#
On June 5, 1989, a bunch of tanks in single file rolled down Chang'an Avenue, with Tiananmen
#
The previous day, protests at Tiananmen Square had been crushed by the Chinese government,
#
with hundreds if not thousands of people killed.
#
Just one day later, the streets were empty, except for these massive tanks rolling past.
#
And then, suddenly, a man dressed in a white shirt and black trousers, holding what appeared
#
to be shopping bags, walked over in front of the first of those tanks, and just stood
#
there as it advanced towards him.
#
It stopped just in time.
#
Two other tanks stopped behind the first tank.
#
A fourth one approached from behind.
#
Then that first tank started and swerved away from the man and tried to go past him.
#
He ran into its path and stood there.
#
The tank swerved again, the man swerved again.
#
This went on for a bit till the tank just stopped.
#
The man was three feet away from it at most.
#
It's an iconic photograph and there's also an iconic video of it.
#
But we don't know who the man was.
#
And we don't know what happened to him.
#
53 years before this, on June 13th, 1936, a group of workers gathered at a shipyard
#
There was a moment when they all raised their hand in the Nazi salute.
#
In another iconic photograph, you see this man in the crowd, the only man not saluting.
#
As alone as the man 53 years later, who we now call Tank Man.
#
And as I think of these men, a part of me wonders why they did what they did.
#
The tank is always stronger than you.
#
The mob is always stronger than you.
#
The instinct for self-preservation dictates that you keep quiet.
#
It dictates that the unknown man in China goes home with his shopping bags and empties
#
them on the kitchen platform and maybe makes himself a cup of tea.
#
The man in the shipyard, he can raise his arm, he can go with the mob so that he's
#
But these two people didn't do that.
#
And we have to ask, what is it that made those men do what they did?
#
And why do we feel inspired when we look at those photographs?
#
Maybe those men were foolish, but we think of them today as heroes.
#
Why do we feel that way?
#
Would you have walked in front of that tank?
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
#
My guest today is Aakar Patel, someone I've known off for many years as an enterprising
#
reporter, an excellent editor, a provocative columnist.
#
In recent years though, in addition to all of these, I think of Aakar as a principled
#
Aakar was a journalist through the 90s and 80s, took a break in 2010, decided at one
#
point to become head of amnesty in India, and after our government clamped down on amnesty,
#
has been an outspoken dissenter.
#
To me, dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
#
And Aakar has gone all in.
#
Over the last couple of years, he's written two superb books, Our Hindu Rashtra, What
#
It Is, How We Got Here, and Price of the Modi Years.
#
He also has one of my favorite Twitter accounts of all time, where he's mastered a unique
#
form of satire in a unique voice that is unlike anything else in that space.
#
On some days, I feel grateful that Narendra Modi exists, because if he didn't, Aakar
#
Patel may not have been Aakar Patel.
#
Now, Aakar has been on the show before, in 2019, when we discussed the intellectual foundations
#
of Hindutva, as that episode title was, I'll link it from the show notes.
#
I visited Bangalore recently to record a bunch of episodes, and given how prolific Aakar
#
has been, it made sense to catch up with him.
#
We spoke about politics, we spoke about the media, and we spoke about Aakar's passport,
#
which at that point had been impounded by the government, and had been with them for
#
Soon after we had our conversation, Aakar's passport was returned to him.
#
I'm like, wow, you would have thought someone was listening in.
#
Be that as it may, check out this quick commercial break, which is a commercial for me only,
#
what else is there, and then check out our conversation.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it?
#
Well, I'd love to help you.
#
Since April 2020, I've enjoyed teaching 21 cohorts of my online course, The Art of
#
An online community has now sprung up of all my past students, we have workshops, a newsletter
#
to showcase a work of students, and vibrant community interaction.
#
In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
#
about the craft and practice of clear writing.
#
There are many exercises, much interaction, a lovely and lively community at the end of
#
It costs Rs 10,000 plus GST, or about $150.
#
And registration is now open for my April 2022 cohort.
#
The first webinar is on Saturday, April 9th.
#
So if you're interested, head on over to register at IndiaUncut.com slash clear writing.
#
That's IndiaUncut.com slash clear writing.
#
Being a good writer doesn't require God given talent, just the willingness to work hard
#
and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
#
I can help you Aakar, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
Thank you for having me.
#
You know, I recorded a long episode with Abhinandan Sekri in November.
#
And before we started, we were kind of talking about you, admiringly.
#
And my feeling was that Aakar has reached that stage of a person who has no more fucks
#
So you just write anything onto it and you're just, you're just kind of out there.
#
And is that a characterization you would kind of agree with?
#
And if so, how did you get here?
#
I don't know if that's true and if it's true, I should be really worried.
#
I do give a lot of fucks.
#
I think no more fucks to give in a sense of fear, no more fear, nothing.
#
So I'm not really sure about how I got here, but certainly it is a fact that once you've
#
faced what the state can do to you as an individual and you've gone through it once, the fear
#
of that diminishes in some sense because you know exactly what it is comprised of.
#
That they can do this to you.
#
And I have gone through that quite a bit in the last four or five years.
#
That is sort of acceptable.
#
The other thing is that I run off at the mouth.
#
So I think that because I find using Twitter so entertaining for myself, I tend to do it
#
a lot more than I should be doing.
#
Because purely in terms of volume, there is so much material, a lot of it might be seen
#
as flying off the handle, which it probably is.
#
I'm struck with a phrase you said that after having been through all of this, that's now
#
You know, so is that something you're comfortable talking about?
#
Because of course you were harassed when you were in charge of amnesty and all those cases
#
And even now you are constantly being harassed, I believe your passport was impounded and
#
Like, you know, it just sounds like so incredibly, incredibly traumatic for me.
#
Is that something you're comfortable talking about?
#
What that process was like?
#
With amnesty, what happened was a series of raids and the accounts were frozen the following
#
We had people in the office.
#
We were not allowed to move for many hours till about 11 o'clock in the night.
#
The worry always was how do we keep the operation going because this sort of action had been
#
taken against other entities, including Greenpeace.
#
So we knew what it was to anticipate.
#
When it finally happened, the lack of competence from the state showed.
#
And so we were able to get relief from the courts fairly quickly the first time.
#
The second time it happened on the same set of transactions, this was the CBI coming in.
#
We had raids by the MHA, the CBI, the Enforcement Directorate.
#
The second time also there was a lack of competence.
#
This time the ED charged us with money laundering, but the relief from the courts was only partial.
#
So at that, my term had ended in November.
#
The people who came after me felt that it was too difficult to be able to carry on with
#
They felt it was better to suspend operations.
#
Facing the state, I think, is slightly different for those who face the upper echelons of the
#
So when the CBI comes to you, it's not like an inspector type person.
#
It's somebody fairly higher up.
#
And they tend to talk to you in the way that people of that level of education and that
#
level of exposure will.
#
The ED was much rougher with me at least.
#
They were fairly accusatory in terms of why you're doing this kind of work.
#
And it occurred to me that the language that they used was pretty much the same as somebody
#
who would not be acquainted with the wider world would actually use.
#
So yeah, in terms of purely harassment, there wasn't that much.
#
I mean, there's continual summons.
#
So then you go once you figured out that that's the way it works.
#
When they call you, you go.
#
But with no resources, that becomes slightly more difficult.
#
So these days, not having made too much money over the last several years, it's not that
#
Having your passport impounded is, I mean, but it's the two years of COVID.
#
So where the heck would you go in any case?
#
So it's fine for them to keep it.
#
On the personal side, there was the possibility of jail till I got bail.
#
So I didn't have to go there.
#
I don't know, because there is always the fear that somebody else files a case for something
#
you said or something you are accused of having said.
#
That's the nature of living in this country at this point in time.
#
I think that you either put your head down and say, fine, I'm not going to engage with
#
But many people can't do that.
#
They have to engage with what they see around them.
#
I can't look away from what it is.
#
That means that necessarily you get into trouble sometimes.
#
But that's the price of being in this country at this point in time, which many people are
#
paying a much higher price than me for.
#
I'm one of the fortunate ones.
#
A publisher is dead though, so books will no longer be printed.
#
But I suppose it's the same experience writers would have in any part of the world with an
#
authoritarian leader who doesn't like dissent and whose supporters see dissent, any kind
#
of it, as a direct insult to his greatness, which is why they act.
#
And that is the reality of India Post 2014.
#
I mean, your publisher is dead, but we all hope that they come back to life in some way
#
So let's see how that goes.
#
So I'm reminded of this book I read called Exit Voice Loyalty by Albert Hirschman, where
#
he says that when you are in an unpleasant situation, whether it is within an organization
#
or within a country or whatever, you have three options.
#
The easiest option is just loyalty, you stay loyal.
#
Another option is voice, that you voice out whatever the problem is and how to make things
#
And the third option is exit, that you just leave.
#
And now within corporations and all the way markets work, exit is possible, that you don't
#
like a job in a company, you look for another job, you know, and if you're doing something
#
which is kind of, if the market is there for that, you kind of get out.
#
And voice is always sort of dangerous.
#
Now, you know, at a national level, now what happens is that many of us who may not be
#
happy with what's going on, we've got two effective options, which is exit or voice.
#
And this came to my mind because I have been like, it's damn disturbing, Akar.
#
I have spoken to so many people who like me years ago, decades ago, two decades ago, in
#
the 90s, made a conscious choice that we will stay in India.
#
We can go, but we will stay in India because this is where we want to be.
#
This is our comfort zone.
#
And without exception, they've either left or they're thinking of leaving, right, which
#
is heartbreaking because these are not the kind of guys who would have left anyway.
#
And I'm thinking these are the privileged types that they can leave, so they leave.
#
Most people can't leave.
#
And most people can't even, are afraid of the voice angle also, because for all kinds
#
And therefore, I sometimes think that there's another kind of exit that happens there, which
#
is not an exit out of the country, but an exit into yourself, like a psychological thing
#
where you become in denial and you say, I don't want to, you know, almost a kind of
#
effective loyalty, but not really.
#
But you're just like, I'll do my own thing, you know, maybe not my circus, not my monkeys
#
And I'll do my own thing and find people are being lynched and girls aren't being allowed
#
to enter schools and that's somewhere else and I'll just kind of focus on my own life.
#
So you know, along this framework, how do you think of things like, of course, you can't
#
exit because it took your passport.
#
But if you were to on the question of voice, you know, you are someone who's gone down
#
that route that I'll, you know, I care, I'll keep saying what I have to say.
#
And obviously, you know, many, many people like that in our circles who are exactly the
#
And the point what happens, you know, have you seen people who have just become silent
#
because what's the point?
#
Nothing's going to change.
#
And the fact is that that's rational because nothing is going to change in a larger scheme
#
You know, some people might say, oh, I'll play the longer game.
#
There needs to be someone who's speaking.
#
So what are sort of your thoughts on this as over the years we've, you know, when we
#
last spoke in our last episode was in early 2019 before the elections and you said, oh,
#
there's going to be a hung parliament, I think, right?
#
So yeah, it's, you said, I think there's going to be a hung parliament, no, it's too late.
#
And so I think many of us had more hope than we do now.
#
Many of us saw a greater point in actually speaking up than we might do now.
#
So you know, what are your thoughts?
#
I think that most people don't have a voice or don't have a sufficiently loud voice.
#
This has changed with social media, where if you have, if you can generate content of
#
reasonable quality, you will find a fairly large audience for much of your content.
#
Those of us who have a formal voice or have been given a formal voice as you and I have
#
where over the years we've been given platforms to be able to say what it is that we want.
#
I think that it's important for that set, especially to be able to use it.
#
And I think that it is being used.
#
What is striking about the formal media space is that there is an informal media space,
#
which is a social media, but in the formal space, while the industry has tilted towards
#
Mr. Modi and towards his majoritarianism, I would say a lot of people who could have
#
either exited or could have turned inward and say, you know, not my circus and not my
#
monkeys have chosen to speak.
#
And I don't think it's a small number.
#
I think the reason why the media dominance is stressed on by this government is that
#
And I think it is right that what comes from the other side, even though it might not be
#
amplified too much, is powerful.
#
And so I'm in very good company, I think, with that we have a lot of people who may
#
or may not be part of the media system, but have a formal voice such as people in civil
#
society who, because of social media, have become formal spaces where they can command
#
authority in terms of their reach.
#
I suppose it's also a question of a community.
#
Many of us can't take the options that you picked, two of them, because they belong to
#
the persecuted, that for them it's personal, that even if it is not them who is being disrobed
#
or who's being kicked out of their prayer spaces or being told not to sell this or being
#
beaten up for being who they are, the sense of fraternity that they will feel will be
#
For them, I don't think it's possible.
#
I can't speak for them, but I suspect that for them it won't be possible to either exit
#
or to look inward and say, I'm not going to engage with it.
#
But for many of us, I think that we still believe, and I think we are right to believe,
#
that that space is actually available.
#
That India is not a competently run authoritarian state.
#
It's not like China, where you will not come out of jail till you're on your knees and
#
you say you're not going to do it again, and maybe not even after that.
#
We have a little bit of space available, despite a fairly pliant judiciary, despite a fairly
#
empowered mob, to be able to say some things and to be able to get resonance and response
#
So I think that quality of our country, where there is so much chaos that even tyranny does
#
not operate in lockstep fashion and the mob really is not able to efficiently control
#
our voices, that space is there.
#
Some of us get into trouble at some points because of it, but it is there.
#
I think that those who choose to engage with the polity, and of course, engagement should
#
always be from the positive sense, that people say what they do for the most part because
#
they want things to be better.
#
It is the case that we have in India, today in 2022, enough freedom to be able to just
#
enough freedom to be able to say some things.
#
I think that those who choose either to exit, whether physically or intellectually and morally,
#
are missing out on that because certainly they are doing so not because they like what
#
they are seeing around them, but they believe it's safer for them or they believe it's
#
more comfortable for them to be able to disengage.
#
I think that they are missing out on something very valuable.
#
I found that engaging with my fellow country women and men on these substantial issues
#
in these times is the most rewarding thing I have done in my life, though I'm not making
#
It's rewarding in ways that few things ever can be, I think, that the sense of solidarity,
#
the sense of meaning that you have when you speak for things that are so meaningful to
#
so many people, so real, is very different, I think, and very new to me at least.
#
I'm quite pleased that though we've had very difficult times in the last two and a half
#
years, these have also been times that have given the opportunity for this maybe not insignificant
#
number of people to gather around values as I think has not been the case for a very long
#
I think what I've also seen, and I think it's an observation I'd make a little more
#
hesitatingly about the country as a whole, but certainly true of social media, is that
#
what you see on social media are these shrill, vocal minorities, but the vast, silent majorities
#
are not quite like that, and there are ways to reach out and connect, and I wonder if
#
at the level of a country, it might just be possible that there are many more people with
#
us than we think, and those connections then become valuable.
#
I understand what you're saying that there is a space, and that space for dissent might
#
be there because of inertia, it might be there because those in power feel English-speaking
#
elites like us are not important enough, and that space can shrink very fast, like if the
#
emergency was on, for example, if this was 1976, I'm sure both of us would be in jail.
#
That space can shrink very fast, and other spaces have shrunk very fast, especially as
#
you pointed out for Muslims, which has been their locus so far, but if they also decide
#
at some point that, okay, let's get down to it and teach these elite liberals a lesson
#
instead of ignoring them, that it can shrink very fast, and in many ways, I think about
#
sort of the process being the punishment, that it is not necessary that an Amit Shah
#
sends a powerful state after you.
#
It is some random guy somewhere can go to a police station, I mean, you've pointed out
#
how you had some Suwamoto case filed against you by your local police station, and then
#
that process becomes a punishment, and no matter how skilled you are at avoiding Twitter
#
notifications and all that, there was a time where people were claiming you were a Muslim
#
as if that is a bad thing to be and calling you Akar Ahmed Patel and all of that, and
#
that's also got to be disturbing at some level.
#
So one, has this stuff affected you as it's happened in your own time?
#
And two, if the space should suddenly constrict, at what point do you see a point where you,
#
do they have to kind of physically lock you up and shut you up for you to kind of, you
#
Or is there a point where you can think of, you can say that, look, okay, for my family
#
or for whatever, and it's not practical, let's lie low for a while?
#
I foresee a continuation of what we have seen in the past eight years, we are going to enter
#
year nine very soon, rather than a deterioration.
#
And I think part of that is a structural, that India engages with the world and no country
#
can be fully sovereign in the 21st century.
#
You are dependent on country X for something, some other country is dependent on you for
#
No country is fully sovereign, which means that you, at some point, nations have to follow
#
We are sitting down on a day, just hours after this has been violated.
#
But that is exceptional.
#
I think that for the most part, you have to do things in a particular way, broadly speaking,
#
I think India continues to tell the world that we are this liberal democracy, liberal,
#
not as defined by Twitter, but liberal as defined by our constitution, that it says
#
that it looks at the individual not through the prism of faith, but through the prism
#
of their humanity and their citizenship.
#
Into this, the BJP has introduced the element of faith, that using this secular carapace,
#
this Neruvian carapace, which overarches the polity, they have introduced laws that go
#
after Muslims specifically, whether it is on interfaith marriage, whether it is on what
#
they eat, or through policies like what they may wear, where they may pray, where they
#
And because that carapace exists externally, it's difficult for India to be able to continue
#
doing what it is doing beyond a point, which is why I foresee only what is going on being
#
the case without any deepening of it.
