Ep 248： The Decline of the Congress

And many of them have become defunct now or there has been a lot of factionalism like our political parties are growing, caste associations are also growing.

1004

But many of these caste associations have played a very, very important role in freedom movement and pre-independence India.

1011

The Yadav Mahasabha and all of those organizations were very important for certain reform measures that were taken during pre-independence India.

1021

And would these platforms of caste necessarily then also have a prism of caste which is then internalized by all the people who are reading it?

1031

So say for example, you belong to a particular caste, you get the magazine, you are anchored in a sense of history of where you stand in the grand scheme of things and all of that.

1040

You know that wherever you go, there'll be some people you can relate to, there might be these little networks that can help you out, all of that.

1048

You can publish your fiction or poetry there if you wish to.

1051

But do they all then carry this insidious prism of caste through which you forever see the world or is it more benign than that?

1059

You could get locked up into this cell or prison and you see most of the things happening around you through the caste.

1070

And I don't want to blame the messenger that of course magazine is an instrument and it might be doing that.

1078

But we see lots of spillover of dissatisfaction, anger, protest happening on our streets for the last four or five years.

1091

Somewhere it's a demand for Jat reservation, somewhere it's a demand for Maratha reservation.

1096

Caste identities continue to play a great role in our social and political arena and all of these mediums become instrument in mobilization of those identities.

1109

You know it's fascinating that there are all these different social strands playing out which then find expression in politics as well.

1118

For example Akshay Mukul in his book about the Geeta Press and in the episode he did with me as well spoke at great length about how political Hindutva should not take us by surprise.

1127

Because those underpinnings were there in the culture forever as you know Breitbart famously said politics is downstream of culture.

1134

Yeah and it is what it is but I mean this is, we could talk about this forever.

1139

So let's go on to your personal journey.

1142

And you mentioned earlier while giving your answer another thread I want to double click on where you said that if you read a Hindi newspaper and an English newspaper in the same city,

1152

they will be different from the kind of headlines they have where they are placed etc etc.

1156

Can you give me an example of this to kind of make it concrete for me?

1160

So very recent example which I can remember was during the farmers agitation when there was a hoisting of like basically around 26th January from the Red Fort.

1173

I think the stance of English newspapers was much more to do with basically putting government on the back foot how it happened and why like you know farmers are angry and those kind of things.

1189

And that's why there was a march, it's a failure of administration.

1193

The Hindi newspapers on the other hand was basically saying what has these farmers done?

1199

Deshwa Saramsha, right?

1202

So basically putting the entire blame on unruly elements within the farmers.

1208

So now you basically getting to very different pictures.

1211

On one hand it's a failure of administration and government not being able to hear the farmers voice.

1218

Whereas in the Hindi newspapers it's much more like this movement is not able to control the unruly elements and government must now take hard stand.

1230

So I'll go back to that earlier issue and come to a larger question which this kind of brings to mind.

1236

Like I remember there was a recent controversy when there was some marriage app, someone posted a screenshot on Twitter and it allowed you to filter by caste.

1244

Now this is of course shocking but then the point is that is it the app which should be blamed for this or is it society?

1252

Because the app is doing this because there is a demand for it and this is how society is.

1257

And the larger question I'm then coming to is supposing you're a kid growing up.

1261

You're a kid growing up and you have these magazines in your village or wherever you are and you don't have much other access to information and you adopt these prisms.

1272

This is all you know, you don't have any other way to tell right from wrong and then you go to the city and let's say the farmer agitation happens.

1280

But the only access you have is to papers in your language and that is a narrative that you get.

1285

And for all these reasons without passing a value judgment you are who you are but are you responsible for who you are?

1293

You are shaped essentially by your environment, by everything you read while growing up, by the media that you read today,

1299

by the peers around you who have grown up with similar backgrounds and similar whatever and the people who disagree with you will inevitably be English speaking people like myself

1311

who will seem condescending and superior and know it all and cheering to you and you go like WTF.

1317

So my question here is that how easy it is to stand in judgment over other people especially in these times

1325

when standing in judgment over other people helps us posture on social media how virtuous we ourselves are.

1331

But should we just sit back a little bit, not be so judgmental of people but be judgmental of social trends,

1340

be judgmental of all these toxic forces within our society like caste, like any other kind of identity politics for that matter.

1348

But that people are complicated and that some of our discourse today could be getting corrupted by exactly this from all sides

1357

where you are looking for human villains while that may be a mistake.

1364

I might have rambled a bit but I am just sinking a lot because of...

1367

It's a complex question. Being judgmental is easy and we all basically and also virtue seeking is easy.

1375

So these two tendencies are now overflowing. If you want to understand something, learn from it, diagnose it and then offer a solution

1386

that's going to take time and you can't do it if you are going to be judgmental to begin with.

1394

For example, let's take this aspect of caste. Is caste inherently bad? I don't know.

1401

Caste brings certain values with it, which is bad.

1405

Hierarchy, oppression, tying you to social categories, all these things are bad about caste.

1414

But then caste as a form of solidarity, especially those who have been at the bottom of hierarchy,

1422

using those solidarities to overcome the oppression they have seen, that's not inherently bad.

1429

But at some point, it's a cycle. When it takes its course, at some point it's also going to have negative spillovers.

1439

So my job as an analyst or as a citizen of this country is both first to understand when is caste being used as a privilege

1450

and when is caste being used as a form to overcome barriers.

1455

And I should be able to distinguish between those two. And that distinction is important to say caste is good or bad.

1463

But I'll voice a slight disagreement here, where I just think it's fundamentally a problem.

1469

Any kind of categorization like this, where I think every individual should really be respected for what they are

1476

and all of us contain multitudes. So anything that reduces a person to a particular identity which they are born into

1484

is, I think, problematic. And the positive aspect of it that you speak of is that, for example, what you're saying,

1490

and it's true, that an understanding of caste is what allows Dalits, for example, to come together and fight against that oppression.

1498

But the point is that oppression is there in the first place because caste is there in that first place.

1502

Why is that fighting necessary? If the caste system wasn't so entrenched and so oppressive,

1508

they wouldn't need to mobilize to fight against it and it would kind of therefore be irrelevant.

1514

So anything that furthers and perpetuates caste, and there are different kinds of casteism,

1521

but anything that makes you think in those kind of categories itself is a problem and kind of needs to be thought about.

1529

And this is, I think, just one example of caste. You can also get into these sort of reductive categories from the left,

1536

where you could say, oh, you're a Cissette white male or whatever, and you immediately reduce someone who's incredibly complex to that.

1542

Or you could say that, oh, you're a black trans person, and you reduce someone who's very complex to one narrative of victimhood,

1550

which seems to carry inherent dangers to me and might even stop us from getting past all of these divisions and oppressions.

1559

True, but should there have been no caste? Yes, we won't be having this kind of discussion.

1568

But should individuals be reduced to these identities or these categories?

1576

No, they shouldn't be. But then these identities and categories exist.

1582

And I can't imagine a social formation where we are not going to have these identities or categories.

1590

If it's not caste, it's going to be color.

1594

Like it's easy to judge and virtue signaling, it's also easy to categorize.

1602

So it's an inherent human tendency that we are going to categorize people through something.

1609

That's very true. And I realized that just as you began that it's easy at a normative level,

1614

at a level of how things should be to say that no caste is bad at that level.

1618

But if you look at a descriptive level, the point is even if caste wasn't there, something else would have been there.

1624

Because A, we are hardwired for tribalism and B, we are also hardwired to make up simple narratives that explain the world to us.

1631

And these two come together and they feed into these kinds of sort of divisions.

1637

Let's kind of move on. We've covered 10 years right now where you are going to the bus stop in your village

1644

and you are wearing a uniform which sets you apart from many other kids.

1647

Already you are part of the elite because you have a school uniform and you are going to the school.

1652

So from there, how do the next sort of steps happen?

1655

Like what is the evolution of the aspiration of Rahul Verma, for example, over the next 10-15 years?

1662

Like what do you want to be at that time and as life happens to you and things happen, how does that evolve?

1669

Take me through a little bit of that sort of journey, both external and internal.

1673

Okay, so I studied in that school till class fourth and then my father, when he moved to Lucknow from Kanpur,

1685

he's an engineer, so once he moved to Lucknow, he has a more settled life. He thought of getting us to Lucknow and study there.

1695

So he wanted us to study in an English medium school and in cities you have entrance process where they interview your parents and everything.

1707

So yeah, the first comment was, you know, kids can't speak English. How will they survive in this environment?

1715

And so, of course, like any parent would have done, my father would have pleaded that they are hardworking kids.

1722

Hard work, not Harvard.

1725

They would go, okay, give them a chance. And so, yeah, so slowly we got into one school,

1733

which you can think was on a borderline of, we went to Bhartivedya Bhavan, which is a good English medium school,

1740

but then there are better English medium schools also. So slowly we moved to a different English school in two, three years.

1747

I think then the ambitions and aspirations slowly keep changing, right?

1752

You keep seeing new things, you're moving to a state capital, so just moving to a state capital in the village was the aspiration.

1760

Once you move to the state capital, you slowly think of what you all can become.

1765

You see, you meet some of your friends or their parents or colleagues of your parents and you figure out,

1772

okay, this uncle is doing well in life, he has a bigger house.

1777

So those kind of like, you know, I should also be thinking of becoming a civil servant, IS officer or PCS officer or those kind of things.

1785

And then because I think like by class six, seventh, those fascinating aspects of I will become a fighter pilot,

1796

which is more sort of like a macho thing to do, those start taking much more realistic shape.

1803

And you also start realizing where is sort of like not dignity, but power, money, fame.

1811

And you think that these are the positions one should be unless like you are driven by, say,

1817

you want to become an army officer or you want to become a cricketer or a Bollywood actor.

1822

So you take sort of like much realistic goals.

1826

Okay, I want to go to IIT or I want to like those kind of things.

1830

And so I'm there in Lucknow, did my high school, I was an intermediate.

1836

I realized I don't have fascination for either engineering or medical.

1843

I didn't know what I want to do.

1845

But that time, you know, I think TV journalism is just coming to age.

1851

And you're seeing lots of like firebrand brave journalists on TV asking tough questions.

1858

So I think I was getting a little bit fascinated by that.

1862

And that's why my first email address is Rahul.reporter.

1867

That was the moment of fascination to become a TV journalist.

1874

But then come to Delhi University to do my college.

1877

That time, I also wanted to do journalism.

1880

Like, in fact, I chose BA program because I thought, oh, so newspapers have three elements.

1887

So news has three elements that there are others, but mainly three.

1891

There is politics, there is a section on business and economy, and there is a section on sports.

1896

So my sort of innocent mind basically thought, okay, so why don't I do a course

1904

which basically teaches me both politics and economics?

1907

Sports toh dekhte hi hai, I can manage that, right?

1909

So that's why I chose the BA program.

1912

And later on, I realized that it was not a good decision.

1915

My friends in the department or course asked me, you've come from Lucknow,

1920

you're doing a BA pass course, why didn't you apply for honors courses and all those things?

1925

And I just didn't know.

1928

In fact, when I went back home in my first or second year,

1932

there was a relative sitting in the house chatting with my father and asked me,

1936

what are you doing?

1937

I said, I'm studying at Kerala College in my second year.

1939

He said, that's okay, but what are you doing?

1942

And I could later figure out that he wanted to ask me, are you preparing for civil services or not?

1948

You've gone to Delhi, you're taking a social science or humanities courses,

1953

you should be preparing for civil services exam.

1955

And if you're not doing, then you are in some ways not utilizing your time.

1960

But in my college years, the good thing was that I, in each summer, I interned at different places.

1969

So I worked at Indian Express office in Lucknow.

1974

The mentors there were really, really nice and helpful in a way.

1979

At that age, I got bylines in the city edition,

1983

the three pages which comes with the main edition on every second day.

1987

Then I worked as an intern in Astak for 30 days.

1991

Most of my time got spent in the sports section where my job was to watch India-Australia match

1999

and make call like time logs to basically edit the section where there was a four or a six got hit

2007

or where there was a catch or a bull.

2009

So I loved it.

2010

So in that sense, I would say I didn't learn a lot about journalism there,

2016

but at least, you know, I'm watching test match five days in the Australia.

2022

So through that three years working at different kind of news organizations,

2029

I realized my interest actually is not in journalism.

2035

It's much more to understand politics.

2038

And I thought the discussions which I had with some journalists

2043

and like it's not to do with any organization or any particular person.

2049

But I thought like perhaps it will take a much longer time in journalism

2054

to develop the kind of understanding I want to have about politics.

2059

But it doesn't mean that I had decided I want to do a political science PhD.

2064

But I got like my fascination for journalism after those three internships was over.

2072

I have also spent time doing drudge work in cricket.

2075

But if I had to sort of sit and watch matches and just do time codes

2079

for when to cut for, you know, to capture a four,

2082

I think I might have kind of lost interest in journalism as well.

2085

And I can understand a certain fascination for politics

2089

that is there just in terms of the human drama of it

2092

and the whole morality play which is playing out.

2095

And, you know, it has all the characteristics of great drama,

2098

heroes, villains, tension, conflict, masala, all of that is there.

2103

But at some level, obviously, you're thinking of it as something more than that.

2107

You know, there is at some point a transition that happens

2110

where you're not just thinking of politics in terms of interesting stories, obviously,

2114

but as something deeper that can explain something about the country

2117

that, you know, that can be placed in particular context

2120

that reveals a certain amount of society.

2122

In other words, political science.

2124

So tell me, was that a gradual process or, you know,

2127

was there any kind of specific book or any kind of thinker you came across

2132

which suddenly, you know...

2134

It's a work in progress, Amit.

2136

I don't think I have figured out why I'm interested in politics

2142

or political science for that matter.

2144

I think, and I'm happy this is a journey incomplete

2149

because the day I will figure out, I will lose interest in it.

2153

Maybe, I'm not saying I will definitely,

2155

but I think you can call it passion or whatever.

2158

Like, there is a search and I think that search for something is the drive

2165

which is keeping me interested in politics and political science.

2169

What I am searching for, I don't know.

2173

But of course, I can, you know, make up statements like, you know,

2178

now I know that modern India is a political project, right?

2182

And it was a project conceived at the time of independence

2187

or during the freedom movement.

2189

And in every sense, all what we know in political science,

2194

survival of India as a democracy with so much of diversity,

2198

with so much of poverty, illiteracy is sort of like an exception, is a puzzle.

2204

And so, all of us, not all of us, but most of us, I hope,

2209

who study Indian politics are trying to understand this enigma

2214

or like, how are we surviving amidst all the chaos?

2219

Why do we manage to do certain things right?

2222

Like, elections in India in some ways are the greatest show

2227

humankind sees every five years, right?

2230

Like, 800 million people participating

2233

and producing a verdict or a mandate or a result is just fascinating.

2239

Think of all the innovations our electoral system have gone through

2243

or people who were thinking about the, or were imagining India as a democracy,

2249

a feudal society, a deeply hierarchical society, everyone illiterate.

2254

How did they think that we are going to like, you know,

2258

people are going to cast their vote thinking of symbols, right?

2261

That illiterate people can't read that Amit Verma is contesting from party X.

2265

So Amit has a symbol, teddy bear, right?

2268

And people know that Amit belongs to teddy bear party

2271

and so teddy bear gets the vote.

2273

So those kind of innovations.

2276

And there are certain similar lacunas,

2279

like we have more than 25 or 2800 parties registered in the country today.

2284

And the lacuna, or it's a foresight, I don't know,

2288

this is something one needs to think about.

2290

So the reason we have so many political parties in India,

2294

because registering a political party is really easy.

2297

But the Election Commission of India does not have the power to deregister a party.

2303

And so there are many parties that are dead or defunct,

2306

but they still, in the legal sense, still registered as a political party.

2312

Think of it.

2313

And that's why like my fascination, passion, drive, whatever,

2316

like whoever was thinking about this,

2319

and I have spoken to people in Election Commission, former Election Commissioners,

2323

and they have said they have written to law,

2325

Ministry and Law Commission to basically give them the right to make certain amendments

2329

in People's Representation Act and give them the right to deregister a party.

2333

But then when they make this argument,

2335

when they become thoughtful during that interview,

2337

they say, but I think it was some genius, right,

2341

who thought that the Election Commission should not have the power to deregister.

2345

What if the Election Commission is basically under the spell of the current,

2350

of the present regime or any regime at that point?

2354

And basically then you want to get all your opponent parties deregistered.

2359

So it would have been a bad law in that sense.

2362

And so all of these questions,

2364

what was going behind in making these laws or not making these laws?

2370

Like if you read the Constituent Assembly debates,

2373

and we talked about some of it during our last conversation,

2377

like each of those amendments that were raised,

2380

like it's a fascinating document and one should read it,

2384

like the kind of thought process that was going into the framers of modern India,

2390

the realization some of them had about the depth and the breadth of this country in every sense.

2399

Like basically, like I don't think most of us who are on social media and Twitter,

2406

like the kind of conversations we have today, which we think is a debate,

2410

and we are living in a polarizing time is nonsensical.

2415

Think of those moments of 1947, you know, partition happening, people are dying,

2420

there is a debate happening on what should be the basis of citizenship.

2425

That's a real debate.

2426

Yeah, like that's the polarizing time, right?

2429

What we are seeing is just a facade on social media.

2433

Think of that like 70, 80 years ago,

2436

where some people were arguing that, you know,

2439

the Constitution should begin in the name of God, right?

2443

And then others are, you know, we can't have God.

