is a very like a thing that does not matter to
#
But what does this mean?
#
This means that the central collection of resources has to be much stronger.
#
And what this also means is that you cannot take money from small builders and contractors
#
and expect it to reach to the party level, that would never work.
#
So now the politics of this nation is headed towards where the US politics is, where political
#
parties become very dependent on very few business interests.
#
There are going to be 10, 20, 30 business people who are accounting for the bulk of
#
the money that a political party raises.
#
So you become beholden to those 20 people.
#
Whereas in the previous model, yes, small contracts, small local thekas used to go to
#
these people who funded elections.
#
But at the larger national level, there were no like 10 businessmen who were like absolutely
#
dominant and absolutely controlling everything.
#
This transformation could seem like a positive to some who do not have to spend as much in
#
the local elections, who do not have to give as much money to the politicians.
#
But it is also detrimental to the country in a way, because now what the people expect
#
What they expect is entire changes in law that eliminate all competition, who expect
#
entire changes in policy which give them access to say an area that was preserved, saved from
#
mining because of environmental considerations, because of the local tribes there.
#
So these kind of interests also want major things.
#
There have been a couple of very interesting instances that we've heard of in the rumor
#
mill where people have gotten import duties changed on products so that they could just
#
like benefit from the difference on it.
#
If you increase the import duty of an imported product, say the glass that goes on top of
#
solar panels, very few entities, if you look it up, you'll know which entity it is, very
#
specific entity that makes it in India.
#
They're so tiny that they can't fulfill domestic demand, but they still lobbied for getting
#
that duty increased so that the profit margin essentially is just ballooned up by the amount
#
So things like this happen when you take money from big people, they want big policy level
#
Another thing that is happening is that these companies that are being created, might it
#
be IPAC, ABM that works for BJP, all of these entities employ a lot of young people who
#
are highly educated, so they also need higher salaries than your Karakartas and party workers
#
They account for a small amount per se, because there are very few people like this in the
#
The largest political consultancy and the largest set of professionals that there is,
#
it's going to be about 400 people for a state election.
#
So no matter how highly paid they are, the compensation is not much compared to what's
#
spent in an election, but there is a difference.
#
The difference is that these people need to be paid entirely in white money.
#
If someone told me, I am going to pay you in a contract, I will not know what to do
#
with it and I will tell them, no boss, pay me in my bank account.
#
So that system of doling out favors, paying in cash does not work with these set of people.
#
Interestingly what has happened is that in a couple of cases, at least the political
#
party is not the one paying these entities, they have given it out to a corporate.
#
So a corporate is now directly paying a political consultancy firm, which is working for a political
#
So this money and this entire transaction never comes on the books of the political
#
Even in the books of the corporate, it is actually built as a consultancy expense and
#
not a political donation, because he has paid a private entity to do consultancy work.
#
The consultancy work is for a political party is a different story altogether.
#
So these new ways are evolving, electoral bonds confiscate, like basically obfuscate
#
everything because now you cannot prove in a court of law who paid a political party.
#
What this does is I want a policy change, I take an electoral bond to you, I tell you
#
do this policy change and I am going to pay you a thousand crores.
#
You do the policy change in my favor, all the competitors die out, I pay you the thousand
#
This entire transaction can happen on paper and you can never prove it in the court of
#
law because you cannot prove who that thousand crores came from, because electoral bonds
#
So in essence, we have just legalized corruption in the nation and because it is from a bank
#
account, people think that it is not corruption, that is not the case if there is a quid pro
#
It is very much illegal and very harmful for the nation, but this seems to be the new dominant
#
model of political funding.
#
Fascinating there and I want to read out a passage from your book which kind of talks
#
about this whole circular motion of money where money goes into winning elections and
#
then that in turn makes more money and you write quote, through my discussions on political
#
strategy I came to know of a particular politician who seems to have built one of the finest
#
systems of keeping his voters dependent on him.
#
The MLA in question has taken the nexus of business politics and bribery of voters to
#
He won the elections as an independent candidate a few years ago and is reported to distribute
#
a monthly amount of 1000 to 2000 rupees to about half the people in his constituency.
#
In this extremely impoverished region, this means that most of the voters in the constituency
#
are dependent on him for sustenance.
#
Creating this level of dependence in the local population ensures that he will remain a political
#
force to reckon with in the region and so on and so forth.
#
And then you continue, he reportedly funds this entire operation by supporting mining
#
companies in the district where his constituency is located and is backed by a contract miner
#
whose company has become the largest in the region with an increase in turnover from 90
#
crore to over 1300 crores in 15 years.
#
And what you say about sort of the centralization of power leading to a centralization of funding
#
is something that I would actually have expected to happen earlier because money always kind
#
And of course in the US it's very explicit.
#
There's a great book by Jonathan Rauch called Government's End which kind of describes a
#
power of interest groups over there, engaging in what is essentially bribery.
#
And the circular motion between money and politics is actually easy to perceive once
#
you start looking for it.
#
So a big company funds say a party and the party comes to power and the party will then
#
pass a law that helps his big company.
#
For example they could have import tariffs so that their turf is protected and cheap
#
exports don't flood in and take them away and so on and so forth.
#
And I think there are so many policies that you can immediately figure out by looking
#
at them that hey they actually harm the people even though they've got good intentions behind
#
You can figure out exactly why this policy is there, for example at one point I used
#
to point out how both the BJP and the Aam Aadmi party opposed FDI in retail and the
#
BJP I think later changed his mind.
#
But of course the reason for that is that small retailers are a big vote bank.
#
In the case of AAP they are also big funders for them so it is natural that they'll want
#
to protect them and all of this is under the lofty rhetoric of look we will protect local
#
manufacturers and all of that.
#
But the unseen effect of all of this is that is the consumers who suffer that instead of
#
getting something for 10 rupees you are paying 15 rupees for it and what you don't see is
#
what you would have done with the extra 5 rupees had it remained with you.
#
And of course there are many knock-on effects like local manufacturers would have had to
#
up their game to compete and it would just have helped the entire ecosystem but that
#
kind of doesn't happen.
#
So whenever you look at a public policy I'd urge all my listeners just kind of look at
#
who stands to benefit from it and it is quite often not the people of India but some random
#
But with that rant over we now get to sort of your lamp fellowship because one of the
#
intriguing things you said just now in this answer was and you said this in the context
#
of the money and fundraising is that the local MP doesn't really matter.
#
You know everything is centralised on top and as a lamp fellow one of the things that
#
you've described while working with an MP is that parliament doesn't really matter and
#
part of it is because of the anti-defection law of 1985 which basically means that you
#
can run parliament from an excel sheet and I'd done an episode on this a short episode
#
ages ago with Varun Mitra but I'd like you to elaborate on this because you've actually
#
seen this from the inside like did you know did you go in thinking that oh I'll be working
#
with an MP I'll be you know helping him in the parliamentary debates we will take this
#
great nation forward what was that process like and how does it really work?
#
Oh definitely so the first time I entered parliament I was extremely excited.
#
The building feels like such an important place when you enter through multiple layers
#
of security in parliament you get a sense of real purpose and pride and you think okay
#
you are at the centre of the country right now where laws are going to get made where
#
policies to better a constituency better the lives of people are going to get made and
#
when you spend three months there you actually don't even want to enter the building anymore
#
because one you realise okay MPs just get to go in and you get to go in through so many
#
security checks and you don't see the purpose of it you actually start feeling okay I'll
#
see the parliament from outside on television so much easier to do it that way.
#
What you realise very early on is that anti-defection is a major component of it because it was
#
brought in so that politicians couldn't jump one party to the other and basically dismantle
#
one government and bring upon a new government but the law is framed in such a way that they
#
can't vote against their own party in any bill on any legislation on anything debated
#
in parliament if a whip is issued and for most legislations that come about because
#
most legislations have someone's huge interest tied into it and that's why it was written
#
there is a whip issued for most legislation so the MPs could absolutely disagree with
#
it they still have to vote for whatever the party tells them to vote for so their opinion
#
doesn't matter this was the first realisation with this comes the fact that they go to parliament
#
or they don't it doesn't matter on what laws are made in the country if the party
#
in power has the majority and they decide this is the law then it is the law the debates
#
that happened and the speeches that happened there are in general a show put on for the
#
public sometimes the politicians who spoken against it will take clips and circulate it
#
on their YouTube pages and Facebook pages and they'd be telling their constituents
#
okay I tried to stand up against this but I couldn't do anything even though they
#
voted for it in the actual motions the second thing that you start realising is that most
#
of the times you don't even know where an MP voted most democracies you can tell an
#
MP's voting track record on in India a majority of the legislation gets passed by
#
voice vote which is people just saying aye or nay and the speaker deciding okay I think
#
I hear more ayes so it's passed now and this is one of the major things that was debated
#
in multiple legislations right now including the farm bills and before that the Adhar bill
#
that was passed it was passed as a money bill so it never went to the Rajya Sabha at all
#
but even in Lok Sabha a lot of people called for division specially on the farm bills you
#
can hear people on TV saying we want division that means they want everyone to go back to
#
their seats and press a button so that it is known exactly how many people and who voted
#
in what way but the speaker decided this wasn't essential he heard more ayes in the shouting
#
of the parliament and the bill was passed so this is how legislation is passed.
#
The parliamentary debates that happen are valuable in the sense that sometimes data
#
and information comes out but most times it's as good as a television debate in a TV studio
#
the valuable component that I found there is actually motions and parliamentary questions
#
because in parliamentary questions it's like an RTI that an MP files except an RTI they
#
can write oh it will take too long to compile this information so we won't or we won't
#
give you this information because it's privileged in this and this way.