#
And it's our vulnerability to the external world with whom we have relationships, with
#
whom we have dependencies, that ensure that we haven't gone down a far nastier path than
#
we have chosen to go down.
#
And I think that that will not change.
#
We will see what has been going on continuing.
#
And there are structural reasons why I think that this will fail, that not from the point
#
of view of pure optimism, my sense is that we have reached the period from where things
#
And I don't think that that time is too far off.
#
So while it's entirely possible that I'm wrong, and things do get worse, and they will
#
go after not just Muslims, but other people and, you know, sort of brutalize them the
#
way that they are doing to Muslims now.
#
I don't foresee that happening for structural reasons.
#
And I foresee that things will improve on the rights front in short order, not too much
#
longer than five or seven years.
#
I mean, I've been saying for a long time that things will get worse before they get better.
#
But sometimes I wonder if they will kind of get better at all.
#
You know, there is that old quote, in fact, you begin the last chapter of our Hindu Rashtra
#
with that quote by Martin Luther King about the arc of history is long, but it bends
#
And I wonder if that is naive, because we have a low sample size, history isn't really
#
How the hell do we know it bends towards justice?
#
Maybe it was just being optimistic, maybe it doesn't bend towards justice.
#
So if you look at the last 150 years, it's hard to think of a single battle that liberals
#
They've won everything from slavery to the rights of women to vote, adult suffrage on
#
torture, on colonialism, on war, like it's very hard to think of an issue on which what
#
is called the traditional right or the conservative has won.
#
Like seed space continually.
#
But this is only visible if we step back and look on time as being in maybe a century and
#
a half rather than years.
#
Somebody who looks at India from the lens of 30 years might say things have become very
#
But I think that the arc is not something that the shift is not really possible.
#
I think it can only move towards justice, because humanity is good in a way that is
#
difficult to introduce malign influence, which remains for too long.
#
It does come and it does stay sometimes, but it's not permanent.
#
I think the permanent shift is towards goodness, more freedom, more rights, more understanding.
#
So I think he got that right if you look at it from the long point of view.
#
And I see the same happening here as well, not just in our country, but I think across
#
the world that the next 20 years will be very good for us because we have so many things
#
to unite us as a planet.
#
The fact that we are all endangered by one thing, the climate shift, the recognition
#
that in most countries that war is not the way to resolve issues.
#
As we've seen in the last 30 years, very little violence, which is a state on state.
#
The changes we are seeing in science that what we are bringing in terms of from rocketry
#
to intelligence to the shift that is on us, on labor, I think that will produce very good
#
I think the causes might be bad.
#
I think that what India is facing today, whether for mismanagement or just the fact that we
#
are a very large nation or very poor people at this point in history with so many people
#
out of work, there are five crore fewer people working in India today than were working in
#
I don't think that this is an issue that's sufficiently spoken about, but this is government
#
data that the labor force participation rate fell, started falling and went from 52%, which
#
it was in 2014, to 40%.
#
This is before the pandemic.
#
It's not really the last two years that have done the damage, but what this will produce
#
is a state that looks at its citizens with much more sympathy than has been the case
#
I believe that the arc of history does bend towards justice and I think it will continue
#
You referred to recent events, I should point out to my listeners that we are recording
#
this on February 25th and the whole Russia-Ukraine thing happened yesterday.
#
Like you said and like you've pointed out, I mean, I've done tons of episodes on the
#
economy before the pandemic and we were already in dire straits, obviously only made worse
#
I'm glad to see you so optimistic about the arc of history because I think, yeah, sure.
#
If you step back and see the last 150 years, good things have happened.
#
If you step a little further back and see 3,000 years, you say 150 years is just a blip,
#
So I did this recent episode with Tripur Duman Singh and Adil Hussain on this excellent book
#
where they've reproduced Nehru's debates with four people and one of them is Jinnah.
#
And the reason this reminded me was that at the same time as one realizes that things
#
change very fast, one also realizes that things fester very long.
#
And in that fascinating debate which Nehru and Jinnah are happening and how their book
#
is structured is they write an introductory essay, but then it's Nehru's words and Jinnah's
#
words speaking for themselves.
#
And it's a fascinating debate and Jinnah is really not at his best in that particular
#
He's written much better elsewhere.
#
And in that debate, Nehru keeps berating him that I want to focus on poverty, I want to
#
focus on this and this is happening in the 30s.
#
And I don't want to talk about the communal question.
#
The communal question is an issue only for you elites, right?
#
And there I feel it was one place where Nehru was clearly wrong.
#
It was not just an elite issue, Jinnah's fears of what a Hindu majority may do.
#
And I think over there he used the term Hindu Raj in one place.
#
And Nehru was like, what are you talking about?
#
How can there be a Hindu Raj?
#
And there I feel that Jinnah's fears were justified.
#
His belief in the communal divide as it were, his words, the communal question as it were,
#
his words, were borne out in a sense by Partition and Nehru himself may have realized that he
#
got a little bit wrong.
#
And I think that many liberals have made a similar mistake to Nehru, thinking that, hey,
#
we'll put a constitution in place and we'll put these liberal values in place and we'll
#
put all these rights in there and then there'll be no problem and it'll go away.
#
And I tend to side with Mahatma Gandhi's view on this, where Gandhi's view was that, listen,
#
you have to change society from the bottom up.
#
Even Ambedkar realized this when he called the constitution a topsoil, right?
#
And this is something that has festered.
#
I did an episode with Akshay Mukul on his great book on the Gita Press.
#
And one of the realizations there is that all of this has been an inherent part of our
#
You look at the sales of the Gita Press books, for example, things like love jihad, even
#
if it's a new term, but things like love jihad and cow slaughter and all of that were
#
life political issues in the 20s and all of that, right?
#
And we've kind of reached this space where now you could say society has caught up with
#
politics, where in a sense, while I don't think we were ever much of a republic, you
#
could say that we've probably become more of a democracy because this is how the people
#
feel and our politics now reflects what our sort of society is.
#
And therefore, I look at that arc and I don't see what is there to make me hopeful, because
#
the values that the constitution laid out, I mean, I know there are books like A People's
#
Constitution by Rohit Dey, which argue otherwise, and for India, everything you say the opposite
#
is true, as the old cliche goes.
#
But I look at that arc and I think that nothing has changed.
#
We had this thing which festered, festered, festered.
#
You tried to brush it away, you tried to be in denial about it, and the elites basically
#
ran the country in an incompetent way, but now that has kind of changed.
#
This is what we always were and this has now been amplified.
#
I think that what Ambedkar observed in terms of the constitution being a document that
#
didn't necessarily reflect the society on the issue of caste has also turned out to
#
be true on the issue of communalism.
#
There's absolutely no question that if you look across India today, we have 28 states,
#
no Muslim chief minister, 15 states in India, no Muslim minister at all, 10 states, one
#
Muslim minister normally given a minority affairs, a ruling party with 303 Lok Sabha
#
MPs, none of whom is a Muslim, which had 282 Lok Sabha MPs, none of whom was a Muslim.
#
It is stark that the issue on which India was partitioned, which is that one community
#
saying that we want legally guaranteed means of representation, which was denied to them,
#
which led to partition.
#
It would be very difficult in 2022 to look across the landscape and deny what it is that
#
you've said, that this is, as you've said, a society meeting its politics and agreeing
#
that leave the constitution aside.
#
This is who we want to be and we are comfortable with this.
#
I don't think there are too many instances of democracies across the world.
#
I would say there is none where 85% continually vote against 15% for them being the 15%.
#
We are an outlier on many other issues.
#
So maybe it is the case that we will continue to do this to ourselves.
#
I don't think that that will be the case.
#
And I don't think it will be too long before this shifts.
#
And the reason I'm saying this is that at some point the evidence cannot be denied.
#
And for a polity that is coming into year nine, the evidence is there now.
#
I don't think it's easy for people to look away from what has been done to this country
#
over the last eight or nine years and say that it is good.
#
You could be happy about the fact that a bunch of people are being brutalized.
#
And I'm sure there are many of us who do feel that.
#
Are there enough of that lot to make sure that this continues into eternity or at least
#
for the next couple of decades?
#
It's highly improbable that given the performance.
#
Would it be different if they were competent and authoritarian?
#
And it would not be easy to tell because you would not know whether the vote is coming
#
for the competence or for the authoritarianism.
#
But right now you've got incompetence and you've got a kind of brutality, which is the primary
#
I don't think the prime minister goes out and says that I've changed the rate of GDP
#
growth and we're going to become the next China because we're not.
#
He doesn't say that I'm going to get you a good job because he's not.
#
What does continue is the narrative that we've seen the latest one being in Karnataka, the
#
state we are in with what it is that Muslim women cannot be allowed to wear.
#
And I don't think I'm using my emotional side here.
#
It's highly improbable that such a polity continues in a democratic space.
#
And I foresee it changing, not before long.
#
So it's interesting that you said the evidence can't be denied and of course you wrote a
#
book full of the evidence.
#
And that's what I rather naively felt, like for example, when demonetization happened
#
and I was very sure they're going to get massacred in UP because I thought the largest assault
#
on property rights in human history, the poor have suffered far more.
#
How can they possibly win an election now?
#
And obviously there are little factors like Schadenfreude, the poor thought the rich were
#
hurt more and all that, but I think what has happened is that one, people have always in
#
India because of 70 plus years of misgovernance become almost apathetic of the role of governance
#
They assume that everything is broken and it will remain broken.
#
They exist and they do what they do despite the state.
#
And therefore they don't make that link necessarily between their vote and the governance that
#
And therefore I'm not sure how much of this evidence really matters.
#
And part of it is of course muddied by COVID because now it's easy to build narratives
#
and say, Hey, this happened and at least Modiji saved your life and whatever other nonsense
#
So we'll see how that kind of plays out because I feel that we sort of entered a space where
#
I don't know if reality matters.
#
It's all narrative battles.
#
And when you think about it, no one person within himself actually sees reality.
#
They see their own limited reality in their limited circles, figures like what GDP growth
#
may be or what is women participation in the workforce and all of those things.
#
They are abstract things.
#
They're not real to me.
#
They see what is real to me and what is real to me if I'm poor and if I'm, you know, is
#
that everything's been, it's been screwed forever.
#
And then that kind of tribalism kind of kicks in.
#
And I wonder if this is a realization that the other parties have also come to because
#
the thing that dismay is me even more than the way our government behaves is that all
#
the other parties seem to think that this Hindutva vote, this Hindu vote is a big deal
#
that they have to cater to it.
#
One guy will win and do, you know, have recitations of Hanuman Chalisa.
#
Another, you know, the Congress boasted when the court judgment on Babri Masjid came out
#
that it was after, you know, Priyanka Gandhi said it was my father who opened these gates.
#
So there seems to be this understanding that the core issue of today is this Hindutva thing
#
that you can't go against that.
#
And whatever else you do, like whatever AAP says about good governance and schools and
#
all that, it is on the margins.
#
But this, this Hindu vote thing is a given thing.
#
And you know, in an idealistic way, I would like to believe that we contain multitudes.
#
There are many aspects to our nature.
#
You know, even if there is one person who doesn't like Muslims and who doesn't want
#
them to eat beef, he also wants jobs.
#
He also wants a better future for his children.
#
But then I see the political parties who would surely understand this better than me.
#
And they're not trying to appeal to those aspects.
#
They are keeping in mind that.
#
So what's your feeling on this?
#
Are the parties showing a lack of imagination?
#
No, I think that politicians understand the electorate by which I mean the population
#
better than most of us, better than all of us, I would say.
#
And this is purely because of the amount of contact they have, mass contact and regular
#
And so if they're doing something, it has to be on the basis of something that they
#
know it's not, they're not operating on instinct.
#
They are actually functioning on knowledge.
#
Do I expect that a chart on employment or on GDP growth or whatever else might convince
#
somebody to shift their word with in a moment of epiphany or knowledge?
#
I think that all of us as a species for some reason operate and decide things often on
#
hope and change, which tends to be narratives that are common to democratic politics around
#
And hope and change is hope for something which is different from this and change from
#
something which is different from this.
#
And I think that what this is, is not necessarily data.
#
Because as you said, most of us really don't know or cannot even be able to comprehend
#
what it is that GDP growth rate means.
#
What does it actually mean?
#
In a part of the world where consumption is limited to 15% of the economy and the vast
#
multitude only consumes food and a bit of water and a bit of power and a bit of 4G and
#
What does GDP growth even mean?
#
So I don't think that it will be the facts by themselves that produce the change.
#
I think it is the reality that the facts are communicating that hope and change will come
#
And to believe that it will not, that this will not be the case, is to not be empirical.
#
I think we will have to look at many decades of democratic nations and conclude that we
#
are totally different from this, that we will remain democratic in the sense that we will
#
come to the booth and vote, but we will almost never vote for anything other than hatred.
#
I think that's what separates the real Hindutva of the BJP from the fraud one of the Congress
#
Theirs is a defensive one.
#
It doesn't do what real Hindutva does, which is attack.
#
It goes after the minorities.
#
The three things that made this party great, Muslims shouldn't keep that mosque, Muslims
#
shouldn't keep their autonomy, Muslims shouldn't keep their personal law.
#
These people don't have.
#
They might wear a janayoon, they might go to a temple.
#
That's not really Hindutva.
#
It's not Hindutva at all actually.
#
Hindutva is the desire of people to actively, legally, politically exclude and brutalize
#
minorities, especially Muslims.
#
And that is, if we are saying that has permanent appeal, I believe we would be either very
#
wrong, which I think we are, or we would be very different from the rest of humanity,
#
which I don't think we are.
#
So by your point that there might be an active Hindutva as it were and a passive Hinduness,
#
but at the same time, I think of Kejriwal when 370 was repealed, he put out a tweet
#
celebrating it, saying it's a good thing for the people of Kashmir.
#
He equivocated on CAA and at no point did he support the protesters and all of that.
#
In our earlier episode, you had very eloquently said something that you argued in your book
#
and that straight with me is that if you think about Hindutva today, everything by which
#
you define them is by what they are against, which is basically Muslims, right?
#
There is nothing that they are for, right?
#
Now the thing is, I also then wonder what are these other parties for?
#
We don't see enough of an articulation of that.
#
What are the principles that you actually stand for?
#
What is your vision for a better India?
#
There will occasionally be lofty rhetoric, but when these fault lines open up, like Kashmir,
#
CAA and so on, one doesn't really get that.
#
A lot of the time, of course, they will say the right thing simply because they are opposing
#
something that is wrong.
#
But apart from that, one really wonders, like I, you know, one conclusion that I have come
#
to is that we think of so many of us think of 2014 as a dividing line in two ways, where
#
the BJP and so on will behave as if history ended at 2014.
#
Nothing happened after it.
#
So everything is Nehru and Indira and this and that.
#
And after 2014, you don't need to discuss shit that has gone wrong.
#
But the other side, which is the opposition, will behave as if nothing happened before
#
Where you are not going to talk about everything that went wrong in the past.
#
You know, for example, you argue, you know, people talk about the sedition law and the
#
But the fact is it was declared unconstitutional in 1950.
#
It was Nehru who brought it back with the First Amendment.
#
And you know, when Sanjay Gandhi's birthday comes around and you'll find it this year
#
also whenever it comes around, all the Congress Party official handles will be treating what
#
You know, there is no recognition of, you know, all of that.
#
So, and it's so easy to kind of be virtuous in opposition as well.
#
I mean, and there are other reasons why I'm kind of, you know, sort of pessimistic on
#
several margins and we'll go into them.
#
But what is, what would be your response to this?
#
Many things here, I think firstly, Kejriwal's constituency has a bigger component of the
#
urban middle class than most other large parties.
#
And he's a large party only because of geography and where he is rather than purely the number
#
So, I'm not surprised that he would take the opposition on Kashmir that he did.
#
I think he's using the same thing as a visit to a temple or being seen in a janayu.
#
And once again, I suspect and I think I'm right that this is a defensive thing.
#
And why is it defensive?
#
I think that these parties are operating, this is coming to your second point, they
#
are operating at a time when the narrative dominance of the BJP is absolute.
#
So, they feel compelled to do things and not talk about either the economy or the GDP because
#
they are forced to speak of specific things.
#
Is this how politics and the language of politics was in 2003?
#
From both the BJP and from the opposition, the language was different.
#
It's not as if the BJP didn't want to go after Muslims then it did, but it didn't know how
#
I think Modi gave them a clarity of voice and a clarity of mission which was lacking
#
So long as the narrative dominance is what it is, you will find the parties in the opposition
#
compelled to at least sort of address that bit before trying to talk about other things.
#
Should parties talk about how bad they were in the past?
#
I would probably say no, like there's no reason to, politics is about the future and about
#
Should they deify people like Sanjay Gandhi?
#
I think that's dumb and I think that that shows that they haven't learned the lessons
#
that they should have, that putting somebody who's barely literate, dropped out of school
#
after class 10, given charge and did so much damage, Arvind Narayan has written a very
#
fine book called India's Undeclared Emergency where the first chapter chronicles what happened
#
I think that it would be very difficult to argue that that was a period we were in any
#
way different from what we are facing today from a pliant judiciary, no habeas, people
#
locked up, forcibly sterilized for God's sake, kicked out of their homes.
#
That was not very different in terms of the damage the state could do.