2445

Some of those debates still exist,

2447

but I think putting those debates in the context of 1940s,

2451

when many things are happening, World War II had just ended,

2456

India didn't, like we had seen 1942, famine, right?

2461

Like thousands of, lakhs of people had died, partition happening.

2465

And I think like constructing a nation at that point

2470

from 200 years of being a country subjugated by a colonial power,

2477

those are fascinating moments from a political standpoint.

2481

Yeah, it's crazy. And you don't know then what you know now.

2484

Like I did an episode with Gyan Prakash, who had written the book on the emergency.

2487

And one of the key points he made was that, one, the emergency wasn't unconstitutional,

2492

that power was actually given to the state to be able to do what it did.

2497

And the reason that power was given,

2499

the reason that it was enshrined in the Constitution and it was so centralised,

2504

was that at the time the Constitution was being drafted,

2507

the country was falling apart, there was violence everywhere.

2510

You could not assume that, you know, the centre would hold, as it were.

2514

And therefore, the centralising urge and therefore,

2517

this mindset almost of another new colonial power in the making,

2520

in the way that they got all the states together and all of that.

2523

But, you know, within that context, you understand what happened.

2527

But then, the result of that centralising urge is the emergency.

2532

The result of that strong centre is so many things that are wrong with our politics today.

2537

And you were speaking about so many parties which don't exist.

2540

Have you heard of the Uttar Pradesh Mitak Sangh?

2542

No, I haven't, but it's possible that there is a party here.

2546

No, it's not a party.

2548

So, this is a story I love telling.

2550

I've forgotten the name of the original guy, but basically in the 1960s,

2553

there was a farmer who was declared dead by his relatives so his land could be taken away.

2558

So, he was basically legally dead.

2561

And he tried to fight and obviously the state wouldn't help him

2564

because there's no proof of his existence.

2566

And he formed the Uttar Pradesh Mitak Sangh.

2569

And for 27 years, he fought a long battle to be declared alive again.

2573

Among the things he did was I think in the elections in the late 80s and 89,

2578

he stood against V.P. Singh and V.P. Singh's constituency

2581

because he said that if they register me,

2583

that will in a sense be the state acknowledging my presence.

2586

He also, I think, kidnapped the daughter of one of the people who had taken his property

2591

not to harm her in any way, but if the police arrested him,

2595

they would have to acknowledge that he existed.

2597

And this Uttar Pradesh Mitak Sangh had a membership of tens of thousands of people.

2602

And eventually, I think in 2001, he was finally declared alive.

2606

Oh, that's interesting.

2608

I'm hoping those 10,000 members were not all...

2611

Okay, most of them were declared dead by the state.

2614

I think this is like in absolute numbers also, like in proportionate terms not,

2620

but in absolute numbers, this is the kind of thing keep happening in our country.

2625

These small things keep happening.

2627

But the support of these small things and the boundaries of these small things,

2632

most people live their lifetime, right?

2637

Basically, trying to guard their property,

2642

trying to basically make sure whatever little inheritance they have

2646

is passed on to mostly their sons, right?

2649

And protecting it from jealous neighbors or jealous relatives,

2653

that's all what most people do in their lifetimes.

2657

And not only were you interested in politics at the level of,

2660

I want to understand this shit, but were you also interested in it

2664

at the level of, I want to do this shit?

2666

I vaguely remember that you mentioned some kind of political career in the making...

2672

Now you're putting words in my mouth.

2675

I wouldn't say that at different points in time,

2679

I haven't thought, oh, I should do this shit.

2684

And I have still not been able to figure out what would be the mode or method.

2692

There have been moments in my lifetime, one or two personal instances,

2697

but largely to do with what was happening around us, right?

2701

And at that moment you think, is sort of like being an analyst of politics enough?

2708

Why not just like leave everything, jump the bad wagon,

2712

join protest movements that were happening at that point of time?

2717

Then you do go to some of them, spend couple of hours and then you come back, type.

2722

So that's what has happened for most part of it.

2726

But I wouldn't say that I haven't thought of having a life in political arena.

2735

So what stops you? Is it like the practicality of actually being able to

2741

be in a position to win anything in these times where the parties are arranged the way that they are,

2746

they are so centralized, psychofancy is so important?

2750

It's not like the US where anyone can just stand for Congress or for the Senate.

2755

Or is it just that politics has become so unsavoury that your idealism no longer feels like a fit?

2763

So I think if I'll be like realist here, the game of power everywhere is difficult

2773

and it will always be difficult. It's not easy in US and it's not difficult in India.

2779

Anyone can contest in India as they can contest in United States.

2784

Same way in US, if you look at the wealth of people who win or pedigree of people who win

2792

is very different for people who can contest.

2795

In the Indian case, you can make these arguments that parties are closed structures in India.

2801

So yes, in some senses, the mobility is limited, but in US, you have two options.

2808

In India, in most states, there are eight to nine viable parties.

2813

So you have more options to join.

2816

Elections are competitive in India and they are more competitive than other places.

2821

But in India, entry of politicians is easy.

2824

If you look at all our parliaments and legislative assembly, half of the members are first timers.

2830

Whereas in US, the electoral turnover is very low, like 80 to 90 percent of congressmen win their seats.

2841

In India, more than half is new. So you have more chance to basically try and win.

2847

So I wouldn't say it's the practicality of politics.

2851

But I think the drive to be in the political arena is not that enough that I want to leave what I'm doing at the moment.

2859

There may be a day where I think, you know, like this is enough.

2863

I don't think I have anything to contribute here.

2867

Why not break my head somewhere else?

2870

Maybe I fail there also, but like the drive to try is not at the moment.

2876

Yeah, and at least nobody will be able to say that he did not know what he was getting into.

2881

You have basically studied it in such depth.

2885

Take me now to your actual doing political science abroad and that kind of journey,

2890

which took you to, you know, writing your first book with Mr. Chibbur.

2893

So we spoke till I was in Kirurimal College.

2897

There were certain things happened and we can talk about that at some point.

2901

No, you're smiling now. Tell me now.

2904

So funny things like and all of those things basically shape you as a person.

2909

So when I joined Kirurimal College or Delhi University,

2913

we were the first batch for whom the internal assessment procedure came in.

2919

Basically, you will have a final exam of 75 percent and 25 percent would be graded internally,

2925

which will be comprised of, say, a half yearly exam, some assignments and attendance.

2931

And somehow, basically, to cut the long story short,

2935

my internal assessment marks for all subjects in my first year were allocated zero.

2942

And so it was a three year fight where I had been from pillar to post,

2946

have asked help of student union president to like anything you can think of.

2951

And ultimately, like the university refused and all those things happened.

2956

So some of my faculty members helped me to go to a court.

2960

I filed a red petition in Delhi High Court.

2963

I won that case against Delhi University.

2965

They gave my marks back, not in full.

2968

I should have got 76 out of 100, but like or 67 out of 100.

2973

But even after like second intervention of the court, they only gave me I think 62 or 64,

2980

still kept three marks and I don't know why.

2982

What are you gaining out of it?

2984

But yeah, those were like so that was a struggle.

2987

So it basically delayed my admission into masters for a year

2993

because these court cases and other things.

2995

But during that time, I got to travel many parts of North India.

2999

I worked with a research organization which required me traveling.

3003

And so I traveled to Rajasthan, to Himachal, to UP, to MP,

3007

like different states doing those surveys or helping the survey team.

3011

I traveled on the bus floors just for fun.

3014

I'm not saying I didn't have money to travel.

3016

Like you like sitting on the top of the bus and traveling

3022

Himachal or Uttarakhand, it's not legal, not nice.

3025

But then you like, you know, you see things very differently.

3028

So that gap year was in that like very helpful in knowing different parts of the country.

3036

Then I got admission at Tata Institute of Social Sciences here in Mumbai.

3041

I did my masters here.

3043

And the reason I basically applied, like I would not have got admission here.

3049

But the reason I applied, because one of my professors who helped me during that course,

3054

he said, apply to this. It's a good place.

3058

They also have a research component, which you will like.

3061

Now many places in India might have master's dissertation.

3064

But I think that was one of the first places, development studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences,

3069

we started this like writing master's dissertation.

3073

This was between 2007 to 2009.

3077

And Bahujan Samaj Party had just one single handedly in UP.

3081

And so I wrote my master's dissertation on the rise of BSP.

3086

So it was in with like first foray into political science research.

3092

And so yes, then the journey began.

3094

I also did my internship during this at CSDS Center for Study of Developing Societies in Delhi.

3101

I like the place.

3103

And I think they also liked my work.

3104

So they asked me, once you finish your masters, come here and work with us.

3109

So I worked at CSDS for two years on 2009 elections.

3114

And I was trained under Yogendra Yadav, Professor Suhas Palchikar, Sanjay Kumar.

3119

So very early on getting trained by these people, sort of like Yogendra Yadav used to say this.

3127

And I have copied it from him that in the musical tradition, you belong to Gharanas.

3132

In the research tradition, I belong to the CSDS Lokniti Gharana where we do empirical political science research.

3139

And so yeah, during those years at CSDS, they also allowed me to, you know,

3147

while working at CSDS pursue my MPhil at Delhi University, like both places are just like in a half kilometer radius.

3155

So I used to go and attend my classes.

3157

And then I wrote my MPhil dissertation on why does Indian states have different party systems?

3164

So you would see states like Kerala or Tamil Nadu where it's basically two party systems.

3171

But in a sense, like there are polar party systems, right?

3174

There is a UDF, there is a LDF, there is a Dravidian Pole and AID MK Pole.

3179

And then you have states like UP and Bihar where you have multi-parties, four or five.

3184

Then you have states like Madhya Pradesh or Chhattisgarh where you have only two main parties, BJP and Congress.

3191

And then you had at that time West Bengal or Gujarat.

3194

Gujarat was still developing like a one-party dominant state.

3198

And at that time, Bengal was still the left ruled one-party dominant state.

3203

So why does Indian states have these different party systems?

3207

Do I have an answer? No.

3209

But in Delhi University MPhil, you have to write a dissertation based only on secondary sources, no primary research and all those things.

3220

But yeah, I do some historical analysis of why it's a path-dependent journey.

3226

It depends on what opposition came first and other things.

3229

Some made up stuff, I still don't have one clear answer on that.

3233

But so slowly, I was basically getting into the stream.

3238

And then at CSDS, I applied for, I was encouraged by many people to apply for PhD in US.

3248

And luckily, I got admission at University of California, Berkeley to work with many people.

3255

Pradeep Chipper was my primary dissertation advisor.

3260

And so like in US, the way the course structure is that for first three, four years, you just do your coursework and write your prospectus.

3269

And then you go on to write your dissertation.

3272

For me, that took a long time for many reasons, one of which was Pradeep and I somehow like in 2014 or 2015,

3282

were discussing about there is a long shadow of partition on Indian politics.

3288

There are certain issues and themes which are reoccurring and they keep emerging.

3293

And from there, the conversations basically took the shape.

3299

The conversations were very different from the book that finally came out, which is that Indian politics is deeply ideological.

3307

And those ideological conflicts have shaped the party system development.

3312

Post-independence and voters sought them on those ideological issues.

3317

Yeah. And just to kind of put that in perspective for the listeners,

3320

there has been this common notion, which I share at a point in time, that the ideologies of left and right,

3327

as we understand them in the worst world, rest of the world, don't apply to India.

3331

Left and the right is a meaningless distinction here.

3334

And if you look at all our parties are pretty much left of center on economics and right of center on social issues.

3340

Exactly the opposite of how someone like me who cares for individual rights would like it.

3345

And the point that Rahul and Mr. Chibber made in their excellent book,

3349

and you should really listen to that episode, which I'll link from the show notes,

3352

is that there are ideological fault lines.

3354

It is not all identity politics, as many people say, but those ideological fault lines are different ones,

3361

not the paradigms that we are sort of used to in the left.

3365

Now, a couple of comments. One is, at one point, you were speaking about the marks you actually got,

3369

and you said 76 or 67.

3371

And I will let the listeners know that just before this,

3374

we were kind of joking about all the 100% cutoffs in Delhi University for Political Science today,

3379

because in our time, like in both my 10th and 12th, in one of them I got around 70,

3385

in another one I got around 60, I don't even remember, it didn't even matter.

3388

And I think Rahul has the same approach as mine.

3393

But I guess, in a sense, that mistake that they made, you know,

3397

might have really helped you in the sense that it set you along this path

3401

where you travel on the roof of buses and all of that.

3404

And do you look at that and feel that maybe your life would have been different

3407

or your outlook would have been different had that not happened?

3410

How important was that gap year to you?

3412

Do you recommend, in fact, that people take those kind of gap years?

3415

Because it's a tradition in the West, but not so much in India.

3418

So, it's definitely helpful to take gap years during your college years.

3425

And I have a bad joke, it may be politically incorrect,

3428

but in a way, the way our education to job line-up Indian system or Indian culture is,

3436

as if one has to do a hajj, right?

3439

You don't see these four, five, six years of college education to job

3449

and to finally settling into something as progressive steps and steps of learning,

3456

steps of making mistakes, steps of figuring out.

3459

And so, if you do your BA, you finish your MBA or whatever you want to do and then get into a job,

3467

you actually didn't give yourself time to make a mistake, right?

3471

And you actually didn't give yourself time to think there could be other avenues or areas

3478

which might suit your talents more, right?

3483

So, when we choose our undergraduates, not our choice most of the time,

3487

perhaps now the kids are doing it.

3490

Even when I didn't end up going to an engineering degree, my father is an engineer,

3498

most of my school friends did engineering.

3502

In fact, to just have a good time because now everyone has decided

3509

they have to write their engineering entrance exams, so they have joined some coaching.

3513

I have decided I won't do engineering, but I have not got admission into Delhi University yet.

3519

So, what do I do in those summer months?

3522

I used to basically go to engineering coaching with them just to hang out,

3526

that after the coaching is over, we will all go to have tea or something, right?

3531

Some of those days.

3533

And it was easy to come like if everyone is writing their entrance exam, why am I not writing, right?

3539

So, most of the time you do these things under family pressure, under peer pressure,

3543

you actually don't get time.

3545

It's not like as I told you, I was not making a conscious decision what I have to do.

3549

I just made a conscious decision based on my own abilities that I'm not good for engineering degree.

3557

And I basically came to Delhi University thinking, okay, I can do journalism.

3564

Then I realized that's also not my field.

3566

So, I think gap year at some point is important and especially if you can utilize it properly

3574

and sometimes it's like perhaps at our stage, we need like six, eight months of gap time just to do nothing

3580

and think what we have managed to do.

3583

Like, you know, basically reflect deeply on the course of next five, seven years

3588

because we all are running against time, right?

3591

We have to finish a volume that has been promised, you have something left over,

3598

you have family to take care that there are lots of family obligations.

3601

And so, in all of that, taking those four, five months off or a year off was very helpful.

3608

I did many things in that gap year between college and joining MA.

3614

And there were some good things happened.

3616

So, of course, this court case, but I also got a summer scholarship to study at Cambridge for one month.

3623

That was one first time flying international.

3627

Before that, no one in my immediate family had traveled.

3630

So, I actually didn't know where your luggage would be, right?

3633

So, I had to figure out.

3635

So, those are the things.

3637

I remember I was in Himachal when my grandmother passed away.

3643

And I have this habit of not looking at my phone.

3646

So, I used to keep my phone in the bag.

3648

There were like 30 calls when I checked in the evening.

3651

And now you are like, college is not young kid, but you are in Himachal in some remote village.

3658

And now you have to reach Lucknow.

3660

And that's I'm talking like 15 years ago, right?

3663

And so, like just figuring out the route and everything.

3666

So, some of those things teach you different things about life.

3672

I may have still perhaps gone to this politics, political science route, not because of that court case.

3680

But at very early age of my life, I was introduced to high court.

3686

That cases are actually heard for just two to three minutes.

3690

It's not like that.

3692

So, I had seen that like your lawyer or the most of the time, both lawyers are not even present in the same time, right?

3700

That's the reason why case gets postponed.

3702

So, if two of us are lawyers of representing two parties and you made an excuse that I can't come today, it will get extended to another date.

3711

The next date at minimum will be after two months.

3714

That's why Indian court cases basically takes up years to get finished.

3719

This is like this simple case, right?

3721

When my college is making an argument showing you prove my college, my principle and vice-principal.

3727

They have written many letters to the university that this kid got this much.

3732

My lawyer had to put so many papers to show that the college is giving what I deserve.

3738

I used to debate and also I had so many certificates to show I am half intelligent kid can get 60% marks, right?

3748

Otherwise, one of the arguments which the lawyer from the other party or the university made that the college is favoring this child.

3757

So, this case also of a simple thing took eight or nine months, six or seven hearings.

3764

And that's crazy and you obviously had the means to fight it and the will to fight it and all of that.

3769

I think so means and so will because I was not left with much option.

3775

Means because my faculty at Kirolimal college were very supportive.

3781

Money I didn't have to pay because someone actually fought this case pro bono.

3787

I had to only the legal fee in terms of paperwork and other things.

3792

And so I also realized that there are people who are willing to do these things for others at a very, very minimal price.

3801

In fact, when I told my father and some of my relatives that I am going to court, some of them were like, you should have told us.

3809

We would have gone to the university, got some Babu, given him five thousand rupees.

3813

He would have done this thing.

3814

But then you were like, you know, I was also like taking high moral ground that, you know, if I can't, if I'm not going to fight for these injustices on my own and take these easy routes, then what kind of person I'm going to become.

3829

But you know, all those like.

3831

Yeah, I think part of growing up is realizing that there are too many injustices and you can't fight them all.