#
In parliamentary questions they have to reply even if it takes them compiling data creating
#
like new tables for it they will have to spend time and do it and because of that it is the
#
richest source of information and data that exists in this country if you want information
#
on any subject if you want numbers on what was imported what was exported very likely
#
that an MP has asked that question before and it is listed on the Lok Sabha website
#
so that as a tool I found to be extremely useful but essentially that is useful because
#
that is the only disclosure that the government does at large when BJP came to power in 2014
#
there was a national open data platform to be created which would have all data from
#
all government schemes and all data from all the budgets of all departments that website
#
exists but it's not been updated since say 2016-17 no new data is uploaded onto it so
#
we are still where we were once where what the government does with our tax money what
#
the government does in government schemes is still a closely guarded secret it the government
#
holds the data but it's not public it's not accessible the only means to get it is
#
parliamentary questions but yeah that was one component the other component sadly is
#
that MPs have something called the MP-LAD fund in their constituency they get to spend
#
5 crores every year on local area development 5 crores for an MP constituency is a very
#
small sum what it does do is that it provides the MP some sense of having some power they
#
don't have the money they actually have to write to the district magistrate and request
#
that the money be spent on this project the DM decides who the contract will go to the
#
DM decides implementation only what the project would be is decided by the MP and then he
#
writes a letter so this entire thing gives them some semblance of power in the local
#
area a politician has no authority whatsoever on the district administration in our legal
#
framework MPs and MLAs are supposed to make laws within Vidhan Sabha's and the parliament
#
their power ends there within the constituency when they tell a district magistrate to do
#
something a superintendent of police to do something some department rural development
#
panchayati raj urban development any department to do something the government officials do
#
it for two reasons one is because the politician is powerful enough to talk to the minister
#
the chief minister and then the real administrative authority kicks in or in the local area they
#
want to maintain some amount of peace with them so it's only the nuisance value within
#
a constituency that gives the politician any value other than that an MP and MLA would
#
not be able to implement anything so when we talked about how these Bahawalis and these
#
criminal nexuses came into power an important part to understand is also for a local person
#
these people probably deliver more value than someone who is highly educated and very calm
#
and is very good at studying bills and then talking about them in the parliament because
#
that is just not affecting the local person's life another important aspect like we discussed
#
how local karikartas exchange money sometimes in return for delivering services I believed
#
that a strong central authority would decrease corruption my belief was that local politicians
#
would be cut out and then corruption will go down I am sorry to admit that I was extremely
#
wrong on this very surprising fact of this nation but local politicians are a check and
#
balance on local bureaucracy so if you look at something like pensions or PDS the PDS
#
shop owner and the official who has to issue your pension and enroll you for the scheme
#
or any government scheme for that matter a lot of time the local politician pressurizes
#
him to do some people without taking money or to not take absurd amounts there are competing
#
interests when the local politician becomes powerless the official in charge becomes so
#
empowered that there is no way to circumvent that corruption at all there is no one to
#
reach out and this in India has happened in a lot of places so in a lot of areas where
#
we hear this politician is very honest and you hear that corruption has gone up in the
#
state and I was very surprised why would this be the case if the chief minister is honest
#
if these officials are honest at the center within the district capital how can corruption
#
go up then you go to the local constituency and you realize that Tahsildar is not honest
#
and then you realize the person do handling the PDS shops is not honest and that is where
#
the corruption arises and there is no system to counter that other than a local Bahubali
#
politician who earlier used to pressurize him extremely fascinating and at the start
#
of your answer you pointed out how politicians whatever they do in parliament they are really
#
just posturing and you have mentioned in your book that it is the same in TV studios and
#
this is something Barkha Dutta also told me in the episode I did recently with her that
#
politicians may believe whatever and they may be quite reasonable person outside the
#
studio but they become defenders of the faith and shouting maniacs my words not hers when
#
they are actually in the studio so it is all just theatre it is all political theatre as
#
playing out and people are watching news television are you know even when it isn't fake news
#
it is still theatre which is really kind of interesting one of the things that struck
#
me and I shouldn't say it's poignant because why would I feel sorry for an MP that's never
#
going to happen is what one could call the legislator paradox which is you write at one
#
point quote in India almost no one votes for an MP or MLA because of their voting record
#
in legislatures or because of the kind of bills they have supported people vote for
#
an MP or MLA with the expectation that the politician will help solve their everyday
#
issues top court which it seems a sensible on the part of people because they have kind
#
of figured out parliament doesn't make a difference except for what you just said that even at
#
the local level they don't have too much power like I don't know how different it is in rural
#
India necessarily but in urban India and I have done an episode ages back on urban governance
#
with Shruti Rajgopalan where she lucidly explained the disconnect between power and accountability
#
that the local legislator that you're the MP that you're voting for actually has no
#
power you know if there's you know what a shortage or if there are potholes in the road
#
outside your house he can't do anything and the person who can do something the humble
#
corporator or whatever their incentives are different and they're not actually accountable
#
to you this is why government needs to be really as local as possible so you feel that
#
there is a point to your vote today someone like me knows that you know it doesn't make
#
a difference my vote won't solve any of the micro problems around me like in garbage collection
#
or whatever and the macro problems of course are not kind of going to be solved either
#
so during this LAMP fellowship you've written about one your disillusionment with the way
#
it was but the MP you were working with Premdas Rai of Sikkim Democratic Front seems a fascinating
#
man he was IIT IIM and he got this also so as you went through your LAMP fellowship you
#
clearly decided that even though you know this parliament thing was a sham that politics
#
was worthwhile so what were the kind of lessons you were learning and what was the next move
#
that you made what was kind of driving you forward at this point what was your vision
#
of yourself like one of the things I'm really interested in and I can't ask you to elaborate
#
at every different part of your life obviously but I'm also interested in how the conception
#
of yourself was changing you know from I want to do this this is what I want to be and I
#
am certain that that must have been kind of changing in either subtle or perhaps very
#
big ways through this entire journey so tell me a little bit about it at this point in
#
time and what did you do next so I learned a very important lesson from Mr. PD Rai excellent
#
MP who understood that you could deliver even without parliament so what he chose to do
#
instead was engage a lot of civil society organizations create a lot of entities and
#
groups of MPs so he created a northeast MPs forum where all the northeast MPs discussed
#
northeast specific issues he worked on something called the sustainable mountain development
#
summit that brought together all legislators from the 11 mountain states of India to discuss
#
sustainable development issues he worked on the drug problem in Sikkim worked on organic
#
agriculture worked with the population foundation of India on population control so things like
#
this with entities outside parliament he was able to do it because he had the tag of being
#
a member of parliament so that tag and that branding helps even when you are talking to
#
a local say official to get a road built because you are an MP they are likely to listen to
#
you out of a sense of respect and the aura of power that you create around you this again
#
was an electoral lesson in a way because I realized a lot of famous names a lot of politicians
#
that are famous who are known to not do anything in the constituency still continue to win
#
the reason they win is that constituents realize that famous name for an MP matters if your
#
MP is a known name your official would listen to your MP if your MP is an unknown entity
#
and a non-political heavyweight no one is going to listen to him and there is no actual
#
authority it is all based on the aura and the image so it made sense politics I realized
#
is something that affects the country disproportionately and disproportionately because it is not the
#
most important thing in the country at all my personal belief system working in politics
#
and in the parliament is that the country that does the best on the whole economically
#
socially on human development are countries where politics matters less and less the more
#
valuable a nation's political posts are the worse off it is in all indicators of human
#
development and all indicators of economic development in India politics is disproportionately
#
important and it occupies a central theme in people's conversation it is essentially
#
like cricket Bollywood and politics and politics is more universal than the other two because
#
of this I felt it is an important area to be involved in what I realized was being in
#
policy I would always be someone who is like creating research creating reports and then
#
anyone above me would not do much with it so it is a very low impact field and low impact
#
things are in general quite frustrating in life for everyone I realized that the highest
#
impact space was actually working in direct politics where one it is a short turnaround
#
time so whatever you do shows its results in eight months nine months you are not waiting
#
for say a five year thing because you are working on different states different elections
#
so whatever you have done now you will know if it has been a success or not within nine
#
months that was the first incentive the second incentive was that I believed so did a lot
#
of people who joined CAG before me and a lot of people who were in IPAC is that once you
#
help a politician win an election you will have some say in governance and policy and
#
you will be able to shape at least some of the things in the right direction it is not
#
been the case largely for any entity in India like I think the person who has come the closest
#
is actually Prashant Kishore he tried a couple of times in a couple of different states also
#
got Bihar Vikas mission made in Bihar which was supposed to be a developmental entity
#
created a company called Citizens Alliance to do this entire work tried to get people
#
embedded in Mamata Banerjee's cabinet offices like young consultants within the political
#
set up tried earlier with the BJP after the 2014 elections because of which he largely
#
exited out of the BJP so it has been a theme he came the closest and did not succeed I
#
also believed that I would have like at least some say in policy making largely not the
#
case winning elections is very different from governance as soon as an election is won people
#
realize the utility of all of the work that you did but it will not translate into anything
#
like happening towards development the prime example that I have of this we do electoral
#
surveys and we do really granular surveys at the village level and the district level
#
we know what the biggest demand is in say a panchayat so we will know that this bridge
#
is impacting 1800 people of this region and 43 percent of the people want this done so
#
like really granular data like that and we compile it into an app which is essentially
#
listing literally panchayat wise what the biggest three issues are and this happens
#
for like an entire constituency and an entire state my expectation after a lot of the elections
#
was that the political party and the CM will go through this and my belief was if he fixes
#
like even one of these top three problems everyone's going to support him no one goes
#
back to that data we realized very early on that like no one's looked at the app again
#
once the elections won the attention shifted to a completely different part the same exercise
#
on the same data collection will happen again before the next election where they'll promise
#
when they go there they will tell you exactly I am the like chief minister or I am the prime
#
minister and I still know about this NALA in this like tiny little hamlet of 300 people
#
and people will be really impressed that this man pays so much attention that he knows about
#
a NALA in this tiny hamlet except it's all data that's collected for that election
#
after the election no one opens it again so very sad but also helped me shape the decision
#
that I don't want to be in the policy content creation space which is also like a space
#
in general where you can write about policies I decided to be like in direct electoral politics
#
still do the political campaigning work which allows you to create some amount of impact
#
and who comes to power what this translates into I am still uncertain so like you asked
#
about like what the trajectory is in life it would be a direct electoral politics but
#
it would only be direct electoral politics like 15-20 years down the line the reason
#
for that is that I personally know how difficult politics is one and I know how expensive politics
#
is and third of all I also understand that once you are in it you can't exit out like
#
if you go into politics and then you come out take a break for like three years then
#
you go back into politics that's not going to work it's not like a regular career where
#
you can like try out a startup and then like apply to your next job if you do this in and
#
out even once you are done for it's very easy to get branded as a non-serious politician
#
so win or lose you stay in the constituency you keep fighting it out and you present yourself
#
as the next in line so you have to be the alternate and whenever the people get frustrated
#
with the incumbent you are going to come into power every decent political party and every
#
politician who has come into power has stayed as the opposition for a decently long period
#
You are describing it like Hotel California you can check out but you can never leave
#
and the correlation you drew earlier is interesting where you said that where there is too much
#
politics those countries tend to be the least developed and I would say that both of those
#
both too much politics and too little development it actually comes from the same cause which
#
is the state being too powerful because if the state is too powerful then obviously the
#
incentive for people to join politics is to become part of that gravy chain they are attracted
#
to power and money and not to service as it were or you know whatever else and equally
#
you know it's underdeveloped because the state is just not letting you know people flourish
#
it's got its finger in every pie it leads to a rent seeking mentality rather than a
#
profit seeking mentality and it's a mess all around.
#
So now at this point you kind of decide that okay I'm going to you know get into the thick
#
of things you join Prashant Kishore's political consultancy and you go to Punjab for the Punjab
#
elections to help Amarinder Singh and it's really interesting because I have thought
#
of Amarinder Singh over the last three or four years as everyone has as captain but
#
you point out that that was actually a brand makeover which to some extent you guys were
#
responsible for that because he was earlier like a Maharaja he was an elite out of touch
#
with the people and you guys did a complete brand makeover which is essentially also what
#
politics is entirely about so tell me a little bit about that that you dive into it you go
#
to Chandigarh there is this bungalow which has been given by a supporter and that's where
#
you have to work what is that sort of experience like and what are the interesting things that
#
you learn you know over your first few days there and then just over the whole process.