#
And there is no question that when we move on from where we are today from the BJP, whether
#
it is the party itself or a change in the party that says that, okay, we will no longer
#
focus on these things and we'll move on to some other things, we will need to have a
#
new agreement within society, informally at least, that we will not continue doing what
#
it is that we have in the past.
#
I think that will come.
#
And the reason I say that is because that is the nature of democratic politics, that
#
you have to go back every five years and ask people a question and they have to give you
#
And within that exchange, I think we will find a more normalized way of functioning
#
in our politics rather than being nasty to ourselves all the time, as has been the case
#
I would completely agree and is the case today.
#
And when talking about current times, I often argue that we really have three problems and
#
there's a proximate problem and then there are two deeper problems that remain with us
#
and cause me to be so pessimistic.
#
The proximate problem is, of course, the government in power, Modi and Shah and whatever is happening
#
and the proximate problem has been there since 2014 and we've seen what's going on.
#
And many people believe that proximate problem is the only problem, that the government
#
And I think that ignores the two deeper problems.
#
Now, one of those deeper problems is what we already discussed, which is the nature
#
If our society is fundamentally illiberal, if our society is full of people who are bigoted
#
and misogynistic and hate Muslims and all of that, then, you know, there is a hope.
#
The other deeper problem is the oppressive state, right?
#
And the oppressive state was, in a sense, hardwired into us.
#
We took over the oppressive state from the British.
#
You know, the policeman state, as one constitutionalist called it during those debates, we looked
#
at it from the point of view of a policeman.
#
And that oppressive state, that colonial state, as it were, remains a problem.
#
Josie Joseph has a book about how it's been used and his book is not just about the Modi
#
era, it goes back to way before.
#
It is the way that it is.
#
You know, many of these people who were arrested in this alleged Naxal conspiracy, like Ferrera
#
and so on, had been arrested before by the Congress in 2012, 2011, you know, Ferrera
#
wrote a book about his years in jail.
#
And I think that those are the two deeper problems.
#
Now, I don't want it to seem that I'm minimizing this particular group of people who are there.
#
But what I am saying and the one point where I'll differ with you is that you say that
#
when we are done with these people, we'll have a new agreement with society, your words.
#
I think, no, I think that even that new agreement in society is meaningless because people respond
#
to the structures around them, to the incentives that they face.
#
And this all powerful, oppressive state in combination with the way that our society
#
is, and you know, it hasn't changed for decades for the better.
#
And I'm not saying there'll never be change.
#
I just think that it's a really long haul and if it changes for the better, none of
#
But it's a really long haul.
#
It's not a six or eight year process and these deeper problems bother me far more because
#
I am actually lucky to be living in Maharashtra, which is a state where the BJP is not in power.
#
These deeper problems are around us.
#
I meet bigots every day.
#
I, you know, I feel the hand of the state.
#
So you know, how would you respond?
#
I would actually agree with you.
#
I don't think that anything you've said is either out of whack with what I think or what
#
I think you've just organized it better.
#
Is one of the problems the state?
#
I would say yes, that the way in which the laws have been written and the laws have been
#
interpreted, the rights of the state override the rights of the individual almost every
#
time that you have to go to a constitutional court to determine whether or not Article
#
25 is true and valid for the Muslim woman.
#
And we are going through a period where a high court is listening to such a thing.
#
Does the state have the right to deny somebody the right to wear a garment over their head?
#
The state believes it does have that right and the state wants to enforce that right.
#
This is the important thing.
#
The state is empowered in ways that it ought not to be.
#
And the state chooses to engage with that power and chooses to wield it constantly.
#
So we may have spoken about this in the last podcast, but the reality of that table of
#
rights, you mentioned Singh, he's also written a book on Article 19, do we have the right
#
You have to fill out a form and send it to the police station.
#
The police has the right to tell you whether or not they will let you peacefully assemble.
#
Do you have the right to freedom of expression?
#
You've got criminal defamation, criminal contempt, sedition, you've got mob violence, you've
#
So you don't really have the freedom to say things that people might be uncomfortable
#
Do you have the right to occupation?
#
The Supreme Court said no, that the fundamental right of the Bihari butcher to slaughter the
#
animal that he had was overwritten by the rights of the majority not to have their sentiments
#
This is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
#
So there is a structural problem there with the state that you've given it too much power
#
and it is enthusiastic and willing about using that power.
#
Is there a mechanism that you can employ to change that?
#
And I would say the answer to that is yes.
#
And does history tell us that in the long view states that have a fundamentally sound
#
structure are able to reform themselves very quickly if need be?
#
I would say yes, that if you have a fundamentally sound structure, which I think we do, which
#
is the constitution, the little stuff can be sorted out.
#
Will the state be malign even if it doesn't legally have that power?
#
I think it will to some extent because it is coded into the state to round up the house
#
servants and beat them up first before they start any kind of, you know, sort of probe
#
That's what the state is in India.
#
The most efficient part of the state in India is the police, it's law and order.
#
So some of that will remain, it will be residual, but it will be drained out in time.
#
There is no question that that is the trajectory of modern states.
#
To the second point on society, slightly more difficult.
#
I think because it's easy for us to engage with individuals and look at their traits
#
and it's much more difficult for us to portray that on a large number of people, that this
#
is how they will continue to behave.
#
Dindayal Upadhyay in his lectures, which have been compiled, the four lectures which are
#
called Integral Humanism, said that the nation was the same thing as a mob.
#
And the mob he defined, these are not his words, I'm trying to explain what it is that
#
He said that it is possessed by a frenzy which is not different one individual from the other
#
And at a larger level, this was what the nation was, that people felt something so similar
#
that they could be compared to a mob and what the mob wanted.
#
I found that sort of interesting.
#
I don't think he's right.
#
I think he's very wrong that the human being has not evolved differently one nation from
#
Cultures, faiths haven't evolved differently one nation from another.
#
The effects on fertility rates of education, modernity, poverty, illiteracy or wealth are
#
exactly the same everywhere in the world.
#
Now if something so fundamental as sex and progeny is the same, is the rest of it, can
#
Is this purely once again, the question we were talking about a while back, whereas if
#
you look at let's say the Sensex from where you're sitting from 1980, it looks like this.
#
But from where I'm sitting and I've got a narrow view, it looks like that.
#
And maybe are we looking at one of the troughs of a few years?
#
So while I completely agree with you that the party, the first part of what you said
#
was the issue and you and I agree that it is a serious problem.
#
The other two have to be addressed.
#
Will the second part be addressed through a conversation we have with the ballot box?
#
Will the third part automatically then fall into place because it follows the rules of
#
the second that the population believes that we need to do things differently because our
#
priorities must lie elsewhere in these things.
#
So I'll just think aloud and of course I agree with you entirely and Mr. Upadhyaya
#
is comparing a mob with the nation is rather strange, but there's one aspect in which
#
he might have something there, though I don't think he meant it this way.
#
There's this wonderful book by Gustave Le Bon written in the early 20th century, I think
#
it's called The Madness of Crowds or something.
#
I'll look it up and link it from the show notes.
#
But there's an interesting insight he shares on mob psychology, which is where he has this
#
concept of a threshold at which people sort of act.
#
And you know, one of my friends and you might know him as well, the journalist Rishi Majumdar,
#
he was once lynched somewhere in a small town, lynched in the sense lynched just means beaten
#
up by a crowd, by the way, doesn't mean killed.
#
So he was beaten up by a large mob.
#
And he described it to me the way he described it was that he was just arguing with a couple
#
of people and they were shouting at him and there were five, six people around him and
#
they were haranguing him.
#
And then one guy who wasn't even part of that original bunch of people, he just came from
#
the fringes and he whacked him, right?
#
Because whatever, I'm so macho, I'm just going to whack this guy.
#
And then another guy whacked him and then people, then they all joined in and everybody
#
Now, what Gustav Le Bon's and I think it is Le Bon's insight, I might get confused because
#
I read a whole bunch of books on this at that time.
#
No, I think this is a crowds in power.
#
And the insight here is that everybody has a threshold that you know, you might be a
#
person who if you feel like hitting someone, you'll hit him.
#
But then there might be someone else who will not be the first to hit, but if five other
#
people hit, he'll join in and his threshold is five.
#
And there might be somebody else whose threshold is 20.
#
And then eventually everybody has a threshold and they all join in and they beat up whatever.
#
And I wonder if, you know, in the kind of actions we see around us, whether there are
#
thresholds in play as well.
#
Anyway, that's a, I agree with you on the broad point that nations are not mobs.
#
Now I'm going to sort of try to ask another broad question and I'm going to go back to
#
what we discussed earlier of, you know, when we think of history, if we think of 150 years,
#
200 years, it's a small sample size in the larger scheme of things.
#
And another way of thinking of it like that is that we think of nation states as having
#
some kind of permanence, right?
#
That nation states have really been around for a few hundred years, not really more than
#
that in the modern form in which we know them.
#
This particular nation state of India has been around for less than 80 years now.
#
In our minds, it is a permanent thing.
#
These are lines on a map.
#
This is kind of what it is.
#
In the lived reality of people, once you forget about the oppressions of the state and the
#
limitations that imposes, this is not such a factor.
#
Like I did an episode with Nirupama Rao a couple of days back, I recorded it a couple
#
of days back, it might even release after this, where she spoke about how the people
#
of Tibet, when they would draw maps back in the day, there would be no borders on it.
#
You know, if there's a mountain, they don't want to divide it with a border.
#
If there's a river, they don't want to divide it with this thing, that the cultural similarities
#
that we have and what brings people together and you've been to Pakistan, I've been to
#
Pakistan, we know this, we are the same people, right?
#
You know, Lahore and Delhi have way more in common with each other than Delhi and Chennai.
#
And I sometimes wonder if, you know, sitting from where we are, we make a mistake in assuming
#
that this is a nation state of India, it will always look like this, borders will always
#
And maybe that's not the case.
#
Maybe you should just step back and you'll see that these things have been in flux throughout.
#
For example, you know, you do see a North-South gap coming up, this could explode when the
#
delimitation issue kind of comes up.
#
And we have the solidified notion and I would say that honestly, the India that you and
#
I love, it's sort of an abstract thing, which includes elements of culture and food and
#
language and people and all of that.
#
It is not lines on a map, right?
#
So what are kind of your thoughts on this?
#
And do you think that some of the ways in which we think about the world could be constrained
#
by our thinking in terms of these lines on a map?
#
I think that unless we acknowledge and come to terms with what we are doing in Kashmir
#
or what we have been doing for 65 years in the Northeast, this will not end well for
#
those who think of nations as lines because it's unsustainable.
#
We don't have enough sovereignty because we live in a fairly engaged world, which we want
#
We are not telling the world go get lost.
#
We are saying to the world, we want more responsibility in this world.
#
Give us a permanent seat on the security council.
#
So as a polity, as a state, we are moving in a direction where we are willing to engage
#
Willing to engage with the world more necessarily means that you're giving up sovereignty on
#
many things, that you will listen to the world.
#
That's the first aspect of losing sovereignty, that you have to stop speaking, let the other
#
person speak and then respond to them.
#
You might choose not to say anything back or you might say as this government does,
#
this is our internal matter, get lost.
#
But the reason why you're forced to say even that is that it is the first element of a
#
loss of sovereignty, which all states have, no matter how powerful.
#
In such a world as we are seeing develop, can you continue to have actions from the
#
government as we have today in the Northeast and in Kashmir?
#
I would say no, and I would say not for very long.
#
And if you don't, the external world will force changes on you.
#
And then you will not be able to see the same lines that you saw or the lines that you even
#
the lines on the ground today are not the ones that are there in my mind.
#
Most Indians would be very disturbed if they saw the actual map and were actually the line
#
For example, I was, I think 16 or 17 when I first saw it and I was traumatized because
#
the idea we have so anthropomorphize the map and it looks so much like a person that any
#
part of it, particularly the head, you know, being shown as being in a position of somebody
#
else seems very, very wrong and very off.
#
And that's the way I felt then.
#
External change will come.
#
And I'm not just talking about the fact that we engage with the world and most nations
#
want to be part of a rules based system where human rights is one of the rules, it's not
#
I think the broadest parts of change come because of technological shifts and the rate
#
at which it's happening today is much faster than it was in the past, accelerating.
#
In fact, one of the most obvious things that that occurs to somebody who looks on this
#
and says, okay, what does that have to do with the state?
#
So when Jammu and Kashmir acceded to the union, one of the conditions, one of the handful
#
of conditions they had was that communications would be controlled by the union government.
#
Communications can't be controlled by anybody today, you know, because communications that
#
word meant the telegraph and the telephone in a time of the world and maybe highways
#
if you were to sort of extend it.
#
Today, none of that is actually relevant in a world where you can communicate without
#
the state being an either a provider or an intermediary or an agent of any sort, a state
#
can deny that to you for how long, I don't know, but it cannot, it doesn't control communications
#
That whole part is gone.
#
One of only three or four things that the Union of India had wanted from Kashmir.
#
So that's the nature of the world we live in.
#
So how much power will the state have over the individual and the way they lead their
#
lives 20 years from now?
#
It's hard to imagine a world where what happens in Kashmir today, which is that there is no
#
freedom of either assembly, where there's denial of communication, are the only part
#
of the world not to have had any education through the pandemic period because for 17
#
months they didn't have any net.
#
It's hard to imagine a state doing that, being able to get away with doing that 20 years
#
I don't think it will happen.
#
So what are the options?
#
Either you fix it or it will fix itself.
#
I think those of us who are line nationalists, as I have been for most of my life, will be
#
These are problems that you cannot let fester for too long.
#
If you want these lines to remain, it will be one or the other.
#
And I think that the, what you and I saw on old maps, you know, where when you said it
#
about the Tibetans, it sort of occurred to me that really old maps don't have line.
#
They just say Tibet here, China here, India here, you know, this is very vague.
#
There's no sort of nation state type lines.
#
It will probably become that.
#
I'm saying that right now, again, looking at the kind of long view of history and the
#
short view of history, global trade was low from 2014 onwards, was very high before that.
#
Last year was the biggest, there was a 23% boom in sort of global trade.
#
Probably not because there's a sort of limited space there is.
#
But the desire is there that we want to be a world where it's easy for components to
#
shift quickly sort of in and out of countries without too much paperwork.
#
So that efficiency is where it's at.
#
I don't foresee that being too different for people either, that you will have movement
#
which will be fairly smooth and much simpler than it was 20 years ago or is, you know,
#
This sort of system, I don't think will continue for too long.
#
And it's for nation states that are particularly nationalistic or have lots of nationalistic
#
people within them to ask themselves what, because there'll be a lot of trauma.
#
This will come with a lot of pain for many people who don't think of the world as a
#
benign place outside of the nation.
#
They see their geography in sort of Chanakyan terms, you know, where the immediate neighbor
#
is an enemy and then so on.
#
That's not, I mean, that's neither is that the reality, nor is that something that they
#
will be able to escape from in the very near future.
#
I think in our lifetimes, I don't think that you and I will die in a nation that is even
#
remotely similar to the one that we are living in.
#
Yeah, I'm assuming we don't die too soon.
#
Well, I mean, in the long run, we're all dead.
#
Yeah, that's very true.
#
I'm struck by what you said there about the relevance of the nation state and that in
#
many ways it might gradually be becoming more and more helpless because one of the themes
#
I've been thinking about and in different contexts, and it seems to really apply uniformly
#
and might apply to this also, is the dissipation of mainstreams and the decentralization of
#
We see this in the media, for example, where you had a consensus on the truth in the 90s
#
because you had these mainstream outlets and they controlled everything and that's completely
#
dissipated information, knowledge, anyone can kind of go there.
#
And I think net-net, it's a good thing, but obviously it has obvious negative effects,
#
which we've kind of seen equally in the worlds of cinema, in the worlds of music.
#
You have these kinds of dissipation, Steve Van Zandt said in a spoken and old interview
#
about you had a mainstream in music, which was rock and in the Western world, only really
#
between the 60s, Beatles, Dylan going electric to Nirvana.
#
And after that is kind of dissipated in all the kinds of little niches that often don't
#
even talk to each other.
#
And I wonder if that's one of those illustrations of something that is mainstream, not recognizing
#
its own irrelevance is the whole nation state kind of thing where we don't need to function
#
within those frameworks as well.
#
Individuals are empowered by technology and trade to kind of go beyond it.
#
And a lot of the authoritarianism that you see is in a sense a kind of response to that.
#
I think that the nation state is constructed for a reality which is very fast eroding.
#
So let's say one aspect is the military, which is like a disproportionate sum is spent
#
by many nations, which face very little threat on things, on toys that they will never use.
#
We've bought 36 planes for 59,000 crore rupees when the last war where we used fighter jets
#
in meaningfully was 50 years ago.
#
Do we foresee a war with the state sort of anytime soon?
#
But that is the architecture of the state that it looks on itself, not only as a provider
#
of security and a sovereign, but also a provider of services to the community that it services
#
Are we built for purpose, as the corporate set would say, no.
#
Because the impulse of the state in many parts of the world, including ours, is to focus
#
disproportionately large resources on the negative side of what it does, stopping people
#
from doing something, law and order, rather than being able to make things more sort of
#
not just efficient because that's a word that has been captured by the set that extols
#
Aadhaar, but by making things easier for the citizen and the individual to enjoy their
#
There is a disconnect between that kind of Ramraj, real Ramrajya type thing, which I
#
presume is what was meant when that phrase was constructed.
#
I hope it wasn't the fact that we should have a sort of society that is stratified by caste.
#
Either you change yourself or you fail and failure comes to many states.