3837

But, you know, just going back to the gap year thing, I think what is more appealing than a gap year is a gap year mindset.

3843

Like, I think you should always leave open the opportunity for serendipity to happen to you.

3848

And if we just follow the structured path, we will do tenth, twelfth, we will do engineering, we will do MBA, we will get a job.

3857

And then before you know it, the decades have passed and nothing has happened and you haven't grown.

3862

And, you know, and this is literally the seen in the unseen, because what is seen is that path that you chose for yourself and you went down on.

3869

And what is unseen is all the other things that could have happened, including on sort of the top of the bus.

3875

Now, you spoke earlier about at different points, like, you know, when you spoke about your master's dissertation, you said that, OK, you know, these were the questions you asked,

3885

but you're still not sure of the answer, but you put, quote unquote, some made up stuff.

3889

And earlier also, when I asked you about your attraction to politics, you said something to the effect of there's no concrete reason, but I can make up something for you if you'd like.

3898

Now, it strikes me that when one is in academics, in a sense, you're putting yourself in the business of making sense of the world or whatever little aspect of the world that you're focusing on.

3910

And therefore, your incentives go towards finding answers, even when there are none of building narratives,

3918

even when you know that those narratives are necessarily simple, because otherwise, you know, why are you there?

3924

What are you doing? You have to also not just justify your existence in that field,

3930

but also justify to yourself the choice that you made doing this, you know, just for your own self-esteem.

3937

No, I am not useless. I have asked this question. I will find the answer to this.

3942

You know, and is that a danger that you kind of find about, you know, do you have to warn yourself against overthinking something

3950

or about getting attracted to a particular theory because, you know, it seems so attractive, but is it the right one?

3957

And in your work, of course, as I have seen, there's just tremendous rigor. And I'm going to ask you about that as well shortly.

3963

So, has that been a mindset that you've fought with?

3966

Because, you know, the lazy way out is to make a theory, make a narrative, find evidence to support it, make an argument.

3975

You were a debater also, so no doubt you argued both sides of the same issue.

3979

So, what are your thoughts on that?

3981

So, I think, let me say a few things and then we'll try to round up what all of this means.

3988

And it may be very different for different people in this field.

3992

A lot of people, like I think their focus is to understand the world and explain the world to people.

4000

I think for me, while this is, of course, an important thing, I want to understand myself through this process of understanding politics and the world.

4013

And let me give you an example. So, like I knew a friend during college years and when I was in the US, they also moved to San Francisco.

4022

And so, I just like, you know, and we, like, but acquaintances, not great friends, like both of us like hanging out with each other.

4030

And so, when I called her, I said, like, let's meet. She was like, you know, but and I said, like, come over, a couple of my friends will also be there.

4037

And she was like, you know, but all your friends are PhD and I don't do any of this thing. What will I talk?

4044

And I said, I don't know. But I think like why the reason I hang out with you is that you also have a passion and her passion was running.

4053

She used to run every day, like 20 kilometers, right? And the whole life was organized around running, which is what to eat, when to sleep, what to drink, what not to drink.

4066

Like, so I said, like, you have a passion for running and your everything is organized around that. I have passion for elections and politics.

4075

Like, my life is actually also organized around like, I know 2024 election, I'll be busy, but not busy in terms of like, I will be occupied, right?

4089

Maybe wearing kurta pajama and giving bhaashans. But you know, so now I have to think backwards that, OK, so if 2024 is gone, I can't do anything.

4099

Then in next two years, this is what my plan is. Of course, none of them will be, but then you plan, right?

4106

So I'm passionate about politics and elections and it is more to do with understanding myself than to understanding and explaining things to others.

4117

Second, I know like the theories or the narratives that I offer is my like representation and my thinking at the current moment with my best sort of like knowledge gathering exercise.

4139

But I'm not going to sort of like put all my money on the theory that I'm saying today because new facts will emerge and my theory or thinking should change based on the new facts that are emerging.

4153

So I have and this is not again a virtue signaling that I'm being, you know, open to sort of like the idea is very clear. It keeps me much more sane if I leave the room open for basically me being wrong.

4175

If I'm going to stick to any theory or thought and those kind of things, I'll be basically making myself insecure.

4186

And especially in the world of writing, academia, this keeps happening. You will see five criticisms like you write newspaper articles.

4195

There are 10 comments. It's like stakes are very small in this game, right? So everyone is going after everyone. They will say few things, one or two nice things in front of you, but 10 things to your acquaintances and 100 things to other people.

4210

So I'm like, you know, like, for example, on that, I know the arguments we made in the book on ideology is only scratching the surface, right?

4225

There is much more happening. Half it is being made sense through data, something through other things. And to say that we have now mapped out 100 years of ideological conflict in Indian politics is basically making a fool of myself.

4240

And I would rather say incomplete things and know that those things are incomplete than saying that I for sure know the answer.

4251

Yeah, that's very wisely said. There's a phrase that a friend shared with me, I forget who, maybe Pranay Kutasane, somebody in policy, and the phrase was strong opinions weakly held.

4261

I really like that as a way of kind of thinking about the world and about the things that I am unwavering in and the things that I am open to.

4268

The way I define it is that I am unwavering and unflinching when it comes to values, you know, valuing individual rights or freedom or whatever.

4277

But when it comes to facts or a view of why things happen the way they do and so on, I am open to evidence.

4284

You know, tomorrow I might believe something differently from what I believe today, but my values will be the same and those will always kind of be my guiding light.

4293

Earlier you had sort of spoken about the CSDS Lokniti Gharana as it were, which I presume Yogendra Yadavji is also a fellow traveller on.

4304

Tell me a little bit about this Gharana.

4306

So, this started way back in 1960s, one of the new social science research institutes and was started by Rajni Kothari and his fellow travellers in 1960s.

4323

And sort of like very unorthodox way of doing things, the stories that I have heard about.

4332

And Mr. Kothari was apparently, I mean, I have read a book of his on caste and Indian politics and it's just a wonderful book, so sharp.

4340

Yeah, so it started with like people like Rajni Kothari and slowly Ashish Nandi and Dhirubhai Seth and Bashiruddin Nehma, then many of these people joined.

4351

And the stories I have heard is like those were the days when people used to play bridge or chess or cigar or pipe in office.

4363

And so it was basically creating a kind of an academy club, right, where you come, you do your thing.

4371

It was not a Sarkari institution. You have to come at 10, leave at 5.

4376

People are sitting on Fridays, so they're sitting till midnight and having debates and talking about those things.

4384

So, and they did like Kothari was innovate, also got trained in Michigan in behavioral political science that was emerging then in 1960s.

4397

So with India conducted, CSDS conducted its first national election studies during 1967 and then 71 and some like, you know, very influential books were produced by this set of scholars.

4413

And slowly CSDS got diversified into doing many things.

4417

But the election studies program got halted during the emergency and other things, mostly because I think the intellectual orientation of these scholars changed

4430

and they were much more worried about what was happening to the state and to democracy.

4435

So that's why like Kothari in 70s is writing state against democracy kind of books or in search of humane order.

4443

Right. So, so things got changed. But then at like one corner of his heart, it must have been there that we need to revive it.

4451

So then I think they met or Yogan Yadav in early 90s invited him to give a presentation at CSDS and then asked him to join CSDS.

4462

So then Yogan Yadav started Lok Niti 95 revived the tradition of election polling.

4469

So in some ways outside the developed world, India hosts one of the longest series of election survey data conducted by Lok Niti group of scholars.

4481

It's a network of scholars across the country in many state or central universities who conduct these surveys and trying to make sense of Indian politics through the prism of voters, what they are doing.

4495

Of course, there are limitations even there. And I think like the best thing I at least learned from that Gharana or tradition,

4505

whatever everyone thinks is basically be open to the limitations of what you are doing.

4515

And it's good, right, like makes you know that you don't have to basically, you know, put your life on every damn theory you speak or your ego on everything you say.

4529

But it's not to say that don't be rigorous, say anything that comes to first thought like think deeply, deeply research a topic, think of bigger questions, think of important questions, but don't make it an ego that oh, I argued this and so it must be true every time, every context.

4555

So I think I learned and mistake is very normal part of research, right?

4561

When we are conducting this humongous national election survey, those questionnaires are being translated in 18 languages.

4571

There are places now I think that problem of electricity and internet is not there.

4576

But when I was in 2009, like I have heard stories, how do I download your questionnaire and translate it?

4587

I'm not talking about like some rural village in Chhattisgarh.

4593

This used to be the case in even many state capitals and central universities that internet is not working and all those things.

4600

So you like you understand like at such a young age, I got an opportunity to not just see the masters but learn from the masters, work with them was like for me like I feel fortunate and lucky.

4617

Yeah, and speaking of no internet or no electricity, I mean, there is some kind of coal crisis going on in India right now, right?

4623

Some friend of mine from Bangalore was just complaining today morning ki yaar, you know, doh gante se bijlee nahi aayi hai and I was like, doh gante, how are you even living?

4633

Would it then be fair to paraphrase this approach by saying that there is no need for you to try to come up with definitive answers.

4640

What you want to do is either expand the scope of the discourse or sharpen some aspect of it.

4646

Yes, both, both. And that should be our aim, right?

4651

I think right now, if you like give you a medical analogy to figure out what the diagnosis should be, you need to know the actual point where the disease is and the surgery or whatever performance has to be done.

4671

And if you have seen all those medical shows on Netflix and other places like those guys carry out lots of tests to figure out what actually the problem is.

4682

Right. So in our world, which is much more complex, everything is a variable changing so rapidly.

4691

And most of the things we have not even like studied descriptively or sort of like, you know, have some sense of it.

4701

And then thinking that we can have a definitive theory of something is a misnomer to begin with, like perhaps 10, 15, 20, 30 years down the line.

4711

If we collect lots of information about various aspects of things, perhaps our next generation will be able to join dots and see something about about what is like come up with more definitive theory.

4726

And so just to give you an example, I think the U.S. political science is at a much more advanced stage and they are having like now answering much more narrower questions with much more certainty is because the base knowledge on certain things is a lot.

4744

They have records of each individual congress member voting on each bill that has been tabled in the House.

4752

We don't. So they have a whole field of study of Congress, a sub discipline within the U.S. political science.

4762

We can't we don't have a sub discipline of parliament and legislative assemblies.

4767

We don't have even like now for last three parliaments, we have attendance record to begin with a number of debates.

4776

They are participating. We don't know what was the attendance record in 1970s and 80s.

4782

So our data gathering exercise is less. Not much has been written about many aspects of things.

4789

And so that so at our stage, we have to have like broad description of things and trying to get basically the perimeter right and then go for the bullseye.

4801

At the moment, if you can basically be in that radius, that's fair.

4807

Yeah. And I like what you said earlier about joining dots.

4810

I mean, I used that metaphor myself a lot.

4812

You know, I wrote a column once in the importance of reading where I said was my basic argument was, look, we make sense of the world by joining dots.

4819

And the more dots we have, the more high definition our picture will be.

4823

And I guess you could argue that the state of political science in India is at a place where collecting dots is more important.

4829

And, you know, the better pictures will emerge later.

4832

But right now it's a collecting of dots, collecting of data, just understanding that which is kind of important on the subject of reading.

4839

I'm also kind of curious about that because, you know, earlier, before we started this conversation, we were chatting about the book of another person who, of course, we won't name.

4850

But you mentioned that your feeling was that that person who's written a book with many, many footnotes and all of that hadn't read enough of the literature in the subject.

4858

Now, what I've noticed from your work, both in your book and otherwise, is that you clearly you read a lot.

4863

You're obsessed with gathering your own dots to make sense of what your field is.

4867

How do you manage to do that?

4869

Because, and again, a subject we've discussed, given how boring academic language can sometimes be.

4874

Many academic texts are just written in this turgid prose that are really hard to go through.

4879

But it's a part of your work to actually go through that and to go through many, many books like that.

4884

So how have you built this reading habit? Was it hard work? Is it easier now? Is there a sort of a discipline to it?

4892

And how do you then kind of do knowledge management of figuring out, you know, how to assimilate the information and retain it and categorize it and make sense of it?

4902

So I'll be honest with you in any book and including mine, like if I have 100 citations, it doesn't mean I have read all 100.

4911

And not in the same, like even if I've read say 70 or 80, some have been skimmed through, some through abstract, some through like pinpointed.

4923

So it's not humanly possible to read it. But you do that exercise for two reasons.

4930

First, knowledge generation is a cumulative exercise, which means that there is already some dots that are already existing.

4940

And if you want you and this is just like, you know, self vested interest.

4947

If you want your work to be acknowledged like a dot, you need to refer to all the dots that is possible.

4953

I'm not saying like you won't be able to manage it.

4956

Many times you are going to miss it. But then if you miss important, I'm not saying like refer to every damn work in that area.

4965

But if you are missing important work in your area, it means that you have not done due diligence.

4971

And which means your question and your answer would not be sharp enough because there is already a body of work that exists in your area.

4980

You should do the due diligence for your own sake and also for basically adding to this collective exercise of knowledge generation.

4990

And two, I don't think so. Some readings are always done for a particular research project, right, which you like you have to just cite.

5001

So because you're making a claim and that claim needs to have either some primary evidence or you say, OK, Amit argued this and I'm referring to this.

5010

Right. So I like if I have the sentence and I could think of or somebody tells me, you know, Amit has like so you you do become aware of what is happening on a research project.

5022

Who else is working on what different angles they are coming from? Right.

5027

So sometimes those citations are just OK. On India, there is a book by Amit. I don't even perhaps read Amit's book. This is not good.

5035

I'm not saying one should do it, but most often we do these things.

5040

There are a lot of things you just keep reading and you have to develop a habit of reading either on like, you know, devise a time of day that, you know, this one or two.

5052

So I generally try to not that I stick to it very dearly, but I like I don't like to have meetings in first half of the day that I want to just like read,

5064

flip over, write something. And in second half, I think after lunch, I'm useless.

5070

So why not like have all the meetings? So I try to follow this schedule as much as I can, but then there are sometimes I'm not able to do.

5078

So a lot of like information or like this kind of knowing what work is happening in your area is part of your job.

5088

You need to know who is working. Of course, you would need to know more about the subjects you are interested in.

5094

So, for example, like the school crisis, it's not an interest of mine.

5100

I know there is some crisis. In fact, like people asked me to refer to someone who they can talk and quote about this.

5107

But I didn't try to find out what's happening. But if there was a crisis in, say, Congress Party or some state politics, I would definitely like, you know, Google it.

5117

I have not yet tried to Google what has happened in Jharia, but due to which a lot of, you know, like electricity in many of our metros have gone down.

5128

Yeah, I'm certain the Prime Minister would blame the coal crisis on the Congress Party, in which case we'll have to quickly in great panic dive into that is really the case.

5138

So before we go in for the break and after the break, of course, we'll talk about both your book and the project that you're working on now.

5144

And we'll talk about Indian politics in great detail and get down and dirty.

5148

But a final sort of question about your journey, which has always interested me because looking back, I can see how this part of my journey was kind of fuzzy till it kind of gradually fell into place,

5159

which is that when we are growing up, we are just taking in influences from here and there by osmosis completely at random, not really thinking things through.

5171

And the prism through which we view the world is kind of random like that.

5176

And it's only over a period of time that you actually sort of start thinking about things and reading books and discovering thinkers and forming a prism through which the world makes sense to you.

5189

You know, for example, my prism, as I said, is largely now kind of based on values and sort of derives from there.

5196

But it took me a long time to kind of get there. A lot of my thinking when I was in my teens or early to mid 20s and all of that was very fuzzy and very wrong.

5205

In fact, in a sense, I'm thankful that there was no social media back then because I might have done all kinds of random posturing and virtue signaling and hardened myself into certain ways of thinking by having publicly taken a position on that,

5218

which is, you know, a tangential question that do you feel that's a danger today? But my main question here is that in your case, are you able to look back and say that these are the books or these are the thinkers which shaped me, which are foundational in some way?

5232

Like, of course, I would imagine that the experience at CSDS and being part of that karana would have shaped you in terms of methodology and all of those things.

5240

But just in terms of the way that you look at the world, the values that have kind of formed you or that you have formed for yourself, what are those influences?

5249

That would be hard to pinpoint.

5252

No, I don't even want you to make up an answer.

5255

So I don't think the influences can only be books of famous people and thought processes.

5270

Like, I think I like I learned about like one principle of equality and Marxism from my father, which was, you know, I remember like we had just moved to Lucknow.

5286

It was hot. I was sitting in like me and my sister playing in cooler, not studying all day. And then there was some work happening on the road.

5294

And perhaps my father was in anger. We were not studying or something. And and he could have like just said that why you guys are sort of like wasting your time and playing, not studying.

5307

But his reference, look at people outside working in such like such bad condition with no clothes on their shoulders.

5319

And you guys have got these privileges and just chilling. Right. So, you know, and so if I remember that sentence, like from 25 years, like of my life, it means that had a very, very deep influence on me.

5336

Like, similarly, some of the comments my grandfather may have made on caste or against the Brahmin Brahminical system has shaped up my thinking about caste that, oh, there are there is a hierarchy.

5351

There are some people on top and they have shaped the system or society, of course, like reading books and people have opened up not just like ideas in terms of like just writing.

5368

Right. Some people you read flows like a river. It's beautiful. Right. Like so about aesthetics.

5374

Like I think like some of the arguments, especially early work by Pratap, his book, A Burden of Democracy, I think was really good.

5389

Rajni Kothari, you mentioned like his writings, Politics in India, the articles on, you know, the Congress system and others were political science.

5399

According to science, it's very influential. Myron Wiener, his work was really good.