#
So once we are there we actually do some surveys on the ground we assess what Amarinder Singh's
#
image is and at that point of time he is actually known as Maharaj and that is what people call
#
him this captain phenomenon is entirely something that got built in 2016-17 and it stuck so
#
well because all the branding was centered around it so once there were a couple of problems
#
that came out in surveys and focus group discussions so how this works is that you do on ground
#
surveys where there are like quantitative questions but you also do focus groups where
#
you call say youth between the age group of 18 and 25 of different caste groups you take
#
their feedback on a lot of issues then you call say women take their feedback and you
#
see how different demographic groups different caste groups are reacting to the same questions
#
you assess what groups you are strong in what groups you are weak and you do an analysis
#
like that so we realized there were three universal problems the first universal problem
#
was obviously the image that lazy Maharaj doesn't do anything that was the first part
#
of it the second one was that he doesn't visit constituencies at all and anytime that
#
he is one he becomes inaccessible to the people entirely and the third one was basically around
#
his Maharaja's properties which had been taken over in general now he was trying to
#
get it back he had loans then he tried to pay loans and he was going to be extremely
#
corrupt to get his properties out so these three themes kind of interrelated but a lot
#
of people in Punjabi about these what weren't issues was also very surprising to me a lot
#
of personal issues Punjab politicians did not care about that at all like you can have
#
affairs no one cares about that in Punjab politics a politician could do drugs as much
#
as he wanted no one cared about that in Punjab politics you could be a public drunk no one
#
cared about that which was very different from like UP and Bihar politics for me because
#
like the overt display of morality is a very UP Bihar thing so yeah after realizing these
#
things the team got together decided on okay how do we fix all of this the first one it
#
was decided that okay like he was a captain in the Indian army there is a lot of respect
#
for the Indian army you brand him into captain Amrinder Singh from Maharaj Amrinder Singh
#
multiple things happened for that the second one a campaign was started called Halka which
#
captain it was announced that he will Halka is an assembly constituency in Punjab it was
#
announced that he would visit all 117 assembly constituencies of Punjab and collect people's
#
problems so people would give him problems in writing and then within 100 days of forming
#
the government he will create a task force that will go through all of these problems
#
and find a solution for them and the third one when it came to like corruption in cases
#
and this and that an aggressive captain was something that we realized would be a positive
#
image where he speaks up against social issues against fake FIRs filed against corruption
#
so a campaign was launched for that but the first one the captain Amrinder Singh the rebranding
#
was by far the most successful thing that was done in Punjab and the campaign itself
#
was essentially captain's government it wasn't even Amrinder Singh so music the movies that
#
were made all of the advertisement that came in newspapers and TVs all of that focused
#
upon that so I definitely realized the value of branding but it also reinforced my belief
#
in collecting data and information because once you have data and ground feedback and
#
once you know how each demographic is voting and you know which demographic group is where
#
in a constituency you can create campaigns to address issues most politicians in the
#
country actually fail at the first level and that was my takeaway even in 2019 like looking
#
at the elections the congress party lost largely because they did not even recognize what issue
#
the election was being fought like they talked about Nyai but they never assessed who was
#
hearing it so the CSDS has also collected data on it more rich taxpayers who would be
#
paying for Nyai heard about it than people who would be beneficiaries if you look at
#
something like Rafale they did not accept that it wasn't working multiple reasons
#
that it wasn't it wasn't actually Rahul Gandhi's fault it was also local politicians
#
within the congress did not believe in these campaigns so they weren't popularizing them
#
congress MP candidates MLA candidates have never popularized these schemes it has largely
#
just been the Gandhi family who has talked about it election itself though was being
#
fought on Modi's image it was being fought on the Hindu pride theme on the developmental
#
model of Narendra Modi and on the Palakot airstrikes and like the strength that the
#
nation showed so without dismantling these key pillars on which the election was being
#
fought or creating new pillars entirely you couldn't counter the campaign whatever you
#
did was just on a tangent which did not affect the election results at all so yeah in Punjab
#
the branding was so overpowering that whatever else anyone else did was not like impacting
#
the votes at all what you also described really well when you write about your Punjab experience
#
is how much of it has to do with event management like number one you write that developmental
#
activity interactions with constituents politicians look at them as a way to build their brand
#
so the event per se whatever it's for the proximate reason doesn't really matter you're
#
building your brand everything has to be focused on that you also had another great slogan
#
coffee with captain which I immediately thought okay talk show man he should now that he's
#
out of politics he should just do a podcast coffee with captain you know Navjot Sidhu
#
can be his first guest and he can poison his coffee or something and also your own sort
#
of excellence in this this department like you're overseeing an operation where you
#
know there are autos with sound systems and banners going from village to village and
#
of course your particular specialty I don't know why they don't call you poster boy of
#
just you know getting posters plastered all over the villages and towns and constituencies
#
of Punjab you were apparently an expert in preparing Lai or Leti which apparently is
#
that thing you prepare with which you know once you stick it you can't take the poster
#
off you know half the wall only will scrape off if you try to take the poster off so how
#
did you kind of discover that and also what happens is that foreign educated kids come
#
back to India they don't want to do this kind of you know manual shit of course they want
#
to go to the grassroots but they want to collect data and you know may draw intellectual conclusions
#
but you were out there getting your hands dirty so tell me a little bit about that was
#
it an enjoyable process you know and and also is there a similar enthusiasm in that across
#
party ranks like do party workers go through the motions or are there innovative things
#
being tried out all the time and once you have one vision let listen this is our brand
#
we are talking about issue X and not issue you know ABC and that we got to stay on message
#
and all of that how easy is it to kind of then bring that kind of discipline within
#
the party especially as an outsider.
#
So the extremely interesting experience had never prepared Lai in my life before but this
#
was the first what is the formula what is the formula yeah so it's actually made out
#
of atta so what you do is that you heat up water essentially and then you make a paste
#
out of atta what this does is that once you pasted it on if you pull it off it's just
#
going to pull off like one tiny layer it's not going to pull off the entire poster so
#
like it's going to like literally involve scraping off the entire wall if you want it
#
off a very old preparation in politics but obviously we were political consultants we
#
weren't political karyakarta so we hadn't done it.
#
So we decided that okay posters need to be planted because the entire town was looking
#
very bland and this was the first Halkhavich captain so it had to look extremely grand
#
and it had to look that like captain had come here because he's going to meet like what
#
five thousand six thousand people in an assembly constituency how do the rest of the people
#
know that he came to this constituency the right way to do it was one autos with speakers
#
across the constituency blasting that he's going to come here on this date that happened
#
but once the autos leave how do people remember and that's where these small posters come
#
in big hoardings are there on like main highways but like most people don't see it every day
#
the only thing that reaches like internal villages are these like stickers and posters
#
so obviously had to happen we called up Chandigarh and ordered these posters the graphic design
#
part and like the data part is actually easy it is the logistics of elections that is actually
#
the complicated part so the posters came very late the people that we had actually gotten
#
together to paste the posters they were willing to like just run away by then very interesting
#
story on how we kept them there they were like essentially like auto drivers and truck
#
drivers to take us around some youth congress karkatavs so the youth congress karkatavs
#
were obviously there because they saw it as a job and also like Punjab is one of those
#
states where like the BJYM and youth congress karkatavs all come from extremely rich families
#
so to post posters at night they would bring an Aldi and a BMW so they are chilling in
#
their hoddy waiting there for like the posters to arrive but the labour at that point of
#
time was just willing to run away they were like we don't even want money forget this
#
we waited here for three hours we are not doing it and in a situation like this you
#
realise ki boss kuch to karna padega to we had this guy who went and talked to them and
#
basically told them okay what do you want so they realised ki the good way to keep them
#
there was to actually buy them like really cheap alcohol so that all of them like sat
#
there and got drunk by the time that posters came and they would happily sit there so ye
#
theke se leke aata hai, baithaata hai by that time like we have been making laahi as much
#
as we can make in wats and for that like we hire a dhaba persons cooking utensils someone
#
from youth congress gets like the atta and all itself from his house so very funny situation
#
and they realised that we don't know what we are doing so this like dhaba person is
#
like ki bhai kiya vya to hai nahi tumne dikh raha hai I will help you and suddenly like
#
this is the great thing about India in general when you are completely messing up and making
#
a fool of yourself random people come out from here and there and start helping you
#
so we had a lot of villagers come who are helping us make this thing standing there
#
at 8.30, 9 at night posters came by 12.30 we started pasting them and this entire process
#
happens and the event is a huge success everyone is very happy Prashant Kishore is very happy
#
what happens next really surprised me though they go to the next town for the next Thalkevich
#
captain event I am not in charge of that event at all but suddenly like the next town people
#
realise they have no idea how to paste these posters and they have no idea of how laahi
#
gets prepared so they start calling me up and I become the guy to ask for like the recipe
#
of making this thing so yeah obviously like very different experience from like studying
#
economics at the University of Michigan but again very interesting experience and this
#
is essentially what the nation's politics is data matters information matters the analysis
#
that you can do matters survey matters everything matters but if you are not able to go out
#
to the ground you are going to fail whatever you might do at the narrative creation level
#
will not translate till you have this structure in place so we all know that BJP has a very
#
strong carder we also know it has a huge social media presence a huge data analytics team
#
it is very strong in controlling the media and managing the larger narrative but you
#
see where the BJP is losing if you look at state elections since say 2018 then wherever
#
there is a strong regional party the BJP has actually lost so Maharashtra it lost essentially
#
because of an alliance but it also lost Madhya Pradesh it also lost Rajasthan it also lost
#
Karnataka it lost West Bengal so all of these states that it's been losing it's happened
#
because there is a strong regional force over there who's overpowered the carder so an election
#
like West Bengal essentially Mamata Banerjee has so much larger of a carder within the
#
state of West Bengal that the BJP carder cannot function to the same efficiency at all so
#
even when they have the narrative control if you looked at Delhi media then everyone
#
was sure that BJP is going to sweep West Bengal and I have written like multiple Twitter threads
#
telling people that this is not the reality on the ground this is not the reality on the
#
ground and it's just the media saying that the BJP is sweeping West Bengal but that became
#
the dominant narrative whoever you spoke to told you oh BJP is winning West Bengal in
#
some cases these things become self-fulfilling prophecies in this case though it was very
#
certain that it wouldn't become one just because TMC had such a strong carder so their
#
messaging and right now during the farmer protest this ties in very well with this because
#
I was talking to someone from Western UP he's a local Neta type person in his village and
#
I was like okay BJP is circulating these WhatsApp forwards and they had all seen these WhatsApp
#
forwards and he literally told me that whatever you want to circulate do it on WhatsApp here
#
at every crossroad the uncle is blowing a hookah and explaining why you are wrong that no amount
#
of WhatsApp forwards can tackle the uncle with a hookah and I was completely like sure
#
that okay this makes absolute sense and then I went and talked to more people on the ground
#
their understanding of why they are protesting against the farm bill is much stronger than
#
what's presented in say Delhi media or within like the community that's not an agricultural
#
community or within other farmers who have never gotten MSP so yeah on ground carder
#
matters so politics essentially is narrative is data is everything but it is event management
#
and building an organization and that is the tougher job because you can hire people to
#
do the data you can hire people to do the branding you can have higher big companies
#
who create like huge slogans for you big branding exercises you can do all of that but the carder
#
building is something that takes years and years and years of effort it is something
#
that takes constant resources being pulled in if you look at a political party then the
#
party has offices at every district at least some have committees at the booth level to
#
sustain a structure like that in a state like say Uttar Pradesh 80 MP constituencies 404
#
assembly constituencies 56,000 panchayats the number of people it involves the amount
#
of resources that involves is just beyond comprehension for most people till they go