#
It may interest your listeners to know that India has substantially moved away from the
#
Nordic states on the failed states index towards Somalia and Yemen.
#
We are moving in that, we're not there yet, obviously.
#
But the direction of the movement is sort of in the wrong way.
#
And I think only one reason is that first part of the three part problem that you spoke
#
of, which is the party in power.
#
I think in large measure is also the third part, which is that the state is not built
#
for the purpose of modern living, tends to focus on the wrong things too much of the
#
time and will have to change or will have change forced on it.
#
Yeah, I'm reminded of, you know, Francis Fukuyama had sort of, I learned about a framework of
#
looking at the state through him where you look at it alongside accesses of scope and
#
And the problem with the Indian state really is that it should do a few things and do them
#
really well, like protect rights, like rule of law and all of that.
#
But it does many things and does them really badly.
#
And of course, it does a few things like rent seeking exceedingly well.
#
But that aside, so, you know, this is just sort of a fundamental problem with it.
#
I want to sort of, you know, almost continuing along the same lines, but on a sideways team,
#
you know, one of the, for me, the most interesting debate in that Nehru book I mentioned was
#
between Nehru and Mohammed Iqbal.
#
And there I realized that, you know, there's almost a sense that Nehru doesn't understand
#
what Iqbal is all about and then Iqbal writes him this letter where he's very patiently
#
explaining to him that it's almost like, dekho beta ye hai.
#
And it seems to me that Nehru's focus is on the nation state that is to come, that is
#
Nehru, that is India and he's already got that idea of India in his head, which he develops,
#
solidifies all of that.
#
And that is where we are and that is where we went.
#
Iqbal's focus is on a bunch of different things.
#
And his thing is the Muslims of India and indeed elsewhere are not just thinking of
#
a nation state, you know, they are also simultaneously grappling with does their loyalty lie to Ummah,
#
which is a larger sort of Muslim brotherhood, a Muslim nation, as it were.
#
And at this point, we are in the British Empire.
#
There is no Indian state yet.
#
So, you know, while Nehru's focused on that one thing, they are talking at cross purposes
#
because to Iqbal, there are other worries which encompasses, which go well beyond this,
#
And so tell me a little bit about and perhaps you could argue that, you know, some Hindus
#
may have also, you know, had a crude version of the same thing, that it was not about nation
#
state, it was reaching ancient Hindu glory again and all of that, but leaving that aside
#
and it seems to me that in a sense, it's a tragedy for the Muslims of this geography
#
that they kind of first got trapped by partition and then they got trapped into a particular
#
nation state, which has now gone along this particular direction.
#
And it almost seems that this continuity with history, they were, you know, there were thoughts
#
kind of going in different, this thing, and I'm not obviously saying that the Ummah could
#
be something concrete or it could be something, but in terms of your sense of identity, then
#
perhaps being constrained in one way and perhaps being expanded in a good way where, you know,
#
as a citizen of a nation state, you know, there are good aspects to that as well.
#
So what is kind of your sense of the history of this?
#
Because now sitting in the current moment, everything seems solid to us, that nation
#
state, India, line on a map, it is solid, you know, we have Muslims, you know, Pakistan
#
doesn't have so many Hindus, so we are secular, but we have 15%, all of this is happening.
#
Everything kind of seems solid, but these are really to me, for lack of a better term,
#
I'm not being very eloquent, these are kind of liquid questions, these are, you know,
#
the resonances of the past continue to echo today.
#
No, the two things that I think would stand out in terms of not being as solid in the
#
period that you're speaking of would be first that the, because they were in a weaker opposition
#
in bargaining terms, the Muslim League said, they said two things, one is guarantee us
#
a certain number of seats in these areas and in the union, separate electorates, which
#
the Congress said no to.
#
The second thing that they said as a compromise, if not this, then this, not a strong union
#
government, a federal government, a federation of states that become a unified India, Congress
#
said no to that, Nehru wanted, Nehru is closer to the BJP in many ways.
#
He sees India as this kind of, you know, civilizational state, Bharat Mata, as you said, forward
#
looking into what it could become rather than what it was.
#
And also exactly like the BJP, the BJP, this is the same set of speeches again, Dindyar
#
Upadhyay, did not want the states, he said that we cannot have Tamil Mata, Banga Mata,
#
Bihar Mata, we only have Bharat Mata, so there will only be one legislative body in
#
the center and you'll have the village.
#
And the dislike of federation continues, I think that GST, with GST we've seen the states
#
give up a lot of the power that they had, which they shouldn't have, I think.
#
And you're seeing that people are questioning even Article 1 of the constitution, perhaps
#
not knowing that it's there, that we are a union of states, which is what we are.
#
So at that point, I don't think they foresaw it becoming this and I think that they would
#
have acted, or at least tried to I hope, in substantial measure to not reach where we
#
Iqbal, who died 10 years before partition, 1938, he went to Spain, so he's a lawyer,
#
not a man who was part of government, also poet, very fine one, went to Spain and saw
#
the West and said Spain is obviously the sort of what many Muslims consider to be the high
#
water mark of their civilization.
#
And felt that there's something wrong that's happening here and it's happened because of
#
faith, that there's some linkage to faith, that if we are able to fix that, we can go
#
back to be as good as we were then and then we can compete with the West on good terms.
#
I don't think that the idea was conquest, the idea was, okay, what's wrong with us?
#
And to his mind, the biggest influencer was faith, that if you fixed faith, then you would
#
be able to fix yourself.
#
So he is a supporter of the idea that you Islamize government, that you bring in faith
#
into the state and then by that thing, two things change, one is the faith itself becomes
#
more modern and then the state itself becomes more sort of Islamic.
#
When Liaquat Ali Khan speaks to the constituent assembly, the minorities are very vocal, they
#
say that this is a problem, you're going to introduce religion into the law, we'll be
#
His speech, he says, no, we'll make sure that that's not the case, but most of his speeches
#
on the fact that he's saying that this is not aimed at you, it's aimed at Muslims.
#
That the modernity had run far ahead, he's speaking in 1950, so this is just a few years
#
after the atom bomb is thrown on Japan, he's saying that it's reached far beyond the spiritual
#
side of man and we need to integrate the two.
#
And so he comes to the same conclusion as Iqbal does that, if we were to integrate faith
#
into the state, we could reform both and make them sort of better, which didn't happen obviously.
#
The interesting thing to me is that while India in the last few years, legally speaking,
#
has become communal, it has introduced religion into the idea of citizenship, the right to
#
propagation was taken away from the Christians very early on, which is both a criminal offense
#
and a fundamental right in this strange nation.
#
And the sort of introduction of the criminalization of the possession of beef, what we are seeing
#
with the hijab and the law, Pakistan's moving in the opposite direction, it's secularizing
#
So Pakistan, Bangladesh and India have the same 150 year old penal code which was given
#
The only way that Pakistan felt it could do something different from us was to change
#
So they introduced in the 80s lashing for drinking, which they haven't carried out in
#
The Supreme Court has read down the offense of drinking saying that it's not a sin.
#
They introduced the hadhudud, the punishments where you would cut somebody's hand off at
#
the wrist for theft and then the leg the next time and so on.
#
And they trained a set of surgeons to carry out these amputations and never even carried
#
Doctors were terrified when they were being trained.
#
The judges were all trained in common law.
#
So Pakistan has tried to become sort of Islamic and very different from India and from Bangladesh
#
Laws that were introduced also in the 80s on say rape, where rape was taken out of the
#
penal code and sent into Sharia, where if the woman who was raped couldn't prove by bringing
#
four male witnesses to the act of rape, which was an impossibility, then she would be charged
#
So under Musharraf, that law was brought back into the penal code from a Sharia.
#
It's very difficult to tell the difference between the Islamic state of Pakistan and
#
the secular Republic of sort of India in terms of law, because they pretty much show the
#
Even in terms of policy, they show the same thing.
#
Pakistan by law, no non-Muslim can become the prime minister there.
#
There is no chance of a Muslim becoming a prime minister here.
#
So whether it's through your actions or through your statement of intent on what you want
#
to be, there is not that much difference.
#
And I think that both sets of people, Nehru on this side, because he was the most obstinate,
#
and I think Liaquat and Jinnah himself and the rest of them, Iqbal certainly, had looked
#
on the subcontinent of 2022, would have had to recalibrate the way that they imagined
#
both the nation state and the role of faith.
#
So you know, I mean, if Pakistan is moving in the right direction, then that's one thing
#
that supports your argument of the arc of history going towards a good place as well.
#
And one thing the arc of history certainly does is go towards a commercial break.
#
So we'll take a quick break and then we'll come back and continue this discussion.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog, India Uncut,
#
which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
#
I 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.
#
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.
#
I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write
#
regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
#
I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
#
Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
#
You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
#
Welcome back to the Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Aakar Patel.
#
So one of the really interesting bits about your Price of the Modi year is a book and
#
A lot of it is interesting, but I love the introduction where you speak about Modi and
#
at one point you have this passage in the book where you write, Modi's contribution
#
has been to align the party to its original RSS roots while retaining and increasing mass
#
support and bringing crores more to the ideology of Hindutva.
#
He has legitimized and normalized the RSS and made its values, promoting an exclusionary
#
nationalism acceptable to Indians.
#
What was once communal is now legitimate and what was secular has been made inauthentic.
#
It is a remarkable achievement and must be acknowledged.
#
And you know, I want to ask you at this point about, you know, Carlisle's great man theory
#
of history, where the great man theory of history is of course that there are great
#
men who move history and make things happen and blah, blah, blah, yeah.
#
And many historians would argue that that's not the case.
#
We are giving too much credit to great men and women and mostly men and history, unfortunately.
#
And really currents of history move in a particular direction and individuals don't play such
#
And the reason I read out the para is I was struck by this, Modi's contribution is this.
#
It is a remarkable achievement.
#
Now, on the one hand, it strikes me that, you know, that in a sense, this was waiting
#
Society catching up with politics was waiting to happen.
#
Inevitably at some point it happened.
#
And you know, you can argue about the timing this way or that way, but it would have happened.
#
But the other argument is that, like you're saying, individuals do make a difference.
#
There's Modi who managed to build this personality cult.
#
There's Amit Shah, whose skills as an election manager are indisputable in the way that he
#
managed to consolidate the Hindu vote.
#
And again, there are all the counterfactuals, like Keshava Guha wrote an essay about, think
#
of all the untimely deaths which enabled the state of events today, Pramod Mahajan dying,
#
Would Modi have come up in the party in the way that he did if Pramod Mahajan hadn't died?
#
Or within the Congress, strong leaders like, you know, Sindhiya Pailet and so on dying,
#
you know, would the family have captured the party so completely if those guys had still
#
So what are your kind of views on this, because it's very easy to make this one man, Modi,
#
the locus of the whole thing and say that, OK, he's come around and he's changed all
#
this and so on and so forth.
#
But the other side also seems plausible to me that this shit would have happened anyway.
#
Maybe somebody else would have been in charge.
#
Maybe the BJP would have come to power in 2019 instead of 2014.
#
Maybe it would have been Adityanath, maybe it would have been someone else.
#
I'd see it as a car, the car, the first gear is the most powerful gear in the car.
#
It takes you from zero to somewhere.
#
Going from 40 to 60 is not that big a deal.
#
Modi took a party which was at about 20 percent of the vote to about 38 percent of the vote.
#
That is his contribution.
#
He's brought in people who are not traditionally BJP voters into the party.
#
He has also, for the first part of what you read out, the context is technical.
#
That is when in 1980 the BJP decided to rename itself from the Janasangh, Vajpayee said that
#
he wanted to transform what was a carder based party by which he meant all the office bearers
#
of the Janasangh were members of the RSS.
#
That was the qualification that they needed to have.
#
From that carder based party, Vajpayee said, let's make this a mass based party by which
#
he meant that you don't necessarily have to be a part of the RSS to be a part of the
#
But he was not able to succeed in large a measure.
#
But the fact is that from single digit vote shares all through the 50s, 60s and 70s, the
#
BJP only achieved double digit vote share and its first state victories after Advani
#
took over the party and decided that this was a good issue to campaign on.
#
Vajpayee didn't know what to mobilize people on.
#
He had no idea that even Advani did not know that this would be a big issue to mobilize
#
He says he writes in his book, My Country, My Life, that he was surprised when he got
#
the response that he did on his Arat Yatra, which Modi was the organizer of the first
#
Then you had a very serious episode of violence and 3000 Indians died, but the party got its
#
first states, UP, it won UP.
#
That was, I think, the shift for the BJP from being many decades run as a hardworking kind
#
of RSS type discipline force into a mass force.
#
That is what Advani did.
#
Modi carried it to the next step.
#
So I don't think it is fair to either to Advani or the rest of the people within the BJP to
#
say that this is one man's doing.
#
It's much easier to take the party from 20 to 38 than it is from 0 to 5, you know, which
#
is what a lot of people did before him, including Dindayal Upadhyaya and Balraj Mathok and Vajpayee,
#
What he's done in a period of our history where the idea that India is destined for
#
greatness and that greatness was not very far off and that greatness could be achieved
#
through an individual, charismatic person, came together with this man.
#
He had one more advantage, which is that he's the only leader in our history, the only chief
#
minister in our history, because law and order is a state problem, to remain in office after
#
Nobody else in our, everybody else, if you look at Gujarat itself, 69, you know, Hithendar
#
Wherever we've had violence, including in Maharashtra, Nayak was taken out, Pawar, when
#
you have mass violence, we seem to think that we know that justice will almost never come.
#
But one thing that we can do to move on from this is to change the face of the leadership
#
so that society can feel that the past was wrong and then, you know, we've moved on.
#
It didn't happen in Gujarat.
#
Not only did it not happen, he was endorsed by the Hindu voters three times after that.
#
And so he was able to, without doing anything, retain that Hindutva majoritarian charisma
#
that was his when he oversaw the events which are this week, exactly 20 years old.
#
Vajpayee was unable to remove him.
#
He tried to wrestle him down in Goa and Modi said that he would resign if the party wanted
#
The carder barked at Vajpayee and said, you can't do this, he has to remain.
#
And I think he expresses a very confident majoritarianism which Vajpayee did not or
#
Advani tried to, but also muffled his voice by saying, you know, saddest day of my life
#
There is nothing apologetic about what Modi says or does, which is what makes him attractive
#
to a large part of his constituency.
#
In his absence, to sort of return to what you said, would we still have arrived at this
#
It is highly unlikely that the natural cause would have brought us here.
#
And for this reason that in taking the party from 20 to 38, he brought in people who are
#
not traditionally majoritarian voters, a large part of his popularity, which is then reflected
#
in his image in the media, is his messianic quality as somebody who will bring India to
#
what is called a developed nation, whatever that means, that we will sort of become the
#
next US or the next China, which we are not clearly now, now that the evidence is there.
#
And that part of that vote would not have come to the BJP just automatically.
#
You needed somebody from a mercantile type background running a state for several years
#
and able to still retain that quality of being Hindutva minded automatically as he is.
#
So he was able to bring those things together.
#
In his absence, I don't think they would be at 38%.
#
Would he have brought the party to 5% from zero?
#
He doesn't have the focus or the concentration, extremely solipsistic and sort of inward looking.
#
He's the antithesis of all those people who we barely remember the faces of who brought
#
the party to 18 and 20%.
#
And I think because he's spent two decades in office of sitting over absolute majorities
#
for all of these 20 years, he hasn't, he's never learned how to compromise, how to take
#
no for an answer, how to step back.
#
And he's been forced to externally by the women of Shaheen Bagh on the issue of CA,
#
by the farmers mostly Sikh on the issue of the farm laws, as will happen also on the
#
And that is not the sign of somebody who can build something.
#
You can only construct when you have the patience and the ability to work with people.
#
If you're focused on yourself all the time, which he is, you're not going to be able to
#
So I would, in this instance, definitely, I would say that in his absence, the party
#
would not be where it is today.
#
But also that in his presence, the party would not be where it was in the 60s and 70s.
#
Lots to think about that.
#
But you know, my brief counterpoint to that would be that this widening of the base, I
#
think had started happening before that.
#
I mean, even if you think back to 2010, 2011, India against corruption, the anger against
#
the that dispensation coming to the brim, people just fed up of corruption, people fed
#
up of everything that was happening, you know, and had Vajpayee been 10 years younger and
#
still been around, he would actually have had a record in government to point out because
#
he did do a lot of economic reforms.
#
And in that sense, he had already walked that talk to some extent, I feel like Modi was
#
right time, right place in the sense he came along at a time where everything was there
#
and he captured it and he embodied it.
#
And there's no question that he obviously didn't believe it because a lot of the rhetoric
#
that he gave, like Salman Sohz was on my show and he said, even though I'm from the Congress,
#
when he came to power, there's a part of me, which said, maybe it's a good thing.
#
Maybe he'll do all of these things, minimum government, maximum governance and all of
#
And you know, almost none of that happened, you realized immediately that that was just
#
I'm also struck by, you know, the narrative of the 80s, that when Vajpayee started the
#
BJP circa 1980, he spoke of Gandhian socialism because he wanted to kind of expand that.
#
You know, they got very few seats in that first 84 parliament, but Veer Sanghvi's argument
#
in his book, and he also expanded upon it in his episode with me, was that 1984 vote
#
for Rajiv Gandhi was a Hindu vote because it was an anti Sikh vote, it was a Hindu vote,
#
The BJP realized that what the hell is happening, we are talking Gandhian socialism while the
#
Congress is getting the Hindu vote.