5405

Lots of writings in fiction, especially Hindi fiction, Raag Darbari by Shilal Shukla, Murdahiya by Dr. Tulsi Ram, writings by Manto Shivani, the satire genre of of Harishankar Parasai and political satires by him.

5427

Like I've enjoyed them. And this may be my weakness. I'm not able to identify what might be like this is perhaps the reason that I need to sort of like, you know, now take a sort of like gap year and think what these things have affected me and in what ways.

5452

Like just going to new places, seeing those things have shaped me as a person, the successes and the failures and meeting people and talking to people.

5461

But I have not been reflective enough of those things and how they are shaping me.

5468

It seems like I'm basically growing up every day, but I don't know what are the factors or forces that are shaping me in that journey.

5480

Yeah, that's a profound point. And I sometimes wonder as well that are my only reflective moments, those moments when I reflect about being reflective rather than actually something practical.

5491

And then even in reflection, there is a danger of then constructing a narrative about yourself to make yourself look good to yourself or to explain something that has happened that is like the world itself complex and may not necessarily conform to a simple narrative.

5508

So let's take a quick commercial break and after we come back from the break, let's get down and dirty and talk about the subject that you are so passionate about, Indian politics.

5519

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.

5532

I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways. I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things because I wrote about many different things.

5544

Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons. And now it is time to revive it. Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.

5552

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.

5565

So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe. It is free. Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox. You don't need to go anywhere.

5577

So subscribe now for free. The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com. Thank you.

5585

Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen. I'm chatting with my good friend Rahul Verma about all his work in political science, understanding Indian politics.

5593

And in the one and a half hours before the break, we spoke about his fascinating personal journey and what brought him to the point where he's actually writing a book about this great passion of his.

5604

And when we first met and did the episode, I was really struck by it because not only are you challenging myths held by a lot of people, but you were challenging one of my beliefs.

5614

And my belief, to put it in Sanskrit as it were, is that I understood ideologies as being those ideologies of the West, left, right, this, that.

5623

And in India, it was all about identity politics, that you are voting according to what is your caste, what is your interest group, all of that.

5630

But your book convinced me that I need to consider a new way of thinking about it and look at it in a whole new way.

5637

Now we've done an entire episode on this, which I'll link from the show notes.

5641

But in brief, can you tell me about your thesis and what are the ideological fault lines along which Indian politics has played out over the last few decades?

5651

Thank you, Amit, for mentioning that book again and again and saying it challenged some of your belief and it gave you a new way of thinking about it.

5659

So very kind of you. As I have been saying, I don't think the book offers a complete picture of ideological conflict that might be happening in India.

5672

But it makes an important attempt to understand how Indian politics has been shaped over 20th century.

5681

So the starting point, as you said, we also held the same view that Indian politics can't be looked into the Western notions of left and right.

5691

And so when Pradeep and I began thinking about this book, so the first thought was that, you know, there are certain recurring themes in Indian politics.

5700

And so from there on, we started researching on what those themes were.

5706

And it also needed us to figure out why the Western left and right makes sense for those countries.

5714

So the book, in short, makes four or five argument.

5718

First, that the Western left and right notion in West Europe had a historical context.

5726

The Western Europe underwent a series of things, reformation, renaissance, industrial revolution that produced certain cleavages in those societies.

5736

And the ideological conflict in those societies then were shaped on those cleavages, whether it was around labor versus capital,

5745

whether it was around church versus state, center versus periphery, rural versus urban.

5752

So those were the cleavages that shaped Western Europe.

5755

Now, coming to countries like India, we never underwent those historical experiences.

5762

We never had an industrial revolution.

5764

In some senses, most of the Third World became an independent nation state overnight from a colony.

5773

So the process of nation building and state building, which took many centuries in West Europe,

5780

happened in a span of a few years in countries like India.

5785

I'm not saying the process got completed, but both coincided and was happening simultaneously.

5791

So once you start reading or referring to the documents from our freedom movement,

5798

we know that there were certain axes on which our founding fathers and there were only a few women in the constituent assemblies that were debating about these things.

5808

So think of going back to, say, 1909 Morley Minto Reforms or 1919 Montgave-Champs Four Reforms.

5816

You would be surprised to know certain things like Hindu Mahasabha and Muslim League are being born in same time.

5824

And if I remember correctly, it's the same year of 1906, right before Morley Minto Reforms,

5830

because these groups, what they were doing, they were making certain representation to the British government.

5836

And those representations were, of course, around the ideas of religion and caste and other things.

5843

And so once you read the entire gamut of these documents till the constituent assembly debates, certain things become very, very clear.

5854

And it also becomes very, very clear that many of the debates we are having now, the cow protection or the role of God in society,

5864

all those were debates were very much present at that time or the reservation debates.

5869

So when we read those documents, two things basically became clear to us.

5876

The first debate was happening on what should be the role of state in the society, which we call as politics of statism.

5885

And our reading of the text basically guided us to important works that has been written in the subcontinent over centuries, right?

5899

Because those were the basis on which people were drawing references to.

5903

So Ramayan, Mahabharat writings in the Islamic world or among the Muslim communities or Jains and Buddhism, which was in direct contrast to the political thinking in West Europe,

5919

which was about the state society relationship in our Indic political thinking.

5925

The idea was that state is subservient to society in a way that society is ontologically prior.

5932

To the state and the role of the state is to protect the social order, right?

5939

So that becomes the first set of debates.

5942

And I can expand on it a bit more.

5945

The second set of debate was that once India becomes a nation state and independent country,

5951

how are we going to bring diverse groups into the mainstream of body politic, right?

5958

So there was an agreement or a consensus that we have to get everyone on board, right?

5964

There are communities that have been oppressed for thousands of years,

5968

but we need to give them some scale, not just of respectability, but also bring into the mainstream.

5975

But what would be the modes and methods of bringing them into the body politic was a matter of contention, was a matter of debate.

5983

Are we going to give them reservation?

5985

If we are going to give them reservation, is religion or caste going to be that basis, right?

5991

So that becomes a whole set of debates.

5994

Is India going to be a country which will reflect Hindu ethos or are we going to have a multicultural secular ethos?

6003

We also knew that our principle of secularism can't be like a Western European country where there was a fight between church and state.

6012

India never had that fight, right?

6014

But the idea was that it's also a deeply religious country.

6018

So secularism in our country would not be a separation of church and state,

6024

but basically the state playing an equidistant role from all religious fears and activities.

6030

So that became the first set of like one set of debates whom we call as politics of recognition.

6036

The second one was one politics of statism.

6038

Are we going to interfere in marriage norms? Going back to the big debate within the Congress party between the moderates and extremists was on lowering of marriage age

6050

and whether allowing widows to remarry or not.

6054

So inter-caste marriages and those kind of things related to that was basically like all the debates on Hindu code bill, giving inheritance rights and redistribution of private property.

6067

So if you think of those debates, you could clearly see there were people like Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr. Ambedkar who were basically making a case that we are going to use the levers of the state to remake the society.

6086

And then there were people, of course, there were people on extreme end, but there were people like Gandhi who thought that state's intervention in society is violent, is a violent act.

6099

And so, for example, Gandhi also agreed that the condition of Harijans or Dalits is not good and we need to do certain things to uplift them.

6109

But Ambedkar's solution was lost from the state and Gandhi's solution was I'm going to go back to the society and tell them that untouchability is bad.

6117

We should not do it. So for people like Gandhi, the reforms have to come from within the society.

6123

And for people like Ambedkar that villages are basically this sink of localism and those kind of arguments.

6132

We need hard laws to basically protect individual rights and give them social protection. So those were the two axes we argue were the foundational axis on which our founding fathers were fighting about.

6146

And then we make a claim that the party system development in India has happened along the fights on these axes, which is basically the dominance of Congress party system leading to multi-party system and then the rise of rights.

6165

Basically what we say that 2014 in some ways is a culmination of ideological battle that has been based on India's political map over 100 years. Right for a long time, ideologically remained marginalized and slowly basically through coalitions and through other things gathered steam.

6185

And it happens like parties move in some ideological space. Basically Indira Gandhi moved Congress party more in favor of statism and basically creating space for right wing forces to coalesce and slowly they basically gather steam.

6201

So in some ways what we are also saying don't think of like last 10 years and say how these two axes basically explain everything in politics. The claim is not that these axes explain electoral outcomes.

6216

The claim is that this is the structure on which Indian politics stand. There may be other things, but these were the two things we focused on. Then we use lots of survey data, not all we conduct like basically survey data that were collected in 67 71 by CSDS team from 96 onward.

6237

And we show that there is a consistent pattern in voting for a political party and the ideological views those voters share. So right like people who vote for BJP or were voting for Johnson, they were opposed to statism and they were also opposed to recognition.

6256

Similarly, people who were voting for socialist parties or left Communist parties, they were in favor of recognition as also in favor of statism. Congress party was somewhere sitting in the center of it.

6270

Now, of course, the survey questions were not consistent. There were not enough questions, but the pattern that emerged from all survey data over 30 years was same that this is how basically the ideological map of India looks like.

6286

It was really fascinating and important to kind of think about, especially the first point that you started with the importance of contingency on how politics evolves that, you know, England had an industrial revolution so that labor versus capital narrative can take place there.

6303

And so on, you know, their narratives, their politics was born from the fissures and the turmoil that they experienced and our circumstances were kind of different and it is therefore it almost seems inevitable that these two fault lines will emerge though until you explained it.

6318

I never thought of it along these terms in the famous Ambedkar Gandhi debates, which were around the question of caste. I am always on Ambedkar side.

6326

I think Gandhi was kind of waffling on the issue at one point early on. He even defended the Varna system and then he changed his mind, but I felt that he was signaling part of the time. I am totally on Ambedkar side.

6337

In fact, the interesting thing is that Ambedkar and Savarkar were exactly on the same side and Gandhi on the other side. People don't realize this.

6344

I mean, in these polarized times, perhaps to say anything good about Savarkar is dangerous, but he was resolutely anti caste and totally with Ambedkar on this and I think both Ambedkar and Gandhi might even have acknowledged this at different points in time.

6359

But on the other issue on which Gandhi and Ambedkar argued with, I think the diagnosis was correct that this is a deep problem we need to solve.

6366

But in terms of prescription, I feel that Gandhi was wise in saying that we need to change society first and I think Ambedkar would have agreed with him had he lived longer.

6376

It's a tragedy that he didn't because my sense and I think we discussed this in the last episode where I have asked many people the question about was our constitution a relatively liberal constitution imposed on an illiberal society and if so, is that not paradoxical because that imposition itself is illiberal.

6393

And many people said that you gave the best answer to the question of the many guests I've asked.

6398

I'll leave it to them to go back to that episode and discover it.

6402

But one, I think what has now happened is that because we assume that society could be changed from the top down through the state, the politics of statism as it were, that I don't think that top down change could ever have worked.

6415

And today finally, you know, politics has caught up with society and we are seeing the result of that and maybe Gandhi's approach was the right one, that it wasn't enough just to pass laws and write a constitution and assume that the work was done.

6428

The work was never done. And Ambedkar himself said that the constitution is just topsoil.

6433

Secondly, on the broader issue there of the society preceding the state, that's an interesting argument and I agree with it in a different sense. In the sense that I think the people come first, but I think individuals come first.

6447

And the purpose of the state is to protect individual rights, whereas the view here is more a notion of kind of group rights.

6454

That this is how Hindus manage their inheritance, this is how Hindus do their personal laws and the state should not interfere and that is the politics of statism.

6464

And from the one hand you have other people saying that no, society is messed up, the state has to reform it.

6470

And you know, you mentioned the Hindu code bill, this is really something I am waiting to have an episode on at some point in time because at some point in time the BJP will go for the Uniform Civil Code, that's one of the last things left.

6483

And I think on this particular issue I get where they are coming from, because what the Congress Party and power basically did was they said that all these personal laws are messed up,

6494

so we will put our own civil code and make you guys conform to that, but we will only do it for the Hindus.

6501

Which fundamentally goes against the principle enshrined in the constitution that you have to treat everybody equally.

6507

So the constant complaint there over the decades has been that the Muslims got to keep their personal laws, but the Hindus had to change it.

6515

And what is this if not pandering and there are of course arguments on the other side as well, but it's easy to see why this has so much resonance over the years.

6525

So it's really interesting. Now what I would ask you to talk about because you know your current project is of course on the Congress Party and why it is in decline and the decades long process.

6534

And in a sense ideology and identity was also an explanation of this, where you talk about there being these four party systems as you put it.

6544

And in each of them the party at the centre of the change in a sense is the Congress.

6550

And in the first party system you look at it through the prism of these two cleavages, the you know, statism and recognition.

6558

And you say when it came to statism, there was a limited degree of statism, they didn't go too far. But when it came to recognition, it was mainly for Dalits and no more than that.

6567

And this was a first party system. So what I'd sort of like you to do is give me a sense of how this changed over the decades.

6576

And once again circumstances kind of made it change. And it's almost like the sands of history are shifting under the Congress.

6584

And the Congress is kind of floundering till they are where they are today, which is basically buried six feet under quicksand.

6591

So tell me a little bit about this.

6594

So this project on Congress Party with my colleague Asim at CPR is to understand Congress in a long arc of history.

6605

Basically post-independence India, like we're not going back to independence. And even if we're touching the post-independence India, it's much more after the emergency.

6616

But then the background of things are in 1960s and early 70s. So to link it with the ideology book, basically we wanted to understand or to explain that the party system change has happened along these axes.

6631

What we see in four party systems or the first party system from 1952 to 67 was a phase of Congress dominant where Congress was dominant nationally as well as in state in 67 to 89, which is the second party system.

6646

We see Congress facing challenges in states, but still winning most of them remains dominant nationally.

6653

The third party system between 1989 to 2014 is actually a multiparty system or a post Congress system where Congress is not even dominant nationally.

6664

And of course, it's facing big challenges in the state. And post 2014, what we are seeing arise of a second dominant party system where BJP has become the national dominant player in state faces challenges.

6678

So the question was, and so far we had this argument that perhaps the Congress declined because of organization or because of leadership issues.

6690

And so the question which came to our mind was if organization or leadership was the most important explanation, why do we see variation in Congress decline across states?

6703

There are certain states where Congress is still an important player and even today.

6708

So if you think of a Madhya Pradesh or a Chhattisgarh or a Himachal Pradesh or a Uttarakhand or a Gujarat, Congress is either number one or number two.

6716

Then there are states where Congress remains an important player, not as dominant, but still a player.

6725

And then there are states like Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, UP or Bihar, where Congress is a very, very marginal player.

6733

And so the explanation we offer in that book is that Congress manages to distinguish itself ideologically in states where its main competitor is BJP.

6746

So because these parties have a very different stand on these two axes, they can distinguish itself. But in a state like UP,

6756

how is Congress going to distinguish itself on the question of reservation from BSP or on the question of religious minorities or minority rights from Samajwadi party or on the question of, say, statism from Samajwadi party?

6773

So wherever you get two centrist parties or parties which have very similar ideological disposition as of Congress, the Congress declines.

6785

Right. So that was our explanation on the Congress party. And we don't think that's a fuller explanation of it.

6794

So it explains the spatial variation, but it does not explain fully the temporal thing that has happened. Congress has declined nationally.

6803

There is no question about it. Right. A party which used to get vote share in 40s in the first party system came down to 35 in the second party system, came down to below 30 in the third party system and is now 20 percent below.

6817

And there is one thing which we know about the Congress party, which is in any state where Congress has gone below 20 percent, it has not recovered.

6826

So one of the claim I made in a conversation with some people is that Congress actually does not know the route to revival.

6835

And that's why going forward, all the current crisis, I still don't think Congress has figured out how it is going to ward off challenges.

6845

And of course, this is sort of like disheartening for the Congress party sympathizers and Congress party voters.

6854

But it should also be disheartening for anyone who believes in the project of democracy in India, because you need multiple strong parties in the system to act as checks and balances.

6867

Dominance of any party is not good or great for democracy because then the institutions are subverted to suit certain interests.

6876

It happened earlier and it's happening now. So the decline of Congress in that sense is going to be not productive for Indian democracy in medium run.

6888

Superbly put. And just to kind of sum up what you wrote in your superb book about the four party systems.

6894

In the first party system, you know, till 67, there's a limited degree of statism recognition largely for Dalits.

6901

And you also separately in this draft that I have seen of your first couple of chapters of your forthcoming book, which I can't wait for you to finish,

6908

you've described three stages within the evolution of the Congress party.

6912

And this stage kind of coincides with the stage when they were a mass party, where they had pretty much the mass support.

6919

In some senses, I attribute some of that to inertia. They just kind of inherited India almost from the British.

6925

It was like handed to them when they left. But at this point, they're a mass party.

6929

Then within your book, you write about the second party system, which is late 60s and early 70s,

6934

when there is much greater statism and the politics of recognition is still kind of the same.

6939

And this is also when, you know, it starts moving from a mass party to being a dynastic party,

6944

you know, with Indira firmly entrenched as a one lodestar and her children coming into play and so on and so forth.

6952

And then you talk about the third party system, where in the politics of recognition, the Congress has been undone

6958

because it's been dislodged by parties of the backward caste.

6962

And especially in the states, it starts losing a lot of ground very fast.

6966

And then you have the fourth party system, which kind of comes after that when, you know, that unipolar thing has completely ended

6973

and they're kind of gone. And in your new books, the three stages you talk about are mass party, dynastic and dynastic plus bureaucratized,

6982

which is really interesting to me.

6984

So I wouldn't put all my money on this framing, the reason being it's still a process that is getting evolved.