#
and see it once they do go and see it they realize okay running a political party is
#
such a difficult job that no one who wants anything for themselves and knows any kind
#
of skill would want to do it for personal success so ultimately it's going to be people
#
who realize this is their best shot fascinating and that image of tauji with the hookah is
#
like so incredibly powerful in your next book you should have tauji with a hookah on the
#
cover please and I'm also sort of struck by just what a great metaphor lie is like atta
#
which should be used for feeding people is instead used for sticking up posters to sell
#
a narrative which seems like an app narrative to me another sort of interesting insight
#
in this chapter in your chapter on working with Amarinder Singh in Punjab on that particular
#
campaign was about brand building which you've written a lot about and at one point you point
#
out very pithily that if you don't build your own brand someone else will and the example
#
of that of course is Rahul Gandhi who you know didn't build a strong enough brand for
#
himself so the BJP built one for him you know with pappu and this and that and and it kind
#
of stuck because he didn't do enough on that and and when you know he tried to return the
#
favor and talk about Modi being sootbootki sarkar and all that that didn't really stick
#
so much because the BJP was far better at narrative management now at this point I have
#
a broader question for you which is that you start off getting interested in politics because
#
you look at what's happening in the early 2010s when India against corruption comes
#
and you see how messed up the system is and you realize that there needs to be a change
#
Modi seems to represent that change so you join the BJP in 2013 then you do the lamb
#
fellowship where you are assigned to this other party that of course is not in your
#
control but then you join Prashant Kishore and now you're with the Congress and then
#
after this of course you go to the BJP and you work with Ram Madhav in the northeast
#
and and after that you choose to leave the BJP for extremely well articulated reasons
#
but during this period of time when you're working as a political consultant one day
#
it's for BJP one day it's for Congress then it's back to BJP is is there a sense of kind
#
of cognitive dissonance in the sense that where you're looking at it is that I want
#
to learn how politics works so I will just focus on the process and I won't overthink
#
other issues and let there be an implicit assumption that they're all the same anyway
#
I'm here to do a job and to learn a skill or is there a point in time where you know
#
and that's exactly what seems to have happened in in the case of your getting disillusioned
#
with the BJP where you think that no these principles matter what these people stand
#
for matter what they deliver matters and of course we know that what you take to win elections
#
the narratives you build have nothing at all to do with governance so completely different
#
skills which is why a party that is incredibly good at winning elections can be terrible
#
at governance which you know we see all around us in practically every government that there
#
is so tell me a little bit about that internal process for you that do you have misgivings
#
do you ever sit back and think what are these kind of people that I'm working with do you
#
feel that that kind of disengagement between the immediate proximate project and the larger
#
thing that's going on is sort of an issue for you
#
so there are two parts to it the first part is that I believe as a citizen of a democracy
#
you are not supposed to have a party that you belong to as in as a voter your job is
#
not to be like a loyal subject of a political party your job is to look at the choices and
#
see who is going to be the best for the nation and for you at that point in time so these
#
things transform pretty fast in general like the Vajpayee Bharatiya Janata Party is not
#
the Bharatiya Janata Party under Narendra Modi like the Congress under Indira Gandhi
#
is not the Congress of today so these things transform the parties transform a lot of people
#
buy into this entire narrative of okay I belong to this political party I have always believed
#
that I am not supposed to belong to a political party I am supposed to choose what is the
#
best at that point of time whose leadership is the best what does the country require
#
is the structure of the political party good enough to deliver on what they say they are
#
going to deliver the second part of it is that working as a professional in politics
#
you do tend to disengage from the politics of the political party itself a good part
#
in these campaigns for me was that I actually did really believe that the country required
#
a change in 2014 a major part of that was also just the narrative that was built around
#
all of us and especially around me that I did not realize how the narrative was getting
#
built at that time I had no experience in realizing how these things happened now looking
#
back at it I can tell how a lot of things were structured why a lot of different events
#
happened but at that point of time like absolutely got taken in by that very similar thing in
#
Punjab that I did support captain Amarinder Singh and congress over the Akali Dal a large
#
part of it is the drug allegations a part of it is also the crony capitalism that happened
#
in Punjab so thankfully I always was supporting the side I have worked with and that's been
#
true till date but very honestly even if there is a side that I did not completely like buy
#
into politically I would probably still do my best to provide like whatever data they
#
needed whatever support they needed if they were a client so that amount of disconnect
#
does exist there even though it's not like come into play as of right now very interesting
#
part between being a professional in politics and actually being in politics is that you
#
get to make this distinction you are helping someone when you are helping someone come
#
to power but you are someone who is providing like one particular set of service a lot of
#
political consultants go out and claim that they helped this party win and like the party
#
won because of them I have never found this to be the case for anyone a lot of people
#
contribute into a political process coming together and a party winning and you are like
#
as anyone no matter how big you are you are a part of the process and a cog in the wheel
#
you would only be able to do it very well if you truly believe in that moment that you
#
are doing the right thing I have found in my life at least there are very few people
#
even in politics who can do the wrong thing while believing it's the wrong thing most
#
of them do the wrong things but they believe they are doing the right thing or doing it
#
for the right reason so that self justification exists within like all of us including me
#
for every project that I have worked on but yes overarching belief still remains that
#
you are not supposed to be the supporter of any political party you are supposed to decide
#
who is best at that moment so that's you know I love the part of your answer about how in
#
a democracy you should never be a bhakt of one party as it were like you know I always
#
keep saying that you know my loyalties lie to my principles and from those principles
#
will flow support for particular policies or whatever and I am not tribal in that sense
#
so it might seem like I am saying something good about a particular party one day and
#
bad about the particular party the next day but it's simply that I am going on the basis
#
of those principles or those policies and all of that while I think too much of politics
#
in India has become incredibly tribal where people get into these hardened positions where
#
everything that for example the Modi government does is either right for one set of people
#
or wrong for another set of people and there can be no exceptions at all and that simply
#
doesn't make any sense to me so I found that quite resonant now the interesting part of
#
your journey is like where you point out your realization that political consultants are
#
doing the same for themselves what they are doing for their parties they are building
#
a narrative they are crafting an image that isn't entirely true and you point out that
#
what Prashant Kishore's gang was really good at was event management and PR but they weren't
#
really making a greater difference in that which kind of disillusioned you when you said
#
that you know to hell with this political consultants like many people think of management
#
consultants perhaps I don't know with how much justification but these consultants are
#
just paid too much money at one point in your book you point out that they would take crores
#
for a job that the parties figured out would only take lakhs and you decided to actually
#
jump into working within a party itself so tell me about how that came about and where
#
that took you next so yes my personal belief system is that eventually every party will
#
have to do everything a political consultant does in house this entire space of political
#
consultancy is a dangerous space in a way because they work for one party they collect
#
all of the data from within that party and for that party and then they retain it till
#
the next elections and there is no guarantee that they will not switch sides it's not
#
some sort of a cult where like you're not ever allowed to leave if you look at most
#
political consultants they have worked with multiple political parties and sometimes multiple
#
political parties and the state over like same state over two different elections so
#
things like that have made me very sure that the field itself will not last very long it's
#
a blip in the democratic setup eventually there will be political consultants but they
#
are going to be employees of the political party itself so after this realization and
#
after realizing that my interest in it wasn't to become like some famous consultant who
#
manages elections I actually wanted to do political things I actually wanted to make
#
policy difference and I actually wanted to make like differences within the party structure
#
the party hierarchy and I realized that the right way to do this was to work with like
#
a big party leader and like work on a state election as someone who is heading the state
#
campaign a big part of this also was that when I moved to the northeast and started
#
working with BJP I was heading a lot of the operations within IPAC I was still like a
#
pretty junior consultant so that opportunity made sense in the sense of like doing more
#
broader work for a political party doing more intensive data work because that is what BJP
#
was also looking for and what I wanted to do so it made this switch I resigned from
#
IPAC by that time I had this offer to move to Manipur and just start working on that
#
one state election campaign and this was the National General Secretary Ram Madhavji heading
#
that entire campaign for that state so moved there actually spent like two days in Delhi
#
packed up and headed down to Manipur spent a good eight months there extremely interesting
#
experience I still sometimes remark on how much easier it is to work for the BJP than
#
to work against the BJP couple of reasons for that now that the entire intelligence
#
agencies after you think has come about in this public that is definitely a part of it
#
while working for the opposition you do feel some amount of pressure but more than that
#
it is just the resource difference working for the BJP you can literally like get a helicopter
#
requisitioned and go to a different state the same day and like no one asks you much
#
like our hotel bills like no one ever questioned anything you like so for a lot of Karakartas
#
they did they never for us so a lot of Karakartas used to come to our hotel room to order their
#
food so just things like that very tiny little things you want ten cars going somewhere you
#
will get ten cars you want some data collected from somewhere that data will get collected
#
so BJP that way much stronger party the ground carder also like a lot of people believe in
#
the social cause of it the social cause of Hindutva enough that they would spend more
#
energy on it without looking for an immediate return they will like any human being want
#
recognition of their contribution they will want party leaders to know about it they will
#
want you to talk them up but that is all it will take for them to like do a lot more than
#
other political parties Karakartas and a lot of parties had this it's not like BJP is
#
the only one a lot of state parties a lot of regional parties have a very dedicated
#
carder especially within caste groups if it's a caste based party if you look at someone
#
like the Shiv Sena has an extremely strong carder Mamta Banerjee has an extremely strong
#
carder DMK that way probably has a stronger carder than BJP within the state so these
#
carders exist at the regional level it's just at the national level that you realize
#
it's so much easier working for the BJP really fascinating and a quick aside since you mentioned
#
Mamta a few times I was just chatting with a friend in the know a couple of days back
#
and he told me that Sourav Ganguly is in a massive Vidambana now because on the one hand
#
during his career he was kind of helped by Mamta at different points I believe he got
#
land for his academy and all of that which the government gives so he can't mess with
#
her she's extremely powerful in Calcutta and in fact in Bengal I mean someone told me that
#
BJP may not have a carder there anymore because they are getting knocked off which is a fascinating
#
kind of reason and might be a little exaggerated but rings a little true as well but apparently
#
the BJP has been after Sourav to join them because he's exactly the kind of face that
#
they need in Bengal and he can't do that because he doesn't want to piss Mamta off so there
#
was in fact a rumor that he faked his heart attack recently because he just wanted to
#
get away from having to take a decision and of course he's you know he's the president
#
of the BCCI but Amit Shah's son basically runs the whole thing so it's quite hilarious
#
and for someone who's who was a pretty political animal in his cricketing days in the sense
#
of political within the cricketing world I know plenty of people who are feeling a little
#
bit of schadenfreude at this mess that he's found himself in but that's sort of a digression.
#
I found that chapter on your time in Manipur extremely fascinating and one of the great
#
insights there for me was when you quote what one of the IPAC directors told you at one
#
point in time Rishirath Singh where when you were in Punjab he told you that you know working
#
with the party the party workers and all of that he said quote it's like the army not
#
the traffic police stop quote elaborate on that a bit because this was a TIL for me.
#
So the interesting component of being a political worker is that you have to be on standby for
#
most of your engagement it's not a daily job like as a traffic police what you do is that
#
you stand at a traffic signal and you direct traffic every day you are telling cars when
#
to stop when to go and that is a constant thing you are doing it day in and day out
#
and you are doing it the entire year whenever you are on duty.