#
So they pivoted and they went hardcore and Rajiv Gandhi didn't realize this and he lost
#
that and you know, and it worked out for the BJP, right time, right place, everything.
#
But it was Rajiv Gandhi who opened up, you know, the Babri Manchita at that time.
#
So it's like that force in society, you know, whether you call it the Hindu vote, whether
#
you judge it one way or another way, that doesn't matter.
#
That force was there, it was going to be expressed, it was going to grow and it kind of, you know,
#
went in that direction.
#
Would you differ with, for example, Veer's view of the 80s and so on?
#
I haven't read his book, but I'll say this, that what do we know about the manifestos
#
of the Janasangh and the BJP?
#
They don't change at all.
#
It's exactly the same issues throughout the decades.
#
When Vajpayee cedes the presidency to Advani for two years, Advani doesn't do anything.
#
He doesn't know what to do basically.
#
What happens is that a bunch of people within the BJP who are also connected to the VHP,
#
including Rajmatas India and Katiyar, they begin to associate themselves with this movement
#
which says that we need to break this mosque and we need to build a temple.
#
Advani at some point determines that he will throw the party's weight behind it, despite
#
the fact that, as you say, the BJP's constitution, the first page of which says that we will
#
sort of adhere to Gandhian socialism.
#
That will be the party's guiding, that will be the party's official philosophy, I think,
#
if I'm not mistaken, and the guiding philosophy will be integral humanism.
#
They also, Vajpayee, nine years before the law was passed, puts in secular into the party's
#
constitution saying that we will sort of adhere to our secularism.
#
I think the shift is the Babri Masjid.
#
Can you mobilize around violence against Muslims and Advani figures that the answer to that
#
Would that naturally have happened in democratic politics?
#
No, you need an agent to make it nasty.
#
If you are sane in this country, you don't have too much of a problem with the DMC, or
#
the INC, or the ADMK, or the DMK, or whatever, or Navin Patnaik, or PDP, or whoever else.
#
But if you do have that bent of mind, there is only one party for you.
#
It's only the BJP, wherever in the country you are.
#
So that tells you that it's not normal.
#
Doing this requires something within you that most people don't have.
#
Most parties don't want to have.
#
It's the best at doing it for this reason, that it's genuine.
#
It's genuinely bigoted, and it displays its bigotry.
#
Well, Modi is the best person to express it.
#
You spoke about Vajpayee and the auties, or the late 90s, and walking the talk.
#
The demonstration is there.
#
Eight years is sufficient evidence.
#
This is the period between the capture of the chancellorship and the beginning of the
#
All the time is already there.
#
The data shows that there is failure.
#
You could argue that we got one lakh crore rupees in GST last year, which is what in his
#
defense has said that, oh, the GST, we are back to where we were in 2018, and that's
#
I don't know what that means, but he's not able to walk.
#
He walks in disastrous ways, like demonetization was literally stamping on the walls.
#
Messianic figures in our part of the world are dangerous, whether they are from the Congress
#
Party or whether they are from the BJP, because the polity will just dissolve.
#
Not only bend, it will not...
#
There is no ability to say no, and there is no ability to execute with competence, which
#
is the worst kind of thing to be in and have a very strong leader, which is what we have
#
and which is why we are where we are.
#
I did an episode with Vinay Sitapati on his book on the BJP for Modi, as it were.
#
And one of the interesting points he made there was that in his view, Vajpayee and Advani
#
were playing the game because that's where they saw the biggest benefit for their politics,
#
that this is how you can mobilize people and blah, blah, blah.
#
But according to him, Modi and Shah were true believers, which is dangerous and which ties
#
in with what you're kind of saying.
#
I want to talk a little bit about Modi now, but in a sense that there is a wider application
#
So I'd written a column a few years back called the Ankho Dekhi Prime Minister, and that was
#
based on an anecdote that a friend of Modi's told me.
#
And this friend of his used to work with him in the auties when he was CM of Gujarat.
#
And she describes that one evening there was like a personal gathering at his residence
#
of six or seven people.
#
And he was telling them a story about how his mother was once ill when he was a boy.
#
His mother was very ill and he went to switch on the fan because she was feeling hot.
#
And he realized that there is no electricity.
#
And as he related the story, he started crying.
#
And my friend's point of this was that his understanding of the world is purely experiential.
#
He has experienced that electricity is a big deal.
#
He has experienced that roads matter.
#
So when he comes to power, these are the things he focuses on.
#
But beyond this, he can't comprehend anything.
#
In fact, my column was sort of in a sense an argument for reading more that, you know,
#
an experiential understanding of the world only goes so far.
#
There are so many things beyond this, especially when you're running a country.
#
You think of things like, you know, spontaneous order, the way economies organize themselves
#
and how all human interactions are a positive sum game.
#
And these are unintuitive things that you do not really understand all the time from
#
And my point with him was that in his case, one cannot judge him for not being a good
#
reader because that's a question of privilege.
#
If he hasn't read, he hasn't read.
#
But then the approach of a person like that is that you have the intellectual humility.
#
You surround yourself with experts and you listen to them and you understand the limitations
#
of your own knowledge and understanding.
#
And in that area, he's completely lacking.
#
And I want to quote this bit and this is really you quoting Modi.
#
So it's Modi himself where in your book, you quote this Madhu Kishwer interview from 2014
#
and there and these are more these words, which are quoting that as a YouTube link.
#
I'll put in the show notes.
#
And he told Ms. Kishwer, quote, three or four days after I had taken office as chief minister,
#
the chief secretary came to me.
#
He brought a heap of files this tall and he made a gesture about three feet high.
#
They must have weighed 15 or 20 kilos, a peon left them on my table.
#
The chief secretary sat and said to me, this is a file for Narmada.
#
I can remember Narmada, but there were three other files also.
#
The CS said, these are on Gujarat's vital and sensitive issues.
#
Take the time out to read them.
#
You may need to speak on or take a position on at any time and address all these issues.
#
I kept looking up and down the height of the stack three or four times.
#
I said to him, you leave here and we shall meet in a few days.
#
I did not even open those files.
#
They stayed where they were, a stock quote and so on and so forth.
#
And basically the thrust of it is that he'll tell any of the bureaucrats with him that
#
you summarize it in a couple of words and in a couple of lines or, you know, you know,
#
give me a couple of slides and basically just sort of sum it up.
#
So obviously no appetite for complexity.
#
And this also reminds me of something that Harry Truman said when he was president, where
#
he said, give me a one-handed economist because all his economists kept saying on one hand
#
this on the other hand, that so he was like, no, you want certainty.
#
You want to be able to take decisions.
#
And I, and the reason I, you know, love this part where you talk about Modi is that you
#
talk about two qualities that are ascribed to him, decisiveness and charismatic.
#
And you break it down and you talk about why they are really bad qualities.
#
And it seemed to me that this simplistic appetite for knowledge that, you know, make it simple
#
And, you know, the certainties that come from this, it seems to me that they tie in directly
#
to these two words, decisive and charismatic.
#
So break those down a little bit for me, because I love the way you did that in the book.
#
The guy who was the chief secretary then 21 years ago is still in Modi's office, a guy
#
So these are the same people he's worked with and is, you know, are comfortable working
#
with who are willing to do what it is that he requires them to do.
#
And it appears based on his words that he does not like, as you said, a complexity that
#
the simplification of an issue down to its essential elements is sufficient for him to
#
understand it at like whatever depth he feels is necessary.
#
But to add to that, he has the quality of based on that material deciding what it is
#
that should be done next.
#
And I think that a lot of the things that you might look at as unique things that he
#
has brought into the system on the side of the economy, on the side of foreign policy,
#
on the side of national security can be seen as emanating from these two characteristics
#
where the problem is simplified and then that simplified problem is given a solution which
#
It doesn't even work at the level of a household, forget at the level of a nation where things
#
unfortunately are so complex that they can never be simplified.
#
It's not possible that the what ifs are so many that to calculate each of them would
#
be to count the atoms of the universe.
#
But that is what certitude is.
#
It says that there is a certain way of doing things which will either break from the past
#
or be done right by this person who means well.
#
I think that's the one thing.
#
I think he is able to absorb his mistakes because I think he genuinely believes and
#
maybe it is the case that he means well.
#
So once that is internalized, then it doesn't matter then failure or what somebody else
#
sees as failure is just fate.
#
It's not for lack of the person's intent and lack of the person's honesty.
#
Somebody who breaks down crying while speaking about himself will have such characteristics
#
and I think that it will be interesting if somebody once again looks at him.
#
I'm not talking of a psychological profile, but I'm saying that somebody who understands
#
human beings at large and how they behave just like Ashish Nandi looked at him and said
#
that this is much before he became the Chief Minister and was able to identify traits in
#
him that have all come to be shown by Modi and so are true.
#
He shows them quite openly.
#
I think if your listeners were to go back to that video, he's quite proud of the fact
#
that he can't do this through academics study.
#
That is what those are the words that he uses and then he repeats himself.
#
He sort of emphasizes that.
#
My way is to get the gist of something and then throw a silver bullet at it.
#
One of the problems is that very complex problems require very big minds to be thrown at them.
#
When you have a very complex problem with somebody who refuses to approach it intellectually
#
and has a cabal around him which is willing to go, the same person that's spoken of in
#
their interview sits in the PMO today, PK Mishra, it's bizarre that nothing has been
#
learned not only by Modi but by those who feed him the stuff.
#
There are technical problems with this which I have also discussed I think in this book
#
which is that you can only know what is fed to you.
#
If you tell somebody summarize that book for me, I will only receive what that person chooses
#
Similarly, because I am very charismatic and very powerful that person might not wish to
#
displease me by saying something that might offend or sort of upset me particularly if
#
I have a gigantic ego and so now you are looking at, now it's several problems that structurally
#
Ratan Roy who was on the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, a group of only
#
25 people says that people were angry with him for things that he said on television
#
that had been sent to them in writing much before because they hadn't read it, nobody
#
read anything but when you came on TV to say the same thing they got upset because they
#
felt you know this is not the way things are.
#
So it's quite strange I think we will never have it but an insider's look into the PMO
#
after 2014 would be both a fabulous book to write and a terrifying one to read I think
#
the way that this places that in Gujarat because we have a very strong Union government, the
#
damage that could be locally inflicted was minimal and almost none of it through law,
#
you can't make up laws like demonetization or like GST when you're sitting in Ghani Nagar.
#
So this part was hidden actually because he didn't have enough authority to be able to
#
display his full prowess but now that he's been given it not only in terms of the nature
#
of the office but also the number of seats that he's got and the continual ability of
#
this man to keep things focused on him means that this will not change.
#
Yeah I want to quote couple of the lines of Ashish Nandi where he spoke about this meeting
#
and for some reason the year 1988 keeps coming to my head so I don't know if I'm confusing
#
it with something else or Nandi's interview was in 1988 but it was a long long time before
#
Modi rose to positions of power and he wrote of Modi quote, he had the same mix of puritanical
#
rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defense of projection, denial
#
and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence, all set within the
#
matrix of clear, paranoid and obsessive personality traits. I still remember the cool measured
#
tone in which he elaborated a theory of cosmic conspiracy against India that painted every
#
Muslim as a suspected traitor and a potential terrorist. I came out of the interview shaken
#
and told Yagnik the person who went with him that for the first time I had met a textbook
#
case of a fascist stop quote and if it is 1988 it's like quite because this just sounds
#
I think it's 1999, I think it's just after the yatra was organized. I could be wrong
#
Yeah, I mean I have that…
#
No, he wrote about this in seminar in 2002 just after the…
#
Yeah, he wrote about it much later. And it's interesting because what to us is a bug that
#
here is a guy who doesn't read, who's full of certainties, who doesn't have humility
#
then becomes a feature for the electorate because this is the, for example, this is
#
a result of his decisiveness, that he has no self-doubt at all, he doesn't know enough
#
to have self-doubt and people want decisiveness. This is, you know, his charisma comes from
#
here because otherwise you would expect people to have humility, modesty to realize that
#
they may be wrong but he's like superly confident and that kind of makes him charismatic. It's
#
like, you know, Yeats said the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate
#
Think about it, you've got a bunch of very smart officers in the PMO including the guy
#
who's now the finance secretary, T.V. Somanathan, who are told by Modi one day that we are going
#
to get rid of the currency and they are not only are they saying no to him, they are executing
#
it with whatever level of competence that they had. It's fascinating that A, you have
#
such a person in office and he is popular for what he's done. It's also fascinating
#
that really smart individuals, responsible, mature individuals who wouldn't do the sort
#
of things that they do at home are willing to do them in an office and I don't know
#
how many people know this but the man who came up with the demonetization scheme is
#
this guy who's a diploma, an engineer from Pune who says that he went to Modi for 10
#
minutes. This is just before the 2014 polls and then he spends more than an hour with
#
him and he says Modi was riveted by what he said and you've got these people with PhDs,
#
you know, gone to Harvard and so on who are standing around Modi, I doubt that they sit
#
in his presence, who are carrying this out. It says something about us as a society that
#
we don't have the ability whether it's the Supreme Court, whether it's the High Court
#
here or whether it's the IAS to be able to say no to this man. We just go with what it
#
is that he wants. Yeah and actually demonetization is a classic
#
example of the kind of folksy thinking that he does, that you know the logic for him must
#
have been that hey black money is kept in these big notes so let's get rid of the notes.
#
He makes it very clear why it is that he's doing this, that it's going to get rid of
#
corruption, it's going to get rid of black money, it's going to get rid of terrorism.
#
And it also shows his disconnect with the real world because had he actually, you know,
#
he wouldn't have visited a panwala in 20 years so he wouldn't have known that these are really
#
not high value notes, a medium of exchange, not storage. But then that goes back to your
#
friend and what she or he said about the experiential mind, right?
#
No and just thinking back to a very interesting point that you made, that you have all these
#
intelligent people who are IAS officers and economists in the middle of Harvard, Stanford,
#
why are they not saying anything? And I think that this would create a kind of negative
#
feedback loop which would make Modi even stupider than he is.
#
I beg you, Debra, I said on television to Karan Thapar that demonetization would have
#
no effect on GDP growth.
#
Which he must have absolutely 100% known is a blatant lie. It's like, you know, no, I
#
wrote a piece at that time talking about, you know, the useful idiots, a phrase used
#
by Lenin, you know, so the useful idiots, not in a literal way, but Lenin used it for
#
these so-called intellectuals who will then align with an authoritarian and their useful
#
idiots, right? Therefore, and what I had written then was that any economist who supports
#
demonetization is either a bad economist or a bad human being.
#
You know, I think you have it there. It's the bad human beingness. Panagariya will one
#
day say that the government's doing absolutely the wrong things and the next day praise Modi
#
for doing what he has on the economy. And I think that the consistent part of those
#
two days is the fact that what Modi does outside of the economy, Panagariya absolutely agrees
#
with. So his love for the man doesn't come out of the mischief that is being played on
#
Well, he may not even agree with anything. He wants to be close to power.
#
He left power. He left-
#
If you're a classical economist and you've got where the sort of Holy Grail is a free
#
trade and you're running away, not only are you running away from it, you're raising tariffs
#
and so on. You're doing exactly the opposite of it. At some point, maybe his economist
#
self said that it wants to wave goodbye to the sort of more primitive, bigoted self that
#
adores what else was going on.
#
There's something larger here that bothers me a lot, and this is something I've seen
#
in recent years with even a small set of people who supported Modi and a large set of people
#
who supported Trump, for example. Trump went against every value of the Republican Party
#
in terms of being anti-trade and all of that, just a whole bunch of whatever, and it leads
#
me to think about how many of us who claim to be principled, who posture of ourselves
#
as principled people, actually it's a posturing. It's a tribe we are part of and those principles
#
are part of the uniform we wear. But when push comes to shove, we don't really give
#
a shit about the principles.
#
But tell me something, does that also hold for me in my area of expertise, my domain
#
knowledge? I've spent 60 years studying this stuff, and I think I know a set of... Can
#
I be motivated sufficiently to violate every single principle that I believe to be true
#
and good in that one part of the world that I know really well? And the answer seems to
#
be yes, that I'm willing to go along with whatever, so long as...
#
Some people are, some people aren't. Like, speaking of you, I'm sure you never got, right?
#
And you know, I've criticized every government that's been there, and it's on the basis
#
of principles. So, but you know, there's like Panagari has blocked me on Twitter actually,
#
because I just kept writing about him. And just this morning, somebody asked me, would
#
I ever have Vivek Debra on my show? And I just feel so strongly about demonetization.
#
He stopped coming on the media. He doesn't appear anymore.
#
Yeah, I mean, he should be a little embarrassed of the last few years, I guess.
#
I don't think he is, because he is sort of accessible on Twitter. So you can go and say,
#
you know, whatever it is that you want to him, and he's fine with that.
#
I have no desire to do that. But yeah.
#
Not just you, I'm saying that, you know, he's opening himself up to abuse. What he doesn't
#
want is to be questioned on what the government has done. And he's free not to reply on Twitter.
#
So he's got both things.
#
No, and he's written lovely books, you know, and Panagariya, if you look at his economics
#
work before all of this, there's some fine work in there. So at some level, it's a human
#
tragedy for me to kind of see people debase and degrade themselves in the manner that
#
these people have, perhaps bebeak more than Mr. Panagariya.