6990

It's one of our sort of early ventures into how to describe the current state of Congress Party.

6999

And it's a struggle and struggle because if you think academically about the political party literature,

7006

if you want to seriously write about Congress Party, you need to know dominant parties.

7013

And like Congress or India was not only a case of having a dominant party.

7018

You had LDP in Japan, you had a dominant party in Ireland, in Malaysia, in Israel.

7026

So you need to get so understanding why in some countries you get a dominant party system, right,

7031

like for 20, 30 odd years or African National Congress in South Africa.

7036

The second Congress was also a centrist party in that sense.

7040

And centrist parties have their own sets of advantages where they can quickly adapt to the ideological spectrum.

7050

But then they also have challenges because then they can't generate passions in the moments that are required.

7056

And third, as you mentioned, Congress Party is also a type of party which is dynastic.

7061

Not much has been written about dynastic parties because we don't see this phenomena outside South Asia.

7069

So dynastic MPs or dynastic legislators you will find across the world.

7075

But political parties becoming beholden to a family is a phenomena which is largely in South Asia.

7084

And India is, of course, very much part of it. But if you look at Pakistan, the PPP is of one party.

7093

If you go to Sri Lanka, the Bhandarnaikes and Kumaratunga was one family.

7099

Now the Rajapaksha controlled one party. If you go to Bangladesh, both parties for last since the birth of Bangladesh,

7107

like the two top parties are controlled by two families.

7111

So in that sense, in South Asia, this phenomena is very, very big.

7115

And in the Indian case, most of our state level parties, original parties are family enterprises.

7122

And so their functioning is very different.

7126

And Pradeep wrote one of the early papers in 2011 about dynastic parties.

7132

And one of his arguments is that we see rise of dynastic parties because it's to do with control of political campaign finances and other things.

7143

So one, it's like three different type of parties.

7147

Then Congress, basically, like nationally, Congress has always been more than some of its parts. It's a catch all party.

7156

Right. By catch all party, I mean that there is no predefined social base to this political party.

7164

Basically, Congress gets votes from all social communities and way back to Roy Roy and Ashok Lahiri or David Butler.

7173

Roy Roy and David Butler had said that Congress would share among communities is basically within the 10 percent deviation from its means.

7182

So it like it gets votes from all communities like BJP trades a dominant party, gets 70 to 75 percent vote among upper caste,

7190

but gets almost just 10 or 15 percent among Muslims or just 40 percent among Dalits.

7196

So BJP vote in that sense is much more circumcised to a community, whereas Congress was a catch all political party.

7205

So you have to understand these different types of dynamics to make a fuller sense of what has happened to the party.

7215

The second point is like in a long arc of any organization, forget about political party, but even if you think of firms and companies, there is a moment of slump.

7226

There is a moment of decline. So Congress also saw a moment of slump and decline that would have been a normal thing.

7234

But what has happened that Congress is basically and most people think of Congress decline as if something happened in 2014 and that's the only moment of decline.

7244

But if you just plot Congress vote share from 1950 to 2019, basically it's like long decline.

7250

Of course, there have been moments of ups and downs. But if you draw a straight line, it's a decline.

7257

So it becomes puzzling that a party of the freedom movement, a party which ruled India for most of the first four decades after independence,

7267

created most of the institutions, why it is finding hard to revive and revive not post 2014, but between the period of 1990s and 2014.

7278

Also, they were in power in national government, but have now lost half of India.

7283

Like one can't imagine Congress coming back to power on its own in West Bengal or Tamil Nadu or UP or Bihar in next 20, 25 years.

7291

It would be a miracle. So why has it happened and why is Congress finding it hard to revive is the intellectual question we are grappling with.

7301

So the early foray, one argument basically drawing from this idea of inertia that basically there is a bureaucratic structure that has taken over this party.

7313

And because of this, we are not seeing any big shake up within the party. Labor underwent a period of decline and it came up with a new vision of new labor.

7328

LDP went through a period of decline. It repositioned itself. Congress is finding hard to reposition itself.

7336

It's not being able to shake up its leadership. It's not being able to offer an alternative idea of India.

7344

It's not able to revive itself organizationally or as an election machine. So what is stopping it from doing it?

7352

So many fascinating things that I want to double click on there. So one, you mentioned the bureaucratization.

7359

Listen, please don't use that word in the book. Six syllables. Six syllables. You know, I get angry at students when they use like even three or four syllables.

7369

Six syllables. So, you know, maybe something like babufication. Actually, that's also very long. Babudam. I don't know.

7375

I'll tell you if I think of something. Choke. I mean stuff like that.

7379

So there's a nice quote from a book you recommended. I read 24 Akbar Road by Rashid Kidwai, which kind of expresses this bureaucratization, which comes after the dynastic aspect of it, where he writes,

7391

Though the Congress won two successive general elections under Sonia in 2004 and 2009, proving most political pundits wrong,

7398

the best men and women in the UPA government were those who seem to have a patron-client relationship with either her or her acolytes.

7406

In 2009, none of the AICC general secretaries occupying the big rooms at 24 Akbar Road, except Rahul Gandhi, had won a parliamentary election.

7415

As a result, they had little to contribute in terms of generating new ideas and issues into the idea's programmatic agenda.

7422

Some of them were more corporate style managers and politicians who were in touch with the people.

7427

These non-accountable leaders often lacked the ideological clarity of which the Congress was so proud, and they were unable to come up with any out-of-the-box ideas.

7436

And speaking of the dynastic aspect of it, I remember a friend of mine once said something which I think you also mentioned somewhere in your draft, something to that effect,

7444

of how when you look at a dynasty, a political dynasty or other dynasties within fields, you notice that from the starting point they just get smaller and smaller, I mean not in terms of actual physical size,

7458

but in terms of intellectual stature or whatever. Like an argument could be made that really Motilal onwards, they got stupider one step at a time.

7465

Though Motilal was extremely high-stranded himself, so Jawaharlal turned out fine,

7470

but then now they've come all the way down to Rahul, and by the time Priyanka Gandhi's pet dog takes over, God knows what the scene is going to be.

7479

So my question here, before I delve deeper into all the different whys that you proposed,

7485

my question before we get there harks back to what you said earlier that we only see this kind of dynastic politics really succeed in South Asia.

7492

And I'm curious as to whether you have any theories as to why that is, because one would imagine that we are all,

7499

as I have mentioned and I like to keep saying, we are all hardwired for tribalism, that there is that feudal sense in kind of all of us.

7506

But outside India, there are exceptions, like little Trudeau takes over from daddy Trudeau, and even there he's a little stupider.

7516

But why South Asia? Why is there such a huge phenomenon here?

7520

So let me sort of add a couple of things. One, in my doctoral dissertation, I actually studies political families and dynasties,

7530

which is to basically understand why some families stay in power for a long period of time and others decline.

7538

And this is a study based in UP and I collected basically information on all political families.

7545

Of course, it's underreported. But what you were saying a little earlier, which is, you know, there is a cliche or a quote,

7553

which is the first generation lays the foundation, the second builds the empire, the destruction begins in the third and by the fourth one, it's basically, you know,

7563

so it happens like like there is a cycle to things on an average, the building can happen like in one or two generation and then it becomes too big for anyone to sort of manage and control.

7576

So most big empires also lasted for three or four generations. Only after 200 years, there is a decline, which is natural.

7584

And I also mentioned in the first part of our conversation that dynastic legislators are not exclusive to South Asia or India.

7593

It happens in the US, it happens in Japan, it happens everywhere. Dynastic parties are somewhat like exclusive phenomena in South Asia.

7602

And perhaps if we are going to see, you know, functional democracies in sub Saharan Africa, we might even see something developing even there.

7613

But you have administrators who have been there for 20, 30 years. So in a sense, it's not to do with political culture, but much more to do with political institutions.

7624

They are somewhat easier to capture. And once they get captured, because like, as I said, political party formations is easier.

7633

And once the political party is formed, it's formed around the leader. And so the leader, basically leader and party becomes synonymous in that sense. So perhaps that's why we might be seeing more dynastic parties in our system.

7648

It's a combination. It must be some I don't want to completely rule out the culture element, but I think it's happening much more because of the weak political institutions that we have.

7661

Fair enough. Let's get to sort of the narrative of the decline of the Congress and I'll quote from your, am I allowed to quote from your book since it isn't out yet?

7670

You can quote, but as I said, this is first early draft.

7673

It may not actually come in the book, but I'm allowed to quote.

7676

For the purpose of conversations, I'm basically whatever you decide.

7681

Yeah. And by the way, I should inform people that they're in the early stage of writing this book, both Rahul and Asim, who I've never met, but I love with journalism.

7689

I haven't looked for a publisher for this. So if any publisher is listening, you know, you would be crazy to wait.

7695

This is something that kind of establishes the extent of their decline where you write, quote, the secular decline of the Congress started after the rubbing in the 89 elections,

7704

followed by the relegation of the party to third or fourth position in four major states, UP, Bihar, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.

7710

In UP, the party slipped to second position in 1989, third in 91, fourth in 96 and has remained there for the most part, except a temporary recovery to third place in 2009.

7720

In Bihar, it slipped from second to in 1991 to fourth or worse from 96.

7724

In Tamil Nadu, it slipped from first place due to then seat sharing alliances in 1991 to third in 96 and remained at or worse through to 2014.

7733

In West Bengal, following the breakaway of the Trinamool in 97, Congress slipped to third in 1998 and finally to fourth in 2014.

7740

After the rout of 2014, Congress slipped to third or worse position in as many as 10 states.

7747

And then in another excellent conversation you had in seminar, you pointed out that two out of five Congress candidates in the 2014 elections lost their deposit, which 40 percent,

7759

which would have been like unthinkable, you know, in previous elections.

7764

And you've also mentioned that some of the states where Congress had not been in power for 30 years at that time,

7770

included West Bengal, UP, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Gujarat, which is kind of completely crazy.

7775

So it's clear that there's a decline. And how I love the way you've addressed it is that typically an Indian researcher at this point in time

7784

would commit what can be called isomorphic mimicry to, you know, to simplify the jargon.

7790

What they would do is they would take a framework which has been adopted in the West to study similar phenomenon and try and apply it to the Congress party.

7798

And what you've done is you have laid out what that framework is. You've mentioned why it doesn't necessarily apply to the Congress.

7805

And then you have come up with the reasons that have been suggested by previous thinkers within India on the Congress decline.

7813

So now, before we go through that whole process, take me through, you know, the theories that exist about why dominant parties elsewhere have, you know, tended to decline.

7827

And part of it, of course, is circumstances like you point out in the advanced world, like in the West, which are ethnically homogeneous.

7833

You know, the dominant parties focus on socioeconomic issues.

7836

And similarly in places like Malaysia and South Africa, the ethnic cleavages are much harder and, you know, play a much more consequential part.

7844

And the reasons for why dominant parties there sort of decline don't have to apply to India at all.

7851

So tell me a little bit more about this. What are the reasons why dominant parties have kind of declined in the rest of the world when we look at it?

7859

And what are the reasons why those don't necessarily apply to the Congress here?

7863

So the first reason for party decline and not necessarily just for dominant party decline is that if we think of political parties as an entity that are going to profess certain ideas, they exist for a reason.

7880

And if that reason doesn't exist, there is no need for that party to keep gaining traction.

7886

Right. So basically, parties decline because the reasons for which they existed is no more.

7893

That's not the case. There is a need for a party like Congress, especially occupying the space on centers, left, center, right.

7903

Then the second big reason is about ability of the party or the leadership to be able to hold on to factional fluids. Right. So parties are made up of factions.

7919

They are aggregation of different interest group, either based on ideas or based on some material advancement they want to make or identities.

7928

At some point, the leadership becomes so weak that those factional fights go out of hand and they basically lead to a decline.

7939

So Congress throughout its history, even pre-independence has seen these factions basically moving out of the Congress party.

7948

In fact, I don't remember the name, but some famous person basically said, if all the Congress factions can just come together, we'll see a big Mehmet party coming back to power.

7960

But that's not how politics operate. Why would a Sharad Pawar or a Mamata Banerjee or a Jagan Reddy going to come back to Congress when they can operate their party in their states with full autonomy?

7972

Right. Like, why do they need to listen to Delhi that you have to act in this way or that way? So like, idealistically, you can have these desires or thoughts, but that's not going to happen.

7983

So what has happened in last 20 years, if you can think of like last big split within the Congress party at a state level was Sharad Pawar and Mamata Banerjee.

7995

Otherwise, after that, like post 2004, we have not seen any big splits in the Congress party.

8002

Like, if anyone has walked out, like maximum would be a Jyotiratha Sindhya with 2023 legislators.

8007

So no big splits being happening in last 20 years. And there are good reasons for it.

8014

One of the good reason I can think of it like despite like the famous G23 writing the letter and occasional outburst that keeps happening.

8025

And in my opinion, it will keep happening because now Congress has basically chosen the worst possible option for itself.

8033

Basically, there were some good options, either basically throw everyone out and move ahead or listen to them, bring everyone in and work with them.

8044

So those are good options. But Congress has basically chosen to do nothing, which is the worst option for everyone.

8050

But these the G23 or the leaders within the G23 are not going to split the party in the middle because none of them I can think of have

8060

basically resources or popularity to mobilize even within the state which they come from.

8071

So they can't create a state level party like except perhaps Haryana where Hooda might be able to do so.

8078

I can't think of any other state where Congress leader on its own can mobilize the entire state and also has the financial capital to do so running a political party.

8088

Well, there was a sense that Amrinder could have done that, but then they took care of him.

8092

But Amrinder is still basically saying that he might form a new political party.

8099

And if that is to happen, he might have the capital.

8103

But like in six months, you and I will find out his influence is going to be limited within three districts of Sangrur Patiala region.

8111

Yeah, I mean, I think this is a digression and we can tackle it right at the end.

8115

But I think this was a negative sum game for both players. It hurt Amrinder, it hurt the Congress.

8119

Yes, exactly. And as you said, we can talk about it later.

8123

We'll come to it at the end. Carry on. Sorry.

8126

So these are like some of the important reasons.

8131

Again, then you can think of changes in the social composition of voters.

8136

You can think in like basically socioeconomic changes that might happen, which basically lead to changes in the base of which parties are mobilizing.

8145

And none of the reasons basically fully explain the decline of the Congress Party.

8151

And moreover, more than the decline, the question which I and Asim are interested in is why is the party not able to resurrect itself?

8161

Despite being, say, power in between 2004 and 2014 at the national level,

8166

what did Congress Party do to revive itself, say, in Bihar or UP or in Tamil Nadu or in West Bengal?

8175

That's extremely lucid. And you've spoken about the four reasons why dominant parties decline around the world,

8182

which are there are structural reasons, lack of party cohesion, and these two don't really apply to the Congress, as you said,

8188

and weakening of resource advantages, which applies a little bit and sociopolitical change,

8193

which also you guys argued applies a little bit, but they are both at best kind of part of the explanation.

8200

You know, when I think of the Congress, I think in some ways of a lot of these big behemoth giant companies,

8208

which were made irrelevant in the technological age. For example, Kodak comes to mind, right?

8213

Kodak made film, and then they simply didn't get the digital revolution that was going to happen,

8218

and boom, that era kind of ended for them. And similar giants, which...

8223

And I remember, I think Tim Hufford wrote an excellent piece about it a long time ago.

8229

Was it Matt Ridley? I don't remember, but essentially about how the structure of a company is such that one,

8236

all these departments that exist are silos which are specialized in doing one thing,

8241

and they will not do anything else. There is a status quo bias. Why take a chance?

8245

Do what you're supposed to. The stakes are too high. You will never disrupt yourself.

8250

So somebody will always come and disrupt you, but you will never disrupt yourself.

8254

And ways of thinking are just ossified, and therefore big companies are like these lumbering giants,

8260

which are kind of moving slowly, and it's rare when they manage to adapt.

8265

Do you think there's something to that as well? I don't want to dismiss this reason.

8271

Definitely, and I've heard many people, not many people, but a couple of my friends whom I discussed this project with,

8278

they suggested that actually BJP is a 21st century party and Congress is not.

8284

And their argument was much more to do with the ease with BJP adopted itself to all sorts of technological changes,

8293

like basically running a massive IT cell and having such a massive online presence,

8299

whereas Congress took a long time to basically adopt itself to these technological changes.

8305

Just like we were talking about this, if you go to the BJP website,

8309

you will find most party documents related to BJP, even historical ones, scanned and put online.

8317

Like if you think of say Savarkar, who's a Hindu, that 23 page document is scanned and is on BJP website.

8328

Congress party does not have most of its, forget post-independence India, just like pre-independence India,

8337

but of documents of 1980s and 1990s are not online.

8341

So I'm not saying like if you put these documents online, it will give you more leverage or visibility,

8349

but it's somehow the party is not adaptive to change.

8354

Another example I will give you, and everyone would think it's a, people may think it's a very naive thing,

8361

but BJP, when it came to power, everyone was allocated big office space, I think in 1980s or 1990s,

8372

when Congress party was in power, Congress allocated itself like space to itself,

8377

but Congress party did not renovate either its office on 24 Akbar Road, right, or created a new office structure for itself.

8386

BJP, when it came to power, created I think a seven or eight story building at ITO in Delhi,

8393

where the top two floors are reserved for big press conferences or meetings or, you know,

8399

with high tech gadgets where you can communicate with your state level offices.

8405

Now think of this, Congress party was in power at the national level.

8410

They could have utilized resources to create a similar structure for themselves,

8415

but they didn't, and BJP, when it came to power, then they did it.