#
On the other hand a political Karyakarta is someone who is in essentially like in the
#
army where you are training where you are doing random exercises you are doing random
#
things and you are waiting for the election period to come out there is nothing for a
#
Karyakarta to do for four years and three months it's literally a nine month engagement
#
that starts like or maximum of one year engagement that's about it so four years you are disengaged
#
four years you are doing your own thing whatever you want one year before the elections you
#
get activated but you have to maintain this cadre like the army needs to maintain a troop
#
you are paying everyone's salaries you are keeping them engaged so what happens in the
#
army is that when a new general comes about they make their entire troop do some random
#
exercises it's literally things like ki achha ghaas kato like I don't know if you remember
#
but Narendra Modi also did this when he came for the first time in 2014 he was like oh
#
we are going to clean up all the government offices we are going to clean up all the files
#
so you had visuals on TV where government officers were cleaning up all of their cupboards
#
and cleaning up the government offices these are something that in politics we call engagement
#
modules because a lot of times there isn't any real work to be done but if you don't
#
give people work they become so disengaged that it's very difficult to get them back
#
and get them to start doing work so you create fake work for them and that fake work is essentially
#
just for their engagement it's not doing anything to make you win an election and if you know
#
anything about the army a large part of commanding in the army is actually keeping the troops
#
busy in non-deployment periods in peacetime you have people with you on an army base in
#
an area that is not under threat for most of their careers but they still need to stay
#
fit they need to stay active they need to keep exercising but more than any of that
#
they need to not be bored and they need to be engaged and this insight I found to actually
#
be invaluable because if you drop the engagement if you don't keep them busy when you do require
#
them you're going to find it extremely difficult to get them back on the job yeah that's interesting
#
and you know it must be leading to that classic problem where party workers realize that they
#
are in an engagement module that the work they are doing is completely meaningless why
#
the hell am I doing this elections are three years away I am sitting and doing whatever
#
the hell it is whatever I guess elections are motivation enough and they do come about
#
no so good good part about that is that most party workers realize that this is what their
#
internal assessments are based on if they are active during this the leadership will
#
recognize them so interesting side parallel to this so Mulayam Singh Yadav when he used
#
to be active in Uttar Pradesh and Mayawati's government was in power every month he used
#
to do a statewide agitation on some issue or the other and he really did not care what
#
the issue was it could be something related to teachers it could be something related
#
to pensions it could be something related to bad roads it could be related to a corruption
#
issue it just did not matter but on a monthly basis he announced a statewide thing and the
#
entire concept was to get the carder out and the entire concept was just to like for the
#
carder to know that okay the party exists the party is busy and the party is doing something
#
to come back to power so do not go away stay in there and I believe like this is a major
#
lesson to be learned by like say the congress party in the country right now most of the
#
carder for the congress specially in the states that I worked in does not know what they are
#
supposed to be doing they feel disengaged they feel like there is no direction in the
#
party so the party needs to strategize the creation of random work for them to be engaged
#
fascinating random work which could be anything at all you know one party should give an instruction
#
to all its karyakartas that your work is to listen to Amit Varma's podcast and we will
#
ask you questions from it and that's how you will be assessed not happening anytime soon
#
now what's interesting about this little experiment when you go down to Manipur is that there
#
are basically two people you and Rajat Sethi who was from Harvard and who had managed Assam
#
for them earlier who were kind of parachuted into the whole party machinery over there
#
to look after things but it was basically you because Rajat you said would like come
#
once in a while but otherwise you were actually living there and you were on the job and immediately
#
you started doing all kinds of professional things like you said you have written here
#
quote we hired a team of graphic designers cartoonists and other campaign staff to manage
#
the BJP social media for the next few months we took control of all the parties official
#
social media accounts from the local IT cell and started managing them from our office
#
we also got a few sim cards and started making whatsapp groups from the database of numbers
#
that we were provided now at an earlier point in time you've also spoken about the data
#
work that you did out there now this is really getting fascinating that you're out there
#
you're moving into areas which all the other party workers who see you perhaps as an interloper
#
or an outsider or whatever they've never done they don't get what's going on but you realize
#
that this is it this is so incredibly critical and as you point out what the BJP did in terms
#
of reaching out through whatsapp and facebook and twitter and the micro targeting that you
#
did the way that you use data the way that you use whatsapp was what made the difference
#
because your opponent just used the traditional old school things that they know but you managed
#
to do a lot more so take me through sort of what was your thinking when you go out there
#
how do you even strategize and then what are the techniques you choose why do you think
#
they will be effective why are they effective what are the learnings from the whole process
#
so in politics there are two parts to getting your message out one is crafting the message
#
the other part is creating a distribution channel so both of these things need to happen
#
simultaneously and your winning elections is dependent on it because this is how you
#
shape reality for your voters this is how you tell them why the other side is bad and
#
you are good the first part of what your message should be is based on surveys and focus groups
#
and the collection of people's problems and data and like weaknesses of the other candidate
#
so that is happening on one side on the second side what you need to do you might have the
#
best message but if you can't take it to the right people then it's all useless so you
#
start creating these information dissemination mechanisms which is a lot of facebook pages
#
which is a lot of these whatsapp groups but you also realize that you can't reach everyone
#
through the same facebook page largely because not everyone is going to come and like your
#
facebook page so the way to counter that and BJP does it extremely well is that they create
#
a lot of neutral looking pages they create these we support Indian army we support this
#
some Pollywood link pages we support Narendra Modi so earlier it was also done because it
#
gave them plausible deniability for fake news because it would be oh some supporter is running
#
it we don't know who runs it might be a BJP supporting page but it's not an official
#
BJP page so a lot of these pages get created like if you look at nation with Namo something
#
like that right now millions of likes millions of followers very rarely does anyone even
#
talk about okay who funds nation with Namo who is this entity and it's regularly hiring
#
graphic designers it's regularly hiring people to do targeted marketing and a huge operation
#
in general there were also like a couple of pages on the Namo app itself which were basically
#
designed by private entities separately I know of different people who run social media
#
teams which run 100 to 150 different facebook pages so these dissemination mechanisms are
#
important and they did not exist for the BJP in the northeast so when we got there even
#
before we knew anything about the state and its politics we started creating these mechanisms
#
because they take time and it takes a lot of resources you boost it up you get the right
#
people who have the ability to write content that can go viral that has the ability to
#
like resonate emotionally with people so we were doing these exercises on the other side
#
we were also collecting data on the state's demographic about the constituencies about
#
what drive votes were being a money purr there are also some insurgent groups so we were
#
collecting data on okay who supports which insurgent group which candidate would an insurgent
#
group support if you give them a ticket things like that so political parties do take all
#
of these things into account we did this work for the first three three and a half months
#
by that time we also got together a team of PhD students who started compiling a chart
#
sheet against the incumbent government so that did two things one like you get an excellent
#
news day because you get to release a hundred point chart sheet against the opposition and
#
the media covers it very well you get something else too once you created this chart sheet
#
you distribute it to all your party leaders and all of them are blaming the opposition
#
for the exact same issues you get them like a top ten from it and at every speech every
#
social media post they're repeating the same ten things all of these leaders so that reinforces
#
the message another excellent side effect that we realized was on a slow news day when
#
we didn't have any event lined up we didn't have anything lined up we just got hold of
#
some random MLA candidate or a famous like BJP Neta from the area and told him okay call
#
a press conference read this page of the chart sheet tell them what's wrong with the infrastructure
#
development in the state tell them what's wrong with corruption tell them what's wrong
#
with human rights violation and money purr gave us a lot of this content because it was
#
a fifteen year government incumbent government they weren't prepared for a blitzkrieg campaign
#
so when all of these things started happening in succession when these whatsapp forwards
#
started going out we'd also contacted all the newspapers because we've done this before
#
we know how it works so we had all the prime newspaper pages on the exact key dates that
#
mattered so whenever like an ad day came out like we had the front page they had like the
#
second page which doesn't really work very well because the first page is what sticks
#
in people's memories if it's strong enough their messaging essentially also had to be
#
like a pro incumbent message which is much tougher to design it's much easier in politics
#
to criticize than to like defend money purr also made me realize something that an old
#
enough government will always have skeletons in the closet Tripura was like different story
#
because in Tripura we could not make a hundred point chart sheet the government was so good
#
that enough content did not exist so we did make a chart sheet we rebranded it into something
#
completely different from the money purr one but money purr legit had a hundred huge points
#
of failure against the government so it did that entire exercise another thing that we
#
did was we started reaching out to a lot of the journalists in money purr very funny thing
#
has just happened you might have seen it on twitter the largest newspaper in money purr
#
the guy that like I had first got in touch with a newspaper called Sangai Express that
#
is the largest circulated newspaper there that is what people trusted and read so I
#
made friends with this guy I reached out to him and talked to him about okay what is it
#
that you think what is the content that you're planning on writing and we become like friends
#
in a way he's just joined BJP for the upcoming money purr elections so yeah a lot of these
#
different things happen the party leadership did not engage with us for a very long time
#
and we did not engage with them for one specific reason as soon as party people know that you
#
are doing all of this you are doing the surveys you are responsible for the data collection
#
you get a lot of flattery but you also get a lot of threats a lot of people get after
#
you telling you that okay this constituency you have to put this name in even though that's
#
not how it works there's someone in the field collecting the data and you are assessing
#
it they think you will manipulate the data and the survey results for them so it just
#
becomes a lot of pressure it becomes a lot of fakery so like until it was like three
#
months before the election we never engaged with the party leadership and the candidates
#
themselves we always routed all the messaging through party leaders that we were in touch
#
with that's kind of fascinating this little dance that you do so I have another question
#
here one of the fascinating things about the northeast was how you were crafting these
#
individualized narratives for Manipur and Tripura which has nothing to do with perhaps
#
you know what the national narrative might be like at one point you talk about how you
#
know messaging needs to be short and memorable and how you arrive at that is through local
#
conditions is through context and you also point out I think in the context of Tripura
#
that there was no talk of Bangladeshi immigrants there was no talk of Hindu Muslim rivalry
#
because that didn't play there and although you haven't mentioned it and it may not have
#
been in this campaign but I vaguely remember that at one point the BJP while campaigning
#
somewhere in the northeast reassured the people that it's okay you can eat beef it's not
#
a big deal you guys can eat beef we'll have a different stance elsewhere so my question
#
here is this that the BJP seems to have built this incredible political machine which you
#
know which knows how to win elections I mean whether they eventually govern or not is a
#
separate issue but it's an incredible political machine which knows how to win elections
#
and does what it takes to win and this in my mind creates this conflict between on the
#
one hand the will to power that we'll do what it takes to win you know we'll take whatever
#
stances get us a win we'll buy people from the other party that we might have been against
#
yesterday we'll do whatever it takes that's one part of it the will to power but the other
#
part of it is that the BJP at its core does stand for something you know unlike the other
#
parties sort of which could be blowing in the wind or trying to fill gaps they think
#
exist in the marketplace the BJP does stand for something there is a core ideology there
#
is a core constituency as such and these two seem to be in conflict with each other that's
#
the one part of it I can't figure out because you know on the one hand what is politics
#
politics is you know downstream of culture as Andrew Breitbart famously said you know
#
it's supply responding to demand what do the people want you kind of give them that you
#
shape yourself accordingly but equally the BJP is pre-shaped in a particular way which
#
goes with a particular social current that's always been there you know I had an episode
#
with Akshay Mukul on sort of the social evolution of Hindutva and one with Vinay Sethapati on
#
the political evolution of the BJP so they've kind of gone together and existed parallelly
#
but what do you make of this conflict because if politics becomes all about efficiency how
#
do I win the election I'm going to do what it takes you know whatever gets me there is
#
good but on the other hand do you also want to stand for something what is your core identity
#
so is this a conflict that you kind of see playing out is there a sense within BJP within
#
the workers perhaps within you know strategists like Ram Madhav who you worked with that you
#
know there's a certain core thing we will never compromise on but otherwise do what
#
it takes so BJP within itself I don't think the senior leadership has any conflict about
#
this thing at all they are very pragmatic people in a lot of ways and they are very
#
clear on what the path to their end goal is so the way they've structured is that they
#
will do anything to come to power no matter what the ideology required there once they
#
are in power they will push their ideology down on the population so it's a very efficient
#
system in a way RSS also from like a historic standpoint has always looked at power as a
#
means of pushing its ideological goals so what that does is that it lets you compromise
#
on ideology till you are in power once you are in power then you strengthen the ideology
#
and make it the dominant cultural stance of the population so that is the way that it
#
is structured so I don't think there is a major conflict there what is very interesting
#
though and like at a local level if you look at it the RSS is an extremely embracing organization
#
like if someone leaves say BJP right now and goes to the Congress or goes to the CPI there
#
will be resistance within those parties everyone is going to be like we can't accept you
#
you are not ideologically pure kind of a thing RSS which you see as a very ideological organization
#
BJP which you see as a very ideological party especially based around Hindutva is an entity
#
that can embrace anyone and everyone and it's structured that way because this is the RSS
#
culture from a really long period of time they engage with people who disagree with
#
them and then they slowly get you within their fold they tell you how nice they are as people
#
and why you should convert to their ideology so if you look at someone like say Sindhya
#
moving there Jatin Prasad moving there these people would not be felt made to feel uncomfortable
#
they would instead be like senior leaders within the BJP instantly and the RSS carder
#
will like mollycoddle them and try to get them to shift their entire stance and speeches
#
to the RSS line and the Hindutva ideology so it's a very efficient way of doing things
#
the conflict might exist for someone outside but within the leadership there is no
#
my sense is that at some point it feels to me that something's got to give like when
#
Adityanath was made UPCM for example this was something that I think got commented upon
#
like one of the ways in which they won in 2014 and Prashant Jha has a wonderful book
#
on this how the BJP wins he was also on my show and one of the things that they that
#
Amit Shah managed to do brilliantly especially in UP was reconfigure the caste dynamics where
#
they figured out that the OBC vote is gone but they can appeal to the non-Yadav OBCs
#
the Dalit vote is gone but they can appeal to the non-Jatav Dalits and in fact in both
#
2014 and 2019 more Dalits voted for the BJP than they did for any other party and a natural
#
expectation from that would have been that when they were appealing to all these different
#
groups that the eventual state government that would form in UP would be sort of a more
#
inclusive one than you eventually got eventually you got Adityanath as the CM and I think you
#
know there was a faction within the party which said that you know I think one of the
#
deputy CMs was it Maurya was OBC so make him instead and whatever and all those tussles
#
were playing out but no they then just went with their guy and it seems to me that at
#
some point down the line people are going to wisen up to it and something's got to
#
give but that's a little half-baked knowledge that I kind of have is a greater insight that
#
you would add to this particular.
#
Yes sir so UP is an excellent example because I've seen those elections pretty closely
#
one thing that happened was when BJP came to power in 2014 and then in 2017 in the UP
#
state elections a lot of this caste mapping and these caste based WhatsApp groups happened
#
non-Jatav Dalits and non-Yadav OBCs were essentially told how the reservation benefits were cornered
#
by the dominant group within their sub caste group and why they should be voting for BJP
#
to get it back because if Samajwadi party comes to power it's always going to favour
#
the Yadavs within the OBC if Mahavati comes to power she will favour the Jatavs within
#
the Dalit community so the only one who will respect the other groups rights within these
#
If you look at 2019 though that was actually not the case so all of the targeting all of
#
the data analytics all of this declined heavily before the 2019 election 2019 was carpet bombing
#
it was entirely about Hindu, Muslim, India, Pakistan, the strongman image and the nation
#
and Balakot dominating the larger narrative than it was about specific caste groups.