#
Yeah, and also the idea that there was a set of people who believe in conservatism. I don't
#
know what is what the right means when it calls itself the right, if it calls itself
#
the right. But there is no conservatism. This man is a radical. He's going to undo the system
#
violently through strokes on the economy, on foreign policy, on national security. This
#
is exactly the opposite of what conservative right-wing people do. And I think the parallel
#
with Trump is absolutely right that they discarded the principles at the door the moment he went
#
into the White House. Everybody who worked with him. I don't think there was any kind
#
of republican sense of like focus on the things that the party had focused on and what had
#
Yeah. And got to thinking about this where you mentioned that how no one can have questions
#
and I think there might be a negative feedback loop in play there. That once people realize
#
that he wants yes men or who will give him simplistic narratives that he agrees with,
#
they only keep doing that. Only people like that survive with him.
#
You've probably nailed it.
#
And because that is the only feedback that he's getting, it diminishes even him because
#
that's the only thing he's hearing.
#
It's the difference between Amitabh Kant and Vivek Debra and of course P.K. Mishra and
#
Apana Garia who at some point would have drawn the line and said no to this and moved on.
#
The next point I want to make up is that you spoke about how he may have the best intentions
#
and it's quite possible he may. And even he himself, I think after Demon at some point
#
he says, meri niyat toh achi thi. And I think of this and it strikes me that actually this
#
doesn't matter at all. I think what we need, what we need is a system within which even
#
if the worst human being on the planet became Prime Minister, the worst most sociopathic
#
evil person you can think of, all their incentives would push them towards doing the right things
#
and they wouldn't be able to do much damage. And today we have a system which is exactly
#
the opposite, which is so incredibly oppressive that it attracts that kind of person and you're
#
inevitably going to get bad behavior and etc.
#
I think structurally states try to do this through the checks and balances and the sort
#
of division of power. It doesn't work in some parts of the world. I don't think it's working
#
here. In many ways our division is less stronger than that in the US because you've got the
#
legislatures merged with the executive more or less. But the judiciary, I think it's difficult
#
for strong and charismatic leaders to keep them out of either meddling with the judges
#
or making sure that they bend to his will. And I think that there is a systemic problem
#
here which goes beyond him. If you have people like PK Mishra and the rest who are willing
#
to do this not just for 22 years, for 20 years, it means that it's not just the person who's
#
doing the damage. Speaking to intent, I think it doesn't exist. What is it? I mean, it doesn't
#
mean anything and it means something only to the person who actually expresses it. He
#
believes he's doing it in good intent. But I'm saying that the follow up to that is if
#
that is the case, you have to learn from the thing that you did in the past. If you continue
#
that good intent into your next project, you should bring the learnings of the past. He
#
doesn't. It's still going to be locked down at four hours notice. It's still going to
#
be trauma for millions and still going to be moving on from there saying I did a very
#
good job. That is not a good intent.
#
And more than that, I think the lesson from something like demonetization that you can
#
take out if you realize it's a mistake is not that don't demonetize again. That's not
#
the lesson. The lesson is have humility, talk to experts, take your time, you know, all
#
The world is complex. It's not simple. I think that is the lesson. That is not going to be
#
learned because the style is the same. When he's sworn in 2019, there are newspaper reports
#
that says that he's clubbed ministries into three groups, each of which has 10 minutes
#
to give him a sort of, you know, a presentation. And you've got a fertilizer sitting with railways
#
and you know, a foreign and they all have, you know, 10 minutes to put their slides up.
#
So no lesson was learned. Not only in the period in Gujarat, but after demonetization
#
in the five years, first five full years of his first term. Don't know if the word is
#
done though here. His first five years in office as a PM, nothing is learned. The style
#
is still the same. Everything is the same. It's the same people as well.
#
Yeah. And we mentioned useful idiots. I'm just reminded at your recent Twitter outburst
#
against Mr. Jai Shankar. Dude, so on a sideline, I love this Twitter voice that you've kind
#
of adopted. You know, how did it kind of come about? Because it seems to be to be almost
#
an art form on its own. This kind of masterful parodying and it's perfect for Twitter because
#
if you did a longer thing with this, it wouldn't work. It would be too much.
#
People say it doesn't work as a book. So I think we have this wonderful nation and a
#
wonderful culture where we are half bilingual in two languages. Many of us who neither read
#
and speak or write one language properly, the one that we were born into or the one
#
that we learned at school. And we tend to mispronounce words. We tend to use grammar
#
and syntax in a particular way. I like that. And so I sort of enjoy that thing. I don't
#
look down on it in many ways. But the fact is that a lot of us recognize it. This would
#
make no sense to anybody in say New Zealand or another, you know, Anglophone nation because
#
this is us. This is the way that we, that, you know, Punjabis and Tamilians speak the
#
language and write it. So yeah, so I use it mostly to entertain myself. How did it come
#
to be? I don't know. I think my most happy years in journalism were in a tabloid, either
#
while I was working in the tabloid or while I was writing for it. And I think that low
#
brow humor, which is the only real humor to my mind, appeals to me a lot. I like stuff
#
that is considered stupid or that, you know, some people might actually consider silly.
#
Yeah, no. And so that's, that's how, that's how I do it. I, it can't be made into a book.
#
There is no scope. There's no depth. It's a moment basically. And I think for that reason,
#
I think it works on Twitter. Yeah, it's brilliant. And to me, it's, it's low brow. At the same
#
time, I would say it's high art. I just kind of love it. One of the literally, you know,
#
I'm not trying to flatter you, but one of the things I've most enjoyed over Twitter in the
#
last 12 years that I've kind of been there. I knew that it would be a complete addiction
#
for me. I didn't venture into it till I left my, till my term at Amnesty was over. I didn't touch
#
it. There was a handle in my name, but it was being operated by somebody in the office. So
#
the December Shaheen Bagh, when that happened, my term ended on the last day of November.
#
And in 15 days time, the world had changed, right? You had, you had like mass protests for the first
#
time on, on this issue. And that has remained for two and a half years, thank God. And I knew that,
#
and the reason I didn't come on social media was I knew that it's such great technology.
#
It's such a fabulous tool that you can't stay away from it. And, and I'm glad I stayed away
#
from it. And I'm glad I'm now completely immersed in it. It's a, it's a tool. I think that it gives,
#
it gives us a dog in the fight, like with what has happened to mainstream media. And maybe we can
#
speak about that. Structurally, it has taken itself out of the space that it was, and it's
#
not going to return anytime soon. If it can, in many sort of places like a print, it never will.
#
So what do you do then? I'm saying that you, we need to have some place where you put,
#
however small the reach may be, there has to be some space for us to be able to express ourselves.
#
And I think that for many countries, including us, the social media in a time of authoritarian
#
government has been the single one release more than sort of opposition politics or the judiciary,
#
which has given us a voice. Look at the number of Muslims who are active on Twitter in India,
#
talking about things that matter to us. It's, it's, it's fantastic. It's also disproportionate.
#
It does, it shows many things about our country in data terms, which might not be visible or might
#
be hidden by the kind of appraise we lavish on our constitution and what kind of nation we are.
#
The reality comes out fairly, fairly vividly on social media. There's a threader link,
#
which I saw on Twitter recently, which just made me very sad. It's like heartbreaking. You must
#
have seen it. I think Joy Das put out a thread. I did see it. Him asking Muslims, when were you
#
first told to go to Pakistan or something like that? And it's a long, long threader. You just
#
scroll forever. You just scroll forever and forever and forever. And there is story after story after
#
story. Let's talk about the media because that's in any case what I was coming to next. And it
#
strikes me that it's like journalism has splintered and gone in two directions. And one direction is
#
you become Godi media and you have a whole chapter on that. And we'll discuss the reasons for that.
#
And the other direction is that you have a handful of folks who are still fighting the good fight,
#
you know, people like news minute and wire and scroll and all of that, who are still trying to
#
kind of put up a front and news laundry. And the question here is that we seem to have reached
#
a stage where good journalism almost has to be a crusade, where it is only people with that
#
crusader spirit who can still do the good journalism. You know, I would have imagined
#
that in an ideal world, in an ideal state of equilibrium, there is an understanding of what
#
journalism is, where people are, you know, they're reporting the first draft of history,
#
they're reporting local news, they're doing the entertainment things, and they're speaking truth
#
to power and all of these things are happening. But we've reached a stage where you either have
#
the so-called Godi media, where you're just propelling one particular narrative being,
#
you know, one of the front lines in the narrative wars that are out there. And then you have a bunch
#
of people who are kind of holding firm on the other side. And it makes me sad because I don't
#
think that to be a good journalist, you should have to be a good crusader. However, you know,
#
in modern times, it seems that, like, to me, journalism and activism should not go together,
#
they simply should not. But it seems that it's being forced in that direction.
#
I think structurally, what has happened is that, like, when you and I worked in newsrooms,
#
you would, the material would transition from being collected, reportage, edited, and then
#
opined upon. That's the last stage. Very few people do that, right? But that is a natural
#
transition. And that is what we do. That is, that is, that is how, that's what journalists do.
#
And this is legitimate. And this is the way that the newsroom is structured. What happens
#
when the evidence is in? When the evidence is in, if it leads to opinion, where there is no
#
difference being made, I think activism comes after to the right of that. So you've got
#
reportage, you've got the editing, you've got the opinion. Then after that, what? If I have the data
#
with me, if I have the information, if the violation is manifested in front of my eyes,
#
it's in front of my eyes, then what do I do? Do I continue doing steps one, two, and three?
#
Or is there a legitimate fourth step for me? Our discomfort lies in the fact that in our
#
classical newsrooms, this fourth step doesn't really exist. In many newsrooms, it did. It did
#
in a different form. So in Deccan Chronicle, which I worked for a long time ago, the editor
#
would regularly file PILs. So once something was known and on issues, maybe as mundane as, you know,
#
power or something like that, I don't know. But often the paper would be a litigant. So that is
#
actually activism. But it was rare. Does it seem unnatural that a paper should do that? Looking at
#
it from here, I would say no, that because the paper seems to believe that it's a community of
#
readers, right? So I don't think we should be as uncomfortable with it as we are. I'm not because
#
I've transitioned into activism full time and I no longer see myself as a journalist. But I would
#
urge journalists to look at our classical structure and the movement of material within
#
the newsroom and ask ourselves whether it is legitimate to have that fourth step. I would say
#
yes, for sure, that there is no running away from the fact that once you've got the evidence and
#
you've put out the opinion and there is no shift, it is fine for me to act to try and bring about
#
that shift. And you know, one of the things that you've remarked upon, and which has been a very
#
sad case for so long, is that when it comes to influencing media, the government has a very
#
powerful stick. You forget that. And the very powerful stick is government advertising, that
#
so many media houses and newspapers and magazines depend upon government advertising for survival.
#
And this, to me, is something that I feel is incredibly sad because it raises the question
#
that if journalism is valuable, like I'm kind of idealistic in the sense that I believe that if
#
there is anything of value, it should be possible to make a profit from it, right? So even this
#
podcast, I don't think of it in, you know, NGO terms that someone needs to support it. I'm like,
#
no, if I'm doing something of value, I'll figure out a way that I make money from it and I survive
#
through it. And therefore, I think that if journalism is valuable, and I believe it is,
#
then there has to be a way for it to also be profitable. So you can, you know, so at least
#
on this one front, that government advertising, you can just tell the government to get lost,
#
and you can kind of survive. And therefore, I think that not enough thought has, like either
#
it is not possible, which would be either journalism so far is not valued by enough people,
#
which to me would seem very sad, or we have sort of been lax in figuring out ways to monetize the
#
value that we are providing for the people. Now I know people like, you know, news laundry is
#
experimenting with subscriber models, you know, the wire invites contributions, I think scroll
#
does that also. So all those things are there and they're nascent experiments. But at a larger level,
#
it just feels to me that somewhere, there was an ecosystem that didn't build up properly,
#
because the point of the matter is people spend people back in the day would spend a lot of time
#
reading a newspaper. Time is money. That means they're already paying to read the newspaper.
#
Why is there not a way for the newspaper to then capture some of that? So I think structurally,
#
the one of the shifts that happened over the last 20 years is that because of the idea of
#
sort of India shining and India being the next China, a lot of money went into setting up
#
new media, particularly TV channels. So listeners might or might not know that there are a handful,
#
I think of five or six, 24 seven news channels in the US, which are supported mostly through
#
a cable subscriptions. There are more than 100 news channels in India, where not only
#
do you not get a cable subscription, the channel needs to pay a carriage fee to
#
Tata Sky or to the cable operator. What happens in that situation is two things. One is you've
#
got a system where it's not easy to kill a business. You can survive by not paying employees or paying
#
them half their salaries or delaying their salaries in a way that you couldn't do in a
#
more civilized nation where the rule of law would say that if you don't pay, you go to court and
#
then you're shut down and you go bankrupt. The other is the dependency on advertising,
#
which has caused once again, two shifts. One is that the union government gives out between itself
#
and PSUs 2400 crore rupees a year to what is called the DAVP, a direct rate of audio visual
#
publicity, which as you say is a discretionary money. And you might think of it as a carrot,
#
but you're right. It's actually a stick that if you don't tow the line and you know what the line
#
is, then you don't get that money. And that happens all the time, including with the largest
#
newspapers of states, including Rajasthan Patrika, which had to go to court against the India
#
government. Or it happened with Denik Bhaskar as like happened after the photographs and their
#
reportage on the corpses in the Ganga. So structurally speaking, we have too much media,
#
which can't be sustained by the size of the market we have. One problem is obviously the old one,
#
which is that the newspaper costs much less than it takes to produce. And so it is subsidized
#
by the advertiser. But to a very large extent, the problem has been that advertising has also
#
been squeezed because of the problems with the economy. And the fact that the government of
#
India is very, very powerful, not just with the stick of advertising, but also with the stick of
#
regulation. It has switched off this TV channel, the only one owned by Muslims in India called
#
Media One. It has denied a license to probably the best known journalist around the world who
#
is from India, Raghav Bail, didn't get a license. So you've got a government that's enthusiastic
#
and willing to exercise the agency that it has. And so we will have this, you know, problem. And
#
will it go away soon? I don't think so. I think that unless a lot of media dies, and a lot of
#
media deserves to die, we are going to have channels that are dependent on the government,
#
both for regulatory sticks and for the advertising, a carrot, strokes or stick.
#
And we will have a small number of not mass reach outfits, such as the ones you named,
#
which will be doing the journalism at the other end. The problem is
#
is reportage. That my last job in a newspaper, which was some time ago, was in a language
#
newspaper, which had 300 reporters just in one state. And these reporters had beats. So for
#
listeners who don't really know what journalism is like, most journalists on reporting are
#
reporters. And they go, they do the same thing over and over again every day. When I was a
#
sessions court reporter, I went to sessions court number one, went up to number 42, then went back
#
to one, went up to 42, and then went back to the office. So I knew what was going on there.
#
Those who do civic, which is the cooperation beat will know what's going on there, will know
#
whether there are teachers in a school or not. That's not what TV journalism does. That's not
#
what these websites that you mentioned can do. They don't have the resource. They can do some
#
stories. They can't do reportage. Reportage can only be done by newspapers because that's the
#
only material that is not dependent on visual narrative. You can't do court stories on a TV
#
channel even if you wanted to. And it deploys large numbers of people to get actual news out.
#
Newspapers are dying. So the latest data shows that 2021-2020 obviously was less, the share of
#
revenue was less than it was in 2019. But the same has remained the case in 2022, that in a year when
#
we are talking, we are speaking of a 9% GDP growth rate, newspapers will have exactly the same sum
#
of money that they had five years ago. That's why newspapers are shutting down. That's why the
#
Mumbai Mirror does not really exist. Though it had very large reach, it could not attract enough
#
advertising to keep it in the black. Not just that, the star of many, many newspapers around
#
the country have gone. More will go. What will go with them is reportage. And I think what will
#
remain is what we call debate. And I think that, to my mind, can't be fixed. Because even if you
#
have a few good, meaningful outfits, like the ones you name, scroll, the wire, the news minute,
#
they don't have the resources to be able to do this. Send out 3,500 reporters across the country.
#
And so we will only have debate. I think the open question is there that do enough people value
#
this kind of reportage? And if they do, then, you know, is there a way for this kind of value
#
to be expressed in a way that causes something new structurally to come up so the reportage
#
can happen? So we want a life that's not particularly complex. So as a reporter,
#
it's not easy for me to conceive, though this has been done and has been done successfully,
#
in places like Chhattisgarh, where you got a reporter with a WhatsApp group, which gives
#
him 50 bucks a month where he makes sufficient money out of it to be able to run that WhatsApp
#
group and do his work. So it is possible. But for most of us, it's the idea of, okay, give me a
#
space to sit, give me a fan over my head, and then I can come to office and do my work and then go
#
back home. And I don't have to worry about the other stuff. That's that's most of us.
#
So while it's possible that some things will come and replace as has I think the wire and news
#
minute and all do a bit of that. But the volume is too big. One newspaper in one state 300
#
reporters think of that. That is that that kind of resource is needed. You can't just duplicate
#
that. And that's just one newspaper. There were three of that size. Yeah, I fear for what what is
#
to come. I did an episode ages ago with Ashok Malik, where he also pointed to another structural
#
problem. And that explains why so much of TV news channels are just so terrible. And that was price
#
controls that the government put the price controls on how much you could ask the user directly for
#
and what that led to was that TV stations and TV channels and all of that would depend way more on
#
advertising than on subscription. And that also means that niches become difficult, like I forget
#
the exact proportion 70 30 or whatever, but it was the converse of what it was in the US, for example.