8419

Similarly, and I've heard the stories from people who have worked in the Congress party social media department,

8427

that the Facebooks and the Cambridge Analytica of the world, basically when they were coming to India in 2010-11,

8435

all of them first approached the Congress party because it was the party in the power,

8439

but they didn't get positive response or, you know, like positive energy from the Congress party.

8446

They didn't even get similar vibe from the BJP.

8449

But I think the Chief Minister of Gujarat, then the current Prime Minister, his office was basically proactive.

8456

And so they like latched on to all these opportunities that came their way.

8462

So apart from the online, like on the ground places they have through these RSS cadres and other things,

8469

they created a massive online infrastructure, and now they have that advantage over other political parties.

8476

Yeah, and this is a great point about the BJP being a 21st century party,

8480

like leave aside for a moment value judgments and what you think of the BJP's politics or the Congress's politics.

8486

Politics is about winning. The BJP, one thing that's obvious to everyone really over the last 15 years

8491

is the will to power, that they will do anything it takes to win,

8495

and that includes using modern techniques like dicing data at the booth level

8500

and kind of figuring out micro-targeting strategies and, you know,

8505

how to carpet bomb the voters where they want to get the message across

8508

and how to hack minds, as it were, like who needs to hack EVM machines when you can hack minds.

8513

And they've kind of figured all of that out and there is that will to power

8517

and there is that accountability when you don't win,

8519

which is why after 2009, Advani is replaced by Modi, you know.

8524

And you simply don't have that in the Congress. In the Congress, rather,

8527

you almost have the attitude from, you know, their feudal leaders,

8531

that this attitude of entitlement, you know, that they almost feel aggrieved,

8536

that hey, we should be in power. How could you have taken this away from this? What is this shit?

8540

I remember in the 2019 elections when Sonia contested in Raibareli,

8544

the person standing against her was a former party worker,

8547

and Priyanka made this comment, he used to touch our feet, we will teach him a lesson.

8551

And when you think about it, that's such an obnoxious comment to make

8555

and you completely get why they are being wiped out everywhere

8558

because of this attitude of entitlement and this resentment that we are being deprived of our rightful place.

8564

And the point is that with both Rahul and Priyanka, honestly, it has to be said,

8569

they haven't done a single day's work of honest labour in their lives, you know,

8573

while all of these, they have just inherited those positions,

8577

while all of these other leaders of other parties, whatever you think of their politics,

8582

they have come from the grassroots, they have gone to jail in the emergency,

8586

in many cases they have come from the grassroots, there has been the will to power,

8589

they have worked hard for it. So at one level, it's not just like a big company

8594

which becomes this bureaucratic slot, it is also this terrible feudal attitude

8599

that India is ours. In fact, I think when Indira Gandhi coined the slogan

8603

Indira is India, India is Indira, that slogan should really have been

8607

Indira is Congress, Congress is Indira.

8610

So a couple of things, one, you know, the slogan India is Indira, Indira is India

8615

was by then Congress President, UN, they were rather than Indira Gandhi.

8621

And in fact, like when Congress, Indira Gandhi split the Congress,

8625

which first was Congress R and then it became a Congress I,

8629

so currently what you have is Indira Congress.

8632

What is All India Congress Party is Indira Congress.

8636

The second point is I don't want to put the entire sort of blame of decline

8642

of Congress Party on the Gandhi family or Rahul or Priyanka,

8646

but I agree with your sort of like sense that the people who are in charge

8652

of the Congress Party or at the helm of the affairs are not putting enough

8656

energy to show they want to like they have will to power.

8661

And just to like quote, like Ram Guha like this year or last year basically

8666

made a very interesting distinction that if you look at top three people

8670

in Congress, they all share the surname, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi,

8673

Sonia Gandhi, Gandhi. If you look at three people in BJP, top three people,

8677

Prime Minister Modi, Amit Shah, JP Nadda, these are three very different

8681

people from very three different backgrounds.

8684

And in that sense, he was basically trying to make the contrast

8688

of what you suggested. And on this, the feudal mindset,

8692

Sharad Pawar very recently said that Congress is like that old feudal

8696

Lord or Zamindar and this was a snide remark, which is, you know,

8700

they have lost all the lands and they are just standing outside their

8704

Haveli and thinking, you know, all of this land belong to us from

8707

Kashmir to Kanyakumari. I think there is a deep structural problem

8714

that Congress is going through and those problems are many fold.

8719

One is perhaps in like the top leadership within the Congress party

8725

and not just the first family seems to have got disconnected

8730

from what is happening across India.

8734

Two, and just to give you an example, I think Pradeep and I did some

8739

small analysis and to indicate this also, which is very interesting.

8745

If you look at the mainstream English newspaper today, of course,

8748

BJP ministers are writing columns. They are in the government.

8751

But I've seen Congress ministers writing columns, not just when they

8755

are in government, but when they are also in the opposition, right?

8759

I have not either now this could be that BJP people were not giving

8763

space in these mainstream English newspapers when they were in the

8766

opposition, but write columns, but also be on the field, mobilize.

8772

So what happened in 2011 with the anti-corruption movement and in the

8777

aftermath of that, basically, Congress party in some ways lost a big

8786

part of its legitimacy among a vast section of Indian population,

8790

which is the notion of privilege, which is that they are going to tolerate

8796

corruption and they are not going to be on the streets to mobilize people.

8802

Look at the number of civil society protests that has happened between

8807

2014 and now, and Congress doesn't seem to be present or actively

8814

mobilizing at any of those instances.

8816

The crisis of second, like of COVID and second wave, the party just

8821

doesn't know how to use these moments for its political revival.

8825

It could be to do with the leadership, the top leadership.

8829

They don't want to go out, and so they are not letting others out.

8833

I recently was in one district, Saharanpur district of UP, where some

8839

research work we were doing, and I met a fourth generation Congress

8843

party worker. Like in the beginning, for the first 10 minutes, he was

8847

basically saying all the nice things and positive things and didi and

8852

bhaiya and how they are important, and then I kept on pushing him, and

8855

at one point I just showed my frustration.

8858

I said, Abhinav, let's forget the interview.

8861

Have tea, I'll go. And then slowly I pushed him again, and then he

8865

slowly opened up, and basically nothing is happening within this party.

8870

We don't have access, we don't have an idea what is to be done.

8874

There is no communication from bottom to top.

8879

And so right now, it's a party which does not have a purpose.

8885

And I think that's the crisis of the party.

8888

I disagree with you on one point, which is that they're missing all

8893

of the sort of moments of social ferment in the last few years.

8896

Like you mentioned the second wave, but one of the things I kind of

8899

remember was that individual members of the Congress and even the

8902

Aam Aadmi party, both parties I otherwise criticize a lot for not

8905

being a strong enough opposition, actually provided sterling service.

8908

Like on Twitter, for example, Srinivas of the Congress was extremely

8912

visible for all that he did to help people out and so on and so forth.

8915

But I agree that you could say that these are kind of ad hoc things

8918

happening and there is not a broader cohesive narrative strategy actually

8923

being formulated, even in this Lakhimpur-Keri thing, Priyanka Gandhi

8927

did actually try to go there and she was unfairly arrested.

8931

So on many issues, I think they do make the right noises, which nobody

8934

else does, including junior bigot Arvind Kejriwal.

8938

But the wars they are winning are on Twitter.

8940

They're not on the ground at all, as so many people have pointed out.

8946

So we spoke about the global reasons why dominant parties decline elsewhere

8951

don't necessarily apply to the Congress.

8953

And just as you brought your own prism to bear when it came to the question

8957

of ideology, what are the ideological fissures in India, you've kind of

8962

not exactly brought your own prisms, but collated insights from local

8967

scholars on the decline of the Congress.

8969

And you've given a whole bunch of those as well.

8971

So share some of those reasons.

8974

First, I want to say that we don't have a good scholarly treatment

8980

of Congress party post-1977.

8983

There is no big academic book which is basically looking at the inner

8988

workings of the party and making a claim.

8990

Of course, there are some important contributions, like you mentioned

8994

Rashid Kidwai's 24 Akbar Road, and there have been some papers,

8998

but there is still this sort of gap in understanding what has happened

9003

within the Congress party's post-emergency.

9006

There have been different sort of angles to understand the Congress decline,

9011

not to explain the Congress decline, but to explain something else.

9014

For example, Christopher Jaffa Law and Kanchan Chandra both have worked

9019

on, say, the rise of BSP.

9022

And in some ways, they want to understand the rise of BSP and differentiate

9027

it from why Dalits left the Congress party and basically joined the BSP.

9033

So it was not a research on Congress party, but a research on BSP.

9037

And the argument there was that within the Congress party, there was a

9041

representational blockage.

9043

Congress party remained a party of upper caste elites and privileged.

9049

And so leadership positions were basically, in some ways, reserved for

9054

these categories.

9055

And there will be a moment in time when these rising elites from lower

9061

caste would think that, oh, we should also be getting leadership position,

9064

not like party president, but becoming general secretaries and state party

9069

presidents and state secretaries.

9071

So the first thesis is that basically Congress did not give enough

9075

representation to these groups, and slowly these groups moved out and

9079

formed their own caste-based parties, which is sort of linked to Congress

9084

decline.

9085

That's one.

9086

Similarly, related to this argument of representational blockage of caste is

9091

basically Congress is a party which was run from New Delhi by Hindi heartland

9096

elites.

9097

And they were very, like, I am not getting the word, but basically not

9103

taking cognizance of the regional aspirational and regional elites, like

9107

the famous example of how Rajiv Gandhi blasted TJ Anjaya on Hyderabad

9112

airport and which basically was used by NTR in 1982 campaign in Andhra

9119

assembly.

9120

So regional identity assertions in many part of the country, especially in

9124

Northeast and in South.

9126

So these led to regional parties which were basically utilizing regional

9130

sentiments and led to the Congress party decline.

9133

Third argument has been about the organizational and institutional decay of

9138

the Congress party.

9139

So what happens, and that's why, like, when we were talking about Indira

9143

Gandhi or Savarkar or Ambedkar or Gandhi, we have to always understand that

9147

these are the creatures of time.

9149

Right?

9150

They are taking decisions in certain moment of time, and some decisions

9154

turned out to be good or some bad.

9156

Right?

9157

So Indira Gandhi, when she's elevated to the post of prime

9160

ministership by the syndicate, thinking that, you know, we can control this

9164

lady, but she outsmarted them.

9169

And so in her effort to deal with the challenge which was coming from the

9174

syndicates, which was right leaning, she basically aligned the Congress party

9179

to the leftist or left party.

9181

So actually there was the 67 government had outside support from the

9186

Communist Party of India.

9188

Right?

9189

So she moved her party towards these ideas or towards the principles of

9193

communism.

9194

And in that process between 67 and 75, basically she takes a lot of

9200

decisions which became detrimental to the way Congress inner workings used

9205

to happen.

9206

So a couple of things happened.

9208

Basically, organizational elections got suspended, which was a hallmark of,

9212

like, why Congress party remained one of the dominant, everyone wants to be

9216

the part of the Congress party.

9218

And those organizational elections were one instrument of mobility for

9222

Congress to be able to rise up the ranks.

9224

So organizational elections got suspended.

9227

Then in her effort to win national election of 1971, she delinked the

9233

national elections from the state elections.

9235

Earlier, both elections used to happen simultaneously, which basically

9239

opened up state elections for these state-level parties to say, okay, you

9244

elect Congress in Delhi, but we can run the state better, which is what is

9248

happening now.

9249

This is one of the reasons why the BJP or Modi is thinking of bringing

9253

one nation, one election back, where you basically align national sentiments

9259

to even play up during state elections.

9261

So that was basically the decisions to suspend organization, the decision to

9267

basically delink the national and state elections, and the decision to

9271

basically some way change chief ministers.

9275

If you look at what happened, and Pradeep and I wrote an op-ed five, six

9279

years ago on this, basically between 1967 and 1989, Congress chief ministers

9286

in states were changed at whims and fancies.

9289

A state like UP between 1980 and 1989 saw six chief ministers.

9295

So it was a rough, very preliminary analysis to show that in states where

9302

more times chief ministers change, the number of parties in those states are

9306

higher today, basically saying either the person will join another party or

9310

will open his or her own party.

9312

And that's why you're seeing, because if he or she was the chief minister, he

9316

will have enough capital to at least start a political party, and that's why

9319

you're seeing so many parties.

9320

So that became another reason, because you were changing chief ministers.

9324

And I also think that this process of basically not letting any chief

9330

minister stay for a long time because that person can challenge to the

9333

national level is the reason that Congress now does not have big state

9338

level politicians who would say that if you don't listen, I will walk out

9342

today, right?

9343

That's why you're not seeing a vertical split in Congress party.

9347

And then, so once they all started becoming weak at the national level,

9353

they aligned with, like, you know, for national elections, they went into

9357

coalitions with parties which state leaders didn't want, right?

9361

So Mamata Banerjee, she was fighting all her life against the left.

9365

And then you decide that left would be part, like, you know, you were

9369

supporting a left government, like left-supported government in center,

9373

and those became the issues.

9375

So people like Mamata Banerjee moved out.

9378

So factionalism or factions moved out, basically leaving your cadres or

9384

your party, most of your party moved out with your state leaders.

9388

So party became weak nationally because slowly the units are going away.

9394

And then, of course, with the change, like, what happened, like, the

9398

sudden change between 1989 and 1991 of, like, the three M's, the mandal,

9404

the mandir, the market, all three M's, Congress wasn't prepared.

9408

Basically, think of, like, what happened in UP, why Congress from

9412

suddenly being the, like, top player in 1989 becomes second in 1991

9417

and third in 1996 or fourth in 1996.

9421

So mandir-mandal market struck at the same point.

9425

I think we have some intuition about how mandal and mandir played out,

9430

and there is a scholarly work, but we don't actually know how market has

9435

shaped Indian voters in the last 30 years, not a single work.

9439

So basically mandir and mandal happens.

9443

Upper caste is going towards the BJP.

9447

Dalits are going towards the BSP.

9450

The Muslims are gravitating towards the janta dal and samajwadi party later on.

9456

Congress had no clear stand at that moment of time.

9460

Are they with, like, in favor of reservation, against reservation?

9465

Are they in favor of mandir or are they in favor of majlis?

9468

So no stand, and this is a centrist dilemma, right?

9472

And that's why you have to understand why Congress party sometimes

9476

fails to take clear stand, because it is a catch-all party.

9480

It does not want to basically, you know, upset any group.

9484

They take some stand on Shahbano, and also they open the locks of Babri Masjid

9488

because they want to play both sides, and sometimes playing both sides

9491

will basically, you end up with nothing.

9494

So that's also sort of like ideological confusion or not having an ideological clarity.

9501

These are some of the reasons which people have talked about

9505

why it led to the Congress party's decline.

9508

Yeah, and I love the way you point out that it all starts with circumstance.

9513

That Indira wants to fight back against the syndicate.

9515

She has to rebrand herself.

9517

And how does she rebrand herself?

9519

The logical thing is to go left, and she takes us into a disastrous period of time,

9523

not out of conviction, which one could still understand and excuse,

9526

but simply out of political expediency in a completely sociopathic manner.

9531

Like, people talk about the emergency.

9533

I think what Indira did with her economic policies,

9536

like the bank nationalizations and Fera Fima label, or so on and so forth,

9541

there's a litany of them, actually kept millions of Indians in poverty

9545

for at least a couple of decades longer than necessary.

9549

Absolute monster.

9550

And you spoke about Congress not having a clear sense of its own identity.

9554

I think it doesn't have a clear sense of its own history either,

9556

because every year on Sanjay Gandhi's birthday,

9559

all the official handles of Congress will tweet out photographs with what a great leader he was.

9564

And I am like, who are you kidding?

9566

You criticize the BJP correctly.

9569

You correctly criticize the BJP for their WhatsApp history.

9572

And you are trying to paint Sanjay Gandhi as a great leader.

9575

He was a sociopathic monster. He was worse than Modi.

9578

You know, Modi could actually have him as a role model.

9581

I mean, catch-all is fine, but you kind of need to look inwards.

9584

And I think this perhaps stems not from a deliberate strategy

9588

that let us resurrect him as a figure to be revered.

9592

But they really don't know. They're just stupid.

9594

That is sometimes the sort of sense that I get.

9597

And again, the culture of psycho-fancy plays a big part.

9600

Like, I remember many years back, and I mentioned this in a previous show,

9604

but I simply can't remember who this person was.

9607

But there was a picture of a mafia don who was basically quite short,

9610

5'7 or 5'6 or something.

9612

And then there were pictures of all the people who succeeded him,

9615

the whole lineage of the gang till eventually it disappeared.

9619

And they were all shorter than the last guy.

9621

So it's like you're surrounding yourself with people shorter than you.

9624

And it strikes me as a great metaphor for what can happen to a party.

9629

Like, for example, even it's not just Mamta and Sharad Pawar and all that.

9633

Even in recent times, like Himanta Biswa Sharma couldn't get an audience

9636

with Rajiv Gandhi, who in all his arrogance didn't meet the local leader.

9640

And what happened next?

9641

He joined the BJP and Congress lost all seven North East states.

9645

Similarly, there's an interview of Mahua Maitra where she's speaking to Barkha Dutt.

9649

And she was in the Youth Congress.

9651

But, you know, she realized that there is no mobility.

9654

I cannot rise in the party.

9655

And of course, I don't have inner-party democracy.

9657

So for all this talk that Rahul Gandhi does about saving democracy,

9660

he does not believe in it. You can see that from his actions.

9663

Have elections in your own party first.