#
What I have seen and what I believe to be the case is that to come to power they exploit
#
the differences between communities and once the BJP is in power the larger goal is to
#
actually unify the Hindu community and unifying the Hindu community does involve vilifying
#
the Muslim community and pitting the Hindu one against the Muslim one but the goal even
#
though BJP itself has a lot of caste hierarchy within it even though RSS has huge caste hierarchies
#
within it and is a decently casteist organisation its vision for society is a consolidated
#
Hindu identity and I believe like Adityanath Yogi Adityanath in UP has worked on creating
#
a unified Hindu identity how successful it is remains to be seen even if you look at
#
the current elections like UP elections are what four five months away there isn't as
#
much casteist messaging happening as it is like Hindu versus Muslim.
#
Yeah in a sense that's a kind of a political monster stroke which I think 20 years ago
#
no one would have said that they can pull it off that they can get all these disparate
#
votes together and create this consolidated Hindu vote and by the way a digression here
#
like one of the criticisms I have of these other parties and I don't know if it is a
#
practical criticism but it certainly I see playing out is that the many of the opposition
#
parties also seem to be chasing this Hindu vote bank you know whether it's the Aam Aadmi
#
party which did not take a strong enough stance against the abolition of 370 or in the case
#
of CAA and they do a lot of posturing about how devout they are and how Hindu they are
#
and similarly the Congress also does a lot of soft Hindutva in different ways.
#
So what is your sense of that do you feel that that is pragmatic and they absolutely
#
have to do that because there is no option that is a vote bank you cannot but who if
#
you want to come to power or is it your sense that there is a lack of imagination there
#
that they see this block and they see that as a reality and they are catering to that
#
because what it strikes me from perhaps an idealistic perspective is that look people
#
contain multitudes you know earlier there might have been someone who said that I am
#
a Yadav OBC and I'll vote as you know according to this party which is appealing to me on
#
that regard and the next day he might say no no no Muslims are bad Pakistan is a danger
#
I am now identifying as a Hindu but the point is there are many other shades of identity
#
which are not restricted to these two in particular.
#
So are the other parties kind of doing the pragmatic thing and is it necessary for everyone
#
to appeal to that Hindu vote to survive in Indian politics or is it a lack of imagination
#
that you can go beyond that and you can look at other kind of reconfigurations ideally
#
of course not based on identity at all I mean why but so what's what's what's your sort
#
So yes there is definitely a lack of imagination but it's also because imagining and creating
#
new dynamics takes time and for that you need to come upon a theory of okay this is the
#
reconfiguration that I want to make.
#
So I don't think anyone sat down and clearly articulated what reconfiguration they would
#
do in society so they're not campaigning towards that but honestly what the Congress is doing
#
and what the Ahmadi party is doing I don't see it as appealing to the Hindu vote bank
#
at all it's actually like at least looking at the Delhi elections it's quite a different
#
thing and it's a very sensible thing on the part of Ahmadi party from a political strategy
#
perspective by not speaking on these issues of Hindu versus Muslim they allowed for the
#
election to be based around other issues like they could talk about how they are giving
#
free electricity they could talk about how they have bettered schools they could talk
#
about the free water that they are giving they could talk about Mahalla clinics.
#
If they did choose to speak on CAA if they did choose to speak on Article 370 that is
#
all the election would have been on and the BJP machinery would have assured it.
#
Because so much of the media is controlled by BJP supporting entities right now that
#
is what the nightly debate would have been on as soon as Ahmadi party gave a statement
#
on the issue all the editorials and newspapers would have been on that issue all of the political
#
speeches that any BJP leader gave even without Ahmadi party commenting they were trying to
#
present Ahmadi party as someone who supports those causes.
#
So if Ahmadi party did comment that would have actually helped the BJP in this sense
#
so not engaging with some of the issue that BJP plants and trying to create your own issues
#
is a valuable part of doing politics.
#
The entire going out there and doing overtly Hindu things to assert your Hindu identity
#
that might not be required but it is required to not engage with these issues if you want
#
to create a different issue and narrative for the election.
#
So I get the pragmatism of framing the narrative that you are right that this is how they wanted
#
to frame the narrative they see themselves as a development party so let's frame it
#
that way and let's frame it that way for practical political reasons.
#
But I think the danger then is something that I referred to earlier in the context of the
#
BJP but something that I think is an issue with politics and I'll make this segue to
#
my next question but basically I think the broad issue there is that who is standing
#
up for principles then?
#
You know if the Ahmadi party and they are the one party in India that basically managed
#
to be a disruptor that you know in terms of being a political entrepreneur Kejriwal did
#
a marvelous job bring a new party out of nowhere stand for something that people haven't stood
#
for before come to power that's great and therefore people had higher expectations from
#
it as a party different from the others but it seems to me that it's a party identical
#
to the others in the sense that it's a will to power driving them that they chose this
#
particular decision because from a political standpoint of what will help them frame the
#
narrative get the votes blah blah blah and the inference you draw from there is that
#
they stand for nothing that for all practical purposes that they're a sociopathic party
#
they'll do what it does to come to power and perhaps that's necessary and sociopaths by
#
the way are it's a medical condition your amygdala is damaged so sociopaths are over
#
represented in the criminal population bankers and politicians that's just a medical fact
#
I'd written a column on this once in which naively I think in 2014 or 15 I had pointed
#
out to Kejriwal as an exception and said no no he seems to be well intentioned but now
#
I know he's as much of a sociopathism but then the point is that it's all incentives
#
it's all driven by will to power that if you put Kejriwal in an identical context to Modi
#
he will be identical to Modi the only difference being sort of perhaps their intelligence but
#
not their intent or not what they will actually do and the question that I'm leading up to
#
is that is it then the case that politics always corrodes character that you can get
#
into politics and you said you might one day get into politics so perhaps it's a good question
#
to ponder on that you might get into politics with the best of intentions that I care about
#
the country I'll change this I'll do that but the incentives of politics that you have
#
to win elections principles don't matter you do what it takes you have the dirtiest
#
bedfellows you make compromise after compromise after compromise and initially you can tell
#
yourself that the end justifies the means but that's a dangerous road to go down on
#
and eventually I think if you compromise too much you change the person you are is dependent
#
on the things you do no matter what you tell yourself while doing them so is this something
#
that you've thought about is this something that when you look at politicians around you
#
do you see signs of this what's your sense of this oh definitely so I think a lot about
#
this and even in a personal context I think about this principled politics in general
#
I haven't seen succeed in large part of this country yet there are pockets where it succeeded
#
once and then like completely evaporated Manipur again like great case study for this because
#
while we were in Manipur we were also looking at Arum Sharmila's campaign who got 370 votes
#
after like months of efforts and like fighting for the cause of Manipur and the removal of
#
AFSPAR for 30 years like you get the support of 300 people 100 people other people in her
#
party there was a Muslim woman who was a lawyer who had actually contested cases for about
#
1000 to 1500 different Muslim women within her community who were suffering from different
#
legal issues she did not even get the vote of those 1000 people she got some 91 votes
#
or something like that so in general like looking at all of these people looking at
#
Jayaprakash Narayan of Lok Sattar party you do start to lose some amount of faith in principled
#
politics just because you are seeing it fail again and again and again my sense of it is
#
to do principled politics you can't care about power so you can't care about the politics
#
of it at all you have to be someone one who is like financially secure enough to lead
#
your own life that you don't need anything out of politics you are doing it because you
#
want to do politics for the betterment of the nation you don't care about being in
#
power you care about the cause more so you are willing to say things that are principled
#
but can cost you votes if you start thinking in calculative terms of votes and elections
#
and winning then you do become pragmatic to the level of seeming like a sociopath in a
#
lot of ways a lot of politicians are that way because that does get you votes and that
#
does get you support at least in the near term and elections are always in the near
#
term no one is planning for I want to win the elections 20 years later until then I
#
am going to transform society most people feel like I will do the pragmatic thing right
#
now come to power and then try to do the principled thing but you can't do the principled thing
#
after coming to power because then there is always the next election and you are scared
#
about losing that and you are scared about the party disintegrating and you are scared
#
about losing all of the privileges that you have circulated so in general very difficult
#
place to be to do principled politics I believe you would have to study like philosophy and
#
stoicism in general get to the level of not caring about winning or losing or even politics
#
just caring about the principles and then doing politics yeah and it will be I wonder
#
if such a politician can survive one of my favorite episodes of the show by the way is
#
episode 149 a life in Indian politics which I did with JP Narayan and I mean he is one
#
of my modern heroes a man I admire intensely who didn't just sit in a corner and pontificate
#
about politics should be like this or like that but he jumped into the fray himself and
#
he tried to change things and he didn't you know I mean he did as long as the Lok Sita
#
was a movement but as a party they couldn't really move the needle which one cannot blame
#
on him in any way you know both incredibly principled and incredibly pragmatic and if
#
he couldn't move the needle you know one wonders who can moving on to sort of the next question
#
and we've kind of mentioned whatsapp before and you know in your book in your first book
#
though in your second book you elaborate much more on it in your first book you write quote
#
during the 2014 general elections whatsapp was primarily used to create a network of
#
party supporters and karyakartas with only about 9000 to 10000 whatsapp groups nationally
#
at that time facebook and twitter were the primary social media channels that helped
#
create the party's narrative and the party's energies and funds were directed towards these
#
platforms the potential of whatsapp seems to have struck them only in early 2016 which
#
is when the party began utilizing the platform for campaigning during assembly elections
#
in all the states that went to polls today whatsapp has become a major part of the party's
#
arsenal with the party's IT cell head Amit Malviya even telling the economic times the
#
upcoming elections will be fought on the mobile phone in a way you could say they would be
#
the whatsapp elections stop quote and you wrote this of course a couple of years back
#
and it's only sort of grown and exacerbated since and now you've also described in some
#
detail on the kind of things you would do in whatsapp like you've of course described
#
in a lot of detail about the kind of micro targeting that you would do and I would urge
#
readers to check out sort of those passages from both your books where you talk about
#
how facebook data was used by both the obama and trump campaigns incredibly fine tuned
#
ways I mean one thing is if only trump governed as well as he kind of campaigned or his team
#
campaigned if all these guys governed as well as they campaigned the world would be a different
#
place so tell me a little bit about this because what strikes me about whatsapp is that look
#
as far as it comes to facebook and twitter I can see what you're doing in theory in practice
#
of course I don't know what's happening in different silos all over the place but all
#
of facebook is public all of twitter is public on whatsapp you have shit happening which
#
people like me have no access to you know and one of the interesting things that you've
#
mentioned is that you know anytime someone adds me to a whatsapp group which doesn't
#
happen often but anytime someone does it I instantly leave because people like you and
#
me as you pointed out in your book PLU's we have an aversion to it but you also pointed
#
out that most voters across the country they love it because they feel they're getting
#
to be part of an inside group they are being able to access privileged information which