#
And if you're allowed to charge subscribers what you want, and if subscribers value a certain
#
thing, you can go into niches, you can do your little things. But if it's only advertising,
#
then you chase the lowest common denominator and the lowest common denominator is what it is.
#
And you in fact have a section in your book where, you know, you talk about why TV has become more
#
strident and you kind of give a number of reasons. And is that something that surprises you? Because
#
there was a time where, you know, when television news first came up, it was respectable. It was,
#
you know, it was sort of a audio visual version of what you saw in the newspapers and all of that.
#
I mean, but it wasn't competing against any other channel. Yeah. The problem is that with this boom
#
that we saw after India shining a lot of money on the equity side coming into media, channels have
#
to compete. Compete for what? They have to compete for money, obviously. How does the money come in?
#
The money comes in through a system where data is collected to show which shows and which channels
#
have the most viewers. How do you get the most viewers? Then that is the question.
#
The good thing about television is that unlike newspapers, the feedback loop is pretty good.
#
Like a newspaper editor outside of the tabloid world can tell what story works and what doesn't
#
work because most newspapers are subscription. Tabloids for the most part in the West are sold
#
on the street. Television gets a rating fairly regularly. So they know what stories work,
#
what stories didn't work. The problem with following the rating system is that you get
#
skewed towards entertainment more than you do towards news. Newspapers can award you
#
a rating. They can avoid that structurally because there is no real pressure on them
#
leaving the tabloids aside to put the sort of, you know, entertaining material up front. So they
#
tend to remain sort of boring in a sense, a good sense in a structural terms. TV has exactly the
#
opposite that the structure forces it to become entertaining. And once you go down that road,
#
you're not going to come out of it. The fear of God is put into those top three, four sort of editors,
#
managing editors or whatever you call them. Most of them are also anchors, I think,
#
who get the ratings each week and look at where they are placed. And so the pressure is on them
#
to make it even more demented than it is, which is why it's gone the way it has so quickly.
#
You know, I remember circa 2008, 2009 and be called to these TV panels and all that. And I've
#
come on Anup's show a couple of times back in the day. Thankfully, nothing on YouTube exists of that,
#
but he was so normal then, you know, not the sort of raging lunatic he later kind of began.
#
My next question is that, you know, what are your insights on the kind of things that people want
#
to consume? Because it's not, you know, in terms of where TV news has gone, it's not just a
#
partisanship that is bothering. It's gone into unhinged territory like after Sushant Singh Rajput
#
died, right? The kind of conspiracy theories that came up, the kind of victimization of Rhea
#
Chakravarti. And of course, social media was a little worse because you had crazy conspiracy
#
theories and I could tell you about some of them. But even on television, you know, there seems to
#
be this appetite for and that's obviously why those channels go in these directions. There are
#
feedback loops and they realize this is what people want and they give them more of the same.
#
And they go much further in this direction than, you know, they otherwise would or maybe than even
#
what the audience decides at that time. And it just becomes a downward spiral. So what is it that
#
people really want? Like, do you think there is a reasonable constituency for what you would call
#
good journalism or good news or so on? Or do you think we just all the time want to be entertained
#
with outrageous narratives that get our dopamine going and all of that?
#
So I think that there are a few things here. I think one is that all of us
#
surely want at some point to receive material which informs us about the world that we are
#
living in. We don't want to be fed material that is bad. So it stands to reason that I want to be
#
told that this is going on. I might choose to dismiss it or I might choose to not act on it,
#
but I want it, right? Which is why one goes to news. So there is obviously a constituency.
#
The question is then why is that constituency not being reflected in the material?
#
I would say two things. One is what I referred to in terms of the structural problems that lead
#
channels to chasing advertising money over subscription money and that leads them
#
automatically into a cycle of moving towards entertainment. The other is I think that the
#
sort of bread and circuses thing which the ringmaster is controlling and wants material
#
to be pushed in a particular direction is successful. So you've got the government
#
saying that this is the kind of thing that there are WhatsApp groups in case listeners didn't know
#
where the editors and the reporters of various beats are linked to the government and the
#
government tells them. The government tells anchors what to do. The day the CBI chief
#
was raided and he was replaced was the same day that the amnesty office was raided in Bangalore.
#
And I know this because the anchors called me and told me. They said that our lead story
#
is going to be the amnesty thing and not the CBI problem. That's what they are told to do.
#
I foresee some change in this and I think that change will be externally influenced.
#
That in small measure because of what has been done to the economy and in some measure because
#
of the problem of too many channels, many will go. The issue then will remain if you've got people
#
like Ambani controlling the media which he does. He's got fingers in many pies. Will that mean that
#
the channel will continue doing what it's doing even without any kind of pressure on say revenue?
#
I don't know. But I do believe that along with my sense that this kind of politics can only
#
continue for so long where external change is forced upon you. I think this kind of journalism
#
can be done only for so long that you will either have a very strong counter or a very
#
strong bar which is successful both in the sense of reach and in terms of money which we don't have
#
at the moment or you will be forced to shut and for lack of an audience that wants too much of
#
this stuff. So I think that the future is pretty good. The near future might not be as good.
#
You know just as in the context of what we were talking earlier about the politics and society
#
and I keep going back to this quote by Andrew Breitbart where he said politics is downstream
#
and I think there is you know something to that and in a similar sense I think here
#
what the kind of content that people want to view and consume will drive what people provide
#
and I think what they want to consume and so on is what is disturbing. Like ages ago I had an
#
informal chat with Pratik Sinha. It wasn't on a podcast or something not in the episode we did
#
together. It was in the sidelines of something and he pointed out about how he had come across
#
this fake news about some minister or the other and he did his usual forensic genius on it
#
and figured out where it came from and that you know wrote a post about how it originated
#
with this person and this person kind of propagated it and a little while after he publishes that
#
he gets a whatsapp message from this guy saying ki bhaiya I am I am so and so person who started
#
that thing can I please call you. So the guy calls him and it's some 16 year old kid or 15
#
year old kid somewhere in a village and he's not part of any IT cell not part of any misinformation
#
campaign but he's just put out he started a website he wants hits what does he do for hits
#
he tries various things he throws things at the world as we should all do and he finds out that
#
the kind of content which gets hits is this kind of rubbish and then he goes all out into this and
#
this is what kind of gathers the thing. So when you say that this kind of journalism won't continue
#
I would say that if there is an appetite for it and the evidence seems to suggest that there is
#
then first that appetite has to diminish and there has to be an appetite for some other kind of
#
journalism before it ceases. So I think that a critical word here is journalism that will this die
#
off by itself I don't think so this will remain what will be journalism when it if it is right
#
now this this is what passes for news as well as what what it is which is mostly nonsense
#
will there be is it possible that there is a large enough constituency of people who to say that I
#
don't want this I want something else and I'm willing to pay for it and make it viable I'm
#
saying that the answer to that is yes it's too large a nation and I don't think the time is too
#
far off the issue will be about the the person who owns it can you have people who control the
#
economy in large measure control the advertising in large measure will they be will they let
#
will they let something like this exist with their platforms knowing that this is this is
#
you know producing material that's going against their own interests I don't know but I don't
#
think this is sustainable and I think the reason it's not sustainable is that it is not a stable
#
it is deteriorating it's getting nastier it's getting more vicious we thought that there has
#
to be an end let there is some end point there which I think will come soon yeah and I actually
#
share the optimism that there are enough people who want a certain kind of good journalism that
#
they'll pay for it and one doesn't know if it'll reach the scale where you can have 3000 reporters
#
in a state but at least I am optimistic about the likes of the the people we named for example kind
#
of surviving and getting by but then again the sticks of the state as it were come into play
#
where you know you might be you know then I think Dhanya Rajendran of the news minute tweeted a few
#
days before we are recording this about how there were income tax raids on whatever and the kind of
#
trauma I mean the process is really the punishment and you see the brave people who are kind of
#
standing up and saying we'll continue to do this but no you have to internalize the fact that if
#
you're going to dissent you will be in trouble what degree of trouble will depend on how much
#
you descend and how much stick the state can bring against you but there is no way that this
#
government will let you exist without a trauma because it is really malicious and really active
#
and willing and sort of enthusiastic about using the powers that it has so let's talk about descend
#
then you know the last chapter of our Hindu Rashtra is called how to fight it right and elsewhere I
#
have seen you tweet quote protest is a craft stop good so tell me about that because yeah like if
#
there's one thing that gave me optimism and filled me with hope it's all the anti-ca protests yeah
#
which would absolutely great absolutely remarkable and inspiring for so many different reasons the
#
women of Shaheen Bagh the young people holding up the preamble of the constitution this otherwise
#
boring unreadable document and that kind of fills you with hope so when you say protest is a craft
#
what do you mean by that so activism has a professionals in it who have worked on
#
something for a long time and as you and I know when you're in the newsroom for a long time or
#
when you're in a podcast studio for a long time you know something more about it than I do
#
I might be naturally sort of gifted I might be intelligent in many ways but I don't know
#
the things that you do because I haven't done them protest is about showing up obviously and
#
saying what it is that you want to say how do you do that is the craft to give you an example of how
#
craft can manifest itself is that Greenpeace uses jumpers of very high places to unfurl banners
#
which are very spectacular that is craft so there is a technique about how to go about doing it and
#
what you do to make sure that it is enjoyable participative joyous which makes it in the long
#
term effective so that's one the second is protest is part of civil society just like a corporate
#
office will function on outcomes the outcome in a corporate in the office might be the quarterly
#
profit or whatever the volume manufactured the rights groups will have outcomes based on changes
#
in laws and policies by the state so they will have something called a power mapping
#
where they will map who they need who they need to shift to be able to get the issue to move towards
#
them and they will do it in various ways so there is a lot of craft involved you need to be able to
#
know things that the others don't and you need to be able to apply that knowledge to bring about
#
that change it's not just a large number of people saying this that or the other so if we look at the
#
so if we look at the success of Shaheen Bagh there are two three things in that they were able to do
#
which came to them naturally we have ghettoized our Muslims fully in this country because of that
#
the women were able to have safe spaces where they could spend all day and all night
#
because of the same fact they were able to replicate it that it's just a sit-in
#
it's in our Mahalla this is what you do you sleep the night here in the in the evenings we'll have
#
people come and talk to us there'll be people singing we will dancing and so on in the afternoon
#
there'll be very few people but it will still be occupied there is that it becomes a template
#
that you can replicate but you can only do that if you have that template it needs to be a good
#
enough template so for most of us protest is seen as something which is easy and it's done
#
spontaneously and doesn't have too many other sort of elements that's not the case it's part
#
of a very very structured very large set of things that activists do to be able to bring
#
about change that is what i meant in saying that a protest is a craft that's that's a tweet that
#
got me into trouble by the way i don't know why twitter banned you sorry twitter banned you i
#
think they took me off there was a case filed against me and the reason is that i said you
#
know protest is a craft at the end of a tweet which was retweeting something i think from the
#
Baltimore Sun i think it was but there was a bunch of people all masked all on the ground
#
saying in unison i can't breathe which is a great way of doing this is the kind of thing that tv
#
that the tv cameras will come to which is what makes it a craft and you think about it in a
#
sort of way which is sort of interesting and the cameras will come and i said that this is what
#
adivasis and muslims and dalits and women should be doing in this country so this the police
#
commissioner told the bbg that i was trying to sort of not his words but a great mischief in a
#
time of covid you know protocols or some nonsense i don't know so yeah i don't know you laugh about
#
it man because it's just so stressful just to think about the kind of harassment that this can
#
kind of result in and the process absolutely being the punishment can you give me more examples
#
of protest being a craft both in the context of organized protest like when you're doing marches
#
and all of this and also in the context of unorganized protests like you know many people
#
listening to this might think that i can't go out on a march maybe they're not even in india i want
#
to protest in other ways how can i protest so i any concrete examples about a book coming out
#
in a couple of months hopefully in a couple of months same publisher no it's not this is
#
harper collins india it's called the anarchist cookbook so it's a book on protest on why and
#
how to protest i'll give an example so the gay community in the united states was empowered
#
and had an outcome in mind delegitimize decriminalize homosexuality and legalize gay
#
marriage right what was the opposition it was the conservatives who said no gays in the army
#
no gay marriage you know homosexualities and offense against god etc so the campaigners said
#
we need to move the needle from no to yes right and there are players here the church is a player
#
the government the president is a player the 500 or whatever it is you know congressmen and women
#
they have they are all players these are the states in which we need to get this fixed these
#
are the states in which victories are easy this is what we need to do in terms of the supreme
#
court to look at fundamentally the campaign would look at how do we shift some of these people so
#
they sort of you know thought about it and said that the opposite to gay marriage the narrative
#
was family values so the campaign that they built was sort of around how gay marriages had the same
#
family values that the non-gay marriages that the sort of hetero marriages had and it worked they
#
were able to over and very quickly knock off the laws and get themselves legitimized similarly with
#
black lives matter i think that in the space of a very few weeks an organized campaign which said
#
that this was unacceptable became popularly accepted and the new york times said that the
#
majority of people shifted actually after that campaign where you had the very simple messaging
#
that we are dying on the street because of who we are you you stop that because our lives matter
#
that's it there's no other message but very large numbers of people saying the same thing so this is
#
a simpler through less technical sort of protest but also works outcomes are actually achieved
#
because the the policing system changes that is the outcome that they seek on a smaller much
#
smaller level with like a protest on a rally and stuff we need to be more creative so a lot of the
#
really grassroots activists in india use a lot of music so when you have when you when the middle
#
class the sort of so-called so middle class is shown in a protest is normally either candlelight
#
march or like you know a few for the for the majority the sad thing is that it's seen like
#
something that's difficult to do and so creativity is outsourced not too many nations in the world
#
have protests where the same banner is held with the same play card is held by 50 people you know
#
it's like going to a match where people are saying pepsi and four you know it's like the same thing
#
because somebody else has made it and has just distributed it it's much more effective if you
#
have your own the u.s is very good with this the uk also where you've got everybody's holding
#
something different and everybody's thought put some thought in it that's all you need you don't
#
need anything else but you stand out because of it you can only think of this once you start doing
#
it if you're not if you've only been to a couple in your life you're not going to have the the
#
idea saying okay maybe i need to do something else to attract people to what i'm saying yeah
#
that's that's why it's a craft and it's not as simple as it might look from the outside
#
and that's why also it's fascinating i think that one of the things the moment the young women
#
showed up wearing the hijab i knew that the government would lose we are talking at a time
#
when it has not lost yet and we're talking at a time when it appears that the high court is going
#
to rule against the women it doesn't matter because they have agency that is the problem
#
once you give an once you give a community agency to push back against what you're doing to them
#
they will use it you might bash them down into not using it but we don't we are not that much
#
of a state that you can't just if the women keep showing up at the gates that's all they need to
#
do nothing else they just need to show up the state will wilt this that this power you can only
#
understand once you look at activism from the inside of organizations that approach it with a
#
technical sense yeah and i think my years in amnesty is really fabulous in terms of learning i had no
#
idea what the heck this was they did they did or how they did it but learning that stuff as you
#
might in a studio or you might in a newsroom came to me while i spent my five years there
#
you're speaking of gay marriage i remember this classic article written by andrew sullivan in the
#
early 90s i think 92 he was an editor of atlantic then called the conservative case for gay marriage
#
where he did exactly that where he reframed it in terms of family values and said every conservative
#
should support gay marriage and sullivan himself was gay of course and i think that's a remarkable
#
exercise in reframing that you want people to believe you know to support you in a certain way
#
and you frame it in a way that brings that support around and i can't wait for that and now the other
#
part of my question that this is all organized protest formal protest in terms of craft and i
#
can't wait to read your book and figure out more about it but informal like anybody listening to
#
this says that you know what can i do you are already doing stuff so what what is it that we
#
mean by activism we mean that you are engaging with state and society to bring about some kind
#
of outcome change right you're doing that through your vote in any case you're doing that through
#
social media you're doing that by sort of expressing yourself on facebook the question is how do you
#
make it more effective and that has dual benefits you become more prominent because of the fact that
#
you're doing something which is amplified by sort of other people and you are able to make sure that
#
what you want is actually the outcome is actually you know of a made real so that that is your
#
you're figuring out how to use and there are lots of people on social media right now who have
#
figured it out and are trying to do it so you don't need to do anything other than continue using
#
social media just make yourself slightly more effective no matter whether your use on social
#
media is in favor of the bjp or the hindutva whatever the same rules apply to all of us
#
you need to be able to communicate what it is that you want to an end and that end has to be
#
the outcome change that you seek once you're clear about that then you can figure out what it is that
#
works and the best activism i would say the most effective activism tool that we have in the modern
#
world is social media for a long time those of us who are in activism believe that you need
#
the people physically on the ground and i think sheinberg and the farmer show that that is true
#
but not all protests require mass mobilization of that sort because the because there the demand on
#
the sort of individuals is too high you can bring about change purely by using your own social media
#
handle and your page slightly more effectively than you than you are and i'll and i'll give tips on how
#
to yeah no i i i did an episode a long time back a couple of years back with pranay kota sene where
#
we spoke about what he called radically networked societies where you know taking lessons from the