9665

And Mahua Maitra left.

9667

And, you know, people often ask that, hey, if not the Gandhis, who?

9670

If you leave the space, leaders will come.

9673

You know, if you leave the space, leaders will come in politics.

9676

Politics abhors a vacuum, as the cliché goes.

9678

You know, who could have predicted in 2004 when Kerry lost to Bush

9683

that your next president was going to be a guy whose middle name was Hussein

9687

and whose surname rhymed with Osama.

9689

And yet, that's what happened. Barack Obama came to power.

9691

Who could have foreseen four years later that that madcap fool

9695

everybody laughed at Donald Trump would one day be president.

9698

Strange things happen in politics very suddenly,

9700

but you have to kind of create the space for it.

9703

And, you know, another example of that kind of psychofancy,

9706

you spoke about how they were changing state chief ministers all the time

9709

as if they are their personal servants.

9711

And I remember at one point, Gyanis El Singh, before he was made president,

9715

Gyanis El Singh said that something to the effect of,

9718

if Indiraji wants me to clean her toilets, I will clean her toilets.

9722

Stop quote, pretty much his exact words.

9725

And lo and behold, he was made president of our August Republic.

9729

So, you know, something had to give and something, I think, eventually kind of gave.

9735

So, tell me this about the Congress, right?

9738

The picture that I'm getting, kind of, is that society is changing,

9742

the country is changing, everything is being transformed.

9745

And Congress is this big lumbering party that is not able to adapt to the change.

9750

And in some ways, it is changing itself and actually going backwards.

9754

But it is simply not being able to adapt.

9756

So, can you paint a picture for me over a period of time?

9760

You know, people talk about how the Congress has declined in the last five years,

9763

for example, or since 2014.

9765

Paint a picture for me showing just how much bigger the disconnect has become

9771

between today and 30 years ago.

9773

The disconnect between Indian politics slash society and the Congress Party.

9778

Like, I think what you asked is very important,

9780

which is the country is changing, the society is changing.

9784

Parties also move in tandem with the society.

9789

Sometimes what they do basically changes societies,

9794

and they also have to adapt to the changing circumstances.

9798

And Congress Party in the past have been undertaking those exercises, right?

9802

In early 1960s, when Congress Party didn't do really well in the 1957 election,

9809

and it seemed that after a couple of sessions in Awadi and Nagpur,

9814

and when there was a bifurcation, not bifurcation,

9818

but within a split when the Swatanta Party faction from the Congress Party moved out,

9823

Congress carried out an exercise, what is known as Kamraj Plan,

9827

where some ministers from the government were moved to the organization

9831

and some people were moved from the organization to the government.

9834

So parties have to keep doing this kind of reshuffling and readjusting, right?

9839

BJS used to harp on the Hindu-Hindustan type,

9845

but once this thought of expanding themselves outside Hindi heartland,

9850

going to the East and to the South,

9852

now Hindi remains largely in rhetorics, kabhi-kabhi aagaya, but not majorly, right?

9858

So parties have to keep adapting to the changing circumstances.

9864

And it's not because a bigger ship needs a greater space to maneuver itself,

9871

so it has to prepare itself in advance.

9875

What is happening of late in the Congress Party since 1990s,

9880

I think the changes are taking at a much rapid pace.

9884

Congress starts certain procedures or processes to make those adaptations,

9890

but is not taking to its logical conclusion.

9894

And let me answer this question by basically referring to how Congress has or has not changed.

9900

So Congress Party, and there is a debate and it has not been resolved,

9904

this is like a debate which is, was Congress Party ever had a deep rooted organization in 60s or 70s?

9912

In fact, Pradeep in his first book basically showed that the member of Congress Party

9917

used to increase during Congress internal election, membership of the party,

9922

basically because if you can mobilize higher number of members,

9926

you are going to get bigger position with the Congress Party in the party.

9930

So party members, it was based on those patronage systems of these privileged elites.

9936

The second point which Pradeep also pointed out in his work and many others also have written about is,

9942

Congress was basically a party which was different in different states,

9947

like its social base used to be very different in different states,

9951

and so nationally it looked up catch-all party,

9954

but in state it was rooted in specific social cleavages and specific caste.

9959

What happens post-emergency when Congress wins 1980 and 1984,

9965

people have actually written about this, that it was not a restoration of previous Congress coalition.

9973

There were certain changes started happening,

9976

especially Dalits in the North India had started moving out of the Congress Party,

9980

Muslims were not happy.

9983

In fact, one way to think about the big change that has happened,

9988

like at least in the social structure for the Congress Party,

9991

that Congress Party's social base has narrowed in most of the states,

9995

where now they get votes from specific segments, it's not a catch-all coalition anymore.

10001

In some ways, and none of us have seen this document, so I won't be able to say,

10006

I only have read it in newspaper reports,

10008

that AK Antony committee report after 2014 election losses,

10012

wrote that in public perception, Congress is seen as a Muslim party now,

10017

that a large portion of its voters come from religious minorities, Muslims than other sections.

10025

The other thing, so in 1989, when Rajiv Gandhi was at the helm of affairs,

10031

the Indian electorate size was around 400 crores, Congress Party received 140 crore votes.

10038

Now Indian electorates are around 800, and Congress in 2019 still received 140 crores.

10046

So the electorate size has doubled, but the Congress vote share has remained.

10050

I think it's the same votes that keep counting every election, I'm kidding.

10054

So what is happening?

10056

They are also losing votes among poorer sections and also among younger sections,

10064

because in some ways, these sections don't see Congress as a party of aspiration and hope,

10072

a party which is going to offer them mobility.

10075

And Modi for right or wrong reasons,

10078

the way he weaves his sort of like various welfare schemes and other things,

10085

is much more tied in the language of aspiration, hope,

10090

rather than in a language of entitlement and other things.

10094

So that's another sort of like important difference between the two parties,

10101

and we have already discussed about how Congress Party has not been able to adapt itself

10106

to the technology-driven campaigns of the 21st century.

10113

For a very long time, Congress did not realize,

10118

and perhaps because it was a big ship or a dominant party,

10122

that the soil or the earth below it is basically sinking or moving fast,

10129

and it needs to adapt to the change.

10131

So till 1998, the Congress Party still lived in the world of basically,

10137

it's like we are the National Party, we rule from Kashmir to Kanyakumari,

10142

like they had no idea whether they wanted to enter into coalitions or not.

10147

They enter into ad hoc coalitions, which in fact diminish their power to a great extent.

10152

Whereas BJP basically used those coalitions or allies to gain up foothold in different states,

10161

and a good example is Karnataka.

10164

Karnataka, like in 1994, BJP was a marginal player,

10168

and slowly basically they aligned with Ram Krishna Hegde's party,

10173

swollen them up, became the second player, then they aligned with JDS,

10178

and now they are basically the most important party in the state.

10183

So it took a long time for Congress to understand the changing circumstances and adapt to it.

10190

Similarly, Congress basically keeps postponing, forget the presidential election,

10197

but having some sort of like Chintan Shevats after losses sitting and discussing,

10203

like even say an AK Entity Committee report, why not some version of it should be distributed

10210

to the state leaders or some other people to understand why did the party lose,

10214

what corrective measures should be taken.

10217

So no conclusive steps in that direction.

10220

They started primary election one day and then they suspended it.

10224

Then they created Aman Ke Sipahi, suspended it.

10227

So they keep bringing in things to make reforms or changes,

10232

but they don't take it to a logical conclusion.

10235

And basically try to, like all parties do that,

10239

but if you are facing this kind of struggle and decline,

10244

you need to carry out some surgical operation, chart out your course to revival.

10251

Surgical operation indeed.

10253

One great point you mentioned, which you've also sort of mentioned in your seminar piece,

10258

which I'll link from the show notes, is when you talk about language and you write quote,

10261

look at the difference between Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi's speeches.

10264

Rahul Gandhi's argument about welfare policies often sounded patronising,

10268

whereas Modi talked about the same policies in the language of empowerment.

10272

They were articulating very different things.

10274

Now I have a question for you, taking off from something you said earlier,

10278

where you said that you are questioning whether Congress ever had a deep-rooted organisation, per se.

10285

I'll throw the question at you that did Congress ever have a deep-rooted ideological belief

10290

or a deep-rooted belief, any sense of values that the party stands for?

10294

Like one theme that I discussed in my episode last week with Shivam Shankar Singh,

10298

and in fact I think I asked Prashan Jha also when I did my episode about the BJP with him,

10303

is that in BJP you do see this will to power.

10306

They will do what it takes to come to power.

10308

They will buy members of the opposition party.

10311

They will do dicing and slicing of different constituencies to a really fine degree.

10319

But while there is a will to power, there are also a bunch of core things that they stand for,

10324

which they don't compromise on.

10325

And at one level I thought that something's got to give,

10327

because these two at some point will contradict each other.

10330

If they will do anything to win, they can't always stay true to their core beliefs.

10334

For example, in the North East, somewhere they told the people that,

10337

hey, you know, you guys can eat beef, it's okay.

10340

We won't stop you. This is just for the other guys.

10343

But does the Congress have any core beliefs at all?

10346

And the larger question here is can any party have core beliefs

10350

which are not based on political imperatives? Can any party?

10353

Because even other parties which are fixed to certain positions

10358

took those positions in the first place for reasons which don't change.

10362

For example, you know, the BSP will always speak up for a certain group of people.

10367

The SP will always speak up for a certain group of people.

10369

Those are their vote banks. They can't do anything about that.

10372

Those are the positions.

10373

The Shiv Sena, you know, changed from attacking South Indians to attacking Muslims

10378

as the sands kind of changed and they rebranded themselves.

10381

Now, what does the Congress really believe in?

10383

Because I look at the Congress even after independence,

10386

it is kind of happenstance that Nehru happened to be the guy.

10389

You know, it could easily have been Patel.

10392

Nehru even almost stepped down once in 1950, I think,

10395

when there was something happening in Bangladesh

10397

and Srinath Raghavan told me this, he thought seriously about stepping down.

10401

And in any number of scenarios when Nehru is in there, they could be Patel,

10405

where you have more economic freedom perhaps

10407

and you have, you know, different scenarios playing out

10409

or you have Raja Ji or any number of people

10412

who all believed in a lot of things differently from Nehru.

10415

So, it's not as if the party believed in all the things that Nehru did.

10418

It was a circumstance that he happened to be the guy.

10421

But in a parallel universe somewhere, it was Patel.

10424

In some other parallel universe, there wasn't even partition

10427

and so on and so forth. There are a million sort of scenarios.

10430

So, what is your take on this?

10432

And is the Congress' problem then

10434

that they simply can't figure out what they should believe in,

10437

that Rahul, of course, wants to posture on Twitter

10439

and he's taken these sort of really archaic positions

10443

where sometimes it feels like he wants to disown the 1991 reforms,

10446

which is the best thing his party ever did.

10449

You know, in fact, our economic decline really started in 2011, not in 2014.

10454

And this is something, you know, Pooja Mehera writes about in her book

10457

and she did an episode with me.

10459

And the single reason for that is that Sonia Gandhi ignored

10463

the wishes of her Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh,

10465

and foisted Pranab Mukherjee as a Finance Minister,

10469

at which point you have, you know, retrospective taxation

10473

and you know, a whole bunch of things which I've spoken about

10476

in detail with Pooja and others in previous episodes.

10479

So, yeah, to cut a long story short, deep-rooted organisation,

10483

but what does it stand for?

10485

Today, I know what Rahul Gandhi stands for on Twitter,

10488

but you're not winning elections there.

10489

And you also see them chasing the Hindu vote in various different manners,

10494

which seems to me to be completely stupid.

10496

You are not going to out Hindutva the BJP,

10499

something that even, you know, Aam Aadmi Party will discover at some point.

10502

Even the BJP may not be able to control this tiger that it is riding on.

10507

So, couple of things on this.

10509

I think we should not just look, like, at the current moment,

10512

there is a confusion within the party because

10515

different people within the party seems to have a very different view

10519

of what the Congress Party is.

10521

And the leader and party sometimes, you know,

10527

have like a big overlap of what that ideological standpoint is.

10532

And it's natural, right?

10534

Leadership generally comes from within the party

10537

and whatever the median position within the party is,

10539

the leader is reflective of that

10541

and leaders also change the course of parties,

10543

like the rebranding happens because leaders take certain position.

10549

So, I think the Congress Party of 1950s and 60s,

10553

you are absolutely right.

10554

Had someone else been the leader of the Congress Party,

10557

the course and direction of Congress Party would have been different.

10561

Parties are always coalition of interest.

10564

And whichever coalition is in power or basically like steering the ship,

10570

the ideological proclivities of that interest group would be reflected the most.

10575

So, if Patel had taken, the Congress would have been in a different direction

10579

and Subhash Chandra Bose would have taken,

10581

it would have been a different direction, right?

10583

So, yes, Nehru being a towering figure,

10586

in a way, it was his, like, he put his weight behind a lot of things.

10591

If Nehru would not have made Hindu-Codebela do-and-die battle,

10596

I don't think it would have got ever passed in the parliament.

10600

He not only basically got it broken down into four different legislations

10605

and then passed one by one. So, yes.

10608

And by the way, for those who don't know,

10610

Nehru is the reason the sedition law is there.

10613

The sedition law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of India in 1950.

10618

But Nehru wanted to use it against his political enemies,

10621

which at that time was the communists.

10622

So, your so-called great liberal, Lal Nehru, brought the sedition law back on the books with the First Amendment.

10628

And so, continuing the conversation, in a way,

10631

what was Congress's position in 1950s or 60s,

10637

once the socialist wing basically moved out of the Congress party pre-independence in the 1930s and 1940s,

10644

and then slowly the right-wing factions with Patel and Tandon

10648

and Rajagopalachari right, moving out,

10652

basically the centrist faction within the Congress party remained.

10655

So, the idea was of much more madhyam marg, right,

10660

which is not going in any extreme, being accommodative of different sentiments, right,

10668

be it religious, be it like religion would be allowed,

10671

but it's not like the state would want to lean on any side.

10675

I think that was the position of the Congress party.

10679

The vision of India in that, why we call it a Nehruvian India,

10684

was basically on the principles of, say, democracy, diversity and development.

10690

Like, we are going to accommodate diversity and we will find means to accommodate that diversity.

10696

On the development front, the vision was that the state is going to take the burden, right,

10701

is going to be the principal provider, principal consumer, principal producer,

10705

and on the democracy front, that we are going to basically develop ourselves as a liberal electoral democracy,

10713

and on foreign policy also we will make equities.

10716

So, I think, like, the Nehruvian standpoint was a thought-out standpoint given those circumstances.

10723

Indira Gandhi basically moves from the Nehruvian consensus,

10729

and most of these, like, ideological worldviews are developed through some sort of compromises and consensus, right?

10736

Even within the BJP, if you are going to look, there are going to be some orthodox who would say that

10741

no one should be allowed in the temple, right, other than the upper caste.

10745

And then there are some reformists also within the camp.

10748

So, ideological position of a political party is not, I won't say, compromised,

10753

but a consensus or median position of different factions,

10757

and it keeps changing upon which faction is in power.

10761

Slowly, what happens that with the changing time,

10765

Congress is not able to update what its grand vision for India should be.

10771

It made an effort in 2004, where it basically, you know, Congress ka haa taa maadmi ke saath,

10777

that was a big sort of, like, economic module pe there is a change.

10782

It also basically tried something on the reservation aspects by going for Mandal 2,

10789

also for Sachar Committee report and thinking about what to do about religious minorities.

10796

I think basically they were, in the first UPA term, trying to create a new Congress,

10805

but somehow they were not able to take to its logical conclusion.

10810

And I think, like, two things which we will try to focus in this book.

10816

One is that crucial period around 2009, where there's, like, seen that Congress can recover, right,

10825

and then suddenly the anti-corruption thing happens, and then they basically crisis of legislation.

10831

That's one moment to look for.

10833

And the second moment is to actually look for the period between 1991 and 1998,

10839

when Gandhis are not at the helm of affairs,

10843

why could party not think of basically move out of the Gandhi shadow, right?

10849

What, like, of course, there are always going to be factions and leaders who are going to say,

10854

you know, because it serves their vested interest that they will,

10857

like, they got Indira Gandhi, the goongi gudiya, let's bring Sonia Gandhi.

10862

But, like, how can, like, I just don't understand how can these, like, big Congress leaders,

10870

seasoned Congress players, think that once the power goes back to the family,

10875

they will be able to do what they want to do.

10878

Like, how can they be so short-sighted?

10881

So, what are your candidate answers for this?

10884

I don't have a good answer at the moment.

10887

Okay, let's come to current times.

10889

Like, you know, people keep asking that, hey, if Rahul Gandhi is a deadweight on the party,

10893

and in fact, Ramchandra Guha in an episode with me called him a born loser,

10897

because, I mean, the argument is 2014, look at the number of seats, 2019, look at the number of seats.

10902

He might be a nice guy, you know, but I wrote a piece on this once,

10906

but the point is, you know, whether he has character or intelligence or the right ideas

10911

or would make a better prime minister than Modi are all irrelevant if he cannot win an election, you know.

10917

So, I completely get where Guha is coming from.

10920

And my sort of repose to the question of why no one rebels against him really comes from game theory,

10925

because, you know, in game theory, there's something that refers to that old adage of belling the cat, you know,

10930

that a bunch of mice realize that they're constantly getting knocked off by a cat.

10934

What do they do?

10935

The idea is that you put a bell around the cat's neck so you can hear it when it comes.

10939

But the first mouse who goes with a bell to the cat will probably die, right?

10943

So, for a similar reason, it is optimal for any potential rebel within the Congress

10949

not to make the first move himself, because it's not the first mover who will win.

10954

You know, there will be carnage if there is carnage and somebody else will eventually take over if there is a change at all.

10962

So, it's game theoretic. Nobody can act first.

10964

And the G23 is really interesting because it's like they knew they had to fricking act.

10968

They acted in such a large group that you can't single any one person out really,

10974

though I think poor Sanjay Chah was out of the picture by then, but it didn't really work.

10978

Now, I'm intrigued by something you said earlier, where you said that in this current moment,

10983

you know, what Congress has done is made absolutely the wrong choice when it comes to their leadership.

10988

So, elaborate on this, please.

10990

So, think of this, right? The moment when the G23 wrote a letter, there were four possible options.

10997

There could be others also, but like four choices.

11000

The questions they raised or the demands they made seemed very straightforward, genuine demand, right?

11007

Like they were not asking to replace Rahul Gandhi.

11009

They said, like, we need a full-time president. You come, take over the party and run, right?

11015

That's the least the Congress party or the president could have done.

11019

Basically, Rahul Gandhi coming back and assuming the party, G23 made a demand.

11024

It has been fulfilled. Everyone is happy. Let's go. That's the first thing.

11029

The second option would have been that Rahul Gandhi is mad, angry at people who have written the letter.

11036

Throw everyone out. Only the loyalists or people who want to serve the Congress party and the family will remain in the party.

11042

That's the second option. At least it serves the purpose of Rahul Gandhi, right?

11046

Everyone has been thrown out. That also didn't happen.

11050

The third option was G23 and it had some big names.

11054

These people should have decided to basically take the party by coup, right?

11060

Basically, form a different Congress, Nehru, and say people who built like we are going to have a new party.

11068

This is the constitution of the new party. This is the organizational structure.

11072

And this is going to be a full-time party. And we are going to have an election, internal election in six months.

11078

Those who want to join the party come back, just split the party in the middle.

11082

They didn't do that because I don't think anyone has that kind of resource and legitimacy to run a national level party at that moment.

11091

So that was the third option. At least there would have been some solution.

11096

The fourth option was do nothing.

11100

Basically, you write a letter, someone will leak the letter, then there will be some tweets.

11106

If you have disagreements, it should be put in the party forum, not on the public platform.

11112

There is no big purging suddenly. Just sideline one or two people.

11117

Key people basically divide and rule and give some people access to the family and some people don't get access to the family.

11124

So the system continues. Basically, Congress party at the end chose the fourth one.

11129

The election has still not happened. There is no full-time president of the party and it just goes on.

11135

And this is, I think, the tragedy of the party.

11139

Like right now, it's an ICU. It needs a serious operation.

11145

But it's still living under certain pretence of history that it's a national party that runs from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.

11155

Two, it still thinks that it is the default governing party of India.

11162

It still thinks that there would be a day that Narendra Modi and BJP will lose, which, of course, they will lose at some point.

11170

And they will be the default option.

11173

It still thinks that because Rahul Gandhi is still 50 and the prime ministers in this country can also become at 75 or 80.

11181

So one day, Rahul Gandhi will become the prime minister, if not now.

11185

So you keep hearing this conversation among Congress enthusiasts that Congress is preparing for 2029 election, right?

11194

If you are not sort of like strong or at least willing to fight in present, I don't know whether you will even survive as a political party by 2029.

11206

I'm not basically writing an obituary of Congress party.

11209

But given that history teaches me that Congress does not know a route to revival in any of the states,

11218

I'm not very confident of the possibility of Congress party's revival at the national level.

11223

In fact, if someone puts a gun on my head and bets on what would be Congress party's vote share in the next election, I think it will go further down.

11235

Because all the indications at the state level is that Congress has lost votes in many of the states.

11241

And just thinking from like a very strategic voter's perspective, if in many of these states or seats, they don't think Congress MP or Congress candidate is going to win elections, they're not going to vote for the party.

11254

So naturally, the party is going to get restricted to fewer seats and fewer states and slowly it will become like state level parties in four or five states.

11265

Yeah, and like you've pointed out that any state where it's gone to less than 20% of the vote, it basically hasn't managed to revive itself.

11271

Why should I do that now?

11273

It also strikes me that the incentives of the party are very different from the incentives of the people who lead the party right now.

11279

The people who lead the party, one, because they are surrounded by psychophants and no one who will tell them the truth or perhaps they're delusional and they don't want to listen to the truth.

11287

And they actually believe that at some point Modi will lose and we will be the choice then, like you pointed out, that they believe that their incentives are just keeping hold of the party at all costs.

11298

Whereas a party's incentives would be to just get fresh leadership, find someone who can win, let people emerge from within the system and that's not happening and it's all kind of atrophy.

11308

You know, I get the game theoretic aspects of it. What I find a little baffling is that like you said earlier, there are so many tall leaders in the Congress.

11316

People, I respect a lot and would have no hesitation backing. And yet, you know, they also show the same psychofancy.

11323

For example, you know, when I think Rahul Gandhi had stepped down as president, P. Chidambaram said, oh, the Congress needs Soniaji to be president and all of that.

11331

And I really don't get that, you know, because those guys know what the country is going through.

11338

Those guys know that our democracy is actually in danger and we need a strong opposition.

11346

And, you know, this is not it. These are profoundly smart, accomplished people. So it's completely bizarre.

11355

And that's why I think the concerns raised by G23, like that was genuine and serious concern.

11362

That was their attempt. And to basically, you know, make things public, their concern.

11368

I don't think it's basically just their hunger for power and other things.

11373

One shouldn't just dismiss all politicians as cynics and they have no stake in the system.

11379

But it does baffle that why are they not taking things head on? Perhaps many of them are old.

11386

And, you know, power has its own way of generating psychofancies, right?

11392

It's not just in Congress Party. It's in BJP today. It happens everywhere.

11395

And it's the job of the leader to basically separate out the feedback from the psychofantic and their phrases.

11408

Because that becomes the main reason for the decline of leaders and organizations and parties.

11415

If you are not getting proper feedback and channels.

11418

Yeah, but these guys aren't leaders. They're inheritors. You know, they didn't get there by leading.

11422

So here's my question for you that the paradigm of Indian politics has completely changed

11429

where we have gone from a unipolar party to being a unipolar system to a unipolar system in another way

11434

where the BJP is at the center of everything.

11438

And one, they are a dominant force within Indian politics today.

11443

Two, it seems that many of the ideological foundations of the past need a relooking

11448

because, you know, they've managed to consolidate a lot of separate identities within something called the...

11454

within the Hindu vote, which many would have thought was not possible, say, at the time of Mandal.

11459

Nobody ever thought that Mandir will completely subsume Mandal.

11462

But in a sense, they've made strong steps in that direction.

11466

And one of the fundamental truths of politics that seems to be playing out here is

11470

something the German theorist Karl Schmidt once said when he said that, you know, politics always needs an other.

11476

And, you know, the Congress didn't need an other because they inherited the country, in a sense.

11481

The same way the Gandhis inherited this Congress.

11484

But the BJP has an other. They're very clear about who this other is.

11488

And it is, of course, the Muslims. And they might modify this notion of the other as they go along.

11493

And one theory of what will happen to the party is that, look, because there's no opposition outside,

11499

there will be opposition inside and it will splinter and there will be factions.

11503

Like already, if you Google trads versus raitas, you'll find ferocious debates.

11508

If you go down right-wing rabbit holes on YouTube and all that about who is a true Hindu and who is not.

11513

And there are people who are arguing that Modi ji has actually let Hindus down

11518

by, for example, not changing the syllabus in schools and all of that

11522

and by, you know, not building the temple until a couple of years ago.

11526

That was a complaint. Where is the temple?

11528

And there's a sense that these guys have got on a tiger which even they can't control.

11532

So, look, going ahead, how does Indian politics evolve?

11537

Because it seems to me that the paradigm that you set out in identity and ideology,

11541

that of the politics of statism and representation, no longer applies.

11545

The game has changed. So, one, where do you see it going?

11548

And two, is there a precedent of something like this anywhere in the world

11551

where you have this one dominant party in this large, complex, vibrant democracy?

11556

And, you know, what has happened there?

11559

I wouldn't say that, you know, politics of recognition and statism

11563

does not apply at all to what is happening now and a few years down the line.

11569

See, form and modes of debate might change,

11575

but I think some elements of recognition and statism will continue to shape Indian politics

11582

because birthmarks of childhood does not go very easily.

11586

So, certain things that were inflicted at the time of independence and nation building will remain there.

11594

Like, I don't think the debate of accommodating groups into body polluting

11599

using the means of reservation and affirmative action is anytime going to go.

11603

You will keep seeing demand for some form of reservation or the other.

11608

Similarly, this debate of whether India is a Hindu country or a secular country

11613

or at least, like, showing some sort of majoritarian tendencies

11618

will continue to keep, basically, getting back and again, right?

11623

Now, population control bail and then citizenship remains a very, very contested space

11628

and it is going to shape Indian politics.

11631

Even on the side of statism, I think we will continue to see

11638

both on what should be the role of, and its form will change, right?

11642

Like, as society will change on marriage norms, not just marriage norms, but dating norms

11649

and, you know, like, what one should eat and what one shouldn't eat

11653

and should the state be forming laws of what should be eaten or not eaten?

11657

So, in some ways, those debates will continue to shape our society

11661

and, of course, new elements will also keep coming in, right?

11666

And there is also going to be some distinction which will keep happening.

11671

Like, a good example would be, like, you know, right now, BJP gets a lot of support from young people

11678

and young people are also most connected in the global world through mobile, right?

11683

So, like, one part of traditional BJP mindset would be to not allow pre-marital dating

11691

or not having legislation of same-sex marriages and other things.

11696

But many of these young people who are seeing things in different parts of the world

11701

where progressive norms are being passed or followed, there will be pressures, right?

11706

Because it's your base, you have to respond to this basis concern.

11710

So, there are going to be those kinds of conflicts that will also creep into the system.

11715

I would also, like, not disagree, but I think it would be a very narrow reading of BJP

11723

that the other for the BJP is always Muslim.

11726

It's a constant other, but they will also keep constructing different others, right?

11731

And so, for the Congress also, Indira created some other, Nehru created some other.

11736

So, Rahul Gandhi is creating the other, which is RSS and BJP is more than India.

11741

So, you keep constructing others, but the question is, when you construct the narrative on the other,

11747

how credible your construction of that narrative is?

11751

Ultimately, a voter is basically going to choose between the competitive credibilities of narratives, right?

11758

Everyone wants to do away with poverty and make everyone happy and bring development,

11763

but I'm going to believe certain narratives and certain people and not.

11767

That's how I'm going to respond as a voter. So, this will keep happening.

11772

The third point where we are heading in terms of, like, a party system, one thing,

11778

and this is my lack of knowledge, which is I don't know a case of basically a democracy

11784

where we saw in 50, 70, 100 years span of time, two different dominant parties coming up,

11791

one basically completely going down and one completely coming up.

11796

Of course, there has been moments in political history of Britain when Conservative Party

11800

was basically winning consecutive elections and then Labour was winning consecutive elections,

11804

but we are a young democracy, 70-year-old and those kind of things.

11808

So, no parallel as such comes to my mind,

11812

but the emerging political system which I see now is that because of the weakening of the Congress

11819

in the last two elections and its inability to basically find a path of revival

11826

has now basically given, like, basically other players have tasted blood

11832

and they are going to basically now they know if they have to rise, they have to basically feed off Congress.

11839

So, now there are going to be parties which will show cannibalizing tendencies on the Congress party.

11844

So, you see, like, a couple of days ago or weeks ago there was talks of opposition unity

11850

and now TMC after winning, Trinamool Congress after winning West Bengal election

11855

is basically poaching on Congress leader, got Sushmita Dev in Northeast, got Goa, former CM in Goa.

11862

So, now they see one possibility to expand themselves.

11866

Amadhi party, especially after the crisis in Punjab, sees an opportunity to expand itself in Punjab.

11873

In the short run, what would happen that as Congress declines further,

11878

basically these two parties, TMC and AAP, seem to be making a smaller headway.

11884

Despite that, I don't see themselves basically becoming a party which will get 70 or 80 odd seats, any of them.

11892

Both of them combined, TMC or AAP, will basically get at max 100 seats.

11897

So, what will happen, you will have three players at number two, Congress, TMC or AAP, basically fighting the number two spot,

11904

which means that there is more fragmentation happening.

11908

So, the electoral distance between the second position and the BJP will further increase.

11913

So, dominance is often sustained by oppositional fragmentation.

11917

This is what was happening between 1967 and 1989,

11922

that there were lots of parties challenging Congress in the state,

11926

but they were not coming together at the national level to basically dislodge it or challenge it.

11931

So, it may actually elongate the shelf life of BJP as a dominant player nationally,

11938

despite all the crisis building up and other things.

11941

So, that's going to be the medium term prediction.

11945

Of course, BJP also has to think that one of them, either the TMC or AAP,

11952

when they get bigger, they are going to challenge BJP also.

11955

The interesting part is that TMC and AAP are coming from slightly different angles.

11962

The TMC is coming much more from the centre left side,

11965

like basically mobilizing Muslims, talking about religious minorities.

11970

AAP is coming much more from the centre right, to use certain terms of K. H. D. Wal,

11975

like they have promised to introduce more patriotism or nationalistic elements in their syllabus.

11983

So, in some ways, I don't know which...

11986

This is a hard question for me to at the moment answer,

11989

who is a bigger challenge for BJP in the long run, whether it will be AAP or TMC,

11995

because both can become...

11997

I thought about it, there's so many permutations and combinations,

12000

that it will take them 15 minutes to sort of just like spell that out.

12005

But yeah, BJP also needs to think of which one would be the challenger and how to tackle it.

12011

But amidst all of this drama which will happen in the political system,

12015

basically we will have no effective opposition to challenge the dominant players,

12021

because they will be cannibalizing of each other, which is a bad thing for democracy in that sense.

12027

And not just no effective opposition, but also the BJP is using the institutions of the state,

12034

especially the security apparatus of the state to crack down on its enemies so hard,

12040

that it's crushing dissent so hard, that it looks bleak.

12046

But then the thing is, things change in politics very, very fast.

12051

Ten years ago, if you said that a brand new party is going to win Delhi so overwhelmingly,

12056

as AAP did, it would have seemed ridiculous.

12058

So you never know what kind of disruption is around the corner and what direction the disruption goes in.

12063

It's not necessarily going to be a good one.

12065

I mean, you know that old Martin Luther King about arc of history bending towards justice or freedom,

12070

or whatever your favoured value would be.

12073

I worry that it might be visual thinking that it bends in a good direction.

12078

The sample size of democracies is really small.

12081

The sample size of even political movements in history is really small,

12085

if you ask any statistician to draw a conclusion that there is one direction it necessarily goes in,

12091

when there are so many authoritarian movements around the world on the rise, might be a bit optimistic.

12096

So my last question to you is, looking, say, 20 years into the future,

12102

and I'm not going to ask you what's going to happen in 2041.

12105

Just through the entire span of this, what makes you hopeful and what makes you despair?

12111

What's a best-case scenario and a worst-case scenario, which is another way of putting this?

12115

So I'm hopeful.

12117

Hopeful, the reason being basically the history of democracy tells me that it moves in crests and troughs, right?

12125

So three waves of democratisation at the moment.

12128

We are seeing a global democratic recession.

12132

In my opinion, for the next couple of years, we will see more constraints on democratic values and norms,

12139

but then there will be revival.

12141

The question is, what will bring those revivals?

12144

The sad or the distressing part is what is happening to the economy, what is happening to our institutions,

12153

which is basically given the size of our country, five, six years of economic slowdown and no path of recovery,

12162

it basically will create a big lost generation.

12165

So that makes me sad, but I also think that while having conversations with these young people everywhere,

12173

I still see everyone is hopeful, hopeful and optimistic of their chances to do well in life.

12182

And I think the hope of these young people to do well in life is basically going to put some restraints on

12191

further going down of democracy values and norms, because everyone needs some sort of like a system,

12199

some rules, some rule of law, which assures their path of mobility,

12205

which assures that whatever gains they are going to make will be protected by some rule of law.

12211

So I think that what makes me hopeful and in 10, 15, 20 years,

12218

the bad phase would be behind us and we will be on a recovery path.

12226

That's really hopeful and I hope you're right.

12228

But what makes me despair is that someone more than a decade younger than me is constantly using the phrase

12235

these young people, these young people, bro to me, you are these young people.

12239

So what can old folks do?

12242

So basically like, you know, everyone expects their next generation to do something better than them.

12250

So I'm hoping what my generation is not able to do, perhaps the 25 year olds would basically change things.

12257

Hum se na ho payega.

12261

No, no, I am hopeful for you as well.

12264

Abse bhi ho payega.

12265

So good luck with your book. I can't wait to read the full book.

12268

Both of you must come on my show once that is done and we can have longer detailed discussions.

12273

Thank you so much for your time today.

12275

Thank you, Amit. It was a lovely conversation and hope anyone who's going to listen to it will enjoy the conversation.

12281

If you have any suggestions or comments, please do write to me as we think more about this book.

12287

You might regret making that offer. Thanks, bro.

12290

Thank you.

12320

I did in this magnificent meeting, aren't you privileged to have listened to it?

12323

You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.

12328

Thank you for listening.

12330

Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?

12333

If so, would you like to support the production of the show?

12336

You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking.

12346

Thank you.

Ep 248： The Decline of the Congress | The Seen and the Unseen