#
they can then share at their panwala or in their social circles and their status goes
#
up because they have this privileged information which again another one of those insights
#
which I hadn't even thought about till I kind of read your book so tell me a little bit
#
about this whatsapp ecosystem from two points of view one is how does it really work at
#
the consumption level at the people who are targeted and two as a level of someone who
#
has actually created bought sim cards created all these whatsapp groups in the built narratives
#
and all of that what was that process like so I'll actually start with the second one
#
because the first one will make more sense after that so creating these groups was actually
#
a lot easier in 2016 and 2017 because whatsapp had no policies stopping anything you could
#
literally get sim cards and create unlimited whatsapp groups with random numbers on there
#
like random segregated numbers you could have numbers of like people in a particular booth
#
of a particular caste or a particular age group or a particular demographic profile
#
so you could just get phone number lists like that and keep creating whatsapp groups you
#
had like a couple of admins made in there who kept pumping content and you could do
#
it at a mass scale this transformed in 2018 because there was a huge huge cry about whatsapp
#
funneling fake news in elections these child kidnapping rumors which led to murders in
#
different villages so there was a lot of pressure on whatsapp to act not just in india but also
#
in brazil and in a couple of african nations and us was basically targeting facebook at
#
that point of time on fake news in other nations so whatsapp had to act they changed policies
#
they made this five forward limit they started marking the messages as forwarded these markings
#
these did nothing this forward limit does nothing but there was one policy which most
#
people did not notice that made a major difference if you buy a new sim card and you try to bulk
#
create whatsapp groups literally after the creation of two to three groups your sim card
#
is going to get blocked so it is much more difficult to create whatsapp groups as at
#
bulk today than it was in 2016 and 17 most people that i talk to think this is a good
#
thing this is actually a horrible thing because no one in the opposition was doing it at that
#
point of time only the bjp was now the opposition is trying to do it but they cannot so what
#
this does is this locks up the competitive advantage that bjp has on whatsapp message
#
delivery forever because the previous group still exists it is not like whatsapp deleted
#
all the whatsapp groups in 2018 and everyone was at zero bjp still has 20 to 30 thousand
#
whatsapp groups in the larger states of india the opposition has like thousand two thousand
#
so no matter how good their message might be no matter how much the public would like
#
it their message would not reach the public so whatsapp is majorly fueling this problem
#
creating whatsapp groups also continue to get like more expensive as years went by and
#
also more illegal in a lot of ways because earlier you could acquire legal sim cards
#
and create a lot of groups now there are like troll farms in general who do a churning of
#
sim cards so they get a lot of sim cards create groups let the numbers get blocked have multiple
#
admins so that when this one is blocked there is still one admin number that you control
#
and the group stays alive so its just a more expensive process now its a more specialized
#
process now and cant happen at the same scale when it comes to the content component most
#
people get very happy when they are added to a news based whatsapp group and a political
#
whatsapp group of a party that they support and they belong to because they believe they
#
are getting some information that other people dont have access to and a lot of times they
#
do get information that other people dont have access to but a lot of times its fake
#
information and its fake news that they keep getting on these groups but because its unique
#
information because they think its important they circulate it to their other contacts
#
they forward it to whoever they know their friends their relatives their family whatsapp
#
groups and from there it just exponentially spirals out so there is this very interesting
#
calculation that even with just the 5 forward limit and with whatsapp groups of only 20
#
people it would only take 5 raised to the power of 5 so like 5 people forwarding it
#
to 5 more groups with 20 people within 2 cycles it will reach 4 to 6 million people so what
#
that essentially means is that even 5 forwards is a lot and 20 people in a group is a lot
#
because these things grow exponentially the spread is extremely fast if all the people
#
in there are forwarding it content consumption on whatsapp has changed
#
in a lot of ways because I do see some saturation coming in this thing that I wrote about people
#
are becoming very happy this is going down because more and more people are being added
#
to more and more groups the groups are getting busier there is more content being pumped
#
by all sides all parties there is more advertising happening on whatsapp with surprisingly like
#
bank messages are coming on whatsapp slowly marketing people are realizing how they can
#
do these bulk whatsapp forward so they have started doing it this is decreasing the efficacy
#
of whatsapp which might be a great thing in a lot of ways fake news is also a phenomenon
#
that more and more people know about so ultimately at a cognitive level a time might come it's
#
still far away but a time might come where people just stop absorbing content altogether
#
fake real doesn't matter they just stop listening to everything that's how full of it they
#
are and that might be a good thing for democracy we don't know
#
so that extremely bleak image of there is so much content I cannot consume anymore actually
#
might work in our favor I also think that you know while it appears kind of pessimistic
#
it's actually perhaps too optimistic there are a lot of insights about you know why people
#
believe this shit in the first place like there's of course stuff that we already know
#
that people will believe anything that lines up with their biases and then they'll get
#
invested in it and if you then try to disprove it or dispute it they'll take it as a personal
#
attack it's no longer a question of what is true or what is not true another interesting
#
advice was that fake news and clarification circulate in different groups so if there
#
is some fake news that has spread across thousands of unknown whatsapp groups which none of us
#
have access to and has also come on the public domain and so called neutral facebook sites
#
but we know who runs them and say the good pratik of alt news or you know boom live
#
and they do a fact check and all that their fact check is circulating in a very limited
#
group of really different people and the damage is already done like the one classic example
#
that you've given is a 2018 video of which koinamitra among others forwarded which purported
#
to be a naga sadhu being beaten up by muslims and that obviously spread like wildfire all
#
over and by the time the fact check came that hey it's not a hindu muslim thing the guy
#
getting beaten up was a drunkard who had entered a house and was trying to molest a woman and
#
that woman's brother then came and he was beating him up and that is the context and
#
they're both hindu you know it's too late nobody kind of gets that and as you've pointed
#
out that there is a lot of left wing fake news also and you've given examples of that
#
now here's my question you talk about one there is a worry of a virtual arms race phrase
#
you use in your book which i thought was superbly evocative also as you point out now that the
#
change in rules that you know sim cards get blocked and all of that has created has sort
#
of solidified this imbalance where the bjp has so many groups and the others don't have
#
so many groups and the implication in that is that other people should also do a similar
#
kind of narrative control in the sense that the truth doesn't matter as you explained
#
people don't care about logic or reasoning or whatever they believe what they want to
#
believe and therefore all the opposition parties should also get in there and they should run
#
their own narrative factories and try to counter at that level and that makes me really uneasy
#
like one of the things that i have seen is that i know the bjp it cell is wild and i've
#
been attacked by them in the past till i've blocked all of them i hope but i have also
#
been attacked by the congress it cell when i have expressed my dissatisfaction with the
#
gandhis and even amadmi party got after me at a different point in time though i have
#
a different amadmi party leaders i admire on my show it's almost like it's a race to
#
the bottom and that's what kind of disheartens me that it's it doesn't have to be a race
#
to the bottom that maybe one differentiator can be that you take a high moral ground but
#
that's regarding it cells but regarding narratives do you feel that there is no option do you
#
feel that we are reaching a stage where the parties have to say that truth jai bhar mein
#
you know these guys are building a narrative that suits them we have to build a narrative
#
that suits us and it's war and what the facts are and what the truth is who gives a shit
#
and then everything gets extreme and partisan and nobody is voting any more than on principles
#
and policies and issues and so on they are just voting based on the tribe.
#
So that isn't necessary at all in fact truth might be an excellent thing to base all narratives
#
and campaigns for your side on the issue is thinking truth will sell itself if you release
#
a fact check you've written a fact check and you think you've done your job and it's
#
going to create like it's going to correct everything it's going to fix the fake news
#
it's going to fix the people who forwarded the fake whatsapp news it's not so even if
#
you are on the side of the high moral ground even if you are on the side of the truth and
#
all you ever circulate is the truth you need distribution.
#
If your truth just stays with you in your heart it's not going to make a difference
#
from like a political and democratic perspective for a democracy to function your truth needs
#
to reach at least as many people as the lie is reaching and that involves a lot of effort
#
what is happening right now is that okay like all of the parties have created their own
#
IT cells a lot of them are trolling different people but even the politicians who are taking
#
high moral grounds who are saying the truth who are on side of like things that are in
#
the benefit of the nation as a whole which are not dividing different communities those
#
people might not be known entities right now and they can't just bank upon the fact that
#
they are supporting what is right they will have to put in the energy of propagating their
#
rightful narrative so ultimately the tools that we especially mentioned in the second
#
book about like how these silos are created and how silos are unified and how messages
#
are propagated and spread and how you get people to believe a conjured reality that
#
entire thing is very important even for people who are spreading the truth because you have
#
to do the exact same actions to build a reality in facts as you have to do to build a reality
#
that is completely fake yeah no I totally get that that you can go with the truth just
#
package it well but sometimes I wonder how package it well for example look at Trump
#
right when Trump won in 2016 I remember I wrote a column at the time arguing that one
#
of the reasons he would do well is that his narratives were really simple they were wrong
#
but they were simple for example you know middle America was losing jobs and there was
#
an employment problem there and he came up with two answers one he said that the immigrants
#
are coming and taking away your job so you know anti-immigration message and the other
#
he said your jobs are getting shipped to China so anti-free trade message and you've demonized
#
China and immigrants and that's a simple narrative that sells now it's wrong but the truth is
#
far more complex and to package that complex truth in a simple way which people can get
#
behind and which can motivate people becomes incredibly difficult the other thing as the
#
German theorist Karl Schmidt once said is that in politics you need an other now these
#
gooey feelings of love and brotherhood is not going to motivate anyone to go to the
#
voting booth and vote for someone what the BJP has done brilliantly is if they've they've
#
always had that other but now they've you know otherwise the other even more as it were
#
and that drives the vote there now you know what are other parties to do that is the strongest
#
narrative do you have to create another how do you do that do you have to create a narrative
#
based on hate if that motivates people more than love you know do you have to ignore the
#
truth if the truth is too complex these are the sort of issues that can worry me.
#
So that is an excellent thing to worry about but as you mentioned the Trump example great
#
one here you don't try to counter Trump's narrative by trying to supply truth and facts
#
because that is a very messy thing to do and it is a debate the way to beat Donald Trump
#
was never to engage with that rhetoric at all it was always to create another narrative
#
entirely that would demolish Donald Trump and it could be based entirely on the truth
#
things like how Donald Trump is a failed businessman which like all of us knew was fact like now
#
we know even more because the tax returns have come out you build it on how many times
#
he's declared bankruptcy and defrauded banks and the American taxpayer you build it on
#
his personal character and like how he has been against Christian values all his life
#
so you use the truth that you can use against him but if you think that the truth will win
#
in an emotive battle it will not.
#
That's excellently put you know I've taken up most of the time and we have some 15-20
#
minutes of the time you promised me so I don't want to take up much more which is probably
#
a good thing because I want people to buy both books and read both of them what we discussed
#
mostly is really the material of your first book which I must confess I found way more
#
fascinating because Indian politics is just such a deep fascinating subject that if the
#
book was like five times longer I would have you know still read it in the one sitting
#
I did read it in but now you know I want to do a little bit of justice to your excellent
#
second book the art of conjuring alternate realities so what got you to you know focusing
#
on this book like of course you know while you were doing party work at you know it was
#
all about narratives and they weren't necessarily alternate narratives it's just a question
#
of like choosing what to focus on and what brand to push or whatever but at some level
#
it is alternate narrative like when you paint you know Maharaj Amrinder Singh is Captain
#
Amrinder Singh people's man have coffee with captain how many people can actually go and
#
have coffee with captain right so there's a little bit of alternative in there so tell
#
me about this kind of book and I wish we could talk more about it because one of the things
#
I loved about the book which readers should really check out is all these lovely stories
#
that you've thrown in which we can all relate to like Vishwamitra and Vashishtha and all
#
the alternate realities that are happening there so it's it's great fun to read as well
#
but you know rather than focus on any aspect of it what brought you to writing this book
#
the content of the book can be divided in two parts and neither of which are easy to
#
summarize or one is possibly easier than the other the part that's hard to summarize is
#
of course the whole ecosystem of building alternate realities what are the different
#
ways in which you create stories which people believe why they believe what they believe
#
all of it is fascinating and extremely hard to summarize so I won't ask you to really
#
try to summarize it unless you have a really pithy way of kind of doing that but the other
#
more important thing which I think would be a good space to end is what do we do about
#
this you know what are your sort of policy solutions which you can put on the table what
#
can we do about this and given that the party in power has a most vested interest in keeping
#
it going because that's how they've got to power and that's how they can strengthen
#
their hold on power you know are you optimistic about all of that happening sorry many questions
#
packed in one let's start with the personal one what brought you to writing this book
#
and and what is the process of writing these two books been like if I might digress there
#
like you know they've come out within a short span of time you obviously write fast what's
#
your work ethic like like has it been easy has it been tough how did you discover your
#
voice starting with how the second one came about essentially I met this guy called Anand
#
Venkat Narayanan the book is co-authored with him he's a cyber security researcher based
#
in Bangalore so we actually met at a cyber security conference and he was talking about
#
Aadhaar and data in general and how data can be used against nation states and can basically
#
destabilize entire nations if they fall into the wrong hands and I was talking about elections
#
and politics and things like that so we stayed in touch and over the years we've been discussing
#
a lot around what do the rise of social media giants mean what does it mean that people's
#
reality is based on the information that they receive on their mobile screen and they have
#
no way to get information from any other source what does it mean that even nation power is
#
based around the narrative that a nation is able to create instead of being based on like
#
military strength or just the amount of money that they have the conflict between nation
#
states especially like the US and China right now we got into this discussion about how
#
that is going to be influenced by which nation out of these two countries choose to support
#
so China is selling a model of fast economic growth and you don't need democracy in Africa
#
right now and the Belt and Road across the entire Central Asian continent and then Europe
#
it is telling nations that support us because faster economic growth the US model on the
#
other hand is that they have this narrative of liberty and justice and democracy and they
#
are like you should support our cause for world freedom so it is to a certain degree
#
also an informational conflict between nation states it plays out in a lot of ways similar
#
to how conflicts between political parties play out within a democracy and surprisingly
#
we realized it is also similar to how religious Godmen work and how essentially cyber scammers
#
work because all these entities are trying to convince you of a competing reality their
#
goal is to get into your mind enough to shape your truth to shape your reality and discussing
#
this over time we realized that there are specific methods to do it good part for us
#
was that cognitive security and just like mental cyber security is a major thing that
#
the Russians have studied for a really long time during the cold war specially when the
#
KGB used to exist they wrote a lot of manuals on manipulating people manipulating media
#
manipulating thought in general and there are also cyber entities in the world right
#
now who realized that instead of trying to hack a system it is easier to hack people's
#
machines so we covered the nuclear reactor hack at Kodankulam and we realized that the
#
North Korean people who hacked will not say state actors that is not conclusively proven
#
but the entity from North Korea that actually hacked the nuclear power plant they did not
#
do it by sophisticated programming they actually did it by studying the two nuclear scientists
#
there and realizing what kind of a link they would click on then they were sent a completely
#
fictitious paper and on thorium nuclear research that would peak their interest by the very
#
title and the email very well crafted as soon as they clicked on it a malware was downloaded
#
then they plugged their drive into the nuclear reactor which is air-gapped it is not connected
#
to the internet so there is no way to hack it so we realized just hacking people's brains
#
and creating a reality for them has vast usages across sectors and politics is a very micro
#
study of it because you get to see it at an individual voter level and then there is a
#
geopolitical aspect to it that Anand was working on and studying at that point of time so we
#
decided it's worthwhile to actually sit and research on how realities are shaped are there
#
common themes are there common techniques that all of these people use and there were
#
a lot of common techniques so the book came together well writing process for the first
#
book I would say was much easier because in general that is my story that is all like
#
me telling my life story and I was also free of them because I just resigned I did not
#
have a job now I am working I have consistent work so the second book took longer but for
#
me the second one was actually more interesting because I got to learn a lot I got to study
#
a lot we got feedback on it if you see the endorsements then it's from an intelligence
#
officer at the US Pentagon another one is from an intelligence officer from the Royal
#
Air Force UK who has also worked as advisor to UK's prime minister of defence modernisation
#
the third one is from a friend in the Indian security establishment who worked with the
#
NTRO and now works with the Australian intelligence institute so just meeting all of these people
#
talking to them about geopolitical conflicts and shaping reality and cyber security a lot
#
more fun for me personally a lot tougher to write it's all very fascinating and you spoke
#
about hacking minds I remember I was sitting with my friend Nitin Pai of the Takshashila
#
Institution a long time back and we were chatting about the allegations about the EVMs being
#
hacked and Nitin said something that stuck with me is that you know why would they want
#
to hack machines it's much easier to hack minds and your book in a sense is a blueprint
#
of how to do that which is fascinating and everyone should read it and you know and everyone
#
should also read it because we all seem to think ki baaki duniya chutiya hai mai nahi
#
hoon now I will never get fooled by anyone but the point is all of us have biases all
#
of us have certain things we want to believe so you know all of us can be lonely at times
#
and some of these stories are very alluring like you said the whole community factor someone
#
is connecting with me all of that so we should all I think read it partly for that reason
#
just to understand human nature a little better because that is really at the core of it it's
#
not about information it's about human nature is this way and therefore people can manipulate
#
it and all these really interesting ways the second part of that question then is you know
#
what can be done to sort of change this which is a much broader question because it's technology
#
that enables it it's technology that enables it through algorithms which actually there's
#
no reason to object to them at a principle level like if I am to say that as an individual
#
it is my right to be served by a company which is giving me the kind of content I want to
#
read who is anyone to stand in my way but clearly something has to be done now you've
#
mentioned that whatsapp did a few things and the sim card thing is great and although you
#
know it might sort of perpetuate the imbalance that is already there and it has those little
#
things like forwarded message and all of that but broadly at a policy level being a policy
#
person yourself also along with a politics person what would you say can be done about
#
this realistically in the sense that one can make a public case for something like this
#
and there is a chance that people in power will actually put it in practice.
#
So this question is actually something that is bothering all the multi-billion dollar
#
corporations right now it's a question that's bothering all national governments across
#
the world right now it's bothering every democracy it's bothering every intelligence agency how
#
do you protect your society and your population from just this mental manipulation.
#
So it's a very tricky question because Facebook, Whatsapp all of these entities like owned
#
by the Facebook group, Twitter itself, TikTok they are profit maximizing entities and for
#
that purpose they have all done like some degree of evilness where they have knowingly
#
let people get say like mentally harmed so as the recent whistleblower report from Facebook
#
just stated they knew that girls in a certain demographic age group were getting into severe
#
depression because of Instagram content and they tried to suppress that report and like
#
actually did successfully suppress it.
#
So these things they also like Facebook has done a lot of research into manipulating people
#
using its own platform so historically Facebook has experimented on how they can manipulate
#
people using Facebook like we are guinea pigs to the platform historically they have collected
#
all of this data they have not released it they have tried to hide a lot of it so it
#
is not great history there but if you look at these entities at this point of time I
#
truly believe they are trying to solve the problem because it's just bad for business
#
to get so much scrutiny if you look at the world today everyone is talking about how
#
bad the social media giants are how like fake news is spreading rapidly how democracy is
#
getting destroyed because of it.
#
So solutions at a technological level when these multi-billion and trillion dollar corporations
#
get involved is something that is likely.
#
I believe it will come at an algorithmic level but I also believe what is going to happen
#
is that eventually we will have trust scores for a lot of content that gets circulated
#
you could easily build something that gives it a trust code if it is a news website you
#
could tabulate how many times fact checkers like a global group of fact checkers have
#
identified this entity as circulating fake news you could potentially design algorithms
#
that then mark the separate links and separate pieces of content as okay this might be untrustworthy
#
because this source has circulated fake news so many times in the past do you want to visit
#
this page and see their history something like that is something that could also help
#
but ultimately I do not think any of these is a solution I think the solution lies in
#
recreating society to be more resilient as a whole it does lie in education it is a long
#
term thing and I know educational and long term solutions do not do well for a lot of
#
things but studying societies across the world you find out that not every society is equally
#
vulnerable India is extremely vulnerable to a lot of divide within our own community the
#
US is extremely vulnerable in believing different conspiracy theories in people believing different
#
rhetoric against different groups but you look at a place like Europe then it is slightly
#
more resilient if you look at Australia it is slightly more resilient than Europe if
#
you look at Scandinavia it is extremely resilient then you have countries like Switzerland which
#
are like surprisingly and like just uncannily resilient to these sorts of manipulation so
#
society and social level of education and understanding does have a major role to play
#
on this what we believe is that Indian culture in general has a huge advantage when you look
#
at traditional Indian culture because it has been a questioning culture we are reinterpreting
#
it to be a culture that is hard line that believes in Hindutva but the culture has always
#
been based around debate it is based around discussion if you look at even the Hindu religion
#
then like there used to be Shastrath there used to be debates between different schools
#
of philosophy within the religious movement between Buddhism and Hinduism there have been
#
large debates so India has been a questioning society India has been a society that's been
#
skeptical of what is told to them by just an authority figure or by WhatsApp forward
#
we have lost this in say the past 100, 200, 300 years we have to start recreating that
#
within our society so the school system has a major part to play here the social groups
#
and that we are surrounded by have a major part to play here what is important is that
#
we recognize the problem first and then we explain the problem to other people without
#
explaining it in the context of say BJP and Congress without explaining it in the context
#
of their caste group versus another caste group Hindu versus Muslim that's why if you
#
look at the book we have examples of manipulation from both sides like we actually focused on
#
Iran using the divide and discontent within Indian Muslim youth to create more dissatisfaction
#
and combine the Indian Muslim youth to its own cause and Iran wasn't doing it because
#
it has some geopolitical interest in doing it it was literally doing it as an experiment
#
in India so once you understand what kind of geopolitical risk it presents as anyone
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who cares about the nation you will become someone who wants to fix the problem instead
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of making it into a political issue.
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Fantastic thoughts and you mentioned that you know Indian society has been skeptical
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in the past I'll be a little skeptical of that assertion when you talk about the traditions
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within Hinduism and say that I would argue that they were probably only among the elites
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as it were the questioning the Shasrath and so on I'm not sure how widespread they are
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but that we'll never know really because the history written of that time would largely
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be by the elites for the elites so who knows I'm also reminded when you were you know you
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used the word experiment and that reminded me of this experiment you've written about
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in the book I think Facebook carried it out in 2012 or something where you know one set
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of readers was for one week shown happy messages and another set was shown sad messages and
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they wanted to see at the end of this time what kind of post these two groups will make
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and low and behold the group with the happy messages actually started posting happy messages
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and the other way around which means they actually made people sadder and the great
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lesson in that is that we are not as much in control of ourselves as we think that we
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are that we are all the time being willfully and otherwise being manipulated by everything
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that happens to us that whatever we are right now whatever we feel right now is contingent
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on so many things all the information we take in the media we take in the food that we eat
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the chemical balance in our brain which could be a sort of happenstance so you know I think
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many of us need to lose a little bit of arrogance and gain humility about how fragile human
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nature can be and therefore take problems like this seriously but so to finally bring
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an episode to the end a final question for you and this is really for the benefit of
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my listeners as well as me if you had to recommend a handful of books which you feel shaped you
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and that everyone should read what would they be?
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So one I definitely recommend is something called the Dictator's Handbook Bruce Bueno
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de Mosqueda he's a professor at NYU who explores how dictators stay in power so that book shaped
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a lot of my thought in life in general a book completely unlinked to politics but extremely
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linked to how people think is a psychology of money Morgan Housel just read it I realized
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that even at a financial and investing level like all of us have too many biases and it's
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important to assess the biases in all fields of life and when you do it in a field that
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you don't work in you realize how bad you are so in politics I am less equipped to judge
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my bias than I am in finance reading that gave me a perspective on okay the bias exists
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one interesting book that I am reading right now is actually Josie Joseph's book it's an
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incredibly scary read and you realize how like the deep state in India has existed and
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vilified people in general throughout the process I know you talked to Josie in a podcast
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recently so that is an absolute must read I also think reading just about say philosophy
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and stoicism is something that I have just started reading on because I actually now
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believe that it's important to be a stoic if you want to do anything good in politics
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you can't care about winning elections you just do what you want to do so Marcus Aurelius
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would be a good one to start on there Epictetus another excellent one but yeah philosophy
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well fantastic recommendations and Shivam thank you so much for your time today and
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for writing these two wonderful books and I can't wait to see what you do next frankly
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so thank you again for your time and insights thank you extremely great talking to you
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if you enjoyed listening to this episode head on over to your nearest bookstore online or
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offline and pick up these two books by Shivam Shankar Singh how to win an Indian election
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and the art of conjuring alternate realities co-written with Anand Venkat Narayan you can
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follow Shivam on Twitter at Shivam Shankar S you can follow me at Amit Verma AMIT VARMA
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you can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank
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you for listening did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen if so would you
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like to support the production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot i n slash
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