#
arab spring and so on and a combination of sort of in-person protests and you know using them to
#
using the internet to mobilize that so i linked that from the show notes but when you said you'd
#
give tips or your tips are in the books so they it's not very communicable fair enough so we've
#
just got to wait for your book and let's be patient it's not that far off you mentioned
#
amnesty tell me about your years in amnesty what because before that you were sort of a
#
journalist love for writing language all of that you do your journalism you do do it for more you
#
know a long time and then you move to amnesty where you're now an activist and all of that
#
so what prompted that shift and what are the kind of lessons you learned in what ways did it change
#
you so i was i moved to banglore in 2010 with the intention of retiring and sort of reading and
#
writing full-time and so on which i did for five years and then i suspect amnesty was not able to
#
find anybody to run it because a salaries are pretty low in civil society b because it's difficult
#
work not difficult work in the sense of the work itself but because of the government i suspect
#
this and i could be wrong but when i was asked whether i was sort of interested in the job i
#
felt immediately attracted to it and i think one reason was that after my years in gujarat and
#
i was very dissatisfied towards the end of my job as a tabloid editor because i felt that
#
it's there was something happening in society that was not being captured out of bombay and delhi
#
what it was i didn't know but i knew that there was some things happening in terms of
#
the sort of the communal stuff i had known modi for some time you know before that i knew that
#
he would do well in delhi and so i worked for a gujarati paper where of course i was miserable
#
because it there was no no way that i could express the things that i wanted to say in the paper
#
because the leadership is extremely conservative and so that thing remained with me to some extent
#
that i feel that i need to do something that i didn't know what and so when this thing came along
#
i was i was happy to join but i didn't know what the job was and i didn't realize it for some time
#
i was the least qualified person in their office and i'm not being modest so there was very highly
#
there are three kinds of people who are in activism one is the journalist types who do the
#
the evidence gathering often these are not journalists but these are phd scholars so if
#
you look at something deep deeper like you know sort of a climate change or coal mining in the
#
adivasi belt there's somebody who studied this for a long time and knows a lot of things about it
#
and the third type are lawyers so they all the material is looked at from the legal lens and
#
cleaned up they do the the editing function of but they do it at a level of law rather than at the
#
level of making making it more readable and i like obviously didn't fit into any of this and nor was
#
i meant to i went there as a manager like i was i was the the guy who ran the place so i threw myself
#
so i threw myself into fundraising which is what i did i raised the i raised money to for the for
#
the organization and i would engage with the output not from the active point of view but just
#
observing what it is that they did because they were so much better than me at like what they did
#
that is where i learned that this is what it is that for amnesty especially the evidence gathering
#
is the primary function it is the quality of the material three years into one research report
#
which is 50 pages long like a really intense verified doubly verified if you're using somebody
#
that person has to sign a document saying that it's okay for us to campaign on their behalf
#
and so on and so on they're very extremely complex newsrooms will lose their hair if they saw it you
#
know um and the once the material is in it goes to campaigners the campaigners are the ones who
#
do that stuff now those people they might not even have gone to college they're sitting in a
#
room with people who might have had a phd but they are they are both equally good at what they do
#
the campaigner is operating out of experience instinct and knowledge about what it is that
#
can be done and it's not just about having an event it's about figuring out who the people are
#
who will who who can shift this for us and how it is that they can be influenced very rich to sort
#
of learn and study and so on and i've learned that this a these are the sets of laws we have i i had
#
no i had no clue that things like the coal bearing areas sort of existed where the government can
#
without any resistance be able to take over the lands of sort of adivasis from them which it still
#
does or what exactly afspa was and how it was enforced all these things you learn only when
#
you work with them and i think for me the very rich learning experience of those five years
#
has has you know stayed with me i don't really i don't really desire working in a newspaper
#
anymore i don't really care if my columns don't go away in fact i'm quite bored of writing them
#
i write them because that's the only source of money i have at the moment but this stuff is like
#
a magnet it's like it draws me very powerfully yeah and and i think it'll stay with me for
#
for the rest of my life did it make you a different person it made me more aware of how dumb i was
#
and i think that many jobs can do that but i'm saying that it made me more aware of how dumb i
#
was along with how to try and empathize with somebody which is i think very difficult for a
#
job to do right i think so at least i mean i don't know i've done many jobs and this has not done
#
that to me so the ability to and being a newspaper editor you're basically a tyrant especially if you
#
work in newspaper organizations where the proprietor likes you and gives you the authority
#
which i had the ansari's at midday they never said anything to me and i ran the newsroom like
#
an absolute tyrant in in the wrong sense of the word that is i dismissive of people but here i
#
was in an office where when i when i spoke over somebody they would not stop speaking they would
#
continue speaking which i was not used to and they were half my age perhaps you know so the the idea
#
that you're dumb and you shouldn't be doing dumb things can only come through a lesson which is
#
taught to you in that fashion which i learned i'm just thinking maybe we need to make modiji work
#
in amnesty for a few years no it's a great place i love it it's such a fabulous place and such such
#
a great history so tough like we had this we had a report on where amnesty refers to the israeli
#
treatment of palestinians inside of israel as apartheid and it's not easy to bring out such
#
things because we have a unit within that country and so on but as a movement it's phenomenal
#
amnesty's governance structure is democratic so you vote for people but because it's democratic
#
it's the the country called section in the amnesty language that has the most members
#
would have more votes so it would be six words but because it was europe based the european
#
sections had most members five lakh four lakh ten lakh paying a sort of sum of money every month
#
so they had more votes six votes and they were able to get their own stuff you know enforced over
#
they voluntarily gave up everybody went to one one nation one vote voluntarily gave up power you
#
don't see that in in too many places you don't see that anywhere actually where yeah so it's
#
it's a great place which i think should be taught about i'm glad it won its noble peace prize so
#
long ago 77 because the world instantly recognized that this is you know quality stuff
#
death penalty in europe gone because of our work torture you know yeah great stuff what happened
#
in india in india it started in 50 years ago when george aphanandes was was a member it was very
#
urban and remained so activists tend to not be very good managers i i suspect one reason why i
#
was asked to run it was that there was okay can you do the kind of the management side to it so
#
when you don't have money it just shuts so there were four five times before this time that it came
#
and went each time the government would not like it and each time it had to shut not go shut because
#
all the five times was run entirely as was the case in my time as well run by desi so it was
#
sort of indians running amnesty is only a brand that is lent to a group that is that generates
#
itself so in most nations a set of people say okay we will be the amnesty here they apply for
#
recognition they're giving materials to campaign on they can't just go and do their own stuff they
#
have to speak the same language as as as they're given law poll there's the law and policy unit
#
and so because of a lack of a lack of funding and b malicious government and this is mostly the
#
congress it was not able to survive and but this time around i think we will not go we will not
#
we will not die we will we will be back we are moving supreme court in the next few days we have
#
actually moved it and we expect to be given relief oh good luck with that let's sort of turn to the
#
personal because you know this is the second time we've met and both times we've met for recording
#
episodes all i know of you in a sense is that public face you know you're writing your fearless
#
twittering and you're very entertaining twittering and you know all of that all of what we've talked
#
about like like one question that really interests me with people that i talk to is when you wake up
#
in the morning what are you looking forward to what is like the texture of your day what gives
#
you peace and happiness within a day so i'll describe my day to you i don't know so three days
#
a week i have yoga which is at 8 30 which is for an hour and i've been doing it for a few years now
#
and you do it online on your own online now he used to come home but now now now he no longer
#
needs to which is fine i think my my yoga has become better with with him on the screen rather
#
than him in i don't know why i write much less than i used to i write one column for every day
#
one column for a bunch of newspapers and websites which i write on saturday it takes me about 40
#
minutes to write 750 850 words 850 words is what i write 40 45 minutes but other than that there
#
is no real work so i don't do anything so i wake up and i try and make sure that i shave every day
#
i cycle a bit sometimes i read quite a lot there's a lot of books in my house i've i read much less
#
now than i used to because i'm on the on the ipad or the phone a lot and that's not only distracting
#
it's extremely entertaining so there's no reason for me to go and read penguin black classics but
#
i i'm forced to read penguin black classics because i have a monthly column i do for the hindu on
#
on books from the ancient world so where i write about something that that i know about
#
but pretty much that's it that's there's no other that's i i sort of you know
#
a potter about at home and yeah it's it's very dull does music play a big part in your life
#
not anymore i had three phases so i used to play with a band in surat from the age of 17 till
#
where i left when i was 24 and came to bombay i played the guitar and i sang
#
and it was the usual stuff the dylan and the dire straits and all that
#
then there was this after i married i discovered because my wife sort of introduced me to him and
#
then suddenly i stopped listening to all that sort of music and only listened to indian music kumar
#
gandhar whom i really love and nusrat fatih rikhan and then after amnesty also then i that phase also
#
went away there i don't listen to music too much anymore i like youtube videos a lot so i'm on
#
youtube quite a bit through the day watching stuff on rockets guns sometimes cars sometimes but mostly
#
about things like science and tech and i think this the smallness of the youtube video helps
#
that you could you can just spend five or seven minutes in it and still feel it's worth your while
#
yeah but yeah have you changed your notion of happiness or what you want to do over the years
#
like when we are young and certainly in my case when we are young it's tied up with goals i want
#
to achieve this i want to achieve that i want to achieve x and i think beyond a certain point
#
where it's no longer specific goals it's it's a kind of life that you want to live where you
#
might be taking the joy in small things or you might just want to say that you know i want to
#
i want a life where i can just read without having to think of anything or whatever i want to be in
#
nature different people will define it differently i have that so basically i figured out fairly
#
early on that money was not that important that if you had a certain something you were okay with
#
that was fine that if you that you didn't really need too much money and so at 40 i felt that that
#
was done that that i don't need to do this anymore the thing about writing and particularly writing
#
books is that there is no joy in it the engagement levels are too high so you can't really it's not
#
misery i'm talking about non-fiction i have no idea what you know writing
#
fiction is like but it's not the kind of yeah we're having a party kind of thing at all ever
#
so but that is more rewarding in a sense the the sense that you're doing something
#
productive which i feel i'm doing on twitter as well by the way i feel that i'm doing some i don't
#
know what it is because there's nothing there's no there's no material output but there's some
#
time is being you know invested in something that is i i feel i feel regret after i've sent
#
out tweets saying i should have rewritten that one word differently or whatever i don't know why
#
because who cares you know no i i read that tweet by sanjeev sanyal where he misspelled plagiarism
#
repeatedly and for a moment i thought akar had tweeted it i would have spelled it differently
#
than him because his was too close to the original you have to like phonetically break down a word
#
that's what makes it fun and then you have to drop out some words that the reader has to
#
fill in you know that's what makes it fun for them yeah yeah it's it's masterful but you know so
#
10 years later what do you see yourself doing still writing books like this or would you know
#
i'll be 62 in 10 years time i don't know if so i'm i've got one book which is done which is out
#
very soon and i've got another book that i'm contemplating writing which doesn't mean anything
#
i don't know maybe i'll never write it but i have no plan beyond that i've been called to a few
#
universities to lecture in april in the us not lecture to speak to them and if i get my passport
#
back which i hope to do next week and if i get a u.s visa which i don't know if i will then i'll be
#
doing that but that's as long as i've planned for april good luck with the passport i'll i've taken
#
up a lot of your time very grateful that you you know you've so patiently sat through all of this
#
i'll i'll end by asking you to give recommendations to me and everyone who's listening about books
#
that you love could be something recent could be an old favorite but which you feel really excited
#
about sharing with the world and equally maybe some youtube channels you've really enjoyed and
#
and that you're hooked to and again with music something that is really close to your heart
#
something that you feel you'll still be listening to in 20 years time that's a kind of comfort zone
#
for you i read somewhere recently and it sort of occurred to me that this was a very wise thing
#
that you shouldn't be listening to music you already know you should be listening only to new
#
stuff because that what you're doing is a nursery rhyming of i don't know whether that's true in
#
absolute terms but i'm going to try that anyway so books don't buy anything because i'm saying it
#
but i think that if you can download it from libgear or like whatever consider reading the
#
classics from the top down so you start with the histories amherodota is very readable because it's
#
like good fun thick book refers to india some really fun bits about india and then you go down
#
from there i'm saying that you try and go down as much as you can through the greeks so plato is
#
very readable aristotle not so much so plato stuff is all dialogue so that we were talking
#
uh some of it is very moving and beautifully written and there's a lot of it you might think
#
that it's just these many books so that's there aristotle some of the interesting stuff which
#
is not particularly difficult to read a lot of it is quite difficult to read is things like
#
poetics which is a 50 page book on drama and this and the the nature and the the structure of drama
#
it's a beautiful book also that he's got a lot of essays on the on the physical world so he's the
#
first guy and i i'm quite struck that i didn't notice he says that birds bend their elbows in
#
the opposite direction from us which is true they went them thus so he's got he's got some books
#
which have this kind of observation and then you've got a lot of people who do doing either new
#
a platonic philosophy and all that you can skip but the dramatists are very important important
#
because the same storylines continue in western worlds today so ischelous sophocles or uripe
#
these there's not that much work so you can go through it pretty quickly i read through the
#
greeks in a year so when i moved to banglore in 2011 or so i spent a year going through the greeks
#
and then i moved to the romans and i would say that you that a lot of the romans julius is a
#
julius is a phenomenal writer yeah so the two books that he wrote the the war in gallo the gallic
#
war and and the civil war are outstanding pieces of prose it's the anti modi there's almost no
#
he he does refer to himself in the third person only on the assumption that nobody knows who the
#
author is he's like but beautiful the babarnama is also a terrific work i'm just giving some random
#
names out of all those things one book that indira gandhi really liked and i really like is
#
the called the life of the bee it's by a guy called materlink m-a-e-t uh and then it's l-i-n-c-k at the
#
end it's a book on how the hive functions just like sort of i think eo wilson's done the same
#
thing with ant hills but this is a fabulous book and i think that the good thing about being so
#
connected in a society is that we tend to receive such so many references and be able to find out
#
very quickly how to reach those so i would suggest you spend a lot of time on the net
#
that just hang out on twitter i i'm not on facebook so i don't know how that goes
#
youtube channels i really like a channel called nasa space flight so what they do is they have
#
a set of volunteer reporters almost volunteers many of them volunteers and like you know some
#
of them full-time that cover this the space industry which is quite big in the u.s and has
#
become much bigger in the recent past because of the entry of the private firms so musk is
#
building a rocket that he's trying to take to mars which he's waiting for the the environmental
#
approval for to fly so it might happen this year might not over mars this year but it'll
#
start the testing and so on going into orbit space is a very good subject to go to youtube for
#
because the number of people who do it is are very few with nasa space flight there's a guy
#
called scott manley who does space as well from the technical point of view so he's not from the
#
science technical but from the sort of amateur technical point of view these i find quite
#
quite interesting and i spend a lot of time with these yeah music i learned something
#
which i i became a member of the symphony orchestra of india which is based out of
#
the ncpa in bombay 95 percent of the audience is parsi no phone ever goes off
#
i found it interesting that before i observed a performance i would go to youtube and watch it
#
once so that i could anticipate what was going to happen and i think that a lot of us tend to not
#
be able to get into this kind of music because it's too unfamiliar the first time we we sort
#
of listen to it whether it's this or jazz or whatever so my suggestion is that if you
#
that a you try and listen to some of at least the more melodic bits which is i think you know
#
melodic bits which is i think you know anything by bethoven the fifth or the ninth or the second or
#
so on listen to it a couple of times to figure out what comes after what in what sequence and
#
then listen to it better it'll make it a much more pleasurable thing to listen to and less
#
off-putting because it seems really a not familiar and b because there's no sense of song right it's
#
just going from one place to another but to look at it as like a as watching a movie makes makes
#
more sense you you mentioned io wilson there's a great quote by him on communism where he said
#
great idea wrong species and he meant it would be great for ants and he died he died recently
#
didn't he died recently yeah and you mentioned indira gandhi reading about bees and i'm wondering
#
if she thought that the same principles could be applied to humans she was an interesting
#
character failed all the family did not do well so jawala neru got a third class at trinity she
#
failed she did not get a degree rajeev went to trinity he failed he did not get a degree
#
sanjay gandhi obviously dropped out of high school menka gandhi didn't go to school
#
rahul gandhi and varun gandhi are the only ones who actually properly studied i don't know about
#
the sister priyanka but the same principles of not having academic rigor that you would
#
blame modi for you could just as easily apply sonia gandhi did not study beyond high school
#
but see here is the difference that you understand that i have a problem i'm going to rely on somebody
#
who i think is good and then i'll go with what they say i might actually you know interfere a
#
lot because that's what you know human beings are and the nature of power is such that that will
#
happen but for the most part okay this is something that you can take care of better than me which is
#
not there here so anyway thanks a lot for coming on the show thank you for having me it was a great
#
pleasure and i hope you get your passport back before elon musk gets to mars i hope i will i
#
think that very good the long future is always good and i think it will be good for us as well
#
and i think that we need to make sure that the long future is not too far off by trying to be
#
more active in the spaces that we are and trying to bring that change about in whatever way we can
#
way we can if you enjoyed listening to this episode head on over to your nearest bookstore
#
online or offline and buy akars books are hindu rashtra and price of the modi years you can follow
#
akar on twitter in fact you must follow akar on twitter at akar underscore patel you can follow
#
me at amit varma a m i t v a r m a and you can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen
#
at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the
#
unseen if so would you like to support the production of the show you can go over to
#
scene unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive
